Ethiopia

By: Stuart Munro-Hay

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Ethiopia

Over 3,000 years ago the Greek poet Homer sang of “the blessed Ethiopians.” The English man of letters Samuel Johnson wrote a novel 200 years ago about an Ethiopian prince, in which the philosophers of the country contemplated the mysteries of the universe. In the twentieth century, pan-Africanists, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, saw Ethiopia as the “all-mother of men,” an ancient land of immense importance to human history, while the followers of Marcus Garvey dreamed that the children of slaves might return to Africa and live in Ethiopia, a nation that in the biblical Book of Psalms “stretched out her hands unto God.” More recently, television and newspapers have depicted Ethiopia in harsh terms as a land of famine, war, and very little else, but the country possesses an extraordinary history, which remains little known outside its borders.

Ethiopia

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The land now known as Ethiopia witnessed the birth of humanity over 100,000 years ago, and it was home to some of Africa’s most ancient and advanced civilizations. Indeed, Ethiopia is one of the oldest nations on earth. For centuries the people of Ethiopia’s highlands have maintained a rich cultural legacy, including a literary tradition dating from over 2,000 years ago and a form of Christianity dating from the time of the Roman Empire. Over the centuries many of the country’s people came to practice Islam, and by the twentieth century, Ethiopia incorporated one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse populations in Africa. From the 1960s to the early 1990s Ethiopia suffered a long economic decline, famine, and civil warfare, first under an autocratic emperor and later under a brutal socialist military government. Though in the late 1990s Ethiopia made progress at overcoming ethnic strife and years of economic mismanagement, it still faces many challenges.

Prehistory

Ethiopia was home to some of our earliest human ancestors. Some of the oldest remains of Homo sapiens, dating back about 130,000 years, have been found in the far south, along the Kibish River in the Omo Valley region. Until 1994 the oldest known branch of the human family tree was represented by fossil remains found in 1974 at Hadar, 350 kilometers (217 miles) northeast of the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. The famous partial skeleton called “Dinqinesh,” or “Lucy,” a specimen of Australopithecus afarensis, which dates from between three million and 3.6 million years ago, is exhibited in the National Museum at Addis Ababa. Discoveries of even older hominid remains have now surpassed Australopithecus afarensis. The remains of seventeen individuals, identified as members of a new species, Australopithecus ramidus, have been found at Aramis, on the north side of the Awash Valley, about seventy-five kilometers (forty-seven miles) south of the Hadar region. These new finds take the record in Ethiopia back 4.4 million years, and appear to confirm estimates that the hominid line diverged from that of modern apes between four million and six million years ago. About 8,000 years ago inhabitants of present-day Ethiopia had begun to practice animal husbandry. The region’s people, most likely speaking Cushitic languages, were practicing agriculture 2,000 years ago at the latest. By about 1000 B.C.E. Semitic-speaking peoples had entered the northern highlands, perhaps from southern Arabia. There they probably intermarried with the existing population. These people were the ancestors of today’s Tigre, Tigray, and Amhara (as well as other, smaller ethnic groups), who speak languages belonging to the Semitic family, which includes Arabic and Hebrew.

Early History

The early history of Ethiopia, whether legendary or confirmed by archaeology, is rich and fascinating. The country’s northern borderlands may have been the location of the fabulous land of Punt (Pwene), known to the ancient Egyptians as a source of luxuries, especially incense, for the courts of the pharaohs. Aromatic resins are still collected in some areas of Tigray Province and Eritrea. The ancient Egyptians called this country “the Land of God” (Taneter).

Between about 800 and 300 B.C.E. a literate and highly developed civilization flourished in the Eritrean and Tigray highlands. Its rulers referred to themselves as the kings or mukarribs of Da’amat and Saba, and may have ruled over parts of south Arabia known as Saba (or Sheba). The title mukarrib indicated something like “federator,” and in south Arabia (present-day Yemen) the title referred to the ruler of peoples that were linked by covenant. The people of Da’amat in Ethiopia wrote inscriptions in a language and a script very similar to that found on inscriptions in south Arabia, and presumably the peoples on both sides of the Red Sea shared a common cultural background. Only a few traces of the civilization of Da’amat remain, but they are often spectacular. At Yeha the impressive temple of the god Ilmuqah still stands; it is the most ancient building in Ethiopia. Inscribed altars and some splendid stone sculptures from this period are now on display in the National Museum.

Lucy.  The 3.2-million-year-old fossils of a hominid, nicknamed “Lucy,” on display at the Ethiopian Natural History Museum in Addis Ababa.

(Les Neuhaus/AP Images)

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After this period the uplands became the seat of one of the greatest of all the ancient African civilizations; the empire was ruled from its capital city of Aksum. South Arabian and Aksumite sources, written in the ancient Ethiopian language known as Ge’ez, refer to the so-called Habash people who inhabited the empire. The name of this people is the basis of the word “Abyssinia,” by which Ethiopia has often been known. The name of Ethiopia is taken from a Greek expression meaning “burnt faces.” The Greeks applied this term to the Kushite kingdom and black Africa in general. In the fourth century C.E.. the kings of Aksum began to use the Greek term (Aithiopia) for their own country when they wrote in Greek. A trilingual inscription of Ezana, the king who converted to Christianity about 340 C.E.., employs both names. This is the first known use of the word “Ethiopia” by one of its own rulers to describe part of the modern country. The land was usually called Aksum, after its capital.

According to early church historians such as Rufinus of Aquileia (345?–410 C.E..), a young Syrian named Frumentius brought Christianity to Ethiopia. Around 330 C.E.. he was made bishop of Aksum by Athanasius, patriarch of Alexandria. This established a custom that continued for over sixteen centuries. Until 1959 the Alexandrian patriarch of the Coptic Church of Egypt appointed the bishops who headed the Ethiopian church. They were always foreign, usually Egyptian.

During the Aksumite period the northern regions of Ethiopia belonged to an international trade network linking the Nile River, the Mediterranean, and the Indian Ocean. Aksum’s control over this rich trade provided the basis for its prosperity and cultural achievements. In the sixth century C.E.., King Kaleb of Aksum sent a military expedition across the Red Sea to depose the Jewish king Yusuf Asar of Himyar. Even though historical details about the period are relatively meager, objects recovered from excavations indicate a high level of material prosperity, with pottery, architecture, and coinage attesting unique Aksumite styles. By the Aksumite period, the Agaw and other peoples who spoke Cushitic languages had come under the dominance of a ruling class who spoke the Semitic language Ge’ez.

Over a period of seven centuries Aksum firmly left its mark on highland northern Ethiopia. The choice of Christianity, the style of architecture, and the form of kingship were retained even after the city itself ceased to be the political center. The empire first shaped the general cultural heritage of highland Ethiopia, including Christian religion and Semitic language. From every point of view, the Aksumite kingdom was a golden age in Ethiopian history. Its kings erected stone stelae (or pillars) whose height surpassed any other monolithic monuments in the ancient world, and they employed a gold coinage at a time when very few other societies were wealthy or sophisticated enough to do so.

The zenith of Aksum occurred in the sixth century. Soon after, the rise of Islamic power in the Red Sea deprived Aksum of control over the trade that had been its major source of wealth. Its kings were forced to curtail their overseas projects, abandon many of their trading links, and retreat to the highlands. Arab geographers describe an Ethiopian state ruled from a capital called Ku’bar. This Ethiopian Christian kingdom seems to have maintained itself for several centuries, though it was often threatened by expansionist Muslim states to the east and south. Almost nothing is known about it, aside from the occasional remarks in the reports of Arab geographers or in the chronicles of the patriarchs of Alexandria. These chronicles record a disaster that occurred late in the tenth century, when a foreign queen is said to have seized power, killing the reigning negus, or king. This incident seems to have been preserved in Ethiopian legends that tell of a queen called Gudit, whom the chronicles blame for destroying Aksum.

In spite of such defeats, the highland kingdom seems to have been able to keep its Christian culture more or less intact. The Zagwe Dynasty, which ruled from about 1137 to 1270, figures in traditional Ethiopian sources as a break in the historical sequence, when a “usurping” dynasty of Agaw origin seized control of the throne. Royal chronicles and accounts of Ethiopian saints provide some information about this period of Ethiopian history. The capital city during this period was Adafa or Roha, which was later named after Lalibela himself, who is said to have commissioned the city’s famous churches, cut from the living rock. The Zagwe kings did not rule over a large area. The limits of Zagwe power seem to have encouraged the Muslims of the coast, who grew strong enough to establish states as far west as present-day Shewa.

The church hierarchy and remnants of the old elite resented Zagwe rule. With the support of the church, the Solomonic Dynasty ousted the Zagwe from power around 1270. Traditional church accounts describe the Solomonic Dynasty as descendants of the “legitimate” rulers, in contrast with the Zagwe “usurpers.” In other words, church documents back the new Dynasty’s claims of descent from King Solomon of Israel and the Queen of Sheba through their son Menelik, the legendary first emperor of Ethiopia. In return for the church’s support, the Solomonic rulers awarded the Ethiopian church control over vast stretches of land, which gave the church a source of wealth and power that endured until the revolution of 1974. This Dynasty continued into the nineteenth century, and was linked with the family of the last emperor, Haile Selassie. The Dynasty’s power was based in the Amhara regions (including Shewa). There seems to have been no real capital. The emperor and his court were perpetually on the move, establishing temporary administration as the need arose. During the dry season, when military campaigns were possible, the capital took the form of a vast but rigidly disciplined city of tents.

The founder of this new Dynasty was Yekuno Amlak (1270–1285), and some of his successors were remarkable rulers, who consolidated and extended the kingdom, or made significant contributions to religious and cultural life. During the early years of the Dynasty, royal chronicles give some information about wars with Muslim states such as Ifat, which controlled the area around the Red Sea coast and even some of the highlands of Shewa. For the first time, the Christian kingdom was able to expand toward what are now the southern provinces of Ethiopia. Amda Seyon (1314–1344) even absorbed some Muslim districts, although his empire extracted tribute from more or less autonomous regions instead of imposing direct control. Other emperors campaigned in the north, to gain access to the Red Sea, as well as in the south and the east. Zar’a Ya’qob (1434–1468) controlled a substantial central Ethiopian state in relative tranquility, which allowed the new growth of arts and literature. However, few churches, manuscripts, or paintings survive from this period. Much of the territory and the cultural heritage was soon to be lost, and any further territorial expansion was to remain modest until the late nineteenth century.

Invasions and Disorder

In the sixteenth century the Portuguese search for a mythical Christian ruler named Prester John led to the Solomonic emperors of Ethiopia. A first envoy, Pero da Covilhão, was sent in 1487. He arrived six years later during the reign of Eskender, but was never permitted to leave. More envoys arrived in 1508, and in the following year a letter was sent to Portugal with an Ethiopian ambassador, Matthew the Armenian. He finally reached Portugal in 1514, and returned with a Portuguese embassy in 1520. The arrival of the Portuguese embassy enabled one of its members, Francisco Alvares, to write the first detailed description of the country, the only account we have of the medieval kingdom before Muslim incursions destroyed much of its Christian culture.

The Capture of Addis Ababa.  British soldiers surround a stack of confiscated Italian rifles in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, shortly after conquering the city in 1941.

(AP Images)

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The great rivals of the Christian emperors were the Muslim rulers of Adal, the region lying east of the Awash River as far as the seacoast, and including Harer. In 1516 the emperor Lebna Dengel defeated the emir Mahfuz of Adal. Perhaps because of this victory, he neglected to make a military alliance with the Portuguese, but a strong and determined leader soon arose among the Muslims. The imam Ahmad ibn Ibrahim of Harer, known as Grañ (“the left-handed”), won a great victory in 1529, and Muslim armies invaded most of Christian Ethiopia. Lebna Dengel, who had received the Portuguese embassy enthroned in his great pavilion hung with silks and brocades, became a fugitive until his death at Debra Damo in 1540. According to Arabic as well as Ethiopian sources, Muslim forces ransacked and burned churches, monasteries, and treasuries.

This might have been the end of the unique Christian civilization that had flourished in northern and central Ethiopia since Aksumite times, but the new emperor Galawdewos rescued the state with the aid of Portuguese troops under Cristovão, the son of Vasco da Gama. The decisive factor was the possession of firearms, which the Muslim troops had already acquired in large numbers across the Red Sea. Ahmad Grañ and Cristovão da Gama both lost their lives, but the tide had definitively turned in favor of the Christian state. Christian forces sacked Harer itself, although it survived as the greatest Muslim center in Ethiopia, a trading city in contact with the Red Sea coast and beyond.

After this episode the Solomonic emperors established Christian rule once again over the devastated central regions, but both the Muslim states and the Christian kingdom soon had to defend themselves against a new threat: the Cushitic Oromo peoples. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Oromo-speaking herdsmen began to migrate from the south, and rapidly became the chief enemies of the Christian state of the north and center. They occupied many parts of what is now Ethiopia, and marriages with Oromo chiefly families meant that some of the Solomonic emperors became part Oromo.

For about a century after their entry into Ethiopian affairs, the Portuguese remained active in the region. Jesuit missionaries attempted to convert the country to Roman Catholicism, with little lasting success. With the accession to the Ethiopian throne of Fasiladas, a firm adherent of the Ethiopian Orthodox church, the Roman Catholic adventure was finished. He expelled the Jesuits in 1632 and made an arrangement with the Turkish authorities at Massawa to execute any foreign priest who might attempt to enter the country.

After the expulsion of the Portuguese, Ethiopia was again isolated from European influence. During the following centuries, foreign travelers made occasional visits to the country, which was now ruled from the new capital built at Gonder, north of Lake Tana. Like the Jesuits before them, these visitors recorded their observations of different peoples, plants and animals, political affairs, religious issues, opportunities for trade, and many other features of Ethiopian life. The earlier Gonder period included powerful emperors whose deeds are described in the royal chronicles. Gonder itself is a remarkable testimony to their efforts, the first capital after centuries in which the empire had been governed from tents. The turrets and battlements of its castles still stand, along with some of the forty-four churches that once embellished the city.

In the eighteenth century, however, the power of the central monarchy began to decline. Gonder slowly fell into decay as great provincial lords, largely of Oromo origin, competed to enthrone rival puppet kings. The custom of exiling male members of the royal family to a remote mountain, to prevent them from plotting against the current emperor, actually provided a reservoir of princes with the required Solomonic blood that provincial lords could recruit in any new attempt to seize power. With the assassination of Iyasu I in 1704, the monarchy became increasingly unstable. After the emperor Iyo’as was murdered in 1769, the empire began to collapse, even though the theory of Solomonic rule remained intact. This chaotic period, known as the “Era of the Princes,” continued until the middle of the nineteenth century, with feeble emperors dwelling at Gonder completely at the mercy of the great provincial lords. Some of the emperors lived in such poverty amid the ruins of their palaces that scarcely enough money could be found to provide a decent burial. Only the mystique of their Solomonic descent, or perhaps the need for the great chiefs to have someone to bestow the title of ras (supreme commander), kept the system alive.

Piecemeal Modernization and the Struggle against Colonialism

In the middle of the nineteenth century an interloper named Kassa overthrew the power of the provincial lords as well as the old imperial tradition. He eliminated most of his rivals, and restored a strong and united Ethiopia, even subduing Shewa, which had maintained a separate existence under rulers claiming descent from Lebna Dengel. Kassa was crowned in 1855 as Tewodros II, and the genealogists duly found a Solomonic background for him. Recognizing the growing threat of European imperialism, Tewodros attempted to modernize Ethiopia’s army and establish a strong central state. To fund this modernization program, he imposed higher taxes on peasants and seized church lands; these actions alienated both the overtaxed peasantry and the country’s powerful clergy. Meanwhile, a diplomatic argument with Great Britain led to the Napier expedition in 1868. The British besieged Tewodros at his capital Maqdala, where he committed suicide as British forces overran his defenses. However, even this disaster did not completely destroy the attempts he had made to strengthen and modernize his empire.

As the European world grew more aware of Ethiopia, Yohannes IV and Menelik II, the two emperors who succeeded Tewodros, fought to retain their independence against Sudanese expansionism and Italian colonialism. Yohannes had been the ruler of Tigray, and emerged victorious from the struggle to fill the vacuum left by the death of Tewodros and the British departure. He thwarted a quest for power by his tributary, the king of Shewa. He failed to keep Italy from acquiring the Red Sea ports of Aseb (1869) and Massawa (1885), but resisted Italian incursions inland. Yohannes died fighting the Sudanese Mahdi, and was succeeded in 1889 by Menelik II of Shewa.

With the Ethiopian treasury drained by ongoing warfare, the new emperor needed peace to establish himself on his throne; this put him in a weak position as he faced the Italians. In 1890 Menelik agreed to the Treaty of Wichale granting Italy control of Eritrea, but the treaty’s Italian translation awarded Italy a protectorate over the whole of Ethiopia. After replenishing his treasury, Menelik defeated the Italians at the Battle of Adwa in 1896. This was a unique achievement. Alone among African states, Ethiopia succeeded in retaining independent sovereignty in the face of European colonialism. Even though Menelik lost some territory in Eritrea, he made up for this by his own expansion to the south. Between 1896 and 1906 Ethiopia grew to its present size, as Menelik conquered areas previously ruled by the Oromo or other peoples. Menelik also succeeded in ejecting the last independent Muslim emir from Harer.

Determined to keep his country independent, Menelik used taxes collected from these conquered territories to fund a modernization program. Menelik founded a new capital at Addis Ababa and commissioned Ethiopia’s first modern schools and hospitals. Menelik hired foreign advisers and concluded an agreement with a French firm to construct a railroad, completed in 1917, from Addis Ababa to the Indian Ocean port of Djibouti in French Somaliland. During the reign of Menelik, Ethiopia acquired its first modern bank, postage stamps, and a national currency. The first modern roads were constructed, the basis of a telephone and telegraph system installed, and a rudimentary cabinet established. The new transport infrastructure enabled Ethiopia’s land-owning elite to export cash crops, primarily coffee, for sale on the global market.

Menelik’s grandson Lij Iyasu reigned briefly (1913–1916) after his grandfather’s death, but his efforts to give Ethiopia’s Muslim population a voice in the government angered the country’s Christian elite. A group led by an aristocratic official, Ras Tafari, ousted Lij Iyasu from office and named Menelik’s daughter Zawditu as empress, with Ras Tafari as the new regent. Tafari continued attempts to modernize the empire. He abolished slavery and recruited graduates of the new schools to staff a modern civil service. Coffee exports provided revenues for the expansion of Ethiopia’s modern infrastructure, and the country’s market economy expanded. Tafari kept Europeans from gaining control of Ethiopia’s economy, as they had elsewhere in Africa, by requiring at least partial local ownership of all enterprises.

In 1930, upon the death of Zawditu, Tafari was crowned Emperor Haile Selassie I. Coffee exports continued to bankroll his ambitious modernization program. However, his reign faced a crisis in 1935 when Italian troops invaded Ethiopia. The Italian forces won a quick victory, and Italy formally annexed the country the following year. Although there was great international sympathy for Ethiopia, no material assistance was offered, and the fascist occupation lasted for five years. The Italian colonial administration undertook a significant amount of road building and other construction work, and carried out a modern expansion of the capital at Addis Ababa. However, Ethiopian patriot resistance continued in the countryside. Fascist rule collapsed after Italy under Benito Mussolini entered World War II. A combined army of Ethiopian and British troops liberated Ethiopia in 1941. Haile Selassie was restored to the throne, and his country became a founding member of the United Nations.

As the Cold War between the Soviet bloc and the West came to dominate global affairs, Haile Selassie aligned himself with the West. In return, the Western powers awarded Ethiopia the former Italian colony of Eritrea in 1952. With access to Western markets, Ethiopia earned healthy revenues from coffee exports during the 1950s. With Western and, especially, with United States assistance, new hospitals, schools, and roads were built; banking and currency were reorganized; and a national airline was established. Addis Ababa was chosen as the headquarters for both the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa and the Organization of African Unity.

Although the emperor introduced a new constitution in 1955 granting limited rights to the Ethiopian people, the constitution left ultimate power in the emperor’s hands. Meanwhile, the emperor failed to respond to calls for further democratization and land reform to end the concentration of the country’s land in the hands of the church and aristocracy. Frustrated by the emperor’s intransigence, students began to protest and the imperial bodyguard attempted a coup in 1960. Although the aging emperor crushed the opposition and retained his hold on power, his regime lost popular support, and his government faced ongoing rebellion in Eritrea and the Somali borderlands. With the dramatic increase in the price of imported oil in 1973 and a simultaneous drought and famine in northern Ethiopia, Ethiopia’s economy collapsed. Demonstrations and strikes in Addis Ababa forced the resignation of government officials in early 1974. Soon thereafter, a military committee, known as the Derg, led by Mengistu Haile Mariam, seized control of the government and moved to dismantle the entrenched aristocratic power structure for which they blamed the country’s ills. On September 12 1974, the Derg removed the emperor from his throne, and by the end of the year, Mengistu’s faction, which was committed to Soviet-style SOCIALISM, had driven moderates from the government.

The Revolution and Its Aftermath

With the old establishment shattered, Mengistu installed a revolutionary socialist government. Abandoning earlier contacts with the United States, he relied on support from the Soviet Union. Several groups challenged revolutionary policies on ideological or ethnic grounds, but Mengistu’s regime brutally repressed internal opposition. In 1975, the Ethiopian government carried out a sweeping land reform that seized land from its previous owner and made it the property of the state. This land nationalization eliminated the power base of the land-owning aristocracy and church, which for centuries had relied on the collection of rents from the country’s peasantry. Meanwhile, internal unrest, including an ongoing independence struggle in Eritrea, encouraged a Somali invasion in 1975, which the Ethiopian government defeated in 1978 with massive Soviet and Cuban aid. The government nationalized (placed under state ownership) factories, banks, and insurance companies, and in 1984 established a ruling party, the Workers’ Party of Ethiopia.

During the 1980s separatist movements in Eritrea and Tigray mounted increasingly successful military campaigns. Meanwhile, the Ethiopian government’s land reform and agricultural policies ruined the country’s fragile ecological balance, and harvests declined. Government exploitation of the peasantry further hampered both agricultural production and the distribution of food, and in 1984 a grueling famine gripped the country. News of famine brought Ethiopia to the attention of Western media. This publicity resulted in extensive international aid, which emphasized humanitarian relief rather than development. The country thus remained one of the poorest in the world. The Mengistu regime’s radical responses to the problems of drought and famine—resettlement and “villagization”—made the situation worse. Resettlement programs involved the relocation of peasants, sometimes forcibly, to uncultivated lands where they often lacked the infrastructure or supplies necessary for successful farming. The government’s villagization programs moved peasants from their scattered homesteads to concentrated settlements along roads, supposedly to facilitate the delivery of aid and services, but also to facilitate government surveillance. Both programs further disrupted the country’s agriculture and provoked accusations by Ethiopian and foreign observers that dissident groups were being starved deliberately.

In 1988 rebels in Eritrea and Tigre joined forces and successfully fought Ethiopian government troops. Rebels expanded their control over Eritrea and northern Ethiopia during 1989 and 1990. The rebels from Tigray formed alliances with other ethnically based opposition groups to form the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). By April 1991 all of Eritrea was under the control of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), and the forces of the EPRDF advanced on Addis Ababa. Mengistu fled to exile in Zimbabwe in May 1991, and his regime collapsed.

The EPRDF established a transitional government with Meles Zenawi as president in Ethiopia, while the EPLF controlled Eritrea. The EPRDF announced the reorganization of the country as a federal state divided into regions along ethnic lines. The new government promoted this reorganization as a way to acknowledge the country’s ethnic diversity, but the reorganization angered many Asmara (the ethnic group that had traditionally dominated Ethiopia), who felt that the plan jeopardized national unity. The EPRDF muzzled the opposition and in 1992 carried out parliamentary elections. In 1993 Eritrea formally declared its independence. The Ethiopian parliament approved a new constitution in 1994 (effective in August 1995), and Meles Zenawi won election as prime minister in 1995. The legislative elections of 2005 were marred by accusations and counteraccusations of fraud and official corruption. Despite this, the country’s opposition parties fared relatively well, picking up some two hundred seats in the parliament.

During 1992 and 1993 the transitional government had agreed to a structural adjustment plan that was intended to liberalize the economy. However, the government at first failed to return property seized by the Mengistu regime to private owners. The economy stagnated, and the government’s heavy regulation of commerce discouraged agricultural production and food distribution. Once again, in 1994, famine threatened Ethiopia. International assistance saved many lives, and in 1995 the government finally established a process for returning nationalized land to private control. However, this process aroused opposition because it favored supporters of the EPRDF, who were allowed to claim larger allotments of land than families who had received title to land under the regime of Emperor Haile Selassie or Lieutenant Colonel Mengistu. The government also announced controversial plans to privatize its commercial and industrial holdings. The redistribution of land appeared to improve the country’s agricultural fortunes: the country enjoyed good harvests in 1996 and 1997. Its overall economy seemed to be recovering from years of government mismanagement. However, ethnic strife and raids carried out by soldiers discharged at the end of Ethiopia’s long civil war continued to plague the Oromo and Somali regions in the south and east. In May 1998 a border dispute with neighboring Eritrea erupted into a full-scale war. By the time the UN brokered a peace treaty in December 2000, Ethiopia had spent three billion dollars and had 350,000 of its residents displaced. The end of hostilities and good rainfall led to a brief period of growth. Drought struck again in late 2002, however, creating another persisting famine and crippling the nation’s poverty-stricken economy. Malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS currently afflict millions of Ethiopians.

See also Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome in Africa: An Interpretation; African Origins of Humanity; African socialism; Ancient African Civilizations; Christianity, African: An Overview; Cold War and Africa; Diseases, Infectious, in Africa; Drought and Desertification; Ethiopian Orthodox Church; Hunger and Famine; Islam in Africa; Languages, African: An Overview; Structural Adjustment in Africa; United Nations in Africa.

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