Ethiopia as the Biggest of the Small Nations: Pan-Africanism and Blackness in Amharic Literature and Political Thought

Historical surveys of Pan-Africanist, Rastafari and black nationalist movements always underline the central role played by Ethiopia in the thought of African and black activists. The term 'Ethiopianism', for example, refers to an ideology of African liberation embraced by secular and religious movement in South Africa, North America and the Caribbean. What happens if we shift the perspective, and look instead at how Ethiopian intellectuals responded to Pan-African and black nationalist ideologies? This paper traces Ethiopia's relationship with Pan-Africanism and black nationalism, from the initial reluctance of Ethiopian elites to identify with colonized Africans to their strategic repositioning of Ethiopia as the 'mother' of newly independent Africa in the 1960s. I will discuss the pivotal role of the Harlem-based newspaper Voice of Ethiopia, run by the Ethiopian medical doctor Mälaku Bäyyan and his African-American wife Dorothy Hadley. Voice of Ethiopia campaigned for Ethiopia at the time of the Italian occupation using the language of black solidarity, but according to Fikru Gebrekidan, Mälaku remained a marginal figure in Ethiopian intellectual history. Thirty years later, the poet and playwright Mängəstu Lämma satirized his compatriots' rejection of blackness in his "Pasha Ashabir in America", a long poem telling the story of an Ethiopian traveller in the United States during the civil rights movement. From the mid-1960s, new generations of Ethiopians, such as the poet Ṣägaye Gäbrä-Mädhən, embraced Pan-Africanism much more firmly and closely participated in the South-South conversations of the non-aligned movement.