Content: Opinion

  • Battle of Adwa: An Underdog’s Story

    For the Europeans, the late 19th century was a great period of industrialization. In fact, at one time, it looked as if supply would outpace demand. Understandably, Europeans had to find new markets. They looked to the west, to the Americas. Then they looked to the east, to Asia, but non-looked as buoyant a market […]

  • Rising Populism Amidst Terrorism

    The dark specter of evil (the begetter of war) smiles upon this earth, and humanity, at least once every decade, year, month or day. The world has never known a respite. In the 20th Century though, the carnage and destruction perpetrated by World War II convinced world leaders that war was no longer a sane […]

  • Ethiopia Lags in Global Relevance

    The population of Ethiopia is closing to 100 million. That is the number of human beings permanently residing in this nation of the conservatives, Ethiopia (according to a World Bank projection). All of these millions of individuals have their own, aspirations, joys, sorrows and setbacks. They have a multitude of cultures, languages, and faiths; a […]

  • The Fate of Birr

      In my younger years, when I was more carefree, not to mention naïve, I used to ask myself, “Why does the government keep indebting itself, instead of printing money every time the country needs some hard cash?” I was given several many answers, but none ever sold me. Everyone kept saying that money is […]

  • Local Versus Foreign Teachers

    The great US educator and cultural anthropologist, Johnetta Betsch Cole, ones said, “To teach well is to be a lifelong student.” To teach is to be taught. In other words, no one is perfect. No one can know everything. Even a genius has something to learn from those less enlightened. The process of teaching, and […]

  • Sayonara Obama

    Approximately eight years ago, there was a subject – more than any other – that so concerned me and my friends, it was the only topic of discussion. I was in high school then, and the world was only as large as the campus grounds. I lived in a bubble; I listened to pop music, participated in petty gossip and chased (or at least tried to chase) girls. That was the world as I knew it!
    But then, Senator Barack Obama ran for president of the United States of America. I have never before that time paid any attention to local politics, let alone international affairs. I have, on occasion, heard of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Vladimir Putin or Tony Blair. But they did not mean much to me. They existed in some part of the universe, far above that of mine, making decisions that had absolutely no implication on my life. Or so I thought.
    But when the 2008 presidential elections took place, almost everyone I knew was riled up; all because of the unique color of the candidate. Race, despite the very naïve assumptions of today, matter very much then. And not just to African-Americans in America, but to Africans everywhere.
    For the past two centuries, or even further than that, the most powerful individuals in the world have always been male individuals of European descent. Obama was the first (and for a long time to come, I am sure, only) possible exception. As far as history was concerned, the prospect of a black US President was a game changer.
    And Obama was not just an African-American – he was a first generation African-American, meaning that his parents, or at least one of them, was not even American. Obama’s biological father was from our neighboring country of Kenya, an East African. This, somehow, made the future president so easy to identify with, to support and if he finally won, to rally behind.
    Eight years ago history was revised. Obama proved that once and for all, anyone, from anywhere, could become and do anything. Hope is not overrated, success takes hard work, democracy is a working process and the freedom of the media helps create a tolerant and reasonable society. These were the lessons to be extracted from his victory.
    So much has passed since then, a seemingly simpler time, both locally and internationally. Here in Ethiopia, in 2012, long serving Prime Minister Meles Zenawi was reported to have died in a Belgium hospital, from an infection. Some time before that, the construction of the Great Renaissance Dam, which is to draw massive megawatts of electrical power from the Abay River, and get financed with bonds, had begun. Life went on. I was correct, Obama, Bush or Clinton – they all mean nothing to this medium-sized, ancient, undeveloped but developing country.
    But that undeniable historical significance of the Obama presidency was flung back into our collective Ethiopian consciousness when it was revealed he would visit the country as part of his Africa tour. Many other American presidents have come to Ethiopia, like Bush or Clinton, but they both came after they were already out of the White House. The fact that Obama was visiting, as the sitting president mattered – it showed that we are not insignificant to the outside world, this 90 plus million citizens, their dreams, aspirations, and existences, like during the reign of Emperor Haile Selassie, do influence international geopolitics.
    There were a number of criticisms. Some pundits analysts suggested that Obama’s visit legitimizes the government, which they consider undemocratic.
    I understand that everything a sitting president does and says has multilateral effects in political affairs, but Obama regularly visits countries like Saudi Arabia and China, and we do not hear of the same types of accusations. He is quite an important person but his visit deceives no one, least of all the Ethiopian people.
    On the press conference that followed his visit, where both foreign and local journalists were in attendance, Obama talked of his time in Ethiopia and the bilateral policies the two countries are proud to flaunt. As the President gave one of his famously focused and touching speeches, he would drop some Amharic words here and there, drawing fervent applause from the crowd.
    This was actually not the first time Obama came to Ethiopia. He also did visit the country, almost a decade ago, when he was a Senator. In the Ethiopian city of Dire Dawa, the focus of his visit, it was rumored that he mentioned his plans to one day run for president.
    By the time press, Obama will not be a president anymore. He would have packed his belongings and moved out of the White House and the American political life (that is unless Michelle Obama decided to run for president in the future). I would like to say he is giving way to a new generation of leaders, but no. He and his administration will be replaced by conservatives and political hardliners.
    I wonder if Donald Trump will visit Ethiopia. I wonder if he will visit Ethiopia if Premier Haile-Mariam Desalegn said nice things about him on Twitter. I wonder if Trump knows which continent Ethiopia is in.

  • Looking Back at Marxist Dreamland

    Karl Marx was not such a naive man, as some would be forgiven to think, given the current state of his abused philosophy. Sure, he thought competition was overrated, that capitalism was crude and inhumane, but his visions of how a society should operate were surreal. And not just surreal but so – how do […]

  • The Year That Was 2016

    Days, weeks, months and years all pass us by with such an intolerable flurry of speed. We are then left with no alternative but to sit back and wonder how it all could have ever unraveled so unexpectedly. Some periods affect us, far more deeply than others and require our utmost attention and contemplation. Without […]

  • Tax Adds Insult to Injury for Local Filmmakers

    My grandmother used to tell me, that in her youthful days, which I imagine to be the early 1960’s, that prices were so low that a chicken and all the spices that go into making Doro Wet (a traditional Ethiopian festive stew), could be bought for a mere 25 cents. Now, I cannot independently corroborate […]

  • The State of the Ethiopian Millennials

    The French comedy movie The Bélier Family most cleverly communicates the generational gap far better than any other piece of fiction I have ever seen or read. In the film, there is a 16 year old teen that has a great voice. Ironically, her entire family happens to be deaf-mute. They will never, ever find […]

  • Castro Dead, Good Riddance

    Every dictator, at least once in his unique career, asks himself, how do I rule forever? This is a crucial question that needs to be addressed, if a despot is serious about his vocation. Smarter tyrants look to history for erudition. Others such as Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein lose the plot and meet grizzly […]

  • What Ethiopianism Means To Me

    This article is a response to an email I received regarding what I wrote two weeks ago. I suggested that unlike most other African countries, Ethiopia has never been colonized. A reader pointed out that, no, Ethiopia, as one of the oldest countries in the world, has actually been colonized several times and that racism […]

  • Good Initiative for Ethiopian Movies

    If we take a nostalgic trip down motion picture’s memory lane, we find that it was the French that came up with what we now call a movie. Two brothers, Auguste and Louis Lumiere, were the first to hold film screenings in theatres. What they showed were documentaries – only they weren’t called documentaries back […]

  • Racism Never Starts with Hate but Love

    Eight years ago, Barack Hussein Obama was elected as the first African-American president of the United States of America. This happened in a country, where a hundred and fifty years ago, it was OK to buy and sale black people. Furthermore, for the first time in the history of mankind, the most important person in […]

  • Cloudy, Wrong November

    What just happened? Donald J. Trump did. It isnt fiction, it isnt a joke; Trump just became the 45thpresident of the United States of America. Of course, as he wasa candidate, there was always a good chance he could get elected, but no one, not even for one measly second, thought it would actually happen. […]

  • Themes of the Mammoth Election

    According to the Many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which almost no one understands, there is always more than one realistic outcome to every given conundrum. The theory explains (please pay attention) that everything that could have happened, but hasn’t, has actually happened, just not in the same universe. In other words, for every universe where […]

  • What in the World is a Video Store?

    A while ago, as I was leaving a friend’s house, with two large capacity flash drives in hand, it occurred to me, between the two, I was carrying some thirty movies in my left trouser pocket. In a simpler time, I would have needed a suitcase. Not a hundred yards away from my house, there […]

  • The Nobel Prize and Bob Dylan

    I distinctively remember my school teacher telling a class full of students, including me, that Alfred Nobel created the Nobel Prize because he was so dismayed at people’s use of the dynamite – which he invented, for military purposes. What he wanted to do, we were told, was create a safer way to handle the […]

  • Twenty-First Century Offline Nation

    It has been, according to the Bible, seven thousand years – or, according to science, 10,000 years – since the first forms of civilisation. And it has been a few decades since mankind came up with a simple, and yet complex, digital phenomena known as the internet. The idea behind the invention, at first, was […]

  • Brexit’s Hard-Heartedness

      Why would the UK want to break up with the European Union, when so many other countries in the world would give so much to be a part of the organisation? Well, the rationale was that they would be better off without it and its strict, deal breaking regulations – like the one that […]

  • Crude Jokes for Less Crude Times

    A while ago now, I was sitting at home flicking through satellite channels when I settled on CNN, which I have come to prefer to the BBC. The latter is a channel dominated by technological achievements in the digital world (namely Artificial Intelligence) and usually leaves me depressed. The former is usually more upbeat, and […]

  • Wrong Result at Rights of Way

    It was an ordinary summer afternoon; a car was cruising along a highway at a regular speed, when a pedestrian, rushing to cross the lane, almost fatally converged with the vehicle. By which I mean, there was a serious car accident. But, let me be plainer. I was in a public taxi (minibus), sitting at […]

  • In for a Bumpy Ride

    It is never been clear to me why New Year and Christmas are different holidays. Even in the Gregorian calendar, there is about a week-long discrepancy. If every year counts down Jesus Christ’s age, and if it is New Year that marks the beginning of the ensuing year, does not that make the holiday His […]

  • The Economic Trend Is Our Friend

    These are days of grave disillusionment with the state of the world. Sinister forces of fanatical, faith-based killings – something that we in the West, at least, thought had largely ended in 1750 – are back. And they have been joined by, and are reinforcing, forces of nationalism, bigotry and racism, which we thought had […]

  • Lies and Misdemeanors

    I am going to call my first movie The Hypocrisy. Hypocrisy itself would be a character, and it would go from house to house, city to city, corrupting and annihilating every single thing it touches. I learned, not long ago, it would be better not to announce one’s ideology in any medium of storytelling. But […]