Towards a New Ethiopian-Inspired Pan-Africanism: Fano, Freedom and Hope for a Continent
Jeff Pearce
The fight against Abiy is not a negative one, only about the hate that needs to be rejected and evicted. It’s also about preserving civilization and culture and human rights. Every African person can understand and relate to this.
I : “Ethiopia is ancient, bigger than the whispers and the noise, replenished by its own resources and faiths, its people’s remarkable ingenuity and courage, its diversity and its unity. Ethiopia goes on because its people believe in it.”
I wrote these words four years ago, and I still believe in them. But of course, they were written before Ethiopians discovered that their prime minister wanted to dismantle a nation’s entire cultural legacy and push a demented ethnic cleansing of certain peoples, chiefly the Amhara.
Abiy Ahmed is doing his damn best to destroy Ethiopia even as a concept by crushing those who believe in it and the national institutions they cherish. Have a historic district? Poof, it’s rubble. Pray at an Orthodox Church? Let’s have goons shoot you as you walk to services. Want to know what’s really going on? Well, you can’t—because some of the best reporters are in a jail cell. Along with activists.
So, I was not surprised when declaring the obvious, that “Fano offers freedom, Fano offers hope,” got a good response despite X’s relentless shadow banning of my account, just as it tries to smother other pro-African accounts.
It wasn’t so much a credit to me as a reflection that people want to believe again. Just as I think that the Amhara Association of America’s getting a journalism award was another expression of desperate longing for coverage of the situation.
Even half-baked, half-assed, politically coded and inconvenient facts-omitting “journalism” or what passes for it that covers the plight of the Amhara.
Believe me, to hear Zecharias Zelalem spout rehearsed compassion for these victims in a video clip nearly made me lose my lunch. I genuinely believe that if you engraved a made-up journalism trophy with his name, hooked it to a fishing line and then pulled on it, you could lead him like a house cat to any event you liked, including a “Date-a-Proctologist” mixer.
I detest the AAA’s move but I think I understand it. And it’s indicative of a larger problem, one that is fixable but like everything else, needs effort.
Close to three months ago, I about how the leadership was failing. I to use commonsense communications techniques to gain media attention. In private, I got virtual pats on the head through DMs on X and through WhatsApp, and then the leaders went back to not listening to me and doing nothing… again. Less than two years ago, I , imploring creative artists to get creative about the resistance.
My assessment is still valid. While there’s been a blip of increased attention to what’s going on in Ethiopia, it’s still framed according to the “hopeless Africa” trope with Fano depicted as one faction indistinguishable from all others.
And if there is one thing you can always count on, it’s that when Western reporters and writers can’t understand or even identify the landscape of ideas related to a conflict, they’ll fall back on their bullshit tactics of “pick a victim, anyone will do” and weave a tapestry of disaster. This is why we’ll never notice if ChatGPT or some other AI crap replaces correspondents’ work on Africa. It’s already hack garbage.
See if you recognize this lead: “At 12 years old, little Genet walks 10 miles (12 miles, 15 miles) every morning to fetch more water for her family. But on Tuesday, her village was attacked by Fano/OLF/TPLF units who killed X number of residents. Human Rights Watch, observing from New York, sobbed into its pillow in front of cameras and then condemned the attack…” Rinse and repeat.
Nothing about Fano’s code of conduct. Nothing about the background of why Amhara are being attacked, except for the tediously stupid assertion that “for centuries, Amhara were in power,” which was never true.
And here’s where we get to the point. Like everyone else, I waited for some consensus of ideology to emerge from the different Fano groups which would get picked up in news coverage, although I cared less about this than that they win as soon as possible. I knew that they stood for respecting and protecting all Ethiopians, not just Amhara, and that was enough for me until they were in power.
Unlike a few others, I can readily admit that my views evolve over time, according to new information. And now I realize that it hardly matters what this group or that group says in the field because the ideological fight is on a far grander scale than how Fano will eventually govern.
Consider how often now you see idiotic posts and threads on social media picking away at the most fundamental basics of Ethiopian history. It’s become necessary to refute the most pitiful rubbish, such as the . Or that . One of the problems, of course, is that even when you do have folks who want to defend Ethiopia and its culture, they often get it wrong. A certain rabid monarchist—whose recital of his own royal bloodline could be used as surgical anesthetic—recently claimed, “Black nationalists like Marcus Garvey hated Ethiopian emperors like Menelik II and Haile Selassie I because they couldn’t fit them into their racial worldview.”
Well, no, that’s not historically accurate at all, and I explained why .
But this sweeping generalization unintentionally inspired me. It made me think about the differences in perspective. As Ethiopia was never colonized, there never was a complete buy-in of the whole Black Power, “Black is Beautiful,” Black nationalism movements that really got their momentum in the 1960s. You’ll notice that I wrote with care “got their momentum” and not got their start—because they didn’t in the Sixties. Things were more complicated than that.
This is another reason why royalist guy is wrong. The “racial worldview” had been adopted by at least one prominent Ethiopian, Dr. Malaku Bayen, whom the emperor sent in 1936 to the U.S. to drum up support for Ethiopia against Fascist Italy. When Malaku, his wife, and son tried to check into a Midtown Manhattan hotel, they faced predictable bigotry. The good doctor shrewdly turned this insult into a public relations gain, winning support from the NAACP and all of Harlem.
Malaku knew that to build support for Ethiopia, he had to pin the cause to a wider crusade of civil rights, and so he told crowds: Think Black, act Black and be Black.
Just how far he got in persuading Harlemites is hard to tell, but he at least deserves to be recognized as an activist pioneer. And he was a true believer, not just posing. There is a story that at some reception in Britain, Malaku got all flustered and upset when Princess Tsehai chose to dance with a white man—something that didn’t bother in the least the emperor, who was right there watching the festivities.
Ethiopia’s courageous fight against Mussolini’s army had already inspired the Pan-African movement and its key advocates, several of whom would become leaders of nations such as Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta. And who does not know these immortal words, if only because they’re borrowed for a Bob Marely song?
“On the question of racial discrimination, the Addis Ababa Conference taught, to those who will learn, this further lesson: that until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned; that until there are no longer first class and second class citizens of any nation; that until the color of a man’s skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes…
Until that day, the African continent will not know peace. We Africans will fight, if necessary, and we know that we shall win, as we are confident in the victory of good over evil.”
Haile Selassie spoke these words in an address to the United Nations in October of 1963.
So, there is no need to jump in to fight for one side or even dissect the phony and artificial conflict between “Black nationalism” and the Ethiopian self-image or its brand of Pan-Africanism. These words above are immortal because they speak to the fight against racism, the struggle against colonialism, the unity of African brothers and sisters, the great cause of human rights—all of it.
The parsing and attempted belittling of Ethiopia’s huge legacy has always had an agenda. If you can portray Ethiopia’s “unconquered” status as myth, if you can knock Ethiopia off its pedestal as one of the great inspirations and capitals of Pan Africanism, petty tribalism and thuggery can have its day. And you just know the colonialists—who never truly left—would love that.
It is why in December of 2021 that Abiy Ahmed moved to sabotage the #NoMore movement and claim it was no longer needed. Because its inherent message of Pan-African unity and self-determination stands in the way of all the ethno-fascist Oromuma nonsense. Dictators, as a general rule, play at African unity and anti-colonialism but don’t really adopt it or believe in it.
Today, as much as some idiots want to believe Muammar Gaddafi was a Pan-African hero and a martyr to sinister American geopolitical games, he was in fact a despot and a hypocrite. In exchange for the EU lifting an arms embargo and economic sanctions against Libya in 2004, Gaddafi was only too happy to keep African migrants in squalid detention camps for years. I saw an X post recently that made my blood boil because it portrayed Idi Amin—Idi Amin!—as an anti-colonial hero for his forced expulsion of tens of thousands of South Asians from Uganda. It clearly never occurred to whoever wrote this that the South Asians might have felt strongly as Africans themselves, given that their families had been in the country for generations.
But people are desperate for hope, for signs of improvement, for some tangible reward for their adherence to values. I suspect it’s why Burkina Faso’s Ibrahim Traoré is getting the kind of superstar treatment lately from certain African commentators that they once reserved for Abiy. And all we can do is wait and see what happens with his administration.
What would be great and truly inspiring is if the Pan-African torch was lit again—not to offer a devotional glow for one particular leader to bask in, but as a lamp to millions of Africans who want and deserve better. Those who are sick and tired of ethno-fascism and greedy Western conglomerates playing a slick game of corporate welfare with the World Bank, .
This is the conversation that urgently needs to start now. The discussion of ideas, in the same way that when the protest movement caught on fire for Palestine at university campuses, the talk there and online was about racism, peddled narratives and anti-colonialism.
Palestine was helped, of course, by white savior liberals who assumed they already knew what the hell they were talking about (they often didn’t and still don’t), so there was no intellectual void. As much as the media tried to “cook the books” in coverage by portraying the activism as anti-Semitic, that didn’t fly when sympathetic, left-wing Jews got involved, and it won’t fly now. Palestine’s time had come after years of their activists making the very same mistakes that Ethiopian leaders make now.
One of those mistakes, front and center, is that the conversation at protests and forums is too often maintained for most of the time in Amharic. Yes, it’s understandable, but that won’t get you new friends and allies. It’s unfair to expect everything to be switched to English, but if your goal is to make the crusade into a global movement, we need to start there. And I am not just talking about doing it for the sake of white liberals in America and Europe—the conversation has to be accessible to your fellow Africans across the continent.
The second thing to do is to jettison talk about what Fano has planned for governing or how it thinks and make the conversation about what you think and what Ethiopian people think. Again, despite right-wing media and Israel apologists trying desperately to link every Palestinian advocate (and journalist) to Hamas or point out the failures of Palestinian governing authorities, there was no way they could distract from the discussions of human rights and ideas.
How you talk about those rights and ideas is up to you, wherever you are. Protests, conferences, sit-ins, street demonstrations, campus occupations. Just as long as you actually start doing it and getting the messages out there.
At its core, the fight against Abiy is not a wholly negative one, only about the hate that needs to be rejected and evicted. No, it is a positive struggle, one that’s about preserving civilization and culture and human rights. Every African person can understand and relate to this. Every African citizen wants the respect and affirmation of their culture and the economic opportunities they so rightly deserve, which are too often overdue.
A line from Haile Selassie’s famous speech that doesn’t get quoted as much is this: “The basis of racial discrimination and colonialism has been economic, and it is with economic weapons that these evils have been and can be overcome.”
Yes, you can debate his own record of accomplishment on this, for which he had glaring failures, but the man’s mixed legacy doesn’t invalidate the premise. It’s still true today.
It’s still true in Ethiopia, where Abiy crushes historical districts to rubble and puts up shiny boxes while he lets Bill Gates and his kind run amuck and ruin a country’s agriculture and economy.
The tragedy is that too many Africans live in similar conditions and with government betrayals that Ethiopians would easily recognize. Their salvation lies in their own commitment to themselves, their continent and their cultures. The torch is waiting. Who will light it?