Current Conditions in Ethiopia w/ Ayantu Ayana

Africa World Now Project

Photo: Col. John Charles Robinson of Chicago

In Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Robin DG Kelley writes that “most black people believed there was an order higher than the Constitution. Throughout the Africana experience in the Americas, Psalm 68, verse 31 of the Bible promised redemption for the black world. It reads: “Princes shall come out of Egypt. Ethiopia shall soon stretch forth her hands unto God.”

Kelley goes on to suggest that this passage was as important to Pan-Africanist and emigrationist sentiment as the book of Exodus, even becoming the theological and ideological basis for what became known in the nineteenth century as Ethiopianism. One of the earliest published examples of this doctrine was Robert Alexander Young’s Ethiopian Manifesto: Issued in Defense of the Blackman’s Rights in the Scale of Universal Freedom (1829), which predicted the coming of a new Hannibal who would lead a violent uprising to liberate the race.

Just like Haiti, Ethiopia's reputation as a beacon of hope and strength for the Africana world was solidified in 1896, after the defeat of Italy at the Battle of Adwa.

The histories of Afro America and Ethiopia interacting are both deep and complex. But what is clear, Ethiopia held its own space in the sociopolitical thought of the Africana world.

In his New World A-Coming, Roi Ottley wrote that "Negroes first became aware of the black nation [of Ethiopia] back in 1919, when Ethiopian dignitaries arrived in the United States on a diplomatic mission. During their stay in New York, this group received a delegation of Black folk from Harlem. During a ceremonial reception for this diplomatic mission, held at the Metropolitan Baptist Church in Harlem, the Mayor of Addis Ababa, delivered a speech expressing Ethiopian and Afro-American unity.

Throughout the 1900s, African responded to various official invitations and appeals recruiting technically skilled Black Americans to settle in the country. Universal sympathy expressed by Afro-Americans for the Ethiopian-Italian war was shaped into concrete reality through the activities of several war relief committees.

Actual participation in the war was expressed through the military activities of two Afro American airmen. "Colonel" John Charles Robinson, of Chicago and Trinidadian-born "Colonel" Hubert Fauntleroy Julian, who arrived in Ethiopia in late 1934 (as volunteer pilots for the only two Ethiopian planes that were airworthy during the war).

After the war, Robinson remained in Ethiopia to establish commercial air service into East Africa and the Sudan. With the purchase of an old World War II surplus DC-3 aircraft, Robinson became service crew and pilot for the forerunner of the present Ethiopian Air Lines [Shack, 1974].

I wanted to contextual this deep historical context of U.S. African descendant connections and continuities with Ethiopia in effort to prime your historical memory of the importance of Ethiopia in the context of Africana internationalism and its place in the radical black imagination as a platform to understanding the current conditions in nation.

More importantly why Africa, its nations, and the conditions within which communities face there are directly related to the conditions within which Africana people’s faces across the world.

Today, AWNP’s Mwiza Munthali speaks with Ayantu Ayana, doctoral student and a member of the Oromo Advocacy Alliance, where she contextualizes the current conditions in Ethiopia.

Aynatu Ayana addresses the underlying historical-rooted issues that manifest today in the country.

Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!

Enjoy the program!