ETHIOPIA: REVOLUTION, CLASS, AND THE NATIONAL QUESTION

Abstract

MANY AFRICANIST scholars seeking to explain the dynamics of political and economic change have pointed to ethnicity as the most salient explanatory variable. There is no doubt that the ethnic factor does explain much in African politics, but the basis of ethnic conflict and just how much it explains are open debates. Initially some scholars argued that ethnic affinities were primordially based,' and that ethnic groups tended to be locked in hard and fast categories based on factors such as language, religion, race and/or assumed blood ties.2 These disparate groups were made to cohere, it was only thought, by the coercive authority of the colonial state. Inter-group conflicts, when they occurred, were conveniently labelled 'tribal conflicts' without much attention devoted to getting at the origins of such conflict. More recently, however, this perspective has come in for a great deal of criticism. First, some scholars, while acknowledging the political saliency of ethnicity, suggest new interpretations of the fundamental forces underpinning contemporary incidents of ethnic conflict in Africa;3 and, second, neo-Marxist class analysts suggest that contemporary incidents of ethnic conflict in Africa are more the product of class contradictions disguised by false consciousness than they are of ancient, primordial antagonisms.4 The first, non-Marxist, set of revisionists generally recognize that most ethnic conflict, instead of being based on primordial sentiments, is based on the competition among various ethnic groups over the scarce resources of the modernizing sector. We might call this phenomenon the new ethnicity. Although kith and kin in rural areas continue to be a salient reference group for urban-based relatives, ethnic conflicts generally occur only in urban areas and involve debates over economic resources found there, such as jobs, patronage, education, and so forth. In addition, revisionists suggest that ethnicity as a variable affecting political behaviour is fluid, intermittent, and experiential.s