Heritage Management Practice in Ethiopia: Is it Different?

Abstract

This chapter discusses heritage management practices in Ethiopia. Most sources notably Bahru Zewde (2002) point out to the fact that Ethiopia is the only African country that was never colonised by the European powers, except for a short period of occupation by the Italians during the Second World War. The core question of this chapter is attempts to highlight whether the practice of heritage management in Ethiopia is different from the rest of African countries based on the fact that no colonial management systems were introduced from outside like other African countries that underwent this experience. However, the chapter demonstrates that heritage management practices in Ethiopia share a lot in common with the rest of African countries with a few exceptions. The country is remarkably rich in its linguistic and cultural diversity. So far, the House of Federation of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia recognises 76 ethnic groups having independent identity and given membership status. Ethiopia is also a land of abundant tangible and intangible heritages. Ethiopia is the land of humanity, and land of origins, a phrase used to replace the old motto of Ethiopia being the land of thirteen Months of Sunshine. Ethiopia's rich cultural resources are the evidence indicating millennia of heritage management practices by its own various communities before the so-called modern/western way of heritage management was introduced since 1906, when the Duetsche Axum Expedition (DAE) began conducting archaeological research sanctioned by the Emperor Menelik II of Ethiopia (Littman 1913; Burka 2004, 2014). In the post WWII period, Ethiopia made itself part of the ‘international community’ in standardisation of the institution that oversees heritages and the legal framework that guides the same. This chapter illustrates how post-fascist Italian short period of occupation during the Second World War shaped the perspectives towards heritage management. It also highlights the type of heritages and looks at this through various legislations promulgated over half a century ago. In this regard, we note the foundation of two museums namely the National Museum of Ethiopia (its precursor in 1944) (Abebaw 2005; Bereket, 2015; Burka 2004) and the Institute of Ethiopian Studies’ Museum within the premise of the then Haile Selassie I University (Burka 2004; Mekuria 2007) that coincided with the year of the Foundation of OAU (Burka 2004; Alem 1982). In sum, the chapter demonstrates how Ethiopian heritage management methods might not be so different from other African counterparts.