Abstract
AbstractThis article deals with marriage as mobilized by the Ethiopian Empire as part of its consolidation processes after 1941. It particularly concentrates on post-liberation anxiety and how the Ethiopian Empire envisioned tackling this disquiet by reforming marriage. Within the context of (re)building the empire, policies, laws, and discourses around monogamous marriage instilled normative ideas to produce the imperial subjects — procreative and productive — that a modernizing empire required. Sex was articulated within the confines of a heterosexual union, not only as a legitimate act but also as a responsibility of couples who were accountable for the consolidation of the empire. Sexual relations out of marriage were condemned as a source of degeneracy and the ensuing danger that confronted the empire. New laws were introduced to legislate sex to tackle the unease the empire felt about non-normative sex and associated pleasure(s). What started out as a battle against the Italian legacy continued more forcefully in the 1950s and 1960s with the rise of ‘new problems’ that educated young women and men posed. The article relies on a range of sources such as policy, legal, religious, and travel documents; newspapers; and novels, as well as self-help books produced between the 1940s and 1960s.
Highlights
MARRIAGE AND (RE)BUILDING EMPIREItaly’s five-year occupation of Ethiopia came to an end in
This article deals with marriage as mobilized by the Ethiopian Empire as part of its consolidation processes after 1941
It concentrates on post-liberation anxiety and how the Ethiopian Empire envisioned tackling this disquiet by reforming marriage
Summary
Italy’s five-year occupation of Ethiopia came to an end in. The decades after liberation could be characterized as a period of imperial anxiety owing to the interruption of the processes of consolidation and modernization under Emperor Haile Selassie I, who ruled from –. Osborn highlights that a productive approach to understanding political processes is one that engages the private (through the prism of households) and the political as mutually constitutive processes and products of history It is in this sense that I locate marriage — and its centrality in biological and social reproduction — in the politics of empire (re)building in post-liberation Ethiopia. Byfield, ‘Women, marriage, divorce and the emerging colonial state in Abeokuta (Nigeria) – ’, Canadian Journal of African Studies/Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, : ( ), – These works indicate that in addition to ‘formal’ institutions of rule, political elites deployed marital bonds to forge alliances with their rivals. I further argue that marriage, contingent on the ideal monogamous heterosexual union, was regarded as one of the vital foundations of empire (re)building
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