Remembering The Future

Critical Reflections on an Oromo Aphorism and Emancipation
Author(s): Maimire Mennasema

Source: International Journal of Ethiopian Studies , Vol. 7, No. 1 & 2 (2013), pp. 23-56
Published b : Tsehai Publishers
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26586230
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Critical Reflections on an Oromo
Aphorism and Emancipation
Maimire Mennasemay*
The article proposes a critical interpretation of the Oromo aphorism Kan darbe yaadatani,
isa gara fuula dura itti yaaddui (By remembering the past, the future is remembered). It
argues that the aphorism incubates a non-linear conception of history, a future oriented
understanding of tradition, and a conception of emancipation that embraces political
and economic democracy, social justice and cultural flourishing. The article indicates that
the concepts of “decentring” and “fusion of horizons” facilitate the nurturing of a crucial
idea that gestates in the Oromo aphorism: the idea of emancipation as the means and goal
of Ethiopian modernization.
“Remembering” as a critique of linear history1

The Oromo aphorism, Kan darbe yaadatani, isa gara fuula dura itti yaaddu (By
remembering the past, the future is remembered) is probably one of the most
philosophically interesting statements in Ethiopian culture.2 It has important
significance for the questions that Ethiopians confront in their pursuit of
“development” or “modernization” and their efforts to create a better future
for themselves.3 The aphorism speaks about remembering the future through
remembering the past, raising questions about the relations between the
Ethiopian past, present, and future.
Aristotle writes, “Memory is of the past”, and that “it is not possible to
remember the future.”4 This is the conventional view. Unlike this view, the
Oromo aphorism—“By remembering the past, the future is remembered”—
Maimire Mennasemay, Ph.D. His area of research and publications is political

philosophy and Ethiopian politics. He has published in the Canadian Journal of African
Studies, Journal of Modern African Studies (co-author), Journal of Northeast African Studies,
The Horn of Africa Journal, and The International Journal of Ethiopian Studies. He has
contributed chapters to edited books. He is on the editorial staff of Labour, Capital,
and Society and the Journal of Horn of Africa. He is currently Scholar in Residence at
Dawson College (Montreal, Canada).
The International Journal of Ethiopian Studies (ISSN: 1543-4133) is published two times a year by
Tsehai Publishers | www.tsehaipublishers.com | Copyright © 2013 | Volume VII, Number 1&2

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24 INTErNATIoNAL JoUrNAL of EThIoPIAN STUdIES (VII: 1&2)
intimates that the future is available to our activity of remembering. But what
does “remembering” mean in such a use, and what is its site: the past, the
present, the future, or all of these? How does “remembering the past” differ
from a retrospective chronicle of the past? Is “remembering the future” a mere
speculation? How does remembering the future through remembering the past
affect our understanding of the past, of the present, and of the future? How
do these questions, silently brewing in the aphorism, relate to the issue of
emancipation in Ethiopia? To answer these questions, I propose a preliminary
critical interpretation of the aphorism.
The Oromo aphorism displays a non-chronological concept of time. Its
folding of the future into the past through the activity of “remembering”
suggests that time is not a pure and empty form or a mere condition for a
possible experience but rather that it is a network of processes formed through
real experiences, be they social, political, psychological, or economic. As
Braudel, the influential historian, notes, “social time does not flow at one even
rate, but goes at a thousand different paces, swift or slow, which bear almost
no relation to the day-to-day rhythm of a chronicle or of traditional history.”5
These qualitatively different and multiple temporal processes have a historical
thickness or depth that constitutes their individualities and differences as the
present, the past, and the future. At the same time, this historical thickness
networks and makes the past and the future simultaneous with the present.6
Since the double remembering—of the past and of the future—is an activity that
takes place in the present, the aphorism suggests that neither the intelligibility
nor the coherence of the present could be available to us unless we start with
the recognition that the past and the future are incorporated in the present,
the site of the activity of “remembering”. An activity of “remembering” that
latches on to the past and to the future as dimensions of the present gives depth
to the present through which circulate our experiences of the past and the
experiences that actualize themselves in the future. Not only does the aphorism
suggest that the past, the present, and the future are not discrete points along
a line, not only does it suggest that the present is open to the past and to the
future, but it also suggests that the past and the future are open to the present.
It is not difficult to imagine that what we do now becomes part of the past
with every passing moment and that it has consequences for the future that
are more or less predictable. But the Oromo aphorism goes further, as we will
see, and suggests that whatever dimension of the virtual future in the present
eventually actualizes itself changes the past also; that is, the past is subject to
retroactive processes.
This of course does not mean that one could change or undo past events.
Rather, it means that their meanings could change quite radically from the
perspective of the actualized future. Consider how our understanding of the
1943 Woyanne Rebellion has radically changed in light of the 1991 victory

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CrITICAL rEfLECTIoNS oN AN oroMo APhorISM ANd EMANCIPATIoN 25
of the TPLF. Once seen as a peasant rebellion whose intent was “to protect a
vanishing world or to restore the past”, the Woyanne rebellion is seen in the
post-1991 period as a precursor of the TPLF and of the new but contested
conception of Ethiopia it instituted with the 1995 Constitution.7 Or consider
the discovery that a person revered as a national hero was in fact an agent of
the enemy all along during the 1936-41 Fascist occupation of Ethiopia. All
the past deeds associated with this person now have the opposite meanings.
Instead of meaning loyalty, they now mean treason. The change of meanings
in the present changes the very nature of the past deeds.
The Oromo aphorism makes “remembering the past” the road through
which we need to go to discover the future, the “not-yet” gestating in the past.8
This “remembering” is not in Plato’s sense of engaging in the recollection of the
past. For Plato, “all enquiry and all learning is but recollection”.9 Remembering
understood as recollection becomes an activity of retro-vision that excludes
the very idea of new knowledge, of a future as a site for creating something
that is novel. Remembering as recollection of the past “makes everything a
gigantic déjà vu” which deprives knowledge of its “shock” value as something
new and “astonishing”.10 The Oromo aphorism— “By remembering the
past, the future is remembered”—is resolutely opposed to the Platonic idea of
“recollection”. It invites Ethiopians, not to recollect the past but to question
it and to undertake the crucial task of investigating the meaning of the future,
the “not-yet”, in its relationship to the past, to the present, and to the future
itself. The thickening of historical time—the folding of the future onto the
past and of the two onto the present—that the Oromo aphorism proposes
creates conditions for bringing to the surface the forgotten, the forbidden, the
occluded, the repressed, the unsaid, the inaudible and the invisible of our
past and present. It gives depth to the present and provides the ground and
the opportunity for eliciting the potential that lies coiled in Ethiopia’s history
for creating a new future. The knowledge about ourselves and Ethiopia that
we acquire through such “remembering” has an “astonishing” and a “shock”
value that no amount of “recollection” of our past and indeed no linear
narrative of Ethiopian history will ever be able to bring about.
In stating that the “future is remembered” in “remembering the past”,
the Oromo aphorism suggests that the Ethiopian past is neither monolithic
nor homogeneous. When we explore this past from our present time, we
discover that it is a sedimentation of accepted and repressed practices and
beliefs, a reservoir of dissatisfactions, and a bearer of potentialities of multiple
futures. Our past is thus complex and heterogeneous. Some of it is part of the
hegemonic narrative and other parts belong to subaltern narratives; some of it
is not narratable within the parameters of the discourse of the existing order
but exists as a non-removable bone stuck in the throat of Ethiopia’s history,
reminding the existing order that it is just one actual alternative whose depth

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teems with “virtual” alternatives that are real even if they are not visible.11
Aspects of the past exist as a historical phase that pre-exists the present period,
others have permeated Ethiopian social practices, ideas and beliefs; and some
are immanent in the past and in the present as anticipations of an alternative
Ethiopian future. From the perspective of “remembering”, all these aspects of
the past are related to each other, co-exist with the present, and have relations
of “reciprocal determination”.12
In claiming that the “future is remembered” in “remembering the past”,
the Oromo aphorism intimates that if we perceive the past as co-existing with
the present, we perceive the virtual potential that inhabits it but also exceeds it.
The past, seen as a virtual co-presence with the present, has no sequentiality
and directionality; the past is more than what appears as the past; it is a virtual
past that embraces the present and gestates the future in its depth. The virtual
in the past is the reality of change curled in it, embodying new potentialities.13
The future, in being remembered, marshals the whole past and yet discontinues
itself from it. In becoming the future, it bears an emancipatory potential that
could bring about an alternative future that diverges from the “unremembered”
future—the future that prolongs the existing order—that has now actualized
itself as the present. “Remembering” brings forth the subversive idea that the
past is also what it is not, for the statement that “the future is remembered”
points to non-realized potentialities that lurked in the past, to a repressed
potentiality of a future different from what emerged as the present from the
past. The latter, that is, the existing social order, is, from the perspective of the
Oromo aphorism, the “unremembered future” in that it reproduces the social
order as if it were a natural order, immune to the critical and reflective power
of “remembering”. The “remembering” of the Oromo aphorism awakens the
repressed alternative future that gestates in the past.
One cannot overemphasize that “remembering” the past is an active
critical appropriation of the past and the future and not an indulgence in the
comforts of nostalgia and daydreaming. The emphasis is on what the past
failed to realize in order to throw light on the potential this failure silenced.
This failure is not simply a fact, but it is also a challenge and a question. In
being remembered, this failure forces us to recognize that our ancestors, who
bore the burden of this failure, not only transmit the burden to us but they
also challenge us to share it. This failure questions our view of our ancestors
as dead and buried in the past. The “remembering” of the Oromo aphorism
requires us to recognize our ancestors’ refusal to “die” and to be forgotten and
their resolve to continue bearing the burden of this failure as a light that shines
the possible paths into the future, transforming their failure into a demand that
we redeem their sacrifices. As long as this “remembering” does not bear its
emancipatory fruit, our ancestors failures will continue to haunt us as an open
historical wound bleeding in the present.

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The Oromo aphorism thus leads us to a novel understanding of the future.

There is, to start with, the future that the social practices, ideas and beliefs
constitutive of the reigning order predict. This is a future that repeats the past
actualized as the present, even if it does so in different ways as one could
see from the two futures that emerged from the Imperial regime: the Derg
and the EPDRF. These two futures, actualized as the present, remain within
the horizon of practices, expectations, and understandings of the hegemonic
powers of the past in that both scotomize, like the Imperial regime, the
first in the name of “socialism” and the second in the name of ethnic-self-
determination, the very possibility of an alternative political horizon whose
axioms are equality, freedom, solidarity and dignity. The Oromo aphorism
suggests that the “remembered future” is something other than the actualized
future that has given us the Derg and the EPRDF. These two regimes, in
becoming our present, do no more than reshuffle and give new forms to the
inherited coordinates of oppression and exploitations.
The “future” —the center of gravity of the aphorism—is the qualitatively
different Ethiopian future, to wit, an Ethiopia emancipated from the political
oppression, economic exploitation, and cultural poverty that have been driving
the reproduction, in various forms, of the hegemonic order. This alternative
future is, one could say, “alien” to the social practices, ideas, and beliefs
constitutive of the established order and of the future it projects. This means
that there are in the past social practices and aspirations, ideas and beliefs,
that, in being “alien” to the established order, challenge its “common sense”
and its legitimacy. They appear to it as dangerous, defiant and subversive
ideas, beliefs and practices, which it marginalizes by treating them as odd,
perplexing, eccentric, curious, untraditional, threats to “law and order” and
public peace, and so forth. “Remembering” the past is re-appropriating these
dangerous, defiant and subversive ideas, beliefs and practices as expressions of
the emancipatory aspirations that are in search of new ideas and new practices.
Now, this suggests the presence of a fissure in the past that signals a
difference that lodges in the past itself as something that is incongruous with
its time. This fissure in the past is the crack through which “remembering”
enters. The marginalized practices, ideas and beliefs constitutive of this fissure
appear “alien” not only to the past whose interstices they inhabited but also to
us in the present insofar that our “remembering” reflects that the “remembered
future”—the active memory of a future that bears an emancipatory potential
that is real but not actualized—is still in the realm of hopes and aspirations.
This “alien” element in the past, which has, more often than not, a subterranean
existence—invisible and inaudible to the existing order—is, in its historical
context, a fore-shadowing of an alternative Ethiopia: one without the
institutionalized sufferings imposed on Ethiopians in the name of tradition,
divine right, nationalism, ethnic identity, social status, and class and ethnic

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privileges. In foreshadowing a different Ethiopia through the “remembered

future” awakened by an active “remembering of the past”, the Oromo
aphorism transforms the past into a living site of active subversive questionings
that liberate the past and the future from the muteness and impotence of linear
history. From the perspective of the Oromo aphorism, the linear history of
Ethiopia stifles Ethiopian life. First, it deprives it of the historical depth that
“remembering” brings to light through its folding of the future onto the past.
Second, it railroads Ethiopian life into a one-dimensional future dominated by
those for whom Ethiopian history is linear: the ruling classes or elites.
In addition, in “remembering” the past, we confront the Ethiopian present
in at least two different ways. First, since the alternative Ethiopian future
gestating in the past is still unfulfilled, the present inherits it as the “not-yet”,
as the unrealized “surplus meaning” of the past, as the different future it has
failed to deliver.14 These surplus meanings express concrete utopian impulses
to change Ethiopia, impulses that find various expressions as covert and overt
resistance to the established order in the acts of everyday life ranging from
the cultural to the political, from the spiritual to the physical.15 These acts of
resistance are “alien” to the existing order in that they express the experience
of the oppressed and exploited Ethiopians of not being at home in their own
homeland, an experience that is incomprehensible to the ruling strata and its
ideologues and supporters. Second, the Ethiopian present itself is an “”alien”
country to the great majority of contemporary Ethiopians in the sense that
“development”, which has already taken two destructive forms—the Derg
and the EPDRF—has created social sufferings that are in many respects
incomprehensible to Ethiopians. The future that “development” projects
is none other than the modernization of social sufferings, a modernized
extension of the domination of the past into the actual present. But what
“remembering” elicits is that the actual present has a virtual dimension that is
radically heterogeneous in that it is a slumbering volcano that could erupt and,
when it erupts, has the potential to change the political landscape to a point that
erases the pre-existing forces of domination. The actual present is thus a thick
historical time throbbing with diverse and contradictory experiences, ideas,
beliefs, and aspirations incubating a heterogeneous future whose direction
could be emancipatory, but only if it is based, tells us the Oromo aphorism,
on choices that emerge from the critical reflection that “remembering” makes
possible.
Contradictory ideas, beliefs and social practices that refer to the multiple
past, the multiple present, and the possible alternative futures inhabit
contemporary Ethiopia. Ernst Bloch uses a concept that captures this complex
presence of the multiple past in the multiple present, of the multiple futures
in the past and in the present: the concept of Ungleichzeitigkeit, often translated
as “nonsynchronism”.16 It is a concept that draws our attention to the co-

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presence of contradictory meanings, incongruous historical trajectories,

conflicting temporalities and practices, virtual potentialities expressing
opposing tendencies and latencies. “Not all people exist in the same Now”,
writes Bloch, and adds. “They do so only externally, by virtue of the fact that
they may all be seen today. But that does not mean that they are living at
the same time with others”.17 Thus, when the Oromo aphorism states, “By
remembering the past, the future is remembered”, it is confronting us with the
non-synchronism that informs our past and our present and challenging us to
unpack the contents of the emancipatory as well as of the anti-emancipatory
futures that the past and the present gestate.
Consider contemporary Ethiopia. The majority of Ethiopians are
peasants, shaken to their roots by the “feudal socialism” of the Derg, the self-
styled “revolutionary democracy” of the EPRDF, the capitalist economy,
anarchic urbanization, and ethnic politics. The outcome is a complex
web of contradictory, residual, dominant, and emergent ideas, beliefs and
practices, buffeting Ethiopia down a path that seems until now to lead to the
modernization of oppression and exploitation, provoking resistance that range
from nationalist, religious and ethnic revolts, union and youth resistance, and
opposition political movements, to what amounts to millenarian beliefs in the
saving powers of liberal democracy. The 1974 popular revolution, the armed
struggles against the Derg that raged between 1978-1991, the emergence
of ethnic politics in 1991, and the massive peaceful but failed rejection of
ethnocracy in 2005, the peaceful resistance of Ethiopian Muslims, the various
liberation movements, all express the coming to the surface of past unfulfilled
emancipatory ideas—“the future is remembered”—and the manifestation of
new emancipatory demands in reaction to the modernization of oppression and
exploitation. The co-presence of contradictory ideas, beliefs, aspirations and
projects manifests conflicting temporalities and practices, opposing tendencies
and latencies, in the current Ethiopian historical situation. Some social forces
embrace forward-looking ideas, beliefs and emancipatory struggles; others
engage in backward-looking practices of monopolization of power and pursue
the centralization of the state and the sacralisation of the Ethiopian nation,
and others are busy manufacturing closed group identities.
These contradictory and temporally non-synchronous ideas and beliefs
that co-habit in Ethiopia express the multiple historical experiences of
Ethiopians: the defeats of emancipatory hopes and struggles as well as the
victory of the forces of the hegemonic order. Yet, the strength of the Oromo
aphorism lies in its capacity to make us discover strength in the failures of
the past emancipatory struggles of Ethiopians, for these failures affirm the
virtual presence of the potential for success that could have actualized itself
but did not but nevertheless still informs the present. In becoming part of the
“remembered future”, these failures could be reread as contingent happenings

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that open up a new space governed by the demand to try repeatedly and, if
victory is not achieved, to “fail better”18 so that the “remembered future”,
which is the emancipated Ethiopia-to-come, will eventually become the actual
present. That is, the Oromo aphorism is a call for a theoretical and practical
critique of our failures in order to bring out the virtual but real emancipatory
dimensions of these failures and thus go beyond them.
This does not mean that there are no anti-emancipatory social practices,
ideas and beliefs from the past which inhabit the present and will continue
to contaminate the future. The point is that these dimensions of the past
are recognized through our activity of “remembering” as the obstacles that
blocked the emancipatory struggles of the past, hobble the present, and
have the potential to trip the future. “By remembering the past, the future
is remembered” involves then a “remembering” that actively works against
these obstacles in order to allow the “remembered” future to activate the
emancipatory dimensions of our collective memory, of present conditions,
and of the alternative future. Where such an active “remembering” is absent,
“repetition” steps in, and as Freud argues, when “repetition” replaces
“remembering”, our past failures replicate themselves and incapacitate our
emancipatory efforts.19 We are then caught in a cycle of repetition of our
failures—1960, 1974, 1977, 1987, 1991, and 2005— making our failures
themselves a closed loop whose pursuit becomes a source of “enjoyment”.20
Since the collapse of the 1960 movement to overthrow the Imperial regime,
the absence of “remembering” has condemned Ethiopians to repeatedly
recreate in new forms (1975, 1987, 1991, and 2005) the very phenomena of
oppression and exploitation they have sought to banish, making things worse
with each effort. Doesn’t the Oromo aphorism encapsulate a historical truth
when it suggests that reforms and revolutions in Ethiopia have turned out to
prolong the violence, the suffering and the oppression they set out to abolish
precisely because, inter alia, we lack “remembering”?
What may be hard to grasp in the Oromo aphorism is the idea of “the
future is remembered”. A brief detour through what Ernst Bloch calls the
“future in the past” could throw some light on it 21. Bloch points out the
existence in the past of surplus meanings, or “cultural surplus”, that express
utopian impulses for a better future. 22 These surplus meanings express the
“Not-Yet-Conscious” and “Not-Yet-Become”.23 These gestate in the social
practices and cultural creations of the given era as concrete potentialities
of an alternative society that posits the dignity, equality, and autonomy of
the members of the given society. The “future in the past” points to the real
possibility for human liberation that exists in the surplus meanings. These
cultural surpluses express utopian impulses that inhabit the past and subsist
in the present as emancipatory latencies and tendencies to which human
agency could give concrete historical forms. Though “Not-Yet-Conscious”

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and “Not-Yet-Become”, these surplus meanings are nevertheless real and bear
emancipatory anticipations of a different future. This alternative future is in
the virtual but real realm of the “Not-Yet-Conscious” and “Not-Yet-Become”
precisely because they are not actualized. But it is the task of Ethiopians to
actualize them. The “remembered future” as the “future in the past” reveals
to us the presence of the “Not-Yet-Conscious” and “Not-Yet-Become”
in Ethiopian history; it thus invites us to engage in a critical reflection on
Ethiopian conditions, needs and aspirations and bring to consciousness the
form and content of the emancipatory paths and goals that we must concretize
as well as why we Ethiopians have the obligation to do so. It is the “fidelity”
to the event of our conscious awakening to the potential for emancipation,
which throbs in the very heart of Ethiopian “remembering”, that transforms
the “Not-Yet-Become” into a historical “becoming”, that is, into the concrete
emergence of a new society that aims to overcome the conditions in which
Ethiopians are oppressed and exploited beings.
We can say that the Oromo aphorism intimates the presence of utopian
surpluses in the past, which, in being remembered, direct us to a future that, to
become actual, require our critical reflection and action on the emancipatory
potential that is in the realm of the “Not-Yet”. In the current Ethiopian
context, a point has to be added in order to avoid a deformation of the Oromo
aphorism. “Remembering the past” does not mean relating to an authenticity
that would exist in the past or that would be an expression of an already-
formed identity that must be preserved and re-enacted. Nor is “remembering
the past” a path that leads to the experience of victimhood and resentment and
to a hunger for revenge for past injustices. Rather, “remembering the past” is
a radical openness to the future; it is the site where the utopian surplus of the
Ethiopian history—its surplus history, one could say—unfolds and enables us
to embark on a critical reflection that gives emancipatory formulations and
implementations in as yet unimagined ways to the “Not-Yet-Conscious” and
“Not-Yet-Become” of Ethiopian history. “Remembering” the past becomes
remembering the future only when the past and the present are challenged
by that which they failed to achieve—the alternative Ethiopia. The process
of challenging the past through what it could have become but did not is also
a process of challenging the present as the embodiment of the failures of the
past and of its unfulfilled emancipatory anticipations.
The Oromo aphorism has thus revolutionary meanings. It is resolutely
opposed to a fetishization that tries to use the past to sugar-coat present
oppression and exploitation. A fetishization of the past is in fact an act that
tries to erase the future in the past and close the door to a critical appropriation
of the “remembered future”. It is the enemy of “remembering”; it effaces
the emancipatory yearning that comes from the past, haunts our present,
and beckons us from the future. Second, unlike the fetishization of the past,

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the aphorism connects with the emancipatory aspiration for change that one
finds in all human societies. Marx argues, for example, that the quest for a
society free from unnecessary sufferings is rooted in the past of humanity and
therefore “our task is not to draw a sharp mental line between past and future
but to complete the thought of the past”, and adds, “mankind will not begin any
new work, but will consciously bring about the completion of its old work”.24
The Oromo aphorism encapsulates this revolutionary idea. The “remembered
future” embodies the age-old quest for emancipation.
The quest for a society where human beings are free from domination,
encapsulated in the Oromo aphorism, is thus not a new task, either in Ethiopia
or in other parts of the world. It is as old as the organized domination of man-
by-man. The Oromo aphorism, which probably precedes Marx’s insight, and,
in any case, is of indigenous origin, reminds us that our task is not to segregate
the past from the future, or custom from modernity, or tradition from social
transformation, but to ensure that the seeds of emancipation planted in the
past will grow and blossom into something new. To be sure, the” future in the
past” that we remember is watered and fertilized by the new emancipatory
demands of the present, responding to the new modes of domination that
development and modernization are inflicting on Ethiopians. As such, it will
produce flowers and yield fruits that the past never dreamt of. The “remembered
future” is an open future.
What prevents the full deployment of the emancipatory meanings that
gestate in the idea of “remembering” is the conventional understanding of
remembering as having a picture of what happened in the past. Such an
understanding of remembering makes a fetish of the past, and is dangerously
widespread among Ethiopians. Nationalists remember Ethiopia as an
“ancient” nation that escaped colonization by defeating a European army in
1896. Ethnie-centered intellectuals and politicians remember the past glories
of their ethnies and their “victimhood” as the “colonized” of “Abyssinians”.25
The fetishization of Ethiopia or ethnies enables us, like all fetishes, to close our
eyes to the irrefutable fact that the distressing realities of Ethiopia are of our
own making; it enables us to live as if our appalling material and intellectual
dependence on external powers and our political fragmentations do not
matter.26 From the perspective of the Oromo aphorism, the fetishization of
Ethiopia and ethnicity is the opposite of “remembering”. Not only it breeds
cynicism, it is also loaded with the perils of repetition, in the Freudian sense.
The unnecessary suffering Ethiopians endure will never be alleviated by either
Ethiopia’s “ancientness” or the Adwa victory, or by ethnic identity, or by
the claims of victimhood. The fetishization of Ethiopia and ethnicity gives
primacy to mortality over what Arendt calls “natality” or the act of giving birth
to a new Ethiopia.27 The fetishization of Ethiopia and ethnicity inevitably
dissipate our energies in the obsession to settle accounts for past wounds and

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to recreate what we have already overcome in the past, i.e., hermetically sealed
and territorialized identities.
Unlike the fetishization of Ethiopia and of ethnicity, “remembering the
past” opens the door to a “remembered future” of transethnicity ushered in by
Ahmad who, with his conquest (1529-43) of the Christian kingdoms of
the North, rendered porous and fluid the ethnic, cultural and religious frontiers
that previously separated the North from the South.28 Ahmad has a
crucial role in the “remembered future” in that his deeds, however violent and
destructive they may have been, opened a real “Not-Yet-Conscious” and a
“Not-Yet-Become” future that embraces Ethiopian ethnicities and religions as
a people sharing a common destiny whose “future in the past” expresses an
anticipatory consciousness of shared struggles for shared emancipation.29 The
Oromo aphorism, by making the “future remembered” the center of gravity
of “remembering”, intimates that Ethiopians need a dose of what Nietzsche
calls “active forgetfulness” of memories and resentments that subvert their
powers to liberate the potential for emancipation that gestates in their history
as the “Not-Yet-Conscious” and a “Not-Yet-Become”. Only such an “active
forgetfulness” can enable Ethiopians to “make room for new things” and for
“nobler functions”: the creation of an Ethiopian society infused with “hope”
and “happiness”.30
The conventional understanding of remembering as having a picture of
what happened in the past creates a major obstacle to the application of the
Oromo aphorism in another sense. It generates the spontaneous historical
consciousness that dominates contemporary Ethiopian political thinking and
practice. Not only does spontaneous historical consciousness treat historical
becoming as a linear process from one state of affairs to another, it also
expresses a naïve and sentimental understanding of the Ethiopian past. It
effaces the creative plurality and the critical subversion of oppression and
exploitation that “remembering” calls for and narrows the past to a one-
sided narrative, be it that of the Ethiopian nation or of the ethnie. But the
aphorism, in articulating the future through the past and the past through
the future, rejects such a one-sided narrative. Such a narrative occludes
the potentialities of a new beginning that, in “remembering” the future in
the past through what differentiates it from the actual past, loads it with
emancipatory anticipations that change the past by expanding it to embrace
the emancipatory potentials it repressed. “Remembering” makes us recognize
that we are not born to die for the past but to begin a new future whose
symptoms are in the “remembered future”; it enables us to transvaluate our
values and produce from within our own history the new values and ideas
that lead to the democratization of political, economic, social and cultural
relations and institutions.

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It is one of the conundrums of modern Ethiopia that the effort to escape the
distorted understanding that flows from the mono-vocal, “nationalist” narrative
of the Ethiopian past has given birth to a new form of spontaneous historical
consciousness that once more develops a one-sided, mono-vocal narrative of
Ethiopian history, but this time with the ethnie as the organizing principle of the
discourse. The ethnie-centered narrative has the same effect as the nationalist
narrative in that it also blocks off “remembering” in the emancipatory sense of
the Oromo aphorism. Both thus undercut the emergence of a critical historical
consciousness, because both nationalist and ethnie-centered consciousnesses
are constituted by the interests and not by the elimination of domination,
trapping Ethiopians within the horizon of exploitation and oppression.
The nationalist narrative perpetuates the myth that Ethiopian emperors are
the makers of Ethiopian history and thus projects the future of Ethiopia in
terms of the interests of the “national” elites. The ethnie-centered narrative
dons the mantle of ethnic self-determination which, though it gets rid of the
empire-centered narrative of the Ethiopian past, replaces it with an ethnie-
centered description that occludes the oppression and exploitation internal to
each ethnie. It thus raises a thick ideological curtain that hides the common
adversities Ethiopians faced and still face, and the shared solidarities they
have experienced in their struggles for “another” Ethiopia. It replaces the
critical historical consciousness of “remembering” with the consciousness
of victimhood that cultivates blindness to the presence of “local tyranny”
within each ethnie as well as to the legacies of shared solidarities against
shared sufferings.
In both the nation-centered and ethnie-centered narratives, we have an
understanding of remembering that homogenizes the past and erases the
historical depth of the past and present and the emancipatory potentials
that pulsate in them. This is an understanding that scotomizes the historical
depth of social practices, ideas and beliefs of the past and the present and
renders invisible and inaudible the emancipatory future that stirs in them.
The consequence is the depletion of a critical historical consciousness
capable of giving form and content to the “Not-Yet-Conscious” and the
“Not-Yet-Become” of Ethiopian emancipation. Thus one could say, from
the perspective of the “remembering” of the Oromo aphorism, that the
emergence of “ethnic federalism” in Ethiopia in 1991 and its constitutional
codification in 1995 does no more than rearrange or ethnicize the Ethiopian
system of class domination and exploitation; it occludes the issue of an
Ethiopia free from unnecessary political, economic and social sufferings as
bluntly as the pre-1991 regimes. It is merely, to speak in “Hegelese,” an internal
negation of previous forms of oppression and exploitation—the Imperial and
Derg regimes—in that it is still situated within the anti-emancipatory horizon
of these past regimes. Is it then surprising that contemporary Ethiopians suffer

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from a growing inability to make sense of the changes that have been taking
place since 1974?
The Oromo aphorism is a critique of spontaneous historical consciousness.
It conveys a critical historical consciousness, and thus a radically different
understanding of the past and the future and of their relations to the present, that
breaks through and goes beyond past glories and past sufferings. It resolutely
faces the alternative future, whose signs it asserts are already present in the past
as the “remembered future”, and conveys an understanding of “remembering”
as an active mobilization of the emancipatory promises of the past and the
present that the actual past and the actual present repress. “Remembering”
then is more than narrating the past as a succession of events. Rather, it is
a reflective activity that replaces the mere knowledge of historical facts with
a critical historical consciousness that retrieves the signals of an alternative
future as living but repressed promises of our history, and links them to our
present life in ways that generate a theoretical and practical commitment to
bring about an Ethiopian society free from both the inherited and the new
economic, political and cultural dispossessions. That is, the “remembering” of
the Oromo aphorism calls for a “unity of intellect and will” that is inherently
transformative. The dominance of spontaneous historical consciousness goes
a long way in explaining why Ethiopian reformist and revolutionary efforts of
the 1960s, 70s, 80s, and 90s have been all abortive.
It is interesting to note that in making both the past and the future the
source of emancipatory impulse, the Oromo aphorism differs markedly from
Marx who advised that we let “the dead bury the dead”. 31 If we follow the
implications of the Oromo aphorism, we cannot let the “the dead bury the dead”
and still be able to engage in a “remembering” that activates a critical historical
consciousness. From the perspective of the Oromo aphorism, “remembering the
past” is meaningful precisely because the “dead” refuse to die; they continue to
live as the architects of the “future remembered”, waiting to see what kind of
“future” the “future remembered” begets. Only when their aspirations of an
alternative Ethiopia are fulfilled could they rest in peace. From the perspective of
the Oromo aphorism, the Ethiopia-to-come—the Ethiopia of freedom, equality,
justice and prosperity—is not an Ethiopia that emerges from a historical tabula
rasa. There is still a part of Ethiopia—our ancestors who struggled for an
alternative Ethiopia—that, though defeated and dead, is not yet buried and
cannot be buried, pace Marx, because it is still agitated by unanswered questions,
unfulfilled promises and aborted hopes. If Ethiopian reforms and revolutions are
to run their full course, they must be rooted in a critical historical consciousness
which, by opening the virtual past through the activity of “remembering”, gives
a historical depth to the alternative society that beckons us from the future as
a promise born in the past. The alternative Ethiopia that the Oromo aphorism
anticipates draws its “poetry” from both the past and the future.

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The difficulty of transiting from spontaneous to critical historical

consciousness is an important issue in Ethiopia. Critical historical
consciousness cannot be borrowed. Modernization does not cultivate it; on
the contrary, it obliterates it by occluding the “future in the past” that is central
to “remembering”, by pacifying the past and homogenizing it as “tradition”
that Ethiopians have to abandon in order to modernize. To grasp the full
implications of this Oromo aphorism we need then to examine the issue of
tradition.
Tradition and the “Remembered Future”

Remembering the past necessarily raises the issue of tradition. The word
“tradition” is a term that is intriguing in light of the Oromo aphorism. When
one considers the dialectics between the past and the future that the aphorism
proposes, one is led to raise questions such as the following: Is tradition in
Ethiopia another name for inherited culture? for history? for beliefs, ideas and
social practices of the past? Does tradition in Ethiopia embrace the future? Is
tradition in Ethiopia internally conflicted, with aspects that are past-oriented
and others that are future-oriented? Does it have a utopian component or
emancipatory surplus meanings that provide a fertile ground for critical
reflection on Ethiopian conditions? Studies on Ethiopia rarely raise such
questions. When the issue of tradition arises, as in development studies, it is
in opposition to modernization, tacitly espousing an evolutionary bias that
articulates “development” as the movement from tradition to modernization.32
Such an understanding of tradition occludes the possibility that Ethiopian
traditions themselves could be the harbinger of modernization as the
“remembered future”.
The Oromo aphorism, in articulating “remembering” the past with the
“remembered future”, suggests that neither the past nor the future are value-
neutral terms. It thus leads to a critical question: Is there a universal value-
neutral concept of tradition, or does every tradition have its own concept of
tradition that sees itself as a universal concept? Whatever the answers may
be that those who belong to other traditions might give to these questions, we
could say, based on the specific understanding of the past and the future the
Oromo aphorism proposes, that tradition in Ethiopia has its own particular
way of looking at itself. It does not conflate its understanding of itself with
the understanding of tradition that other traditions might entertain about
their own. Do Europeans see their traditions as we do ours? A European
tradition—speaking bluntly, “time is money”, and so forth—may appear
to be a defective tradition from the perspective of an Ethiopian tradition. It
appears to be defective precisely because the Ethiopian tradition implicitly
sees itself as the authentically universal tradition. Likewise, the Ethiopian

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tradition of treating elders with reverence may appear defective to a European

tradition that considers productivity a universal value for measuring the
worth of a person, with the European tradition thus implicitly seeing itself
as the authentically universal tradition. That is, when we confront different
traditions, we encounter competing claims as to which tradition is “universal”.
The “remembering” of the Oromo aphorism provides an interesting solution;
it demands that we consider our tradition as a tradition in which universality
is immanent, a universality that we could concretize through the fulfillment of
our emancipatory aspirations triggered by our activity of “remembering”. At
the same time, the Oromo aphorism opens the door through the “remembered
future”, as we shall see below, to a “fusion of horizons” of different traditions
founded on the equality of traditions.
The Oromo aphorism suggests a number of interesting ideas regarding the
meaning and role of tradition in Ethiopia. It rejects the reification of tradition.
Its articulation of the past and the “remembered future” suggests that that
tradition is a dialectic of permanence (the “past”) and change (the “future”) and
no linear concept of time can capture the vitality of our traditions. There is an
asymmetry between the past and the future: the past conceived as the “virtual”
past is infinitely fecund, the actual past and present are available for observation
and knowledge, and the future is yet to be constructed. This asymmetry allows
the virtual past to be open to an interpretation from the perspective of the
future we will to construct, for what needs to be seen in tradition—its occluded
emancipatory tendencies—is visible only from the perspective of the future
that the “remembered future” elucidates. The aphorism’s implied articulation
of the future through tradition and of tradition through the future suggests
that a future without tradition is rudderless and a tradition without a future
suffers from paralysis. Since the “remembered future” is not a given but one
that is yet to be constructed, it needs tradition to start its work, intimating,
from the angle of the “remembered future”, that critique without tradition
is empty and tradition without critique is depthless, that is, cut off from the
virtual past. The implication is that tradition, interpreted from the perspective
of the Oromo aphorism, neither blocks our intellectual horizon nor stifles
our powers of critique and imagination, as development theories suggest. On
the contrary, without tradition, critical thinking and imagination are stifled,
for it is through the questioning of tradition via the “remembered future”
that alternative political thinking and alternative political imagination could
flourish. In a sense, tradition seen from the perspective of the Oromo aphorism
is ex-centric and has, like a decentred circle or an ellipse, two centers: the past
and the future. “Remembering” articulates these two centers.
“Remembering” thus grasps tradition in its multiple temporalities—
tradition as part of the virtual past, of the future in the past, of the present, and
of the not-yet future. To see this, we need to consider what we call tradition

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as historically situated answers given to questions that our predecessors raised

in their efforts to live together. These questions relate to the organization and
conduct of social relations, which involve power, production, reproduction, and
our ancestors’ beliefs about themselves, others, and nature. One cannot take for
granted that there is a consensus on what the basic questions are and on the
answers to these questions. Conflicts are common within “traditional” Ethiopia
and bear on issues of personal and social relations, of power and obedience,
of production and reproduction, of justice and injustice, of legitimacy and
illegitimacy. The various individual and group disagreements that often lead to
conflicts in “traditional” Ethiopia do so precisely because they are irresolvable
in terms of the existing procedures and rules. As such, they could be seen as
symptoms of un-raised questions, of unanswered questions, or of unacceptable
answers. “Remembering”, in the sense of the Oromo aphorism, thus embraces
the un-raised and unacceptable questions and answers of existing tradition and
the “not-yet” raised questions and answers. In other words, tradition embraces
also the unasked and unanswered questions, the stuttering questions and
answers, unavoidably making “remembering” a hermeneutical activity that
involves an interpretative confrontation with tradition and its heterogeneity.
“Remembering” unveils the “epistemological crisis” of the reigning tradition and
precipitates it into self-questioning.33 The aphorism itself is indeed a symptom
of such an “epistemological crisis” in Ethiopian tradition. “Remembering the
past” articulated with the “remembered future” then becomes an interpretative
activity that removes the scales from tradition’s eyes and brings into its vision
the structures and processes of oppression and exploitation that it was not
able to see and was not able to overcome. At the same time, it frees tradition’s
occluded emancipatory potential from the dead hand of tradition itself, that is,
from the irrationality of “repetition”. The liberation of tradition from its own
dead hand is not rejecting tradition but becoming aware of the self-critique and
the alternative future that inhabits it. A critical interpretation of the Oromo
aphorism requires that we embrace the unfulfilled hopes and failed struggles for
a better life of the past as part of Ethiopian traditions and re-appropriate them
as harbingers of a virtual success that invites repeated efforts. Seen in this light,
could liberate us from tradition because only tradition showed us how to liberate
ourselves from it.34
To make the point, let us read the well-known Ethiopian tradition, the
Oromo tradition of gada, in light of the dialectic of the past and the future
that the Oromo aphorism proposes. We could say, using the words of the
aphorism, “In remembering gada, the future is remembered.” Formulated
thus, an interpretative confrontation with the gada tradition prevents us from
reifying it. The gada tradition is complex. It classifies young males in terms
of age-sets, those born within an eight-year period, the gada cycle, and gada

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grades, that is, age classifications through which each age-set passes. The age-
sets are “deeply involved in day-to-day socialization” but are also the basis for
governance and mobilization for war.35 It is a system of thought, beliefs and
practices that constituted and legitimated a form of governance, production
and reproductions for centuries.36 But in light of the dialectic of the past and
the future that the Oromo aphorism proposes, we need also to look at gada as a
system that in actualizing itself occluded that which in the gada system is more
than gada: its future-oriented emancipatory aspirations.
Asmerom Legesse makes the usual distinction between the “underlying
principles” that inform gada and the structures of governance that characterize
it.37 The structures are part of the actual past, whereas the principles are part
of the virtual past and thus transcend their particular historical contexts in that
they still speak to the unresolved problems of the past and present: how to
create a society wherein members could live a life of dignity, equality, solidarity
and autonomy. Insofar as these principles are not actualized in the structure
and goal of gada governance, they exist only as emancipatory surplus meanings
that are the “remembered future” of gada and are “not yet” thought out and
conceptualized. For example, whereas the “underlying principles” of gada
exude universality, the structures of governance effectively exclude women
from the institutions of governance. The liberation of women is one of the
dimensions of the “Not-Yet-Conscious” and the “Not-Yet-Become” of gada.
To proceed then on the path of analysis that emerges from a critical
interpretation of the Oromo aphorism, we need to go further than Asmerom
Legesse’s mere distinction between practice and principles. We need to
recognize that the importance of gada for the future lies not in its success in the
past as a system of governance but in its failure to see the internal fissures that
prevent its principles to reach the universality that is immanent to it. But it is
precisely through these fissures, located, inter alia, in the exclusion of women
and the place of war-making in the reproduction of the gada system, that the
“remembered future” enters in the process of “remembering the past”. But the
very presence of these fissures point to potentials of immanent critique that
make gada the most dynamic political experiment in Ethiopian history, capable
of raising questions that still speak to us, making the process of answering
them a process that brings to consciousness the existence of a potential for an
alternative future, expressive of emancipation.
This means that “remembering” gada is not remembering it as a collection
of facts but critically enucleating the emancipatory principles it has failed to
universalize and actualize. From the Oromo aphorism’s perspective, we need to
ask: Is the failure of gada to actualize the universality immanent to it a result of
the lack of “remembering” of the emancipatory elements in gada that existed
for it as the “remembered future”? This question pushes aside any temptation

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to engage in a syncretism that simply grafts borrowed ideas about democracy

to gada, a syncretism that stifles the inner potential of gada to produce from
within itself the universal principles expressive of dignity, equality, solidarity
and autonomy. Only when we excavate gada’s internal inconsistencies and
contradictions and the concrete conditions that generated them through the
“remembering” it repressed could we breathe life into gada, identify its limits,
liberate its creative power, and rationally articulate the emancipatory principles
it could potentially offer to overcome anti-emancipatory circumstances. This
requires the creative questioning of gada as a system of governance in order
to open up from within gada itself a space where its emancipatory surplus
meanings could actualize themselves in ways that meet emancipatory demands.
What the Oromo aphorism tells us is that traditions such as gada are living
traditions that, if they are questioned in terms of the “remembered future”,
generate answers that have the force to bend in a new alternative direction the
unwilled conditions under which contemporary Ethiopia develops.
The Oromo aphorism suggests then that the ideas, beliefs and practices of
Ethiopian social transformation must be immanent to Ethiopian society and
traditions if the transformation is to be a liberating one. Social transformation
cannot be borrowed from or imposed by external ideas, beliefs and practices
unless “remembering” fertilizes and irrigates them with the emancipatory
aspirations, ideas, beliefs and practices it liberates from within Ethiopian
traditions. Indeed, from the perspective of the Oromo aphorism, traditions
are indeed internal to what we call Ethiopian history. “Remembering” is not
circling our cultural wagons. Rather, it is opening our tradition to the future as
a tradition that is “not-yet” in that the universality it harbours has to see the
light of day and become concrete through our own agency. This means that
forgetting tradition is not an option, for forgetting tradition is not overcoming
it; rather, it is leaving its flesh to decompose. Inevitably then, the present
and the future will continue to be poisoned by the unresolved questions that
inhabit tradition itself. We can say then, adapting a Kantian formulation,
that tradition without “remembering” is blind and “remembering” without
tradition is empty. In terms of our present concerns, we could reformulate this
idea: there cannot be “emancipation” without tradition and no modernization
without “emancipation”. “Remembering” tradition in the sense of the Oromo
aphorism is therefore internally related to the issue of emancipation.
“Remembering” and Emancipation

For the purpose of my discussion, I define emancipation as the
democratization of political, economic, and social and cultural relations and
institutions. Since Huntington’s triumphant claim in the Third Wave that the
1970s and 1980s have inaugurated a third wave of democratization, mainstream

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development discourse has made transitions to democracy its main focus.38

There is no doubt that free and regularly conducted elections, together with
the separation of powers, and the respect of human, political and civic rights
are indispensable, if Ethiopians are to liberate themselves from centuries of
political despotism. Therefore, when Francis Fukuyama claims that liberal
democracy is the only conceivable future, he has a point in that one cannot
dispense with the political achievements of liberal democracy if a transition to
a society of personal and political freedoms is to be actualized.39 However, the
critical implications of “By remembering the past, the future is remembered”
demand that we raise the question: Can liberal democracy respond adequately
to the issues of economic exploitation and social and cultural exclusions that
“remembering” the past discloses and “the remembered future” rejects?
Ethiopian history suggests that the aspirations that inhabit and animate
the aphorism “By remembering the past, the future is remembered” cannot
be reduced to the democracy of “liberal democracy”, because “remembering
the past” is not only about the exclusions of Ethiopians from the “good” of
political life, it is also about the exclusion of Ethiopians from the “good” of
economic life. Under the imperial regime, forced labor on the property of
landlords was the fate of peasants. Taxation (geber) that often amounted to
confiscation of property dispossessed peasants of their produce. The claim
that all land belongs to the state allowed the emperor to expropriate land and
redistribute it to members of the nobility or to soldiers for service rendered to
the empire. The succeeding regimes, the Derg and the EPDRF, have intensified
and modernized the exploitation of peasants, the former under the guise of
“state socialism” and the latter, in the name of “revolutionary democracy”.
Economic exploitation, which looms large in our “remembering the past”,
still permeates Ethiopia’s present. The “remembered future” cannot but be a
“memory of a future” where there is no economic exploitation.
But the future in which Ethiopians will try to free themselves from political
oppression and economic exploitation is a future that is shaped by even
more powerful global political and economic forces than in the past. With
Ethiopia’s integration in the economic structures and processes of capitalist
globalization, “traditional” forms of economic exploitation are replaced by
modern forms that are no less exploitative for being modern. The capitalist
market replaces the “remembered” feudal order; capitalist investors, multi-
national agribusiness corporations, and factory owners replace the nobles (the
Rases, the Dejazmatches, the Fitawraris, the Qenazmatches, and the mequanents);
the state dispossess peasants from their lands and hands it over to multinational
agribusiness, modernizing, as it were the practice of past emperors who
similarly dispossessed peasants of their land and handed it over to nobles.
Under the EPDRF “democratic” regime, all land belongs to the state,40 as it
did under the Emperor, and thus the EPDRF’s land policy “repeats” the past

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in the guise of the modern. “Thousands of Ethiopians”, reports the Guardian,

“are being relocated or have already fled as their land is sold off to foreign
investors without their consent.”41 Therefore, the question one must raise is:
Does liberal democracy have a regulative principle of economic justice that
could satisfy the demands for economic democracy that inhabit the Oromo
aphorism, “By remembering the past, the future is remembered”?
The modern version of democracy—representative democracy—arose
as a political way of determining who will govern and how in the name of
the people, the crucial idea being that the people govern themselves through
the deputies they freely and periodically elect.42 However, like all historically
rooted practices, the fate of democracy is intimately related to the historical
transformations of its context. The one transformation that has profoundly
affected the evolution of democracy is the development of capitalism. With
globalization, capitalism has now become a world economic system whose
instrumentalist rationality has colonized large swaths of social and political
spheres of life.43 These transformations have captured democracy and remolded
it into the political arm of capitalism. “The inequalities in the distribution of
economic capital”, writes Green, “are virtually reproduced in the distribution
of political capital”. 44 In the present context of capital-driven globalization,
the policies of democratic societies reflect more the interest of capital rather
than the interests of citizens.45 Even in those countries where democracy
originated and flourished in various institutional forms, democracy has now
moved so far from its original claims of rule on behalf of the people to rule
on behalf of capital that the appropriate term to describe it seems to be “thin
democracy”, which
yields neither the pleasures of participation nor the fellowship
of civil associations, neither the autonomy and self-governance
of continuous political activity nor the enlarging mutuality
of shared public goods [….] Oblivious to that essential
human interdepenendency that underlies all political life,
thin democratic politics is at best a politics of static interest,
never a politics of transformation; a politics of bargaining and
exchange, never a politics of invention and creation….46
Democracy in the West—the place of its historical origin and the location
of the countries exporting it to other countries by all means including military
intervention—has become so “thin” that it is no longer capable to carry out a
“politics of transformation” that gives substance to “human interdependency”.
That such is the case is what the policies of both left and right wing democratic
governments in Europe and in the United States show in their management
of the financial crisis that started in 2008. These democratic countries pursue
policies that make the “citizens” bear the cost of the economic crisis that

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financial capitalism triggered rather than engage in a “politics of invention

and creation” that submits the institutions of capitalism to the democratic
demands and control of the people.47 Democracy is no longer a force for
economic justice. It has espoused the capitalist rationality of functionality,
flexibility, and commodification; it has internalized neo-liberalism’s
conception of inequality as the outcome of one’s mismanagement of one’s
life or as a consequence of one’s moral failures. The result is democracy’s
complicity with the unnecessary sufferings that capitalism produces in its
quest for limitless accumulation. The evidence that contemporary capitalist
democracy functions in ways that legitimate the unnecessary social sufferings
and extreme inequalities is overwhelming.48 Even the IMF, well known for
its structural adjustment policies that decimated the public sector in African
countries,49 now acknowledges, “The rise of inequality is at the center of the
current economic and financial crisis”.50
Ethiopia is one of the poorest countries in the world. If it is the case
that liberal democracy gives primacy to the interests of capital and not of
citizens in developed liberal democratic countries, could one imagine that
liberal democracy could meet the aspirations for an Ethiopian society free
from unnecessary economic, political, social and cultural sufferings that the
Oromo aphorism rejects? Raising this question is crucial to pierce through the
theoretical and political firewall that the current conception of development
has erected to exclude approaches that put Ethiopians and their emancipatory
aspirations in command of the political economy of their country. Currently,
in Ethiopia, capitalism, armed with the spurs of globalization, is, to borrow
Emerson’s words, sitting in the saddle and riding Ethiopians. The emancipation
of Ethiopians is not and cannot be its goal. Liberal democracy cannot but be a
political method for instituting “voluntary servitude”, mediated by democratic
elections, to exploitation, oppression and inequality and a concentration of
wealth in the hands of a minuscule minority, leaving the majority destitute. It
is of interest to note that the goal of the Millennium project is, according to the
United Nations Millennium Declaration, “to free…men, women and children
from the abject and dehumanizing conditions of extreme poverty”. 51 Note that
its goal is not to eradicate poverty, but only “extreme poverty”. Unlike extreme
poverty, which provides no opportunities for capitalism to pursue accumulation,
poverty allows the reproduction of usable labour that serves as an army of
unemployed for lowering the cost of labour and intensifying the accumulation
process. No wonder that the current global order wants to replace “extreme
poverty” with poverty. There is thus a fundamental incompatibility between
the emancipatory aspirations that the aphorism “By remembering the past, the
future is remembered” exudes and liberal democracy, whatever form it takes.
The concept that grasps adequately the aspirations that inhabit the
Oromo aphorism is “emancipation”. Unlike liberal democracy, emancipation

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makes political equality, economic democracy, social inclusion, and cultural

flourishing its means and goal. It provides, to paraphrase Amartya Sen,
the actual positive opportunities that a person actually can choose from to
be and to do in terms of what he or she has reasons to value most in order
to lead a dignified life.52 By emancipation, I mean a state of affairs that
simultaneously expresses the democratization of politics, the socialization of
the economy, and a cultural renaissance that includes the mastery of the blind
forces of nature and society. I consider all three to be necessary conditions
for emancipation. I use the term emancipation rather than democracy, not to
minimize the importance of democracy but rather to rescue it from its present
condition as the handmaiden of global capitalism. That is, emancipation is
conceptualized here as both the means and the end of Ethiopian development
or modernization. Only such a conceptualization of emancipation could meet
the aspirations for an alternative Ethiopia that emerges from the “remembered
future” that the Oromo aphorism gestates.
The tragedy of contemporary Ethiopia is that the emancipatory ideas, ideals
and beliefs that gestate in “Remembering the past, the future is remembered”,
that is, the rejection of economic, political and social sufferings that motivated
and still motivate Ethiopian struggles for a better life, encapsulated poignantly in
the Oromo aphorism, play no role whatsoever in the theorization of Ethiopian
development. Development theory and practice are deployed in Ethiopia as if
Ethiopians had never reflected upon the possibility of “another Ethiopia”—a
possibility that is indeed projected by the “future is remembered” of the Oromo
aphorism. The forward-looking critical questions and the emancipatory
aspirations that gestate in the social practices of Ethiopians, that the Oromo
aphorism intimates, are all relegated to the purgatory of “tradition” and
chalked up as obstacles to modernization. The result is the current intellectual
extraversion, cultural exhaustion, and the poverty of political imagination,
all expressed in the depletion of the creative potentials of Ethiopian cultures,
the personalization of power, the massive dependence on foreign aid, the
emaciation of political imagination, and the shrivelling of Ethiopia’s political
arteries into identity trenches. This is certainly not the future-to-come that the
Oromo aphorism anticipates as the “remembered future”.
Let me repeat my point in order to avoid any misunderstanding. The
rejection of liberal democracy is not the rejection of democracy but a rejection
of the betrayal of democracy. Given that economic power conditions the
distribution of political power, the procedures and institutions of democracy
in Ethiopia need to be re-oriented in order to meet our aspirations for freedom,
whose constitutive elements are, from the perspective of the “remembered
future”, economic democracy, social inclusion, and cultural épanouissement.
The question is: How could we do this? To answer this question, we need to
undertake two intertwined paths as suggested by the Oromo aphorism: an inward

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journey into our history and social practices—“remembering the past”—and

an outward journey towards the future-to-come: “the future is remembered”.
But the outward journey puts us face to face with a globalized world economy,
politics, and knowledge, in which powerful nations are engaged in aggressive
competitions for political, economic, military, and cultural supremacy. The
outward journey has the potential to overwhelm us and shock us into losing
our autonomy and accepting our subservience to the global order or becoming
“mimic men” busily engaged in copying the “other” (the West or perhaps
China) instead of being subjects who create a society that we can reflexively
recognize as an expression of our intellect, will, imagination, aspirations,
needs, and labour. To avoid the voluntary servitude that integration into the
global capitalist order brings in its wake, and to make the “remembered future”
successfully master the “future” that our “remembered past” has never dreamt
of, we need to fertilize the emancipatory ideas we enucleate from our inward
journey with the emancipatory ideas we discover from our outward journey.
This articulation of our inward and outward journey has to pass through the
activities of decentring of foreign ideas and practices in order to master the not-
yet future that our “remembered future” anticipates but awaits our formulation
of it in terms of the new demands of the present.
“Remembering” and Decentring

The outward journey pits us against a world that is complex, dynamic and
contradictory, articulating ideas, principles, beliefs and practices with potentials
for emancipation as well as for subjecting us to voluntary and involuntary
servitudes. Yet, if the “remembered future” is to open the door to a future
wherein Ethiopian emancipation is actualized, we need also to appropriate
the ideas, principles and practices of emancipation that have arisen in the
West and have become part of humanity’s heritage. As the Bengali historian,
Dipesh Chakrabarty puts it, “modernity”
is impossible to think of anywhere in the world without
invoking certain categories and concepts, the genealogies
of which go deep into the intellectual and even theological
traditions of Europe. Concepts such as citizenship, the state,
civil society, public sphere, human rights, equality before the
law, the individual, distinctions between public and private,
the idea of the subject, democracy, popular sovereignty, social
justice, scientific rationality, and so on all bear the burden of
European thought and history.53
Almost forty years earlier, Frantz Fanon wrote in Les Damnés de la Terre
(1961): “All the elements for a solution to the major problems of humanity

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existed at one time or another in European thought”.54 Fanon and Chakrabarty

are right. In moving from our “remembered future” into the “future-to-come”,
it is incontestable that the knowledge and social practices associated with
modernity, which are the outcome of Western development, are in some
sense relevant to Ethiopia. But their relevance is not a given nor something
that imposes itself on us irrespective of our aspirations. On the contrary,
they become relevant or irrelevant only if, first, they are decentred form their
historical contexts, and, second, if they are re-interpreted in terms of the
emancipatory aspirations that we gain from our inward journey. Decentring
means that, Western ideas and social practices—ideas such as democracy,
development, modernization, and so forth—need to be reworked through
a historically informed critical interpretation that recognizes that Western
knowledge and social practices are, in important respects, part of the resources
that the West uses to maintain and perpetuate its hegemony. Therefore, the
appropriation of Western knowledge and social practices in terms of the
emancipatory interests of Ethiopians must be simultaneously a process that
strips them of their exploitative and oppressive dimensions and disarms them
of their potential to become weapons of domination and exploitation, internal
and external. To appropriate them in the interest of Ethiopians, we have to “de-
Westernize” them so that they are pried away from their instrumentalization
as tools of domination and exploitation.
The Oromo aphorism gives us indications on how we could de-Westernize
Western knowledge and practices. It requires subjecting them to the questions
that emerge from Ethiopian struggles and aspirations in terms of the ideas of
emancipation worked out through our internal journey: our critical reflection
on “remembering our past” and on our “remembered future”. Note that
contemporary social science is effective and productive in the West because
it is rooted in Western social practices and history, aspects of which relate
to the West`s global expansion and insatiable quest for raw materials, cheap
labour, and markets. Consequently, one could see Western social sciences as
the outcome of questions that the West addresses to itself in the process of
“becoming the West”, a process that simultaneously constituted other peoples,
cultures and civilizations as the “Other” of the West.55 Or, as Emmanuel
Levinas, the philosopher of the ethics of the Other, put it, “Humanity consists
of the Bible and the Greeks…. All the rest—all the exotic—is dance.”56 Hence,
the need for de-Westernizing contemporary social science.
What the Oromo aphorism offers is a framework for decentring Western
ideas and social practices. The question that the Oromo aphorism obliges
us to raise is: What do Western discourses and practices preclude in order
to maintain the coherence of the West’s self-representation as democratic,
developed and just? Working though this question enables us to decenter and
read Western ideas and practices against the grain, examine them in terms

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of what they occlude, liberate them from the West’s self-definitions, and
expropriate their emancipatory ideas and practices in terms of the exigencies
we discover from our internal journey. Such a decentring is essential in order to
override the presuppositions and questions of the presently hegemonic social
sciences. Without such a decentring, the application of the social sciences to
Ethiopia falsely and dangerously assumes that Ethiopians share the West’s
“remembered past” and “remembered future”. Such an assumption decentres
Ethiopia from her history and social practices, makes our “remembering” or
our internal journey impossible, and leads to paralysing self-misunderstandings
and long-lasting failures.
The point of de-Westernizing Western knowledge is not to reject the
social sciences but to pry them away from the normative and theoretical
thoughts that are expressive of Western interests and “release into the space
occupied by particular European histories sedimented in them” 57 Ethiopian
normative and theoretical insights and thoughts that we enucleate through our
internal journey, i.e., “In remembering the past, the future is remembered”.
This means that de-Westernizing Western ideas and practices is a process
that simultaneously expands our horizon of understanding without losing
its emancipatory historical moorings. For this process to be productive, de-
Westernizing Western knowledge and practices needs to avoid dehydrating
them. That is, we need to operate a “fusion of horizons” between the Ethiopian
and Western horizons of understanding of emancipation.58
“Remembering” and Fusion of Horizons

In inviting us to reflect critically on our past and the “future in the
past”, the Oromo aphorism engages us in a dialogue between the past and
the future mediated by the questions we raise in the present. Given that the
horizon of understanding of the Ethiopian past and the Ethiopian present
differ from each other in important respects, a dialogue between the past and
the present cannot but be a critical discourse of questions and answers that
pits the familiar against the unfamiliar, the new against the old, the habitual
against the unusual, and the expected against the unexpected. Such a critical
dialogue aims at generating a more comprehensive understanding that
embraces the past, the present and the future; it articulates the continuities,
discontinuities, and the depths and surfaces of Ethiopian experiences and
enucleates overarching universal principles that are immanent to Ethiopian
history. In the process, such a critical dialogue creates new terms and
expressions with which to define the unfulfilled emancipatory aspirations
and struggles of the past in ways that illuminate the emancipatory latencies
and tendencies of the present and the alternative futures they project. The
Oromo aphorism thus incubates the hermeneutical (Gadamerian) notion

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of “fusion of horizons”: the interpretative confrontation of heterogeneous

horizons of understandings with the purpose of reaching a “higher
universality”.59
The notion of the “fusion of horizons” exists in the Oromo aphorism as a
practice. However, we need to theorize its practice of interpretative confrontation
of the past, the present and future in order to provide us with an interpretative
approach that we could apply to Western knowledge and practices. Such an
interpretative approach with its roots in Ethiopian history but enriched by
the hermeneutical concept of “fusion of horizons” could enable us to de-
Westernize Western knowledge and practices without dehydrating them and
make them available for our appropriation from the perspectives we elicit from
our inner journey. One way of doing this is to decenter the Gadamerian notion
of “fusion of horizons” and interpret it in a way that awakens and develops
the theoretical potential of the Oromo aphorism to interpretatively confront
the foreign, the perplexing, the unexpected, the alien, and the estrangements
and ruptures these bewildering things beget. According to Gadamer, a “fusion
of horizons”
consists neither in the empathy of one individual for another
nor in subordinating another person to our own standards;
rather, it always involves rising to a higher universality that
overcomes not only our own particularity but also that of
the other. […]To acquire a horizon means that one learns to
look beyond what is close at hand—not in order to look away
from it but to see it better, within a larger whole and in truer
proportion.60
The goal of a “fusion of horizons” is to rise “to a higher universality that

overcomes not only our own particularity but also that of the other” through
an interpretative confrontation of two different horizons of understanding.
In our case, the interpretative confrontation would be between the horizon
of understanding that our internal journey of “remembering” educes and
the Western horizon of understanding that we confront in our external
journey. Such an interpretative confrontation aiming to forge “a higher
universality” that embraces these two heterogeneous horizons does not
require “empathy” or espousing the other’s point of view.61 It works through
a critical question-answer dialogue between the same and the “other”,
between the familiar and the unfamiliar, between Ethiopia’s and the West’s
horizons of understanding.
The purpose of the critical question-answer dialogue is to develop a new
context of understanding that avoids objectivism, relativism and syncretism
and creates new parameters of intelligibility and possibilities that are free
from ethnocentrism, parochialism, and relations of domination. Often,

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Gadamer’s notion of the “fusion of horizons” is discussed from the Western

perspective as a solution for avoiding Western ethnocentrism.62 However,
conducted from the perspective of the West, it is not certain that the fusion
of horizons overcomes the ethnocentrism of Western discourse, primarily
because the world in which we live is so profoundly shaped by the West that
unconscious elements of Western ethnocentrism infiltrate the interpretation
of Ethiopian social practices by both Westerners and Ethiopians.63 As a
result, a number of philosophers have argued that the “fusion of horizons”
approach conducted from within the Western historical framework may still
amount to making the “other” understandable in terms of questions that
the West produces.64 It may be the case that such a process of fusion of
horizons might have some transformative impact on the way the West sees
itself, and thus mitigate its ethnocentrism. But this is not enough for us if
we consider ourselves as historical subjects who have access to universality
through our own history and social practices. However, if we decentre
the idea of “fusion of horizons” from its Western ground and make the
fruits of our internal journey our interpretative lever, we could operate a
de-Westernization of Western discourse and practice that makes possible a
fusion between Ethiopia’s and the West’s horizons of understanding in ways
that open the door to “a higher universality” that embraces both Ethiopia
and the West without dehydrating either.
“The horizon is”, writes Gadamer, “the range of vision that includes
everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point.”65 For us, our
inescapable vantage point is Ethiopian history whose emancipatory potentials
are enucleated through the kind of critical reflection that the Oromo aphorism
calls for. This vantage point is not “a rigid boundary”, for, being opened up by
our “remembered future”, it is “something that moves with” our aspirations
and actions,”66 that is, something that moves both our past and future. Gadamer
argues that a closed horizon—a history or a culture totally cut off from relations
of understanding with others—is “an abstraction”.67 From the perspective
of the Oromo aphorism, this means that an Ethiopian future that is isolated
from the Ethiopian past, and from the Western horizon, which is omnipresent
and with which our “remembered future” is already in contact, is caught in a
double abstraction. The implication being that our appropriation of Western
ideas and practices has to pass through our appropriation of our past in order
to open the Ethiopian and the Western horizon of understanding to each
other’s past and future. Since every historical horizon is always in some sense
open to the past and to the future68, the question and answer dialogue between
the Ethiopian and Western horizons of understanding cannot be limited to the
future only, as development theories assume. If we are to retrieve the critical
emancipatory potential of the Oromo aphorism in the current global context,
we have to articulate the horizon of its “remembered future” with the horizon

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of modernity, which has a resolutely Western form and content. Decentring

the West’s ideas and practices allows these two horizons speak to each other on
a footing of equality. Only then could each recognize the particular universality
that each harbours and cross-fertilize them such that we arrive at “a higher
universality” that encompasses both and thus expands the horizons of both
without dehydrating either of them.
Consider again the example of gada, and its flexible distribution of power
in terms of the notion of democracy. Asmarom Legesse writes:
Compared with Western democracies, the age- and generation-
based democracy of the Oromo, does a better job of distributing
power across generations and age groups. They make sure that
people who are of age have an opportunity to play a legitimate
part in political life. In Western democracies, the young and
the elderly are pushed aside and deprived of a legitimate role
in political life. By contrast, the autonomous self-governing age
and generation=groups of the Oromo are extremely effective
in keeping people actively involved in the affairs of their people
during a major part of their childhood, adulthood, and old
age.69
Asmarom Legesse argues that “the the age- and generation-based democracy
of the Oromo” is more democratic in the sense that unlike the West, where
“the young and the elderly are pushed aside and deprived of a legitimate role
in political life”, in Oromo social practices these groups actively participate in
writes:
People are most likely to participate politically in vigorous,
sustained ways when they have a stake in the outcomes.
Paradoxically, while democracy is a public good, self-interest is
critical to its vitality. Open, competitive, and fair participation
within a framework of legitimate, credible institutions enables
citizens and groups to defend their interests, to act on issues they
care about, and to hold officials accountable for their decisions.
Institutions enlivened by contention among socially rooted
interests can moderate conflict, aggregate demands into public
policy backed by a working consensus, and earn legitimacy.
Political parties are among the most crucial institutions in these
processes. Parties embody both participation and institutions,
and they are essential to negotiating a balance between them.
In their many forms, they do not just contest elections, but
also mobilize and organize the social forces that energize
democracy, on a continuing basis.70

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that there is no democracy without competitive political parties, self-

interests and credible institutions to defend these. We have here two
competing visions of distribution of power, each claiming to be more
democratic. In such a situation, a fusion of horizons approach avoids
to impose a hierarchy between these competing views. Rather it starts
with questions that decenter the competing claims in order to generate a
critical dialogue between the two horizons of understanding of democracy
without establishing a pecking order between the competing claims. What
are the power and resource inequalities and social exclusions that each
system of power distribution generates? Who count as political subjects
in each system and how does the counting operate? What are the interests
each system defends? What are each system’s capabilities for critical self–
reflection and corrections, for confronting old and new social, economic
and political inequalities, for eliminating socially unnecessary sufferings,
for reducing powerlessness? What is the understanding of democracy that
each articulates? And so forth, and finally: How do the answers to these
questions relate to the fundamental issue that emerges from our internal
journey: the issue of emancipation? The critical question-dialogue driven
by such questions generates immanent critiques internal to each and
what one could call a “horizontal transcendental” critique of each by
the other, bringing to light the blind spots of each: the issues each fails
to see, the questions each fails to ask or answer, and the answers it fails
to practice. Such a critical question-answer dialogue debunks relations of
superiority and inferiority, overcomes the dichotomization of tradition
and modernization, rejects the ontological privileges that each side may be
tempted to claim, and leads to the emergence of what Merleau Ponty calls
“lateral universalism” that embraces both the new Ethiopian and Western
horizons of understanding.71 Without a fusion of horizon that leads to “a
higher universality” or a “lateral universalism” that embraces Ethiopian
and Western horizons of understanding, the de-Westernization of Western
ideas and practices could lead into anti-emancipatory ideologies and
practices such as such as authenticité (Mobutu), ujamma (Nyerere), négritude
(Senghor), killilism (Meles Zenawi); or we end up stripping ourselves of
our remembered past and remembered future and engage in the destructive
and hopeless task of becoming a copy of the West.
Both options are unacceptable for they deny us the power to master our
future that the Oromo aphorism posits as the condition of our emancipation. To
escape these unacceptable options, we need to rise up to the Oromo aphorism’s
challenge of “remembering”. We will then discover that the Ethiopian past is
full of, to cite Walter Benjamin, “Valuable things [that] are lying around, but
nobody remembers where.”72 The Oromo aphorism, Kan darbe yaadatani, isa

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gara fuula dura itti yaaddu, enjoins us to engage in a critical examination of the
past, unearth its “valuable things” 73, discover its virtual dimensions and the
potentialities it harbours, and enucleate its remembered future whose truth is
yet to come.
Notes
* I would like to acknowledge the support of Dawson College through its program
of Scholar in Residence during the research and writing of this paper.
1 I put “remembering” in quotes in the rest of the text to remind the reader that I
use it in the sense of the Oromo aphorism.
2 The “Education and Support Groups for Oromo War Trauma and Torture
Survivors, A Manual of Facilitators” uses the aphorism as a lead quote, but does not
offer any interpretation. http://www.healtorture.org/sites/healtorture.org/files. Accessed
23/01/2013; It is also listed in Mengesha Rikitie, Oromo Folk Tales For A New Generation
(London: Tyndale Press,1992).
3 I use development and modernization interchangeably since both refer to the
same process of capitalist transformation that brings in its wake the various institutions
that are present in their “mature” forms in the “developed” countries, to wit, electocracy,
the free market economy and social exclusions, and civil society and the depoliticization of
the economy.
4 A New Aristotle Reader,
1988), p.206
5 Fernand Braudel, On History, trans. Sarah Matthews (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1980), p.12., 1980
6 In this and following sections, I draw on Deleuze’s philosophy of time. It is of
interest to note that the Oromo aphorism intimates an understanding of time that in some
respects could be elucidated through the approach to time that Deleuze suggests. “The past
and the future do not designate instants distinct from a supposed present instant, but rather
the dimensions of the present itself insofar as it is a contraction of instants.” Gilles Deleuze,
Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, (New York: Columbia, 1994), pp.71; Deleuze
notes that “‘…if the new present is always endowed with a supplementary dimension, this
is because it is reflected in the element of the pure past in general, whereas it is only through
this element that we focus upon the former present as a particular”, p.82, emphasis added.
By this he means that the present has to be conceived in relation to all that constitutes its
historical depth.
7 Gebru Tareke, Ethiopia: Power and Protest ( Cambridge University Press, New York
1991), p.3; Gerard Prunier, “The 943 Woyanne Revolt: A Modern Reassessment” Journal
of the Middle East and Africa, 1,2, (2010) pp. 187-195; Constitution of the Federal Democratic
Republic of Ethiopia, http://www.refworld.org/docid/3ae6b5a84.html, accessed 04/09/2010.
TPLF stands for Tigrean People’s Liberation Front. On how a new event in the present
changes the meaning of the past, see, Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, (London:
Verso, 1989), pp. 131-149.

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8 In developing the concepts of “not-yet” in this paper, I draw upon Bloch’s

concepts of “concrete utopia”. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. I., trans. Neville
Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1986), pp. 8-9,
150-156, 196
9 “[T]he soul, then, as being immortal”, writes Plato; “and having been born again
many times, and having seen all things that exist, whether in this world or in the world
below, has knowledge of them all.” Plato, Meno,
Edition, 2012), p.47
10 Ernst Bloch considers that Plato’s idea of recollection, anamnesis, is profoundly
conservative. Michael Landman, “Talking with Ernst Bloch: Korcula”, Telos, 25 (September
21, 1975), pp. 165-185
11 I adopt throughout the text Deleuze’s understanding of the “virtual”. The virtual
is as real as the actual. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, pp. 207-214
12 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p.181
13 The ideas of the new and of potentiality that lurk in the double “remembering”
of the Oromo aphorism gain clarity when seen in light of Deleuze’s discussion of depth of
time. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, pp. 230-43
14 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, pp. 8-9, 150-156, 196
15 Expressions of resistance span the whole gamut of Ethiopian experience, from
songs to armed resistance. While the latter is well-known, the former is less so. Consider
for example the Bar-Kumee songs of Oromo women of North Showa. Translated in Asafa
Tefera Dibaba, Orormo Resistance Literature: Songs of BAR-KUMEE (Addis Ababa: Addis
Ababa University, 2009).
16 Ernst Bloch, “Nonsynchronism and the obligation to its dialectics” , New German
Critique, No. 11 (Spring, 1977), pp. 22–38
17 Ernst Bloch, “Nonsynchronism and the obligation to its dialectics”, p.22
18 Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho
of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail
better”.
19 Sigmund Freud, Repression. Standard Edition, vol. xIV. (London: Hogarth, 1915),
p, 148. My thanks to Genevieve Marcoul for drawing my attention to Freud and Lacan on
this issue. Forgetting that which occasioned the failures of the past does not mean it has
disappeared. Rather, it returns in new and distorted ways, derailing the new struggles for
emancipation. Despite my reference to Deleuze in my discussion of time in the Oromo
aphorism, I do not use here repetition in the sense he uses it.
20 A certain kind of jouissance associates itself with the repetition of failure (not
reaching the goal one pursues). One could say that one is caught in a circular motion
around the goal, a condition from which one draws a certain jouissance
The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan, (New York: Norton,
1978), pp. 174-187
21 I draw my arguments on the “future in the past” from Bloch. Ernst Bloch, The
Principle of Hope, vol. I. pp. 8-9, 114-178, 195-249.
22 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, p.154. Emphasis in text
23 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, pp. 114-178

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24 Karl Marx: Early Writings, (New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 1975), 209.
Italics in text.
25 Bonnie K.Holcomb and Sisai Ibssa, The Invention of Ethiopia (Trenton: The Red
Sea Press, 1990)
26 Freud, Sigmund. “Fetishism” Vol. 5, Collected Papers, vol 5, ( London: Hogarth
and Institute of Psycho-Analysis) , pp. 198-204. My thanks to Genevieve Marcoul for the
reference.
27 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1958), pp. 9, 177
L’Islam en Ethiopie : des origines au XVI siècle, Paris : Nouvelles
Éditions Latines, 1981), pp.131-76
29 On Ahmad Gr ñ’s crucial role in the creation of Ethiopia, see, “Critique of
Ethio-centrism”, forthcoming.
30 Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals” , Basic Writings of Nietzsche,
ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann, (New York: the Modern Library, 1968), p.494
31 Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte , (New York: International
Publishers, 1969), p.18. Marx seems to contradict himself, for, as seen earlier, he claims that
“mankind will not begin any new work, but will consciously bring about the completion of
its old work”. Karl Marx: Early Writings, p.209
32 Donald N Levine, Wax and Gold: Tradition and Innovation in Ethiopian Culture ,
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1972), pp. 11-14
33 Alasdair MacIntyre speaks of an “epistemological crisis” in a tradition when
that tradition confronts problems from within that the tradition lacks resources for solving
them. Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice, Which rationality? (London: Duckworth, 1988),
pp. 361-2
the past showed us how to liberate ourselves from it.” Quoted in Craig Lundy, History
and Becoming: Deleuze’s Philosophy of Creativity, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2012), p. 36. There are Ethiopian traditions that are simultaneously traditional and anti-
traditional, i.e., shiftanët and heretic movements.
35 Asmarom Legesse, Oromo Democracy: An Indigenous African Political System,
(Trenton: The Red Sea Press, 2006), pp.48-9, 66-78, 193-238
36 Asmarom Legesse, Oromo Democracy, ibid.
37 Asmarom Legesse, Oromo Democracy, p. 196
38 Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth
Century, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).
39 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, (London: Hamish
Hamilton, 1992), pp.42-3
40 Constitution of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, op.cit, Art.40 # 3
41 “Indian Investors are forcing Ethiopians off their land, “ The Guardian, (7 February
2013); The Oakland Institute, Understanding Land Investment Deals in Africa: Country Report:
Ethiopia, (Oakland: The Oakland Institute, 2011)
Democracy: A History, (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006).

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The theory of communicative action, Vol. 2: Lifeworld and

system: A critique of functionalist reason. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), pp. 356-363
44 Philip Green, Retrieving Democracy: In Search of Civic Equality, (London: Methuen,
1985) p. 14
45 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism,(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)
46 Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age, (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984), p.24
47 Peter Mair, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing-Out of Western Democracy, (London:Verso,
2013)
48 Branko Milanovic, The Have and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of
Global Inequality, (New York: Basic Books, 2010). That neo-liberal driven democracy has
abandoned its commitment to economic justice has been laid bare by the global fiscal crisis
that started in 2008. “Greece And Italy Ask Technocrats To Find Solution”, New York
Times, (November 11, 2011).
49 Kidane Menisteab and B Ikubolajeh Logan, eds., Beyond Economic Liberalization in
Africa: Structural adjustment and the Alternatives, (London: Zed Press, 1995)
50 IMF Survey Magazine, “Effects of Inequality”, http://www.imf.org/external/
pubs/ft/survey/so/2012/int061412a.htm. Accessed 18/10/2012
51 United Nations General Assembly, United Nations Millennium Declaration, Sec
III # 11, http://www.un.org/millennium/declaration/ares552e.pdf, Accessed 09/07/ 2012.
Italics added.
52 Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom, (New York: Anchor Books, 2000), p.75.
However, Sen does not take into consideration the limits that capitalism imposes on the
practice of “development as freedom” when such “development” aims to overcome the
unnecessary sufferings that result from the very operation of capitalism itself.
53 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: postcolonial thought and historical
difference
54 “Tous les éléments d’une solution aux grands problèmes de l’humanité ont, à
des moments différents, existé dans la pensée de l’Europe” Frantz Fanon, Les Damnés de la
Terre, (Paris: François Maspero, 1961), p.302. Frantz fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, (New
York : Grove Press, 2004), p. 237
55 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1985); Howard Caygill, Levinas
and the Political (London: Routledge, 2002); Sonia Sikka, “How Not to Read the Other: ‘All
the Rest Can be Translated,’ ” Philosophy Today 43 (1999): 195–206.
56 Raoul Mortley, French Philosophers in Conversation (London: Routledge, 1991), 18.
57 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, p.20
58 Hans-Georg Gadamer Truth and Method, (New York: Continuum, 2006), pp.304-5,
337-367. Indeed, the Ethiopian intellectual tradition of qiné zërëfa offers a procedure similar
to “fusion of horizon”. See Maimire Mennasemay, “Qiné Hermeneutics”, forthcoming.
59 Hans-Georg Gadamer Truth And Method, 304-305,
60 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, p.304
61 Charles Taylor, “Understanding and ethnocentricity”, Philosophy and the Human
Sciences, vol 2, (Cambridge University press, 1988), pp.116-133

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62 Charles Taylor “Gadamer on the Human Sciences”, The Cambridge Companion to

Gadamer
63 An interesting example is the highly distorted interpretation of sëm ena wërq in social
science oriented studies. See Maimire Mennasemay, “Qiné Hermeneutics”, forthcoming.
More Radical Hermeneutics, (Bloomington, In.: Indiana University
Press, 2000), p, 43ff. Marina Vitkin, “The ‘Fusion of Horizons: On Knowledge and
Alterity”, Philosophy & Social Criticism 21, 1, (1995), pp.57-76.
65 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 301
69 Asmarom Legesse, Oromo Democracy, pp.235-6
Political parties and democracy in theoretical and practical perspectives,
(Washington: The National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, 2005), p. 5
71 Maurice Merleau Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary, (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 119-20
72 Walter Benjamin, Reflections,
Books, 1986), p. 20.
73 One of these valuable things is qiné hermeneutics. See, “Qiné Hermeneutics”,
forthcoming.

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Remembering The Future

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Critical Reflections on an Oromo Aphorism and Emancipation

Author(s): Maimire Mennasema

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26586230

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“Remembering” as a critique of linear history1

Maimire Mennasemay, Ph.D. His area of research and publications is political

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The Oromo aphorism thus leads us to a novel understanding of the future.

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privileges. In foreshadowing a different Ethiopia through the “remembered

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presence of contradictory meanings, incongruous historical trajectories,

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The difficulty of transiting from spontaneous to critical historical

Tradition and the “Remembered Future”

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tradition of treating elders with reverence may appear defective to a European

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as historically situated answers given to questions that our predecessors raised

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to engage in a syncretism that simply grafts borrowed ideas about democracy

“Remembering” and Emancipation

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development discourse has made transitions to democracy its main focus.38

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in the guise of the modern. “Thousands of Ethiopians”, reports the Guardian,

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financial capitalism triggered rather than engage in a “politics of invention

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makes political equality, economic democracy, social inclusion, and cultural

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journey into our history and social practices—“remembering the past”—and

“Remembering” and Decentring

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existed at one time or another in European thought”.54 Fanon and Chakrabarty

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“Remembering” and Fusion of Horizons

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of “fusion of horizons”: the interpretative confrontation of heterogeneous

The goal of a “fusion of horizons” is to rise “to a higher universality that

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Gadamer’s notion of the “fusion of horizons” is discussed from the Western

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of modernity, which has a resolutely Western form and content. Decentring

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that there is no democracy without competitive political parties, self-

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8 In developing the concepts of “not-yet” in this paper, I draw upon Bloch’s