Ethiopia, a country that’s right here, is known for being the source of delicious coffee,
and a state in Africa that resisted colonisation for an awe-inspiring amount of time.
It’s a Christian country that rejected both sides of the great schism and developed into
its own very unique religion.
Their royal family claimed a bloodline back to king Solomon.
So, sit back and enjoy this brief history of Ethiopia.
Hi, I’m Tristan Johnson, and this is Step Back History.
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Ethiopia is a country located here, in a region called the horn of Africa.
It’s very tropical, and since 1993 Ethiopia has been landlocked.
We’ll get into why a bit later, but first, let’s go back, maybe as far back as we’ve
ever gone on Step Back to the first Ethiopians.
There have been people in Ethiopia going so ridiculously far back, that we weren’t even
humans.
The oldest fossil of a hominid in Ethiopia is a specimen of an Australopithecus afarensis
that archaeologists estimate to be between 2.9 to 3.4 million years old.
The language groups in the region split off from their linguistic roots abound 8 to 10
thousand years ago.
The first sign of farming for cereal grains with ploughs shows up about 5,000 years ago.
Probably coming south from Sudan.
Around the seventh century CE, we see the first kingdom in Ethiopia called D’mt.
They made their fortunes by trading in objects like gold, and silver, as well as many peoples
and things we would be… less than thrilled about a country exporting today.
This includes ivory, tortoise shells, rhinoceros horns, and slaves.
Their primary customers were traders from the southern Arabian peninsula, which would
be modern-day Yemen.
This kingdom declined in 300 BCE, replaced with city-states.
These city-states then reunified under the power of the state of Aksum.
Again Ethiopia thrives because of its location as a central point of trade between Sudan
with the Nile river to the north, sub-Saharan Africa to the south, and the Arabian peninsula
via the sea.
Aksum owed a lot of its culture to influence from the Arabian peninsula.
They spoke a language called Ge’ez and wrote in a modified south Arabian alphabet.
It also seems their spiritual world featured a blend of Arabian and local gods.
This suggests a very close cultural exchange across the red sea.
So much so that scholars used to believe that Arabian immigrants peopled northern Ethiopia
in this period, but more scholars today dispute this.
Nevertheless, this exchange is cemented by one of the most important legends in Ethiopian
history.
They believed that King Solomon, like king Solomon from the Bible, married the queen
of Sheba and produced the emperor Menilek I, who would be the progenitor of the Ethiopian
royal dynasty.
They even still claim to have the arc of the covenant!
By the 5th century CE, Aksum was the dominant power in Red sea trade.
We find lots of coins in this period minted with the faces of Aksumite Emperors.
We even see references to their port towns in Greco-roman texts.
And it's via trade and contact with Greeks and Romans that scholars believe Christianity
came to Ethiopia around the 5th century CE.
Monks came to Ethiopia to preach and eventually founded the Ethiopian church.
Like the Coptic Christians, when deciding between allegiance with Rome and the early
Catholics, or Constantinople and early Orthodox Christians, the Ethiopians chose none of the
above.They broke with both churches and did not resume relations with them until the mid
20th century.
Aksum grew to such an extent that it had several suzerain kingdoms under its thumb.
Even across the Red Sea in Southern Arabia.
They extended their power and even sent troops as far as Yemen to ensure it.
This would end when Christianity began to disappear in southern Arabia due to a Persian
invasion, and an Arab attack shortly after that.
The rise of Islam in Arabia sealed the deal.
This actually had the effect of cutting off Ethiopia from Mediterranean trade, which meant
their contact with Europe and the middle-east was shut off.
Aksum began to decay without Mediterranean trade.
It responded by focusing on land-based conquests, pushing south into fertile land there.
With them also came the Ethiopian church.
A minor lord was able to overturn the Aksumite dynasty, called the Zagwe dynasty.
They initially got flak for not being the descendants of King Solomon but made up for
it by building several beautiful churches out of rock faces.
That being said, they never had complete control of Ethiopia.
People always pointed out that they didn’t have that King Solomon charm.
This boiled over when in 1270 a different noble rebelled.
This noble did some jiggery-pokery and was able to claim heritage to King Solomon, which
made many factions prefer his reign.
He had to publish his long-form genealogy, but eventually his legitimacy was secured.
The legend of Menilek I, the Solomon dynasty, Semitic culture, and their language would
become the basis for Ethiopian national unity.
It was also around this time that the Ethiopians found themselves in constant conflict with
the spread of Islam.
On the edges of the Ethiopian empire, Islam was spreading and converted a lot of people.
By the 13th century, various new Sultan neighbours unified.
At this time, Ethiopia was fighting on all sides and trying to hang on to the land they
would conquer.
They even decided to put tariffs on goods going to the newly unified Muslim region,
which resulted in pushback.
This resulted in a colossal war when those unified Muslim territories fell to the sultans
of Adal, and their leader Aḥmad ibn Ibrāhīm al-Ghāzī.
He declared holy war upon the Ethiopians and invaded.
It looked like the Ethiopians would lose too, until, in 1541, the Portuguese showed up to
give them muskets.
It quickly turned the tide of the war, but there was a catch.
After the mass apostasy to Islam, they now had to deal with Catholic missionaries.
Jesuits came over with the Portuguese on a mission to bring the Ethiopians into the Catholic
church.
More religious turmoil occurred over theological debates, an Emperor needed to abdicate, but
Catholicism was resisted with reasonable success.
This turmoil eventually led to a period of feudal anarchy, where the authority of the
emperor was fragile.
They call this the Age of Princes, and it would last until 1855.
This was a pretty rough time for the average Ethiopian, think the time when the Shoguns
of Japan fought each other for power.
The age of princes ended when Kassa, one of those rulers managed to unify Ethiopia again,
crowning himself Emperor Twodros II.
This would be the foundation of the modern country of Ethiopia.
He attempted during his reign to enact many social reforms and consolidate his power.
This both overtaxed the citizens of the country and angered the nobles, so another rebellion
picked up.
He also tried to reach out to Queen Victoria to destroy the Islamic religion.
The British ignored this, and in anger, Twodros II imprisoned the British envoy.
This led to a British invasion, and to avoid capture, the emperor committed suicide.
It was around this time that Europeans were beginning to take an extreme interest in conquering
Africa, oppressing its people, and ransacking its resources.
The next two successors to Twodros had to fight Egyptians, and resist attempts from
Italy to get a foothold in the region.
This includes an attempt by Italy to turn Ethiopia into a protectorate just by writing
into their translation of an agreement between the two countries.
The Victorian age Italians believed that with their superior European blood or whatever
weird race science they bought into would let them defeat Ethiopia without trying very
hard.
The Italians were decimated when they attempted to do so in 1896.
This was also when Ethiopia quickly modernised, getting communication networks, railroads,
and systems of schools and hospitals.
And this brings us to 1916, and the beginning of the most influential emperor of Ethiopia,
the one you’ve likely heard of, and I’ve spoken about on his channel ages ago.
Haile Selassie I. His birth name was Ras Tafari and began work as a regent for his female
family member who held the crown, Zaudito.
He engineered Ethiopia’s entrance to the league of nations, believing heavily in the
idea of collective security.
He abolished slavery and hired some key advisers to modernise the government bureaucracy.
By the time Zaudito named him king in 1928, Ethiopia was booming from the exportation
of coffee.
This success came at a terrible cost, however.
Benito Mussolini, the fascist leader of Italy, took Ethiopia’s growing power as a sign
he needed to invade them before they could be a real challenge.
When the Italians invaded, Haile Selassie believed that the collective security of the
league of nations would come to his aid.
When that league of nations decided not to help out Ethiopia had to fight alone in a
seven-month war against the Italians.
Their superior air power and use of poison gas gave the Italians the upper hand, and
Haile Selassie had to go into exile.
The Italians occupied Ethiopia from 1936 to 1941.
During that time Ethiopian resistance fighters struggled against their Italian occupiers.
In 1940, Italy entered into the Second World War proper, and with that, the British declared
Haile Selassie I their full ally.
With the help of the British, Haile Selassie was able to mobilise an Ethiopian military
in Sudan and quickly defeated the Italians.
They retook the capital Addis Ababa in five months and reestablished the Ethiopian government.
Throughout the 50s, he used support from the United States, and the global community to
reform government to become much more democratic, but still a monarchy.
However, his reluctance to give up power led to inefficiencies and slow modernisation.
Haile Selassie began to become less popular.
Ethiopians started to feel that their only way forward would be to dump the monarchy.
In 1960 there was an attempted coup, but he didn’t take the hint.
When Somalia got independence that same year, Somali nationalists began to fight the government
with support from Moscow.
So in true proxy war fashion, the Ethiopians got some help from the US.
The situation would just get worse.
Eritreans began to rebel, bringing in a variety of minority groups to their cause.
A student movement in the 60s grew in popularity and became more radical as the decade progressed.
They considered Haile Selassie an agent of US imperialism, which isn’t an entirely
inaccurate statement.
By the 70s, the Ethiopian army was maxed out fighting rebels all around the country.
In 1974, several junior military officers mutinied.
Combined, this conflict, drought and the subsequent famine in 1974 sent Ethiopia into crisis mode.
The military mutineers turned into a military resistance and overthrew Haile Selassie who
was very old and senile in September.
The new provisional military government was full of power struggles, infighting, and overwhelming
tension.
Ethiopia went through three leaders between September and December of 1974.
It eventually…
‘resolved’ with a takeover by a military leader named Teferi Banti, who declared on
December 20, 1974, that Ethiopia was going to be Socialist.
The proxy war reversed.
The USSR now supported Ethiopia, and the US now was best friends with Somalia.
While nationalist rebellions didn’t die down, especially in Eritrea, there was now
internal fighting between military groups.
This campaign would continue until 1978, killing or exiling thousands of Ethiopians.
As many as 100,000 died, with thousands more tortured and imprisoned.
The surviving leader of this power struggle was a military leader named Mengistu Haile
Mariam.
From 1977 to 1991, the new socialist government of Ethiopia tried to reorganise the country
under a USSR model.
This was complete with famines created by brutal land reforms, implementing a command
economy, and the forced movement of some 600,000 farmers.
All this time, Ethiopia fought various rebel groups in a guerilla war.
In 1991, these rebel groups managed to force Mengistu to stop this sovietisation of Ethiopia.
Not long after, the rebels who had eventually organised and unified, were able to advance
on Addis Ababa, forcing Mengistu to flee to Zimbabwe.
So the early 90s was another period of significant government changes.
This new rebel government decided to lean on the strength of Ethiopia being their national
heterogeneity.
They wanted to embrace the immense diversity of Ethiopia instead of one group trying to
rule over all the others.
This ethos runs all the way through the Ethiopian government even today.
In their constitution is the notion that Ethiopia is a nation of nations, where any are free
to go if they desire.
Eritrea jumped on that right away, legally separating in May of 1993.
Then… more troubles were to come.
The government began to love censoring information, and elections started to become more and more
questioned.
They also took the poison pill of entering into the World Bank’s structural adjustment
program.
It’s a programme of loans to help countries develop, but comes with a lot of strings attached.
The program has left some countries like Ecuador with all of their natural resources owned
by overseas companies, and what little is left over unevenly distributed because of
structural reforms they had to make.
It leaves very little for the social services that make up the bedrock of a functioning
country.
The program devalued Ethiopia’s currency, reduced government interference in the markets,
cut civil services, and made it easier for international corporations to syphon money
out of the country.
In 1994, it adopted its third constitution in 40 years, and in 1995 created the Federal
Democratic Republic of Ethiopia we know today.
It sticks out from previous Ethiopian constitutions by being focused on ethnic autonomy, and devolution,
or giving lots of power to local governments.
It had its first multiparty election in 1995 but was boycotted by a lot of people who opposed
the harassment, arrests, and censorship the government was committing.
In 1998, a dispute over some land between Ethiopia and Eritrea resulted in a brief conflict.
They signed a cease-fire in 2000, and the UN entered to settle the dispute.
They decided to give the land over to Eritrea, angering Ethiopia, and in 2008 the UN pulled
out not resolving the issue.
And finally, we come to the present.
The 2000s are a time of relative stability considering, but accusations of government
censorship, and interfering in elections is still commonplace.
The 2005 election led to massive protests as most opposition parties declared it fraudulent.
In 2010 they had another election that was considered better but still had some funny
business going on.
And the story seemed quite similar in 2015.
Ethiopia sounds like a land plagued with problems, and it certainly has more than its share.
But the Ethiopian people are a marvel.
Ethiopia is one of the most diverse countries on earth and has a beautiful array of music,
clothing, mythology, and religion.
It’s quite amazing.
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