DR JUN.-11
“I was born in the land of the priests of Aksum,” begins the Hatata, attributed to ZeraYacob in the 17th century, an opening both disarmingly candid and quietly radical. He identifies not with the priestly caste but as the offspring of a humble farmer, grounding what soon unfolds into an uncompromising spiritual disquisition within a life marked by simplicity and struggle. The Hatata, meaning “enquiry” in Ge’ez, encapsulates his metaphysical and ethical meditations—on God, evil, morality, and the riddle of human existence. A second text, frequently credited to WeldaHeywat, focuses with similar fervour on justice and moral veracity. These documents have not only come to form the axial pillars of what is termed Ethiopian philosophy but have also ignited ongoing philosophical conflict regarding their provenance and intellectual merit—contentions with implications for whether a distinct Ethiopian philosophical tradition can be said to exist at all.
Broadly speaking, the philosophical landscape bifurcates into two factions. The universalist orientation contends that philosophy is a cumulative intellectual continuum, one rooted in an unfolding tradition that began with the Greeks and passed, through Socratic dialectic and Aristotelian logic, into medieval scholasticism and finally into the Cartesian, Kantian, and Continental modernities. This outlook maintains that all philosophical endeavours, wherever situated, must be measured against this trajectory. Non-Western systems—be they Indian, Aztec, or Chinese—are cast as auxiliary subjects under the banner of “comparative philosophy.” In this vision, local designations are subordinate to the overarching project: an intercultural dialogue toward universal truths that transcend their sociocultural provenance.
Set in opposition are the Africanists, whose stance pivots on the concept of epistemicide—the systematic annihilation of indigenous knowledge systems, particularly those of Africa, under the guise of Enlightenment and colonial modernity. For the Africanist, the very act of philosophical recovery is inseparable from cultural redemption. Theirs is not merely a philosophical project but a historiographical and existential one: to vindicate African intellectual heritage from the obfuscations of Eurocentrism and reassert Ethiopia’s role in the broader philosophical canon. As scholar Bekele Gutema asserts, philosophy must be understood as having emerged in plural cultural matrices.
The universalists, however, dismiss Africanist efforts as retrogressive, blurring the boundaries between philosophy and folklore by promoting ethnophilosophy—a static, communal body of wisdom unrefined by individual reasoning. In return, Africanists argue that universalists adhere blindly to the metaphysical assumptions of European thought, forfeiting the possibility of articulating philosophy from an authentically African vantage.
This tension coalesced into personal significance in 2022 when I arrived at the University of Oxford to deliberate over the status of Ethiopian philosophy. Formerly a devoted Africanist, I revered the Hatatas as the epistemic cornerstone of an indigenous Ethiopian tradition. But scholarship by Anaïs Wion and Daniel Kibret upended that certainty. Increasingly, I came to believe that the Hatatas’ credibility was less a matter of rigorous philosophical inquiry than an exercise in ideological projection. Assertions that they embody a Cartesian subjectivity on African soil—akin to Descartes’ “Cogito, ergo sum”—appeared forced, their authorship tenuous, and their content more concerned with religious reform than with metaphysical individuation.
The most damning concern, however, is the uncanny overlap between the Hatatas and the writings of the 19th-century missionary Giusto d’Urbino. ZeraYacob’s wife, described as Werke, bears striking similarity to D’Urbino’s maid. Their journeys from Aksum to Gonder mirror one another too closely to be dismissed as coincidence. In this light, the Hatatas emerge not as philosophical treatises but as artifacts repurposed for nationalist sentiment.
Paradoxically, my opposition to the Hatatas’ authenticity did not lead me to renounce Ethiopian philosophy but to reconsider its potential. Ethiopia’s uniqueness, as historian Teshale Tibebu notes, lies in its uninterrupted civilisational lineage unmarred by colonisation—a polity shaped by a convergence of Christian, Islamic, Judaic, Western, and Arabic intellectual traditions. Any genuine Ethiopian philosophy must reckon with this complexity, not merely rehearse decolonial rhetoric.
Since the 1950s, however, academic philosophy in Ethiopia has been inescapably ideological—from the modernisation ethos under Haile Selassie to the Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy of the Derg, and the ethnic federalism of the EPRDF. Philosophy became a vehicle not of inquiry but of state dogma. My initiation into the discipline at Addis Ababa University in 2005 occurred within a Continental framework, tempered by efforts to include African and Eastern perspectives. Two towering figures defined the era: Messay Kebede, who regarded ZeraYacob not as a philosopher but as a proto-nationalist, and Claude Sumner, the Canadian philosopher who saw Ethiopian thought expressed through written, foreign, and oral traditions. Yet Sumner’s valorisation of proverbs as philosophical vehicles remains contentious.
Still, Ethiopian philosophy, precisely because of its syncretic and embattled history, holds promise. But its future hinges not on reciting ancient texts whose provenance is suspect, nor on reifying cultural tropes, but on constructing a discourse rooted in critical engagement—one that neither capitulates to Eurocentric templates nor confines itself to reactionary revivalism.
Difficult Word Meanings:
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Disquisition – a long or elaborate discussion on a subject
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Metaphysical – relating to the fundamental nature of reality
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Veracity – truthfulness
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Provenance – origin or source
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Epistemicide – systematic destruction of knowledge systems
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Obfuscation – making something unclear or obscure
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Historiographical – related to the writing of history
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Vantage – perspective or point of view
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Ethnophilosophy – philosophy interpreted as collective cultural wisdom rather than individual reasoning
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Syncretic – blending of different beliefs or schools of thought
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Capitulate – surrender or yield
Word Count: 993
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 18
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