By Dr. Richard Pankhurst:-
We saw last week that Ethiopian imports, in the 1920s and 1930s, were both growing and becoming more diversified.
Railway Statistics
This development may be further illustrated by a comparison between
the statistics compiled by the Addis Ababa-Djibouti railway company for
1916, the year of Lej Iyasu’s overthrow, and 1930, the year of Ras
Tafari Makonnen’s coronation as Emperor Haile Sellassie. The import of
textiles, a traditional item of consumption, rose substantially from
3,573 tons to 5,901, while that of articles associated with the modern
sector of the economy rocketed: petrol rose from 142 tons to 453,
ironware from 41 to 221, glassware from 11 to 247, soap from 67 to 421,
rice from 64 to 297 and sugar from 51 to 595.
The gradual introduction of more and more imported goods, as well as
the adoption of mechanical techniques, inevitably resulted in the
beginnings of a great transformation, which is of course still in
progress today.
The social impact of such changes on the daily life of the peasant,
and above all of his wife and daughter may be deduced from the following
poems, collected by Ato Alemayehu Mogus outside Dabra Marqos after
World War II. Several voice bantering male comment on the easier life
opened up for their womenfol, and are by implication critical of
feminine laziness. They remind us of Emperor Tewodro’s comment on a
flour mill cited in a pervious article.
The advent of imported abujedid, or calico, and of flour ground by mechanical mill, causes a husband to exclaim to his wife:
My trousers are of abujedid, and my shamma is of (manufactured) warp.
My ox does the ploughing; I have the flour mill to grind the grain,
What right have you (feminine) to ask where I spend my days or nights?
A similar theme is apparent in the words of the man, who, commenting
on the various innovations of the time observes, in sexist vein:
She does not grind pepper: we now have pepper mills,
She does not wash our feet: we now have large shoes,
She does not gather wood: we now have eucalyptus trees.
A broken piece of tin is of no practical use. Take your daughter, my
lady, for a mother cannot abandon her offspring (however useless).
The same idea may be seen in the following excerpt from a poem in which the husband exclaims:
Welkffa trees (a tree the bark of which is used in making rope) grow in the valleys; Unable to make her grind the tef,
I had it ground (at the mill), and brought it for her to make the dough,
She put the pot on the fire like a cultivated woman,
But she went wandering about instead of preparing the dough,
And my children were hurt when the pot wasoverturned.
The existence of the mechanical flour mill provokes the husband, who still relies on his wife’s labour, to say to her:
Wake up and do the grinding, Shall I also buy flour like the sleepy one?
A conservative, linking together the idea of women’s emancipation and the use of imported calico, or abujedid, says
She who has come as an advocate of women
Is clad in abujedid from head to feet.
What the women themselves thought is not recorded!
Changing Way of Life
Not withstanding the elements of change outlined above the static
forces in Ethiopian economic and social life continued to be powerful.
Charles Rey, writing in the mid-1920′s, reported that though imported
cloth was by then much cheaper than the locally produced article, it did
not penetrate far from the main trading centers. This latter statement
was corroborated by his compatriot Rosita Forbes. She recalls that at
the old town of Ankobar people still did their own spinning and weaving,
and adds: “In front of every hut we saw one or two hand looms where men
plied wooden shuttles on a primitive frame, the white shammas growing
under the gaze of their womenfolk, who with a basket of cotton fluff
beside them, wound the froth on to a bobbin and spun it into thread.”
Conclusions
The review of the history of innovation in Ethiopia covered in over
twenty articles of this series reveals the inflexibility of the
country’s economic and social life, the strength of tradition, and the
immensity of the task of modernisation which confronted the rulers of
the past. Isolation, which tended to be broken mainly by undesired
events, such as invasions and wars, not to mention the intrigues of the
Great Powers, rather than by useful contacts with foreign lands,
produced a situation in which the population was essentially
conservative. Many people disliked the idea of change, and still more
were profoundly unaware of its possibility. The prevailing attitude was
therefore one of extreme conservatism: may I indeed say of misoneism?
On the other hand the rulers of the country, to whom all classes
looked for leadership, in many cases displayed great interest in
newinstitutions. Though often unconscious of the exact nature of the
gulf which separated them from the countries of Europe many rulers were
anxiousto bridge it, usually for reasons of military strategy. The
desire for technical progress, until recent times, was in fact largely
restricted to three sectors. It was primarily apparent in the military
field, especially in relation to fire-arms, but may also be discerned in
the medical field, and to some extent in that of the building of
palaces and royal churches.
The royal insistence on innovation in these three areas moreover had a
great influence on the public at large, so that the society’s attitude
to change presented a dichotomy. European rifles and medicine won the
greatest possible admiration, from a people who spurned any attempt to
introduce the wheel, or to adopt a new kind of currency.
One may hazard the view that change was acceptable if it promoted one
or more of the following aims: the acquisition or maintenance of power,
as in the case of the gun, the preservation of health and the conquest
of disease, as in the case of modern medicine, or the glorification of
the ruler, as in the case of the constructing of palaces and certain
churches in their vicinity. Innovation which failed to promote any of
these aims tended to be regarded at best with indifference, and at worst
with suspicion, often being dismissed indeed as a threat to the
Christian way of life.
The almost wistful longing for foreign technicians, manifested by the
Ethiopian rulers of the Middle Ages gave way in in the course of time
to the construction of the great castle-like palaces which symbolised
the Gondar period. The renewed attempts by Dajazmach Wube and King Sahla
Sellase to import craftsmen from abroad in the first part of the
nineteenth century was followed by the remarkable modernising efforts of
the innovating Emperor Tewodros II, whose ideas in a sense foreshadowed
the modern era. His progressive ideas were followed by Emperor Yohannes
IV, but,more especially, by Emperors Menelik II, and later by Haile
Sellassie, whose reigns both witnessed notable attempts at innovation.
These steadily expanded, from the military field to almost all others.
This later period, discussed in the last few articles, witnessed such
developments as the construction of modern roads and bridges, the
advent of the railway, the motor car and the aeroplane, the coming of
the telephone, the telegraph and the radio, the establishment of central
administration, schools and hospitals. In the capital, where innovation
was most pronounced,there was greater division of labour than ever
before, more external influence and increased utilisation of foreign
goods. The cumulative effect of these developments began at that time to
be felt by increasingly large sections of the community.
The conservative tendencies still inherent in the society, however,
continued to make themselves felt, and as a result innovations which
were often experimental in character, failed to gather the momentum
necessary for self-sustained or spontaneous development until after
World War II. These, however, have no place in the present series of
articles, which come to a close today,
Source: http://www.linkethiopia.org
No comments:
Post a Comment