Addis Ababa

WHEN Winston Churchill coined the expression “summit conference” more than ten years ago, he could hardly have foreseen the immense vogue both phrase and practice were to acquire over the next decade. In recent years the predilection for this kind of diplomacy has become something of an epidemic, from the Bandung conference of 1955 to the Belgrade conference of September, 1961. More recently the craze has spread to Africa, where in the past three years alone there have been half a dozen summit meetings between various chiefs of state. The most recent and grandiose of them all, a congregation of twentyeight African chiefs of state, took place in Addis Ababa from May 23 to 27 this year.

The Addis Ababa conference differed from its predecessors in being unexpectedly successful. Though there was the usual spate of angry anticolonialist tub-thumping, the issues of the cold war and neutralism, which had sparked the earlier gatherings, were hardly raised at this one, and the conference ended with the signing of a charter laying the groundwork for a Pan-African association that might one day conceivably come to parallel the Organization of American States in the Western Hemisphere.

The success of this conference was due in no small part to the moderating influence exercised by its chief sponsor and architect, His Imperial Majesty Emperor Haile Selassie I. He seems to have nursed this pet project for some years, and he prepared for it by having erected a special building auspiciously baptized Africa Hall. Upon its completion two years ago, the hall, a kind of miniature United Nations with a vertical slab of secretarial offices and a hatbox auditorium, was turned over to the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa.

For this modest purpose it proved quite adequate; but it is a commentary on the rate at which things are changing in Africa that the hall was altogether too small to accommodate the delegations and the horde of attendant journalists, diplomatic observers, wives, and security agents who converged on the sprawling Ethiopian capital. It is too early to say whether the Addis Ababa conference will prove to be a milestone in the history of an emerging Africa. The unity of a continent of close to forty lands and 250 million inhabitants is obviously not going to be achieved overnight. Still, as the Prime Minister of Tanganyika, Julius Nyerere, remarked in a graceful concluding speech, “No good mason would complain that his first brick did not go far enough.”

Frontier sensitivity

The conference proved particularly interesting in bringing out the schizophrenic contradictions which lie at the root of the Dark Continent’s present predicament. Speaker after speaker rose to denounce “foreign subversion” and to plead for the respect and maintenance of existing frontiers. Their restraint has not been easily come by, for the borders in many cases resulted from the purely arbitrary and haphazard division of the spoils among the half dozen European powers which undertook to carve up Africa at the end of the last century. The same tribe thus found itself segmented into two, or sometimes three, distinct national entities.

Yet to challenge the validity of these frontiers is, inevitably, to challenge the legitimacy of the various postcolonial regimes which have sprung up in the past three or four years and to justify almost any kind of subversion on the pretext of rationalizing the map. The result could throw the entire continent into interstate conflict and chaos.

The explosive dangers were dramatized at the conference in two notable instances. The first concerned the refusal of a number of African states, led by Guinea and the Ivory Coast, to admit a representative of the new Togoland government to the conference table. Prior to his assassination last January, Togoland’s President, Sylvanus Olympio, used to refer to his brethren across the border as being part of “British Togoland,” better known today as Ghana. This did not endear him to Ghana’s President, Kwame Nkrumah. Immediately after Olympio’s assassination, Nkrumah mobilized tanks on the Togoland border on the grounds that other African states were planning to intervene on their own behalf. For a moment it looked as though there was going to be a general scramble to carve up the remains of the “sick man of Africa,” as Togoland has come to be called.

The other notable instance of frontier sensitivity involved Ethiopia itself. Like so many other African states, Ethiopia is anything but a homogeneous whole. The present empire, which covers an area equal to that of Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico combined, was carved out in the nineteenth century by several kings of the dominant Amhara tribe. The Amharas are to Ethiopia roughly what the Castilians are to Spain - a proud aristocratic people with a rather marked distaste for manual labor. This they prefer to leave to “lesser” and relatively subjugated breeds, such as the Gallas, the Walamos, the Shankallas, the Beni Shanguls, and the Somalis.

Although no formal census has ever been taken, it is estimated that of the 21 million people inhabiting the empire, 3 million or more are Somalis, most of them concentrated in the dry desert areas of the south. This area, a vast chunk of Ethiopia, has been claimed on ethnic grounds as rightfully belonging to present-day Somalia, a pretension which has generated considerable heat between Addis Ababa and Mogadishu.

On the third day of the PanAfrican conference, Abdella Osman, President of the new republic of Somalia, felt called on, for reasons of domestic politics, to bring this quarrel out into the open, thereby provoking an impromptu rebuttal from Ethiopia’s Prime Minister, Tsehafe Tezez Aklilu Habte-Wold. Osman later made a private apology to the other delegates for this inopportune sortie, which had embarrassingly revealed just how fragile African unity really is.

If the Ethiopian government acceded to the Somali demand for a

ITuile Selassie’s prestige

local plebiscite to decide the issue, it could easily unleash unpredictable reactions in other parts of the country, inciting the Negroid population of western Ethiopia to demand fusion with their brothers in southern Sudan and spurring the Eritreans of the Red Sea coast, who were quietly absorbed into Ethiopia last November, to reclaim their autonomy. The proud empire of Ethiopia would then be reduced to a mere stump of a kingdom.

Perhaps because he shares this delicate problem with many another African state, Emperor Haile Selassie was able to set the pace of the conference and to outline the workable limits of present-day African cooperation. The third clause of the charter, specifically condemning outside interference in the affairs of other African countries and upholding the sovereignty and territorial integrity of each constituted state, was, in effect, written to his prescription.

In Ethiopia itself the conference did much to enhance Emperor Haile Selassie’s personal prestige, which had not fully recovered from the abortive coup staged against his one-man rule in December, 1960. University students and the angry young men of the capital who, prior to the conference, were more or less openly skeptical about it were converted almost from one day to the next into enthusiastic champions of the charter and admirers of the Emperor in a contagious wave of patriotic and Pan-African fervor.

Just how enduring this enthusiasm will prove to be is the big question now facing Ethiopia. In essence, the Emperor s problem is the same as that confronting Shah Mohammed of Iran and King Hassan of Morocco: how to liberalize an autocratic regime without undermining the dynastic principle on which the whole structure depends.

The Emperor’s critics, who since the 1960 coup have more or less gone underground and who probably do not number more than a few thousand, claim that Haile Selassie has not been going fast enough along the road of progress and democracy. In theory Ethiopia has been a constitutional monarchy ever since 1955, when a constitution was formally promulgated. There is a Parliament with two houses: a Senate, comprising 125 members appointed by the Emperor for six-year terms, and a Chamber of Deputies, whose 251 members are elected by universal suffrage for four-year terms.

In fact, however, the government of the empire is largely a one-man show. The Emperor personally supervises the activity of every government department, being careful, when necessary, to play off one minister against another. The Prime Minister, who, like all ministers, is appointed and can as easily be dismissed by the Emperor, is not responsible to the Parliament, whose debates are not open to the public and not even recorded. There are no formally constituted political parties, so that elections, when held, center around personalities rather than policies in an atmosphere decidedly more feudal than democratic.

The Emperor’s supporters claim that this is inevitable in a country where only 5 percent of the population is literate, where one person in every three goes around barefoot, and where the average individual income — $47 per annum — is one of the lowest in the world. As it is, considerable effort is being made to reduce this enormous margin of illiteracy, and Haile Selassie’s interest in education is evinced by his personal retention of the portfolio of Minister of Education.

Aristocracy and Church

The Emperor’s policy can best be described as one of gradual liberalization. It would be too much to expect anything else of a man who is now seventy-one years old and who has ruled his country since 1930— which is to say, longer than any other living chief of state, Salazar excepted. His task, furthermore, is complicated by the fact that his rule is based on a close alliance with the privileged Amhara aristocracy and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, which pay a minimum of taxes while owning a maximum of land.

The Emperor’s relationship with the Church is, by the same token, equivocal. On the one hand, the Church is the central pillar of the regime, its own fate being intimately linked with that of the monarchy. When the imperial palace guard staged its abortive coup in December of 1960, the Emperor was in Brazil, and it was the Patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, Abuna Basileus, who took the lead in publicly denouncing the rebels from the pulpit of Addis Ababa’s Holy Trinity Cathedral.

On the other hand, the Church, which owns one third of all the land in Ethiopia, is a built-in obstacle to progress. The part of this land which is owned by the monasteries, of which there are hundreds, is worked by monks: the rest is rented out to peasant tenants, who sometimes are obliged to contribute up to 75 percent of their produce to their ecclesiastical superiors. These are so numerous that it has been calculated that one Ethiopian in every six is either a priest, a monk, or a deacon. The Church does not seem much interested in altering this privileged state of affairs, which helps perpetuate a condition of peasant apathy, subsistence farming, and primitive agriculture.

Ethiopia’s rich earth

This is particularly regrettable in a country with a great agricultural potential. For Ethiopia is one of the few African countries to be blessed with fertile soil — seventeen feet of topsoil in certain of the central plateau areas — and adequate rainfall allowing for two and, in some cases, three crops a year. Properly cultivated, Ethiopia could be the breadbasket for all of East Africa, from Libya to Kenya.

As it is, this immense source of wealth has hardly begun to be tapped, and a few miles out of Addis Ababa one can see peasants tilling the earth with bullocks and wooden plows, exactly as they were doing in the days of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, from whom the present Emperor claims descent.

The one agricultural commodity with which some progress has been made is coffee. Coffee exports account for 50 percent of Ethiopia’s foreign earnings, and to keep them from shrinking in the face of everstiffer international competition, a Coffee Board was set up several years ago to stimulate the selection and cultivation of superior coffee. The result has been to encourage the emergence of a more dynamic type of farmer-entrepreneur. Some of the new farmers are graduates of the Jimma and El Amaya agricultural schools, which were set up in the early fifties with the help of agricultural experts from the University of Oklahoma.

This has led some people to think that the key to Ethiopia’s agricultural problem lies in the extension of marketing boards to other commodities, like grain, livestock, and oil seeds, in all of which Ethiopia could more than double existing production. The absence of such a board for grain, for example, has perpetuated an almost total indifference to the quality of grain produced. The effects of this on Ethiopia’s grain exports have been telling: in 1949 Ethiopia exported 52,000 tons of grain; by 1961 this had shrunk to less than 1000 tons.

The lopsided Five-Year Plan

The Second Five-Year Plan, which was officially announced early this year, makes little allowance for this situation. Ninety percent of the people are engaged in agriculture and provide two thirds of the national income, but only 1.4 percent of the Five-Year Plan’s budget allocations is to be devoted to agriculture. The principal reason for this extraordinary disparity is that the plan’s authors are Yugoslav technicians who seem bent on exporting to Ethiopia the Communist infatuation with industrialization at all costs.

In certain government circles there seems to be an awareness that the plan is lopsided and that the problem is going to be not how to implement it but how to ignore it. The mere fact that the plan has been published is. however, hailed as a noteworthy mark of progress. The First Five-Year Plan, for which the Yugoslavs were also responsible, was never published, and it is an open secret that most of its quotas were nowhere near being fulfilled.

There are signs, indeed, that the heyday of the Yugoslavs is coming to an end. Their importation into Ethiopia was the result of the friendship between Tito and Haile Selassie, which began shortly after the war as a result of their joint battle against Italian invasion and encroachment. Recently the Emperor has favored the importation of increasing numbers of Israeli technicians.

The work of the Peace Corps

American influence still retains a privileged position. U.S. officers have largely supplanted Swedes in training both the army, of 25,000 men, and the air force, of 1500, whose continuing loyalty to the Emperor has been encouraged through pay raises. Americans occupy a commanding position in agriculture and education, and the 275 Peace Corps volunteers at work in Ethiopia have taken on a large share of the teaching of English in the secondary schools.

This is, in fact, the third largest overseas Peace Corps operation of its kind, and the initial reactions, since the program was launched only last September, have been very favorable. Both Pravda and Izvestia have belittled the altruism of this particular venture, but the Russians, whose competitive efforts have been limited to building a hospital at Bahir Dar, have been much frustrated by the fact that English, compulsory for all students from the sixth grade on, is the country’s second official language.

The other major problem facing Ethiopia is the perennial problem of the succession. There is no strict tradition of hereditary rule in Ethiopia, but Haile Selassie has named his firstborn son. the forty-six-yearold Asfa Wossen Merid, as Crown Prince. Even though the latter was involved in the uprising of 1960, to the point of making a public broadcast in favor of the rebels, the Emperor has so far shown no sign of being ready to displace him.

The subject, for the time being at least, seems a trifle academic. Haile Selassie has given no sign of wanting to relinquish the reins he has held for thirty-five years. His performance during the Pan-African conference of last May was remarkable for a man of his age and led some observers to predict that he might last as long as Adenauer.