Martin Plaut’s remark follows a predictable pattern of collapsing complex imperial histories into crude moral equivalences designed to delegitimize Amhara political identity and sanitize the TPLF’s own long record of ethnic engineering. His framing is both historically misleading and analytically shallow. Emperor Menelik II did not engage in overseas colonialism, nor did he “export enslaved peoples.” He consolidated a multiethnic polity within African borders at the very moment Europeans were carving up the continent. Much of what Plaut calls “colonisation” was in fact the reclamation of historic Ethiopian provinces, including Bale and Harar, which had been severed from the Christian highland polity during the 16-18th centuries Oromo expansions. Ethiopian history did not begin with Menelik and it did not end with him. To equate his state consolidation with the slave-raiding economy of Sokoto or with European imperial projects is anachronistic at best and polemical at worst.
This is the same narrative move Plaut and Vaughan employed in their book, rebranding the Northern Ethiopian War as the “Tigray War.” It reduces a regional catastrophe into a parochial grievance and erases the Amhara and Afar experience. It is the analytical equivalent of calling the First World War the Sarajevo War simply because the spark happened there. Plaut’s comment is not scholarship. It is narrative engineering dressed in the language of moral concern.
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The UAE is routing shipments through DP World to the Berbera corridor in Somalia to supply large quantities of weapons to Ethiopia, a landlocked state in the midst of disintegration.
Channeling shipments for yet another war, genocide, and devastation. Stay tuned for more updates #EastAfrica #Afar #Tigray #Amhara #oromia #war #Sudan_War_Updates #Africa