Tibebu Taye
To passionately follow our nation’s socio-political developments is hardly possible. At times, it feels like singing along a non-rhythmic song, leaving you with mental and affective disorientations. Other times, it feels like attending a phantasmagoric theatre, where the darkness and chaos take you on a hyper-hypnotic journey. Things move fast but remain repetitive; change is immediate, but it’s short-lived. We claim to move forward, but with a reversed gear. We seek and sing peace with the melody of war.
Deep down in your heart, your moral instinct tells you that the resolution to all our challenges lies in our creative potential, imaginative abilities, and designing skills. It’s a slow and painstaking process, and you would compare it with the random and chaotic blips and movements throughout the nation, leading to a feeling of hopelessness.
But then, some people emerge—like Her Excellency, PM Mia Amor Mottley, Adom Getachew and Elleni Centime Zeleke— and you regain your motivation back, sharpen your pencil, and unwrap your paper to create, imagine, and pen down the breakthrough that could potentially emancipate Africa, Ethiopia, and its people.
Ethiopian Philosophers like Adom Getachew and Elleni Centime Zeleke (RIP) are invaluable guides. Their works: ‘World Making after the Empire: the Rise and Fall of Self-Determination‘ and ‘Ethiopia in Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964-2016’, really, provide deep insights into the terrain of Africa’s problems at both the continental and national levels.
First, Africans need to reimagine our epistemic foundation to reconnect with our organic moral instincts, which, as Elleni claimed, has the potential to guide our “academic practice, government policy, civil society activism, and the social needs of local communities.
Second, we must redefine the essence of justice and equality to ensure they align with the African epistemic principles. As Adom Getachew argued, we have lost the essence of these elements in our society following the decolonization process. She claims that the current movement for self-determination by most African leaders is flawed and unable to dismantle the imperial structures. She emphasizes that the struggle for self-determination should go beyond mere political independence and include economic sovereignty, social justice, and equal participation in the global community.
Lastly, we need to return to our core values of harmony, brotherhood, and fraternity—HARMOLANTICA. These key points were reiterated by PM Mia during her address at the 38th AU summit. She simply narrated Adom’s call for institutional reform at the regional and global level.
Her Excellency said that it shouldn’t always be only the leaders mandated to craft emancipatory toolkits, but also the ordinary people. Many Pan-African figures emphasized that it isn’t with foreign-borrowed toolkits, but with domestic ones, that we can emancipate the region and its people.
Here I am, claiming that I am an ordinary person, offering an extraordinary African-born emancipatory toolkit called ‘HARMOLANTICA.’
PM Abiy Ahmed highlighted the importance of Africa’s rich spirituality, as it is mainly manifested in humanity’s potential to cohabit harmoniously. Her Excellency also called on us to return to our origin, to herald the spirit of unity and fraternity, declaring: “We have to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery and build the future that our people want of us in the spirit and with the results of Adwa.”
Hyped by the same spirit, I harnessed the African communitarian value of Harmony (HARMO) with the determination of the forerunners of Pan-Africanists to return to the African roots (LANTICA) in coming to the proposal of HARMOLANTICA.
In this proposal, I am not recalling the story of the Israelites who left Egypt and conquered the land of Canaan, forming the nations of Israel and Judah. I am not reiterating Derrick Bell’s Parable of Afrolantica, in which he dreams that “Out in the Atlantic Ocean, a new continent suddenly begins to emerge from the water 900 miles off the coast of South Carolina … with inviting topography that turned out to be hostile to all but African Americans.” In my vision of Harmolantica, I yearn for harmony and peace in the place where we are right now. I call for channeling our political, cultural, and natural resources from divisiveness to unity and building bridges. It is essential to recognize that our collective well-being hinges on unity of purpose and action. This is time to transcend the narrow confines of political and cultural divisions and absolute projections that have long hindered our progress as a global community.
Published a little over 8 months ago, in an article titled ‘Harmolantica: Youth of Ethiopian Following Anticipations from the National Dialogue Commission’ shared on Borkena, I attempt to appropriate the African-born notion of HARMOLANTICA catered to the current challenges of Ethiopia. In the same spirit and optimism as PM Mia, Adom, and Elleni, I call for multinational returns in our political culture including:
- Immediate return to truth: Establishing a ‘Constitution of Truth’
- Return politics to the parliament: ‘Parliamentary Reinstatement
- Immediate return to moral instinct: ‘Path to Awareness and Accountability’
- Urgent psychological rehabilitation of post-war Ethiopia: ‘Affective Modulation’
- Return to compassion: ‘Harmolantica’
READ MORE : https://borkena.com/2024/06/03/harmolantica-%E1%8D%A1-youth-of-ethiopia-following-anticipations-from-the-national-dialogue-commission/
Editor’s Note : Views in the article do not necessarily reflect the views of borkena.com
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