ሓፈሻዊ ሓበሬታ

The Mask I Wore Willingly: A Tigrayan Letter on Love, Identity, Empire, and the Future of the North

July 30, 2026 / No Comments

I loved the country that taught me to disappear inside it. I know now that a culture can hold you completely and still not hold your name, and that no state worth keeping asks a people to vanish to belong.

Before the letter

This is a political letter, not a dissertation. Its point of entry is one life: a Tigrayan childhood formed partly through Amharic language, literature, music, religion, and public culture, and later forced to confront the conditions attached to that belonging. Personal memory cannot settle every historical dispute, and I do not ask it to. Where the argument depends on law, population, boundaries, or documentary history, I place the evidence separately. But archives cannot fully explain how a country enters a child through language, pleasure, education, and love, or what happens when that country later makes belonging conditional. For that, testimony is not a substitute for knowledge. It is one form of it.

Readers who want the sources, qualifications, and limits behind the historical and territorial claims that follow may consult the companion note, Method, Evidence, and Scope.

I write at a strange hour, when yesterday’s enemies are being pushed toward one another by a common danger. Abiy Ahmed’s remaking of the Ethiopian state — the dissolution of the old federal coalition, the gathering of power around a new center — has generated several overlapping forms of convergence. One is ጽምዶ in its original and most valuable sense: a people-to-people opening, above all across the Tigray–Eritrea border, meant to keep geography, kinship, and shared suffering from being turned once again into instruments of war. Around that opening, reports, contacts, and tactical calculations also point to a looser anti-Abiy environment involving some Tigrayan actors, Amhara Fano forces, Eritrea, and others whose interests may overlap without producing a coherent alliance. I have written elsewhere about ጽምዶ as a survival instrument, about the danger of letting it become amnesia, and about the discipline any such engagement demands; I will not repeat that argument here. What matters for this letter is narrower: convergence is not partnership, and a shared enemy is not a shared political future. Nor can partnership be purchased by postponing return, treating occupation as a neutral fact, or asking the displaced to wait until strategy has finished with them. Between the Amhara and the Tigrayans stands a dispute neither treats as secondary — Western and Southern Tigray — and that impasse is not finally about competing maps. It is about two different theories of what makes a land belong to a people, and behind that, about a confusion this whole letter exists to name. So I will come to the territories and to the danger. But I have to begin further back, with a child and a radio, because the confusion that now blocks a necessary alliance is the same one that shaped my own life.

I want to begin with a confession, because everything I am about to say will be misread if I do not.

I love Amharic music. Not politely, and not the way a neighbor admires a neighbor’s house. I love it the way you love the thing that raised you. When I hear ጥላሁን ገሠሠ, when Muluken Melesse opens his throat, when Aster Aweke bends a note until it aches, when Mahmoud Ahmed or Alemayehu Eshete or Ephrem Tamiru come on, something in me still gives way. I am not exaggerating and I am not performing. I still cry. At my age, with everything I now know, I still cry.

And I begin here on purpose. I did not put music into politics — the empire did that long ago, when it chose whose songs would be the nation’s; I start with what I love because love was the door assimilation came through, and because my own love is the first proof of what this letter argues: that a culture can enter you completely and still not decide who you are.

Let me be exact about how that happened, because the exactness is the whole argument in miniature. My first tongue was Tigrinya. My parents, like many of the Tigrayan families who had made their lives in Addis Ababa, spoke Tigrinya at home, and so the ground beneath everything, the first grammar of my heart, was Tigrayan. But the moment I stepped out the door, into the Addis Ababa of the 1970s, the world was Amharic: the street, the school, the radio, the books. It was Amharic that wired the public part of my mind, the part that names and models the world I move through, until I thought, as I still think, in Amharic before my own mother tongue. I was taught to write Amharic. I was never taught to write Tigrinya. As a child, my own language reached me only as speech and song and story, never as a script I could hold a pen to, because the country had already decided which tongues would be taught in school, admitted into its official records, and cultivated as languages of public advancement, and which would largely stay inside the house. I would learn to write it in the end, but not as a boy, and not from the state: only decades later, when I made Tigray my home in the mid-1990s, did I finally teach my own hand the letters my schooling had withheld. Even my mother tongue, I had to go back and reclaim.

The radio did more than speak Amharic; it built whole worlds in it and invited the entire city inside. And I should be exact about the time, because it matters to everything that follows: the radio I remember was already the revolution’s — the emperor had fallen when I was four — and still it carried much of the old highland world into our evenings. When Wogayehu Nigatu narrated ፍቅር እስከ መቃብር, Addis Ababa seemed to go quiet, as though the whole city had camped around a single fire. We walked into the households of ፊታውራሪ መሸሻ and ጉዱ ካሳ, of ስብለ and በዛብህ, among the priests and the churches, the old order of honor and shame, the grief and the tenderness and the authority. Those ገፀ ባህሪያት became part of our own memory. And it was one evening among many — narrated novels, historical dramas, songs and cultural programs carrying that highland world into our homes night after night, as though it were the country’s own memory. We did not experience it as instruction. We experienced it as life — the country reaching me as a voice, and the voice was beautiful, and I opened the door and let it live in me.

And it was never only the spoken word. It was the music, and this may be the deepest channel of all. A policy can be resisted, because it announces itself as power; a story asks no permission, and a song asks less than that. A song enters through the body rather than the mind: the Amharic melody, its rhythm, the እስክስታ that moves the shoulders before the mind has agreed to anything, went into us beneath the level of thought, through pleasure, the one door no one thinks to guard. You do not argue with a song you love. You dance to it.

And the beauty was real; that is the whole difficulty. The old pentatonic modes, ትዝታ and ባቲ, አምባሰል and አንቺሆዬ, carry a depth that argues for nothing and needs no defense: hear Mahmoud Ahmed inside a ትዝታ, or Kassa Tessema’s krar turning ባቲ, and you know, whoever you are and whatever your first language, what it is to be claimed by a sound. But those modes reached us largely through the Amharic cultural stage and were offered as the nation’s own, and that is precisely how assimilation works, not by force but by handing you something genuinely beautiful and teaching you to call it, and yourself, by a single name. I would keep every note of it. I ask only that the door open both ways: that Amhara ears, too, learn to be claimed by the sounds of everyone else.

I will even grant that Amharic-language music built the country’s largest modern recording industry, its widest national audience, and its deepest institutional reach. But that scale was never proof of inherent superiority; it reflected unequal access to studios, airwaves, urban markets, and national prestige — advancement as a gift of the center, not a proof of merit. And where the space has opened since 1991, other musics have begun the same climb.

But I should widen the frame in place and in time, because none of this was mine alone, and to tell it only as a Tigrayan wound would be to miss what it was. I was born in 1970, into the last years of the imperial order — the world of ንጉሥ and ራስ, ደጃዝማች and ፊታውራሪ. Those titles would be swept away within a few years; the order beneath them proved far harder to abolish. Addis Ababa was not simply a city where Amharic happened to dominate; it was the capital of that order, a hierarchy of court and army and church and land whose language of authority was Amharic and whose manners were offered as the national ones. Around it lived civil servants and soldiers, priests and traders and domestic workers, and families who had come from every corner of the country for school, or work, or safety, or a future.

My parents were one such family, and our experience was not uniquely Tigrayan. Oromo, Gurage, Wolayita, Sidama, Somali, Harari, Afar, Tigrayan, and many other families from Ethiopia’s diverse peoples met that order through different doors — school, administration, military service, trade, urban work, radio, and, for some, the church — but the public language of advancement was overwhelmingly the same, and each found a world already furnished, its tongue and its memory chosen before they arrived. This is the thing to see plainly: the empire did not require every people to become Amhara in private. It required them to become Amharic in public — to learn which language opened the office, which manners signaled education, which memory was presented as the nation’s own, and which parts of themselves were to stay at home. Not Amhara in blood or in the privacy of the household, but Amharic in the one place that handed out power.

I have the proof in my own family’s papers. My parents were married in Yeha — the heart of Tigray, and among the oldest inhabited ground in the country — around 1948 in the Ethiopian calendar, 1955 or 1956 by the Gregorian. Their marriage certificate was written in Amharic. Not in the Tigrinya they spoke to each other and to everyone around them, but in the tongue the state reserved for whatever it meant to keep. A Tigrayan marriage, on Tigrayan soil, entered into the record in Amharic: that is what it looks like when one language holds the single door through which a life becomes official.

Watch the turning of the year. When እንቁጣጣሽ comes and the country sings እንኳን ደህና መጣሽ to greet the new year, the melody, the rhythm, and the white dress with its woven ጥበብ raised up as the national costume belong to a particular highland repertoire, shared especially across Amhara and Tigrayan worlds, that was repeatedly elevated to stand for “Ethiopia” entire, exactly as Walelign warned. A Wolayita child, a Somali child, or a Nuer child learns to recognize the nation through a repertoire not originally his own, while being told that it is simply “Ethiopian.” The holiday feels shared; the aesthetic is particular. And honesty demands that I name my own people in it: that dress, that dance are as much ours as they are Amhara. We were not bystanders to the mask. We helped wear it.

And long before I had the word “assimilation,” I had already learned, without once being told, which world sounded national and which stayed merely local. This is no charge against the novel, or the man who read it so beautifully. The problem was never that ፍቅር እስከ መቃብር was broadcast. It was that almost no other people’s world, and no Tigrayan world, was ever given the same reach, the same repetition, the same prestige.

And when the throne finally fell, the center did not fall with it. In 1974 the Derg swept the monarchy away in the language of revolution, equality, and the rights of the nationalities — a real rupture, not the old order in a new hat. It abolished the aristocracy, it named the nationalities question aloud, and in the great የመሠረተ ትምህርት ዘመቻ it set out to teach the whole country to read. That was no simple Amharization: the campaign carried literacy in some fifteen languages and gave several peoples a written public presence the empire had always denied them, and that should be said plainly. And yet those languages were written through the ግዕዝ fidel — an orthographic choice many Oromo intellectuals regarded as linguistically constraining and politically continuous with the old center — while the formal school, the administration, the radio, and the ladder of advancement still ran in Amharic. The revolution widened the doorway; the house still had one public language. The crown was gone; the center endured. Amharic had only moved from the tongue of the palace to the tongue of the revolution.

And yet those worlds did not disappear, which is the part that keeps this from being mere lament. Start with me: my own Tigrayan-ness was never taken, even though the state gave my mother tongue no place in my schooling and never taught me to write it. It was kept whole at home — in the stories my mother and father told, in the Tigrinya spoken across our table, in the relatives who came down from Tigray and carried ዓደይ into the room. The country’s voice filled the street, but it could not reach our hearth. And what my family did for me, entire peoples did for themselves. The assimilative project was powerful, but never total. The Sidama and the Wolayita, the Somali and the Afar, the Oromo above all, held their languages and their worlds, not because the state left them room to flourish, but because their communities refused to let go. Their survival was never proof that the system was plural. It was proof of their resistance. And the order that came after 1991, and more fully the constitution of 1995, did not invent these peoples, whatever its enemies now claim. For the first time in the modern history of this state, it gave them a framework in which to nurture their own language, their own culture, and their own administration — to stand in public at full height, and to govern themselves at home. That the framework was often only half-honored under a single ruling party does not diminish what it was: the first Ethiopian constitutional order to recognize its nations, nationalities, and peoples explicitly as holders of language, cultural, and self-government rights — and, at least in principle, of equality.

Still, survival was never the same as purity, because the machinery reached even into the survivors. Take my own tongue. Tigrinya kept advantages many marginalized languages were denied — it remained the everyday speech of a territorially concentrated population — and even so it did not escape. Decades of that silent architecture thinned it with Amharic, until in the larger towns, and in Mekelle most of all, you can still hear it wearing Amharic like a borrowed coat — not the ordinary give-and-take that neighboring tongues have always shared, but the residue of decades in which Amharic held the school, the office, the city’s prestige, and the national microphone, while Tigrinya borrowed back in a currency it was never allowed to spend in return. Since 1991, and the constitutional space that came with it, Tigrinya has recovered much of the institutional space it had been denied — taught, written, administered, allowed to grow back into itself. But the dilution has not fully drained, and this is not only grammar, because language shapes familiarity, emotional attachment, and the political worlds that come to feel natural. That very thinning is part of why some Tigrayans have felt, sincerely, a pull toward ኢትዮጵያዊነት — not as calculation, but as the residue of an assimilation that entered the mouth long before it reached the mind. I know. For most of my life, I was one of them.

So understand what I am telling you. I am not a stranger to ኢትዮጵያዊነት — Ethiopiawinet, Ethiopian-ness. I am its child. I carried it in my body, and I want to tell you what it did to me precisely because I loved it, and precisely because I am the last person who can be accused of hating it. And here is the first lesson of that life, the one everything else will rest on: I was governed, taught, and enchanted through Amharic, and it shaped me to the bone, but it did not make me Amhara. Administration can shape a person without ever creating belonging. Hold that; the whole question of the land will turn on it.

For most of my life I never once thought I would have to negotiate my Ethiopian-ness. I did not experience it as a negotiation at all. I was Tigrayan to the root — my language, my land, my people, ዓደይ, all of it intact — and I was Ethiopian in the same breath, without contradiction. I think this was something particular about many of us. Many Tigrayans of my generation learned to hold both at once. We loved the wider house while keeping our own room exactly as it was, and we did not imagine the two could ever be made to fight.

And then they were made to fight.

And in being made to fight, I finally understood what this is about, and it is not music, or language, or even my own disillusionment. It is about a political error that has outlived every regime that carried it: the belief that Amhara dignity and Amhara security depend on keeping Ethiopia as an inherited possession, with one center, one custodian, one national self. That belief has wounded every people around the Amhara. But it has also trapped the Amhara themselves, teaching them to measure their strength by control of the center, their history by the reach of old maps, and their safety by the submission of their neighbors. Until it is faced, neither Amhara nor Tigray will be safe, and Ethiopia, in whatever form it takes, will remain a battlefield wearing the clothes of a country.

I will not narrate the whole war here. I have done that elsewhere and I will do it again. I will tell you only the smallest part, the part that changed everything I understood.

One night in 2021 I was taken by security forces and held among many other Tigrayan men, for no offense except the one written on my face and in my name. That was real. I need you to sit with how real it was.

But that is not the part that broke something open in me. I have thought about it for a long time, and I want to be exact, because the easy version of this story is not the true one. The easy version is that no one spoke, that everyone was silent, that all of Ethiopia turned its back. That is not what I mean, and it is not fair, and I have watched too many people flatten a whole society into a single villain to do the same thing myself.

What broke something open in me was subtler and worse. It was the discovery that the national imagination had been built, over a very long time, so that Tigrayans could be removed from the picture without the picture seeming to break. People could be detained, displaced, starved, and the wider public did not feel that Ethiopia itself was being torn — because in the story the country tells about itself, we had always been at the edge of the frame, tolerated so long as we did not insist too loudly on being fully ourselves. The belonging, I finally understood, had always carried a condition I had refused to read. I was welcome in the house exactly to the degree that I was willing to disappear inside it. The house welcomed difference only so long as difference did not challenge the house’s single center.

That is when I finally read, with adult eyes, what a twenty-four-year-old student wrote in November 1969, in a five-page article that would haunt this country for half a century.

Walelign Mekonnen asked what “Ethiopian” actually meant in practice, and he answered without flinching. To be a “genuine Ethiopian,” he wrote, one had to speak Amharic, to listen to Amharic music, to accept Orthodox Christianity; one had, in his words, to wear an Amhara mask. He borrowed the phrase from Fanon and he was not being cruel. He was being precise.

Now here I must be honest in a way that costs me something, because I will not build an argument on a lie. Walelign did not write “Amhara.” He wrote Amhara-Tigre. He placed my people inside that national mask too, and elsewhere in the same essay called the Tigres the Amharas’ “junior partners.” He was right to include us. Tigray was not innocent of the imperial order; Tigrayan elites were inside it, one rank down, sharing in its grammar and its rewards. So when I say I wore the mask, I am not accusing you of something I stood clean of. I wore it willingly, and I wore it well. That is exactly why I can now see it for what it was.

Because this is the thing almost no one says plainly: assimilation does not feel like violence from the inside. It feels like love. It feels like belonging, like music, like home, like a shared and beautiful thing. That is not the exception to how it works; that is how it works.

But let me be precise about the mechanism, or I will fairly be accused of blaming a song for a war. It was not that Amharic is a conquering language or that a lullaby is a weapon. It was institutional and slow, and its logic was simple: advancement, recognition, the very feeling of being a full citizen required everyone else to translate themselves into one standard, while the standard never had to translate into anyone. One identity stayed nationally normative; all the others became private, or provincial, or quaint.

The church deserves a precise word, because the easy version gets it wrong. The liturgy itself remained in ግዕዝ; the Mass was never simply “in Amharic.” But as the Orthodox Church deepened its reach, Amharic became the language in which scripture was explained, sermons preached, and the social world of the faith made nationally legible, until an Amharic-centered vocabulary of Ethiopian belonging came to feel like the natural voice of the sacred itself. Its role varied by region and century, and it guarded ግዕዝ and countless local traditions too; I will not caricature it as one deliberate machine. But its cultural gravity pulled in one direction, and honesty requires that we say so.

And nothing shows how deep that gravity runs better than my own region: even in parts of Tigray, preaching, religious instruction, and publication often operated through Amharic rather than the Tigrinya of the people in the pews. It is telling that reclaiming Tigrinya in worship became part of the Tigrayan church’s recent assertion of itself, just as Oromo Christians had to press for Afaan Oromo in their own services: the language of the sacred, too, had a national default, and the default was Amharic.

Even intermarriage, which softened every border in the country and which I would never call a weapon — intermarriage is a human bond, not an imperial instrument — even that took place inside an unequal structure, where the children more often flowed toward the normative identity than away from it, because that was the direction the whole society sloped.

Let me be careful here, because this is exactly where a true thing can curdle into an unfair one.

I am not saying that Amhara culture built the empire. A language is not a policy. A song is not a decree. Amharic conquered no one; ጥላሁን signed no order. What happened is more precise, more forgivable, and in the end more consequential than any plot: the imperial state selected elements of Amhara culture, of Orthodox tradition, of the Amharic language, and elevated them into the national standard by which everyone else would be measured. The state did the elevating. The culture was simply the material closest to the throne.

And then generation after generation of elites and artists worked inside that grammar. Most never chose it; many were constrained by it, censored by it, dependent on the only national stage there was; and a great many sang not of empire at all but of love and grief and God, the whole human range. They did not build the cage. But much of the culture they made helped it feel natural, and beautiful, and permanent. I would not flatten them into one guilt: some defended the centralist idea, some reproduced it without examining it, some merely worked the only stage that existed, and some challenged the state while still singing in its cultural key. To collapse them into a single verdict would be to do the very thing I accuse the empire of, erasing distinctions to make judgment easy.

So when I speak to the Ethiopianist artists, I am not calling you architects of a prison. Your gift was real. Your beauty was real. I carry it in me still. But beauty has a politics, and the politics of that beauty was this: it made the empire emotionally habitable. You did not teach the generations to obey. You did something quieter and far more powerful; you made belonging so beautiful that no one thought to ask what belonging cost the person who could not, or would not, wear the mask.

Let me now say the thing this whole letter exists to say, and let me say it in both our tongues, because our people have always loved a truth that arrives bilingual.

መንነት ካብ ሓድነት ይዓምቕ። Identity is deeper than union.

To love and to claim your own መንነት — your identity — is not to hate anyone else’s. This is the confusion at the very center of our tragedy, and it is a confusion, not a fact. There is no law of the human heart that makes my becoming fully Tigrayan into an act of war against you. Being Tigrayan has never once made me hate the Amhara, or the Oromo, or the Gurage. I carry your music in me still; how could I hate you? I refuse exactly one thing, and I want to name it so precisely that it cannot be mistaken for anything else. I refuse the hand that reaches to take my identity away — the impulse that wants me denied, that wants me dissolved, that is afraid of my መንነት and so must erase it. Not a people. An impulse. The two are not the same, and everything depends on not confusing them.

A wiser man than me, Amartya Sen, warned that violence is often fed by a single illusion — that a human being has only one identity, one belonging that swallows all the others. That is the illusion the imperial idea of Ethiopia was built on. One language, one faith, one music, one way to be real. The crime was never that Amharic is beautiful; it is beautiful. The crime was making it the single mask everyone had to wear or vanish. And the cure is not to tear the mask off one face and press it onto another. The cure is a country where a face may simply be its own.

And Ethiopia is not the first place to mistake cultural reach for political permanence. Rome pressed its language and law so deep into Europe that the influence outlived the empire, yet the peoples beneath that layer never dissolved. Colonial Africa ran the opposite machine — not become like us but stay different, inside the box we assign you — hardening fluid identities into administrative tribes and setting one against another. One empire says become like the center; the other says remain other, but only in the cage. Both deny a people equal authorship of the country, and both teach the lesson that is also my own: a culture can win the mind — the tongue, the taste, the love — and still fail to make a union that anyone would freely choose.

What I have been describing is not only how the rest of us were absorbed into Ethiopia. It is also how Amhara identity itself became trapped inside the duty of carrying a state that ordinary Amharas never truly controlled. Once one people’s language, symbols, and historical memory had been made to appear as the nation itself, the defense of that national form could come to feel like the defense of that people’s very existence — even for ordinary Amharas who had never held the state that acted in their name. And so now I must say something to the Amhara that is not an accusation at all. It is the part of this letter I most want you to hear, because it is about a wound that was done to you — one the imperial narrative laid on Amhara society itself, quietly and ruinously.

That narrative cast Amhara society as the custodian of Ethiopia — the natural representative of the center, the people charged with holding the territory together, embodying the state, standing as the last wall against fragmentation. It framed every demand for self-government elsewhere as a theft from the Amhara specifically, as though the whole edifice rested on Amhara shoulders, and every act of autonomy anywhere was a stone pulled from under Amhara feet.

And here is the cruel paradox at the heart of it. Amhara society was cast as the symbol of ownership over Ethiopia while ordinary Amharas were often poor, politically expendable, and no more in control of the state than the peoples supposedly ruled in their name. The Amhara farmer in Gojjam or Wollo did not own the empire that flew his culture as its flag. He was conscripted for it, taxed for it, sent to die on its far borders for it, and then, when the reckoning came, he was handed the bill for crimes committed by a state he never commanded. The name “Amhara” was rich with symbolic power and poor in actual power, and that gap is one of the great unspoken tragedies of this country.

So when I ask you to set down imperial nostalgia, I am not asking you to lose something that ever protected you. I am pointing to the very thing that has repeatedly injured you. It ties Amhara security to a centralized state that no longer commands broad consent and cannot be rebuilt by force; it turns every neighbor’s self-government into an existential threat, and so guarantees you a permanent frontier of enemies; and it keeps the Amhara from the single most valuable thing a people can do — building a clear political project of its own, in its own name.

Let me be equally careful about Amhara identity itself, because a lazy version of my argument would be false.

Amhara identity is not a recent invention. It has lived for centuries through local history, through language, through Orthodox faith, through province and kinship and social memory. Anyone who tells you the Amhara were simply conjured into existence yesterday is playing a political game with the truth. What is relatively new is not the identity but its consolidation — its gathering into a modern, explicit political nationalism organized around collective threat and self-defense. That is the real change of our moment.

And I will not mock that awakening. I think it may be the most constructive thing to happen to Amhara political thought in a century — on one condition.

For as long as the Amhara were taught to speak for all of Ethiopia, they were spared the task of speaking clearly for themselves. The imperial identity substituted for a political program; carrying the nation excused you from defining your own nation-within-the-nation. The new Amhara self-consciousness could finally end that contradiction. It could give the Amhara what every secure people has: a bounded, legitimate, self-governing political project with a name and an address, rather than a diffuse claim to represent everyone.

But here is the danger, and it is a real one. If Amhara nationalism merely takes the old imperial territorial claims and repackages them under an ethnic label — if it becomes the empire in a smaller costume, demanding by ethnic right what the monarchy once demanded by divine right — then it will reproduce the very disease it was meant to cure, only in a narrower and angrier form. The question is not whether the Amhara organize politically. They should, and what that project finally becomes is for Amharas themselves to define; my argument concerns only the terms under which it can coexist with the equal political existence of its neighbors. The question I press is what they organize for, and that is what everything in this letter has been circling toward.

And there is an irony here that should give the old centralists pause, because it is already unfolding. The constitutional order after 1991 did not remove Amharic from Ethiopia; it kept Amharic as the working language of the federal government and the widest common tongue between peoples. What it removed was the requirement that every Ethiopian enter public life only through it. Tigrinya could become a language of schooling, administration, and justice in Tigray, Afaan Oromo in Oromia, Somali in the Somali region — the shared federal language remained, but it was no longer the single door. To many centralist intellectuals, formed to feel Amharic culture as simply Ethiopian, that felt like the country coming apart. But what had shrunk was not Ethiopia. It was monopoly — Amharic returned from the scale of the state to the scale of a great culture among other great cultures. And now, faced with what many Amhara nationalists perceive as an expanding Oromo-centered project, some of the very people who once condemned that settlement are reaching for its instruments: distinct peoplehood, regional self-government, collective rights, the capacity to organize in their own name. Whether every element of that fear is justified is not my argument here. The irony is. Federalism looked like fragmentation when it protected others; it began to look like protection when the Amhara themselves felt exposed.

And exposed they now are — which is where this letter meets the present. After 2018 the old Amharic monopoly was not replaced by the equality the constitution promised; it was displaced by another attempt to run the whole country from a single center. Let me be precise, because the point is easy to abuse: the danger is not that Oromo language and identity have risen into public life; that rising is just, and long overdue. The danger is the building of a new governing network around Abiy Ahmed and his Prosperity Party, with executive, security, military, and economic power gathered into one new center and the capital itself remade as its symbol. This is my political reading of the structure of power after 2018, not a claim that the state is simply identical with the Oromo people or that every institution within it answers to one ethnic command. My argument has never been that the old center should be restored against the new one. It is that Ethiopia must stop being a country that one center after another tries to inherit whole.

That new center has wounded both poles of the historic North. Tigray was subjected to war, siege, dismemberment, and ruin. Amhara society was mobilized first into that war and then against the same federal power, into repression and revolt. Out of those overlapping wounds, the possibility, and in some quarters the calculation, of wider cooperation has emerged, forces that only a few years earlier were killing one another now weighing whether they must stand together. ጽምዶ helped open the political imagination for such engagement, but this broader convergence is not the same thing as the people-to-people process from which the word first drew its meaning, and it should not be quietly allowed to become so. Necessity is not trust. A common enemy can create contact; only a common principle of coexistence can create a partnership that outlives the enemy. The new center has made cooperation necessary — disciplined, conditional cooperation, not unconditional alignment. And the territorial memory of the old center may still make even that impossible.

I want to speak now about the North, ሰሜን, because this is where my own story and yours are most tangled, and where the lies on both sides are most seductive.

The Amhara and the Tigrayan peoples are not strangers who met at a border. We share Orthodox tradition and its calendar of fasts and feasts. We share centuries of migration and intermarriage, of trade routes and agricultural rhythm, of military history and state-building, of words borrowed back and forth until neither tongue is wholly free of the other, of art and manuscript and memory — memory of cooperation, and memory of terrible violence, both. We are entangled the way only two peoples who have lived beside each other for a thousand years can be.

But entanglement is not sameness, and I want to refuse two myths at once, because each is a trap.

The first myth says that because we are so deeply connected, we are really one people, and therefore Tigrayan political distinctness is artificial, a modern invention to be dissolved back into a northern-Christian-Ethiopian whole. That is the imperial reflex again, wearing the mask of brotherhood. Shared history does not erase distinct peoplehood, distinct interest, or distinct right.

The second myth says the opposite — that our conflicts prove an ancient, permanent hostility, that Amhara and Tigrayan are natural enemies whose war is written into the bones of the highlands. That, too, is false, and it is the more dangerous of the two right now, because it makes the current bloodshed feel like destiny instead of choice.

The truth is harder and more hopeful than either: we are deeply entangled peoples whose shared future cannot be built on forced sameness or on permanent hostility. And if that is true, then the North needs something it has never really had — a settlement between two deeply entangled northern neighbors founded not on which one commands the other, but on mutual recognition, on non-domination, on borders settled by law, on protection for the minorities who live on every side of every line, on the plain economic interdependence that already binds us, and on security arrangements that do not require either people to kneel.

My own life taught me the distinction before I had words for it, and it is the key to everything that follows. I was educated through Amharic, governed through Amharic, enchanted through Amharic, invited to imagine the whole country through Amharic. That public order shaped me deeply. It did not make me Amhara. And the same distinction applies to the relationship between a people and a land. An empire could administer ወልቃይት from Gonder, or ራያ from Wollo — for taxes, for troops, for the convenience of a governor — without thereby turning the people who lived there into the identity of the administering province. A governor’s jurisdiction is not a population’s consent. A tax record is not a deed of belonging. A map of command is not a map of peoplehood.

The two forms of administration are not identical. One shapes persons through language, education, and public culture; the other governs land through offices, taxation, and force. My life does not prove a territorial claim. It reveals the shared error: in both cases, the apparatus of rule is mistaken for the identity of the ruled. The territorial question must still be decided on its own evidence.

This is the confusion beneath the whole territorial quarrel. The obstacle is not merely that Amhara and Tigray claim the same ground; it is that they argue from two different theories of what makes ground belong to a people. One gives decisive weight to prior administration, inherited provincial maps, and present control. The other gives greater weight to long-term settlement, language, social continuity, constitutional recognition, and consent — to who lived there across generations, and who was driven out. The failure to distinguish administration from belonging is the hidden link between the cultural assimilation that shaped my childhood and the territorial maximalism that now blocks a necessary alliance. No people can inherit an empire’s administrative reach as ethnic property.

The documentary records for Western and Southern Tigray are examined separately, territory by territory, in Administration, Population, and Belonging.

Which brings me, unavoidably, to ወልቃይት and ራያ — Western and Southern Tigray. Here the argument stops being philosophy and becomes a test: the practical measure of whether Amhara political renewal can move beyond imperial reasoning, or whether it will only rename it.

The question the territory poses is simple and merciless. Will legitimacy be decided by imperial-era administrative memory and by who holds the ground with a rifle — or by constitutional law, by settlement patterns, by language, by documented history, by the rights and consent of the people who actually live there, and by the fate of those who have been driven out?

Let me be disciplined about my own evidence, because I have several kinds and they are not equal.

I have personal experience: as a young man in the mid-1990s I walked almost the whole of Tigray on foot to demarcate and digitize its internal divisions, its tabias and its woredas — not the regional boundary, which had already been settled above me, but the fine grain within it. I sat with elders, Amhara and Tigrayan both, who had lived on that land for generations. That is eyewitness testimony, and it is real, but I know it is not proof on its own.

I have oral tradition, though I hold it to the very standard I have set for everyone else. The old ወልቃይት farmers had a verse from long before our modern quarrels — ዓደይ ትግራይ፡ ማሕረሰይ ወልቃይት, my land is Tigray, my cropland Welkait. It is beautiful, and a true trace of how people once named themselves. But a folk memory can no more make Welkait Tigrayan than an imperial map can make it Amhara. If historical memory cannot settle the question for the other side, it cannot settle it for mine. So I set the verse beside the hearth, not on the negotiating table, and rest the case where it belongs — on the record.

And I have the documentary record, which is where the weight properly rests: administrative and demographic sources from well before the TPLF existed — an Italian survey in the 1940s, a language map in Donald Levine’s Wax and Gold, the Derg’s own records, and the post-1991 censuses. For Western Tigray, the available evidence — though not uniform or uncontested — is consistent with a Tigrinya-speaking majority well before any party is accused of engineering one; the record for Southern Tigray differs in its particulars and must be weighed on its own. I have set both chains of sources out in a separate historical note, because they deserve citation and scrutiny, not the compression of an essay, and I would rather you interrogate the evidence than take my word.

From that record I draw three arguments, and only three, and I hold them against every side.

Military occupation cannot create lawful title. Territorial control altered by force in 2020 does not become lawful title merely because the force succeeded, whoever wields it.

Historical grievance, however genuine, cannot justify the collective displacement of a population. Nothing that was done to anyone in the past licenses the ethnic clearing of a people in the present.

And any settlement that will actually hold must deal with everything at once — territory, the return of the displaced, property, the rights of minorities who will remain on every side, and security — because a settlement that fixes only the map and forgets the people will simply reload the next war.

Let me also be fair about the claim I am contesting, because I refuse the rhetorical shortcut. The dangerous doctrine is not that Amharas hold histories reaching outside today’s regional borders. Every people does; so do Tigrayans. The dangerous doctrine is the belief that the mere presence of an Amhara historical memory automatically overrides the equal memories, the demographic reality, the legal claims, and the consent of everyone else. That specific belief — not the Amhara people, and not the fact of Amhara history — is what turns neighbors into casualties. And the same discipline binds my own people: our claims, too, must answer to law, to demography, and to the consent of those who live on the land, or they are worth no more than anyone else’s.

One thing more, because honesty requires it. The post-1991 reconfiguration is also reported to have assigned eastern lowland areas previously administered with Tigray to the Afar Region, reflecting the settlement and identity of the resident Afar population. The precise administrative chain still deserves fuller documentation, so I do not offer it as proof by itself, but it complicates the claim that the boundary principle operated only to enlarge Tigray. I ask only that the same rule be honored wherever it runs.

And this is not a quarrel that can be shelved until after Abiy. It is the test of whether this convergence can become anything more than a marriage of fear. No coalition can hold if one partner treats wartime occupation as the neutral status quo, the other treats restoration as survival, and neither will name the standard by which the matter is judged. So the minimum is not agreement on the final map. It is agreement on the rules: no more territory taken by force, no recognition of conquest as title, the return and protection of the displaced, real mechanisms for property and minority rights, and a lawful, consented process for settling administration and borders. As I have argued in Tigray Must Think North, tactical engagement may reserve a dispute for an agreed process, but it cannot convert silence into consent or occupation into a legitimate baseline.

These conditions follow from the argument I have made throughout. If administration is not belonging, occupation cannot be treated as a neutral baseline. If identity is not a threat, Tigray cannot enter cooperation by dissolving its own political agency. And if no people should speak for another, Tigray cannot let partners interpret its objectives to the wider region.

Nor is territory the only condition. Tigray must enter any cooperative framework as a political society with its own institutions and objectives — not as military weight, a corridor, or a bargaining chip inside another actor’s design. It must also speak for itself to Sudan, Egypt, Eritrea, and the wider diplomatic community, rather than allow its aims to be interpreted by partners whose own maps still require a weakened Tigray.

The fuller institutional position — Western Tigray, constitutional authority through the elected regional council, the Baito, the return of the displaced, and enforceable security guarantees — I have set out in What Tigray Wants; I carry that position into this room too.

The rest I say to the Amhara as a strategic warning and not a reproach: your territorial doctrine is not only blocking justice for Tigray. It may be closing off one of the most consequential partnerships available to Amhara politics itself, leaving you to face the new center alone, on many fronts at once.

The question is whether the Amhara will organize as a people among peoples, or as an empire that has lost its throne and wants it back.

Amhara liberation from imperial nostalgia is not a concession to Tigray. It is the condition for Amhara political survival.

So here is the choice, and I will state it as plainly as I can, without pretending it is easy.

Imperial nostalgia, once it enters politics, stops being innocent memory and becomes a program, the path of restoration: a recentralized Ethiopia, symbolic ownership of the national story, the recovery of old administrative maps, the containment of everyone else’s self-government, alliances built on fear, all of it called national unity. I understand its emotional pull; it is the pull of the songs I still weep to. But it does not lead where its travelers hope. It leads to permanent war on many frontiers, to manipulation by whoever holds the center, to sacrifice after sacrifice with no durable self-government at the end of it. It offers the feeling of Amhara greatness and delivers the fact of Amhara exhaustion.

And there is a path of recovery. It builds a modern Amhara political project on legitimate self-government, on accountable regional institutions, on the real security of Amhara communities, on economic development, on borders negotiated rather than seized, on the protection of minorities within Amhara lands as within everyone’s, and on union only where it is freely chosen. This is not surrender. Let me say that as clearly as I know how: it is not surrender. It is the recovery of Amhara agency from the impossible imperial obligation to carry, represent, and police all of Ethiopia.

I do not know what final shape this country should take, and I distrust anyone who claims to. Perhaps a genuinely multinational federation. Perhaps a looser confederation. Perhaps negotiated regional sovereignty, or some arrangement none of us has named yet. I have argued elsewhere that a people can leave that final destination open without leaving open the terms by which it lives, and I hold to that here.

But one principle seems to me beyond argument now. Ethiopia can survive only if it becomes a voluntary arrangement among peoples who recognize one another, and by voluntary I do not mean weightless or perpetually provisional, but an order that draws its legitimacy from recognized peoples and equal citizens rather than from conquest or inherited custodianship. It cannot survive by requiring that one people’s historical memory serve as everybody’s national identity. That demand is exactly what brought us here, and making it louder will not make it work. A country held together by a mask is not held together. It is only waiting.

So this is my appeal to the Amhara elite — to the intellectuals, the political leaders, the artists, the opinion-makers — and I make it as one who addresses equals, not as one who instructs an inferior.

I am not asking you to give up Ethiopia because Tigray demands it. I am asking you to free Amhara identity from the impossible burden of owning, representing, and policing Ethiopia, a burden that has repeatedly bled ordinary Amhara communities while concentrating its greatest rewards in a narrow state and social elite.

Your people can become stronger. Not by controlling the center, but by knowing themselves as a people; by defending their communities through law rather than conquest; by negotiating honestly with their neighbors; by refusing territory taken through force; and by accepting that union has worth only when it is freely chosen. Amhara strength should no longer be measured by control of the Ethiopian center. It should be measured by the security, the legitimacy, the prosperity, the freedom, and the negotiating power of the Amhara people themselves.

That is not a smaller future. It is the first honest one.

I began with the songs, and I will end with them.

I am not going to stop loving Amharic music. I could not if I tried, and I would not want to. Tomorrow, driving to work and home again, I will play Aster Aweke’s Gela Gela, the record that has quietly made me feel young again this year, and something in me will give way exactly as it always has. That love is not my weakness and it is not my submission. It is simply true, the way my childhood is true.

What has changed is only this: I will no longer mistake the feeling for a country. I will not let the beauty of a culture stand in for the justice of a state, or let the warmth of belonging excuse the terms on which belonging was offered.

I still cry to your songs. I will cry to them tomorrow. But I will never again mistake the tears for a country.

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ትግራይ ትስዕር！ሰላም ንህዝብና！

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