Ethiopia multiplied around us while we stayed small, and in Ethiopia, numbers mean power. The wars and the migrations that followed them explain much of it, but not all, because Tigrayan mothers have never been short of children. A nation is not kept alive by being born. It is kept alive by being passed on, and we may be failing to pass it on. Whatever destination Tigray chooses, we must first heal ourselves, and passing on who we are is part of that healing.

Before reading

This is an opinion piece, not academic research. The numbers here are approximate, and I use them to raise a question, not to settle it. I write it for two reasons. I hope young Tigrayan scholars will take up this question and study it more deeply than an essay can: how our numbers changed, where our language is holding and where it is slipping, and what happens to our names across generations. And I hope it starts an honest conversation among Tegaru about what lies buried under the daily noise of propaganda, the slow changes inside our own homes that will decide what kind of people we remain.

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Half a century ago, Ethiopia had roughly 30 million people. Today it has about 135 million. In the early 1970s, Tigray was estimated at around two million, and today we still speak of ourselves as five or six million. By that I mean the people living in Tigray. Leaving Tigray does not make anyone less Tigrayan, but it does raise the question of what their children and grandchildren will inherit. Ethiopia multiplied more than four times while we barely tripled. I keep asking myself a simple question, and I think every Tigrayan should ask it too: where did the rest of us go?

I know the first answers, because I carry them like everyone else. The famine of the 1980s, the Derg’s deliberate resettlement of our people far from home, the war against the Derg, the genocide of the last war, the displacement and migration that followed each of them, and the young people who left and never came back. All of this is true, and none of it is small. But mothers in Tigray did not stop having children, and war alone does not explain a gap this wide. Many of the children and grandchildren of Tegaru are no longer counted as Tegaru, and not because a census forgot them. They stopped being us quietly, one household and one generation at a time, and most of us did not notice it happening.

I think the reason lies in how identities grow and how they vanish in Ethiopia. The large identities work like wide doors. For generations, Amhara identity was the identity of the state. The 1955 Constitution made Amharic the official language of the empire, so the school, the court, the office and the radio all spoke it, and parents learned to plan their children’s future around the language the state rewarded. Even Atse Yohannes, a Tigrayan emperor, ruled his court in Amharic, because the tradition of the throne demanded it. Anyone who wanted the office, the uniform or the respect of the city learned to stand inside that door. Today the center speaks more and more in the name of Oromo numbers, and the door has moved with it.

But these two doors open onto the same room. Amhara and Oromo have intermarried for centuries, in Shewa above all, more deeply than perhaps any other two peoples in the country. After Menelik’s conquest of the south, northern landlords, soldiers and priests settled in Arsi, Bale, Kaffa and Hararghe, and the Orthodox Church came with them. Local families married into the new ruling class, were baptized, and took Christian names in Amharic. The landlord held the land, the priest held the faith, and Amharic held them both together.

The Oromo door has its own entrance. Through guddifachaa, the custom of adopting a child into the family, and moggaasaa, the old practice of adopting whole groups into Oromo clans, outsiders could become Oromo by belonging, not by birth. Over the centuries, many Amhara and many peoples of the south entered Oromo identity this way. Out of these marriages and adoptions grew a large middle that belongs to both peoples and can call itself simply Ethiopian. That middle is what the two compete for, and it can lean toward whichever side holds the center, all in the name of Ethiopia. When they need to set their own rivalry aside, they have found it easiest to unite against us. In 2020, elites who agreed on almost nothing else agreed on war against Tigray. Every change at the center adds people to one of them. None of it adds people to us.

Not every people walked through that door the same way. Many Gurage, Silte, Gamo and Wolayita families who left their home regions, mainly for Addis Ababa and the towns around it, found it easy. Over generations, many of their children grew up speaking only Amharic, and the capital became a safe home for them as long as they spoke its language. Interestingly, the Somali mostly did not. That is what I have seen: wherever Somali families go, their children speak Somali and their names stay Somali. I think the door was never really open to them, or never attractive: a different faith, a language with no kinship to Amharic, a homeland far from the highland center, and a whole Somali world across the border with its own trade, media and diaspora. Their distance from the center protected them. The center works like a black hole: it pulls hardest on whatever is closest to it. That is an uncomfortable mirror for us. We shared the church, the script, the calendar and much of the highland culture with the Amhara, so for us the door was the easiest of all. Because we were so close, it was easy for us to be absorbed.

We have no door of our own to offer. Ours is a narrow identity, rooted in one land, one language and one memory, and the road leads only one way. Many Ethiopians believe that being Tigrayan was a ticket to success in the EPRDF years. For most Tigrayans, that was never true. Even in those years, no Amhara, Oromo or other Ethiopian family became Tigrayan. Some people learned Tigrinya to get ahead, and Abiy was one of them. Others looked for Tigrayan friends and patrons. But they did not give their children Tigrayan names or teach them Tigrinya. When that era ended, being Tigrayan was enough to cost people their jobs and their livelihoods under Abiy.

That is how the pull works at the level of the state. Inside the family, it works quietly, through names. A Tigrayan family can slide out of being Tigrayan without ever deciding to. A child carries the father’s name. When a Tigrayan woman has a child with an Amhara or Oromo man, her side disappears from the child’s name on the first day, however Tigrayan that child may feel. When a Tigrayan man has a child with an Amhara or Oromo woman, the family often chooses a first name that fits the wider door, and that name becomes the father’s name of the next generation. Within two generations, the last Tigrayan name can disappear from the family line. This is not about blood. A child of any parentage belongs among us, and we owe that child the language and the story. The name only shows how easily the line is lost when we do not. And it happens even in homes with two Tigrayan parents who speak to their children in the language of the street because it is easier, and choose names from the fashion of the city, with no root in Tigray and no story behind them. Nobody forced them. They simply took the easier, safer path, and that is the erosion I am talking about. A people can survive pressure from outside. It is much harder to survive when it gives up its own identity.

This loss can be reversed, and the Oromo prove it. Before 1991, there was no Oromia and no recognized Oromo homeland. Many Oromo in the cities carried Amharic names and kept their language behind closed doors. When federalism gave them schools in Afaan Oromo, their own script, their own regional government and their own media, their identity came back within a single generation, with a confidence that now shapes the whole country. Tigray had the same tools after 1991, and inside Tigray they worked, but only partly. Our children learned, wrote and were governed in Tigrinya. Yet we allowed Amharic to remain the language of the elite. In the ten years I lived in Mekelle, Amharic still ruled many offices and much of public life, and those who came from elsewhere to work in Tigray were never required to learn Tigrinya.

The loss went further where those tools never reached: among Tegaru in Addis Ababa and other cities, and in the diaspora. Our identity itself is not weak. We built too little to protect it, and outside Tigray we left each family to carry it alone.

Our enemies understand the value of what we let slip better than we do. When they took Western Tigray in 2020, they did not only drive our people from their homes and land. Speaking Tigrinya itself became dangerous there. They knew that land is held through the people who live on it, and a people is held together through its language. What they took from Western Tigray by force, many of us are giving up elsewhere for free.

This matters far beyond culture. In a state where seats, budgets and legitimacy follow numbers, a people that shrinks loses its voice. But there is a deeper danger. Those who want to hold the center have always feared a Tigray that knows who it is, because that Tigray has refused to kneel more than once and has challenged rulers when others stayed silent. They learned long ago that they cannot defeat such a people head on, so they look for what divides us, region against region, party against party, leader against leader, and they make it deeper. Emperors gave titles to one Tigrayan lord so he would watch another. The Derg armed Tigrayans and sent them against their own villages. Abiy does it with words, and he is a master of it. He divides every people he wants to rule into smaller pieces, until they see themselves only as people of one district and forget that they are one people. The method never changed, only the uniforms. And it works on us because we were naive. We believed our identity was strong enough to look after itself, so we did not protect the language and the names that would have kept us together. When a politician tells a Tigrayan, “You are from Adigrat, not like those from Enderta,” a person who is sure of his identity answers, “I am Tigrayan.” But a person whose identity has become weak starts to believe the politician.

The ruler in Addis Ababa never needs to come himself. He only needs to find a Tigrayan willing to carry out his plan. We are seeing the same thing again. In 2020 Abiy installed a caretaker administration led by Tigrayans, and within months its own head reportedly wrote a letter of resignation, saying it had no power to stop the starvation and the violence against our women. Now, six years later, he has named another caretaker administration, a ባለአደራ መንግስት, again with Tigrayan names, many of them coming out of our own political divisions. The faces are new, but the plan is old. I do not claim that everyone who serves such a plan has lost his identity. Some are driven by ambition and ego, and such people are found in every nation. But where a people’s shared identity is strong, they find few followers and pay a high price. Where it is weak, they find both followers and rewards. A trustee appointed by those who besieged us cannot be trusted with what they tried to destroy. Tigrayan names in office do not make Tigrayan self-government. The only test is whom it answers to, and we already know the answer.

But I do not blame Addis Ababa alone, because nobody can deepen a division that does not already exist among us. Our own leaders have created divisions too, every time the struggle for office mattered more than the people they serve. The TPLF’s history does not exempt it from that judgment, and opposing the TPLF does not excuse those who invite outsiders to settle our quarrels. How many of our quarrels were truly ours, and how many were handed to us?

Many of us naively believe that the diaspora is a safe place for our identity, far from the pull of Addis Ababa. But that pull did not stay behind. Every new home has its own wide door: English in Washington or London, as Amharic was in Addis Ababa, Dire Dawa or Adama. Online, our identity even looks stronger than ever, with flags, hashtags and fierce debates about Tigray every day. But an identity that does not vote in Tigray, sit in its council, or count when power is shared is, politically, an identity in name only. And even that name is fading. Go to any gathering of Tegaru abroad and listen to our children. Many understand Tigrinya but answer in English, and many cannot read a single line in our own script. I do not blame the children; they cannot carry what they were never given. I blame us. A child of mixed parents who speaks Tigrinya and knows our history carries more of Tigray than a child of two Tigrayan parents who knows neither. Then go to an Eritrean gathering in the same city. Their children speak Tigrinya with their parents, sing its songs and know its stories. Eritreans keep the language and culture we share, even though their nationalism denies that these roots are shared with Tigray. If they can hold on to it for crooked reasons, what is our excuse?

All of this points to a hard truth about Ethiopia. In a country of unequal numbers, the same revival means opposite things depending on who carries it. For a small people, reclaiming its language, its names and its land is self-defense. For a people of tens of millions, the same revival can become a claim on the whole state, and the rights that federalism promised to everyone can become a tool for taking over the center. The tools that protect minorities also strengthen majorities, and the small peoples end up exposed either way. So for us, keeping our identity is not only about language, names and songs. It also needs land, institutions and political protection. Without them, a small people will always lose to the large ones.

The opposite is just as true. Everything we demand for Tigray rests on one condition that we rarely speak about. Self-government, the return of our land, justice for genocide, the right to decide our own future: all of it assumes there will be a Tigrayan people to claim it. Borders can be restored through struggle and law. Institutions can be rebuilt. But if a nation is lost inside its own homes, no peace agreement, no court and no victory on the battlefield can bring it back. Only we can, in our own homes. The large peoples of Ethiopia can lose some of their children to other identities and still be counted in tens of millions. We cannot. For us, every child who quietly stops being Tigrayan is a loss to the nation itself.

For now, our first duty is to protect our right to decide our own future and to escape, as quickly as possible, the disaster our enemies have planned for us. Once Tigray stands on its own feet, Tigrayans across the world must come together and make Tigray their home again, so that our identity stays alive, and together we can build a Tigray that is safe and secure for the generations to come. But we cannot wait for that day to start passing on who we are.

How does a civilization that has lived for thousands of years on the same well-known land, from Aksum to today, fail to keep the numbers it needs to govern itself, and end up living at the mercy of other people’s numbers? I do not think the answer lies only in Addis Ababa. So I ask you to do one thing before you dismiss me. Start with yourself, and be honest, because you do not have to tell anyone the answer. If you live outside Tigray, ask yourself: can you write a letter in Tigrinya without struggling? Can you speak it for an hour without reaching for Amharic or English when the Tigrinya word escapes you? I learned to write it only as an adult, so I ask this of myself first. If you live in Mekelle, Wukro, Adigrat, Adwa, Aksum, Shire or Humera, ask a different question: when a politician speaks to you, do you hear him first as a Tigrayan, or first as a person of your district or your party?

Then count your own family. Count the children who speak Tigrinya with confidence, who can write it, who carry a Tigrayan name and know what it means, who can tell you the village of their grandfather. If the counting comforts you, then I am wrong, and I will be glad of it. If it does not, then being Tigrayan is slipping away from us, and we are allowing it to happen. Will our grandchildren inherit a living Tigray, or search for it only after we have stopped teaching it?

ትግራይ ትስዕር！ሰላም ንህዝብና！