Lecture | COGLOSS lecture
Nation Building, Historiography, and School History in a Multi-Cultural Context: Ethiopia’s Enigma of Our Time
- Date
- Thursday 24 April 2025
- Time
- Serie
- COGLOSS Seminars 2024-2025
- Address
-
Johan Huizinga
Doelensteeg 16
2311 VL Leiden - Room
- Conference room (2.60)
Abstract
This study seeks to explore historiographical contestations over Ethiopia's common past that has devitalized national consensus as well as teaching a common history. It enunciates some of the issues that underpin the profound divisions and contestations in Ethiopian historical narratives and their impact on history education – issues that resonate in several other countries of Sub-Saharan Africa with legacies of conflict. The controversy over historiographical matters and the nation's common past has continued to haunt Ethiopia's political landscape and academic discourse for more than half a century, even more exacerbated after the onset of a federal dispensation in 1991. By problematizing the challenges of teaching a common past in a multicultural state with diversities of all kinds, this paper attempts to shade some light on future direction of history teaching and production of curricular resources. It also suggests areas of soliciting a 'usable past' from the longue durée of the country’s history. I argue that multicultural nations such as Ethiopia, with legacies of internal conflict and still grappling with maintaining their very existence as a nation, better gaze at the 'neo-institutional approach', that recommends a renegotiation of the more privileged space of the nation-state (the national) through espousing narratives of multiculturalism and global education.
About the speaker
Dr. Girma Negash is an Associate Professor of History and formerly the head of the Department of History (2019-2023) at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia. He obtained his PhD degree in History back in 2014, and has been an educator all his life with research interests ranging from history education, textbook research, labor history, and economic history. He has published several research articles on reputable journals and authored a book entitled The Education of Children Entangled in Khat Trade in Ethiopia published in 2018. He was also an editor of high school history textbooks published in 2005/2006, and was a member of the Lead Research Team in a national research project called National Study on Administrative Boundary, Identity and Self Administration Issues under the auspices of Addis Ababa University. Currently, he is a visiting fellow at the African Studies Center of Leiden University (ASCL) for three months from April to June 2025. During his time in Leiden, he is intending to develop a book project on a very topical issue in post-colonial Africa. It is about teaching a common past/history to pupils in secondary schools in plural/multi-ethnic states – a subject not unique to Ethiopia but an issue several other states in Sub-Saharan Africa are also grappling with.