Dichotomies and dilemmas
The Cross and the River: Ethiopia, Egypt and the Nile, Haggai Erlich, London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2003. pp248
Haggai Erlich's timely The Cross and the River: Ethiopia, Egypt and the Nile explodes many of the myths surrounding the historical relationship between Egypt and Ethiopia. The suspicion that Ethiopia might obstruct the flow of Nile water to Egypt has marred Egyptian-Ethiopian relations since mediaeval times. In more recent times, the former Ethiopian military ruler Mengistu Haile Maryam is said to have threatened late Egyptian President Anwar Sadat with cutting off Egypt's water supply, much to the consternation of former United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, and a former minister of state for foreign affairs. The controversy over the Nile's waters is the backdrop against which The Cross and the River is set.
The author has undertaken a Herculean task, one that has not been seriously tackled before. The book spans more than half a millennium, and thanks to his gift for the minutiae of historical detail the book has a vivid sense of each period from Mamluke times to the Nasserist era and beyond. The author's descriptive powers, so resonant in his recounting of specific incidents, allow the reader to participate in the sensation of being party to distant but momentous events.
Erlich read history at University of Tel Aviv, and, after obtaining a MA in 1969, he left Israel to work on a doctoral thesis on the history of Ethiopia at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). Currently a professor of African and Middle Eastern studies at Tel Aviv University, Erlich's many publications include Ethiopia and the Middle East, 1994, and The Nile: Histories, Cultures and Myths.
Egypt and Ethiopia are both ancient countries, but after Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798, Egypt began to look outwards, towards Europe and modernisation, while Ethiopia continued to look inwards, holding ever more tenaciously to its time-worn traditions. However, Ethiopia, too, was forced to change when conquered by a Western power. In Egypt, there was much sympathy for the Ethiopians when the Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in 1935.
There has been no shortage of ideas from think-tanks and policy commentators on the nature of the capricious, occasionally stormy relationship between the two countries, which has vacillated between suspicion and neighbourly interdependence and cultural affinity. Erlich dismisses the sometimes overly optimistic official viewpoints, both Egyptian and Ethiopian, not painting a rosy picture but highlighting prospects for "renewed dialogue" that is by no means restricted to the political.
Indeed, he applauds the "resumption of active cultural ties" between the two countries. One recognition of how much the climate is beginning to change is in the growing interest in Ethiopia in Arabic and Egyptian literature. Citing the translation of Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz's novels into Amharic, Erlich notes that "the medieval enterprise of translating works from Arabic into Ethiopian languages has now resumed."
Yet, politically, too, Erlich sees light at the end of the long historical tunnel for improved relations between Egypt and Ethiopia. "In the 1990s the two regimes became similar in terms of their systems and global orientations," he says, implying that current economic and political developments, both internally, regionally and in the international context, provide an opportunity for closer and more meaningful political, economic and cultural relations between Egypt and Ethiopia.
However, Erlich's work is not simply descriptive, but is also analytical: in chronicling the past, the author draws conclusions that shed light on the predicaments of the present. "One major lesson of the history reconstructed in this volume is its versatility. On the one hand, we have seen strong elements of continuity: the eternal flow of the Nile, the enduring myths, the persisting anxieties, the entrenched suspicions, the ever-recycled game of mutual dependency and relevance. On the other hand, however, we have seen that the complexity of this long history has produced almost endless nuances and options."
While the political nature of the relationship between the Coptic Orthodox Church of Egypt and its Ethiopian Orthodox counterpart features prominently in the book, so does the existence of large and diverse Muslim communities in Ethiopia. Erlich writes extensively about the Ethiopian mediaeval Muslim leader Ahmed Grang, for example, also known as Ahmed the Left-handed, who between 1529 and 1543 spearheaded an Islamic jihad to conquer and Islamise Ethiopia. From his stronghold in the eastern Ethiopian Muslim city of Harar, Ahmed Grang's armies sacked the main Christian cities of the northern Ethiopian highlands, converting in the process many of the country's Christians. Grang was assisted by neighbouring Muslim nations, and especially by the Ottomans who at the time ruled Egypt. His campaign came to an abrupt end after Portuguese military intervention in support of Christians in Ethiopia.
When Mohamed Ali Pasha and his immediate successors laid claim to an African empire spanning the entire Nile Basin, Egyptian-Ethiopian relations were remolded once again. The Egyptians' plan to control the Red Sea and Nile Basin was checked by the connivance of the British and the Ethiopians. The latter inflicted a humiliating defeat on the Egyptian army in 1876 at the battle of Gura, a date that marked a turning point in the fortunes of Egypt in the Horn of Africa and Nile Basin countries and paved the way for the British occupation of Egypt.
Indeed, Erlich highlights the importance of Gura as being one of two episodes in Ethiopian history, the other being the severing of ties between the Egyptian and Ethiopian churches in the 20th century, that have symbolised the "collision course" adopted by both Egypt and Ethiopia and that have had "far-reaching consequences for each [country] and for the nature of their modern relations."
At the time of the battle of Gura the then Egyptian ruler Khedive Ismail, Mohamed Ali's grandson, planned to establish an African empire in the Nile and Red Sea basins, and the Ethiopians were ruled by Tigrean emperors of the Solomonian dynasty from Tigray. Ismail's designs for building an African empire were, however, checked by Ethiopian Emperor Yohannes IV at Gura. "It was a fatal coincidence that as Ismail built his African-Nile-Egyptian empire, Ethiopia also turned again to the Red Sea," Erlich notes. Ismail, claiming that he was on a civilising mission, wanted to construct a railway from the Red Sea port of Massawa, today the chief port of Eritrea, to the Sudanese capital, Khartoum. The railway line was to run through Ethiopian territory and the Ethiopians vehemently opposed Ismail's plans, and the stage was set for a showdown.
Ismail deployed American mercenaries at the head of his 15,000-strong army, while Yohannes mustered some 60,000 warriors. After a series of battles, an estimated 8,500 Egyptian troops perished and beat a hasty retreat to Massawa. While Ismail retained control of Massawa and the Red Sea coastal strip, he pledged never again to enter the highlands. According to Erlich, the Egyptian defeat was so overwhelming that it changed the course of modern Egyptian history. "The Ethiopian victory at Gura in 1876 was arguably one of the most important events in the history of modern Egypt. The Gura defeat began the rapid countdown toward Egypt's fall into British hands in 1882. It can also be considered the point at which early modern Egyptian nationalism was born."
Erlich's chapter headings can be provoking. The introduction, mischievously entitled "The Crisis of the Nile", revolves around Christian Ethiopia's innate "fear" of being encircled by antagonistic and militarily aggressive Arab and Muslim states. "Modern Rediscovery and Fatal Collision", the fourth chapter, is even more ominous sounding, and so is the sixth chapter, "Stormy Redefinitions: 1935-1942".
While throughout the book Erlich highlights Christian Ethiopia's "fear" of being overrun by surrounding Muslim states, including Egypt, he also highlights the demonisation of Ethiopia in the Arab media even in modern times for historically resisting Islamic encroachment, for surviving intact in the face of the Islamic conquest of the rest of the Horn of Africa region, and for occasionally persecuting its Muslim communities. Erlich cites the examples of Syrian intellectual Shakib Arslan and the Egyptians Yusuf Ahmed and Sheikh Mohamed Num Bakr whose Islam in Ethiopia and Italy and Her Colonies, respectively, were widely circulated in publications like Rose Al-Youssef, Al-Balagh and Al-Hilal in the mid-30s.
However, there were also many high-profile Arab supporters of Ethiopia, including Egypt's "Prince of Poets" Ahmed Shawqi, whose poem Al-Nil Najashi, The Nile is the Najashi (King of Ethiopia), was sung in 1933 by Mohamed Abdel-Wahab, one of Egypt's foremost singers. With the eruption of the Abyssinian crisis in 1935, the Italian colonial authorities forced the Ethiopian Church to sever all ties with Egypt, which were not restored until Emperor Haile Sellassie re-established the ancient links between the Coptic and Ethiopian churches in 1942.
In the chapter, "From Compromise to Disconnection: 1945-1959", Erlich is prejudiced when he attempts to explain why Egypt and Ethiopia became more dissatisfied than ever with each other during the years in review. Erlich hints at, but does not delve extensively into, the close military collaboration between Emperor Haile Sellassie's Ethiopia and Israel. In what appears to be an attempt to tarnish the image of the late Egyptian President Gamal Abdel-Nasser in Ethiopian eyes, Erlich writes that "by attempting an Arabisation of the Horn's Muslims, Nasser, perhaps unconsciously, followed in the exact same footsteps of Ahmad Gran and Mussolini."
Later, in his description of the aftermath of the July 1952 Revolution in Egypt, Erlich claims that the Coptic Church was in turmoil and that the Ethiopian Church had a hand in stoking the fires of discontent. Patriarch Yusab II, a close ally of Haile Sellassie, was forced to abdicate in 1955 and banished to a monastery in Upper Egypt. However, the Ethiopians continued to recognise Yusab as patriarch, much to the chagrin of Nasser and the Coptic laity. Erlich implies that the episode was engineered by Nasser in an attempt to weaken Coptic institutions, in the same breath decrying the alleged "dependency on the Nasserist regime" of Egyptian Copts at the time of the Suez Crisis.
According to Erlich, Haile Sellassie suspected that most of the Egyptian Coptic clergy and professionals resident in Ethiopia were "Nasserist agents", his views appearing to be based on a report written by Dajazmach Asrate Kassa, an Ethiopian aristocrat and one of Haile Sellassie's "inner circle of advisers", who was dispatched by the Ethiopian emperor for talks with the Egyptian church aimed at a redefinition of relations.
As Erlich reminds the reader throughout the book, Egypt was for 17 centuries the source of the Abun, the Egyptian bishop who headed the Ethiopian church, and Egypt was thus key to the religious legitimacy of Ethiopia's political establishment. This reliance of the Ethiopians on Coptic Christian Egypt for religious and political legitimation was itself a constant source of tension.
Chapters 8 and 9 deal with contemporary Egyptian and Ethiopian concepts of each other (1959-91), and these two chapters are among the most interesting in the book, showing the author's familiarity with the writings of Egypt's intellectuals and the different ideological strands in the Egyptian press. However, it is a shame that more room could not have been found for the political intrigues of the 1950s and 1960s, a vitally important period that saw a radical change in the African continent as countries moved from colonial status to that of independent nation states. The Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa was chosen as the headquarters of the Organisation of African Unity, for example. Indeed, towards the end of The Cross and the River Erlich concedes that, "much of the literature produced in Egypt [about Africa] during the Nasserist period dealt with Ethiopia in the Pan-African context," and he highlights the views of Egyptian intellectuals such as Professor Rushdi Said who have warned against "pretentious attempts to exclusively Egyptianise the Nile".
Erlich, however, decries the "anti-Ethiopian dimension in Nasser's Africanism" as articulated by Mohamed Fayeq in his Nasser and the African Revolution. According to Erlich, such views merely recycled "the old dichotomies and dilemmas". Erlich brushes over the deeper reasons for the apparent mistrust between Nasser and Haile Sellassie, but his arguments are typically intertwined in a narrative that is both forceful and often extremely entertaining.
Finally, books such as Erlich's, in spite of his biases, are needed for informed policy debate on the future of Egyptian-Ethiopian relations, as they are for Egypt's relations with Africa more generally.
Reviewed by Gamal Nkrumah
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : 18 - 24 September 2003 (Issue No. 656)
Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/656/bo5.htm