The controversial Anoole and Haile Selassie monuments as reflecting the religious and political tensions between Christians and Muslim Ethiopians

Abstract

Statues referring to history are expressions of the collective conscience of nations or groups in a nation, and therefore their value is determined by the changing policies and altering concepts of such nations or groups. Ethiopia, the only African nation without a real colonial past sensu stricto, presents some characteristic examples. Crowned in the Orthodox Tewahedo Church’s Cathedral in Addis Ababa, Emperor Haile Selassie’s reign (1916/1930 - 1975), fall and murder are well known. He was the last of the so-called Solomonic line, beginning with Sheba and Menelik I, the son she had from King Solomon. Haile Selassie became anathema and was regarded as an outdated dictator, belonging to the colonial period. However, a statue of the emperor was erected outside the African Union’s headquarters in Addis Ababa, but it soon also became controversial. Another very controversial statue was erected in Hetosa, Oromo, in 2014 and is known as the Anoole statue. It was also a remembrance of the past and refers to the acts of one of the most glorious emperors of Modern Ethiopian history, Menelik II, who wished to restore Ethiopian unity by bringing all old territories back under the crown. The Oromo group, a non-Semitic, largely non-Christian-Orthodox ethnic group resisted such unification. The emperor reacted by persecuting the Oromos in 1886, using an old Ethiopian traditional way of punishment, i.e. to cut the right breasts of women and right hands of men.