The Rhetoric of Endings: Confusing Loss with Disappearance
In his latest Facebook post, Nasser Omer Ali offers a lucid reflection on an increasingly central tension in Ethiopian political discourse: the tendency to conflate strategic threats with existential ones. The occasion is the release of a new musical work by Teddy Afro, which reached millions of listeners within hours and immediately became a public event in its own right. The line that drew the most attention, evoking the rupture of a shared national rhythm, captures a widespread sense of fracture and discontinuity. But it is precisely here that a profound misreading takes hold. The perception of loss is rapidly translated into a diagnosis of national death. When a particular idea of Ethiopia is called into question, when power balances shift or established narratives are contested, the experience can feel like a shock. Yet a political shock is not the same as the disappearance of a political community. Collapsing these two registers narrows the space of the possible and transforms every change into an absolute threat. In this way, the language of crisis does not merely describe reality but actively constructs it, feeding a spiral in which every transformation is perceived as a step toward collapse.
The Absence of Trust and the Role of Institutions
To understand why this language proves so tenacious, a comparative perspective is useful. The European case offers a significant example of how the perception of threat can be transformed over time. After centuries of conflict, and above all after the Second World War, the countries of Europe arrived at a shared recognition that war among themselves could no longer be tolerated. This evolution has its roots in a long intellectual tradition reaching back to Immanuel Kant, but it was made concretely possible by the devastation of the twentieth century and by the support of the United States. From this process emerged first the European Community and then the European Union, marking a passage from a system grounded in competition to one oriented toward cooperation. In this framework, security gradually became a shared concern. In the Horn of Africa, by contrast, no comparable process has ever taken hold. In Ethiopia, political change is frequently experienced as an existential threat, while in Eritrea a mirror logic prevails, one in which any transformation is seen as a risk sufficient to justify its indefinite postponement. In one case, the nation appears to be dying because power is changing hands. In the other, the nation is held to survive precisely by preventing power from changing at all. Different contexts, the same inability to distinguish between stability and stasis. Without institutions capable of generating trust, every political shift becomes suspect and every transformation risks being read as a radical menace.
Art, Memory, and the Construction of Identity
Against this backdrop, the role of art becomes critically important. Teddy Afro is not merely a successful musician; he is a figure who exerts a profound influence on public language and collective imagination. In his earlier work, he has repeatedly drawn on the symbolism of the Ethiopian emperors, reinforcing a narrative centred on historical greatness and national continuity. This is not a neutral choice. While it resonates with and gives voice to widely shared anxieties, it also risks feeding precisely the kind of singular, totalising vision of identity that is part of the problem. In a country marked by a mosaic of diversity, art cannot be placed in the service of a self-founding national narrative, nor can it become an instrument for legitimising the centrality of one dominant group over others. An artist, precisely because of his influence, should create room for freedom, encourage encounter, and celebrate plurality. From an anthropological standpoint, identities are always multiple and in transformation. Cultures are not closed systems but dynamic realities built through continuous exchange. In this respect, the contribution of Amartya Sen is particularly relevant. In his volume Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, published in 2006 by W. W. Norton and Company, Sen demonstrates how the reduction of identity to a single dimension is one of the primary sources of conflict. The case of the India-Pakistan partition shows how a rigid identity paradigm can produce deep and lasting fractures. Applied to the Ethiopian context, this suggests that the problem is not diversity itself, but the way in which it is narrated and organised politically.
From Fear to Strategic Clarity
If the crisis is at once institutional and linguistic, its resolution calls for a shift in perspective. Nasser Omer Ali’s analysis brings to light how the dominant narratives, however opposed they may appear, share a common premise. In Ethiopia, the argument runs that the nation is in danger because power is in transformation. In Eritrea, the argument runs in reverse: the permanence of power is legitimised precisely in the name of avoiding any transformation that might be perceived as destabilising. In both cases, the existence of the nation is made to coincide with a specific configuration of power. It is this equivalence that must be overcome. A nation is not a regime, nor a dominant group, nor a single historical narrative. It is an open process, capable of adapting, of renegotiating its own equilibria, and of making room for new forms of belonging. Moving from the politics of existential fear to a politics of strategic clarity means learning to distinguish between what genuinely threatens collective survival and what represents instead a shift in the distribution of power. It also means building institutions that make change predictable and therefore less traumatic. Without this, societies risk remaining trapped in a spiral in which every transformation produces new fears and every fear justifies new closures. The Horn of Africa stands today before a crucial choice: to continue interpreting change as an existential threat, or to begin constructing the conditions for a coexistence grounded in trust, plurality, and cooperation. That is where the possibility of a different future resides.
