ABSTRACT
Understanding the Bible as the unparalleled self-revelation of the deity, Protestants have tended to apply communications media to the delivery and ritualization of God’s message. While Ethiopian Christian art is immediately associated with Orthodox icons and architecture, the visual culture of a Protestant group in Ethiopia offers an opportunity to study the place of images in a fast-growing Protestant community in Africa, the Ethiopian Evangelical Church Mekane Yesus. The president of a synod of the Mekane Yesus in Western Ethiopia noted in an interview that people hang portraits of Jesus in their homes in order ‘to show they are Christians’. The degree of freedom that Ethiopian Protestants felt in the wake of the Derg is also proudly announced in the common southern practice of painting the exterior of one’s home. In provincial churches images were quite common, gifts that were either purchased in the marketplace or hand-produced after models in circulation.
