ABSTRACT
In this article I argue that Ethiopian history reserves a privileged site for successive states as incontestable sites of knowledge, truth, legitimacy, and national identity. It shows how the state reconstructs memory of its past as total knowledge, and how the state utilizes this ‘truth’ of the past to command legitimacy. The state-authorized history has been packaged as a foundational knowledge for the nation, national identity, and raison d'être of state power. As much as Ethiopia's history has been always a totalizing narrative, the historians have also been strategically selective in reflecting the history of the militarily and politically dominant groups. Ethiopian history has been reductionist and history writing has been a state project. This study critically examines how the state's history as a metanarrative claims totality; and how everything else is silently subsumed under its totalized discourse. It excludes marginalized populations, ethnic and religious polities. As much as the state attempts to centralize every outlying domain around its power core, it simultaneously exteriorizes them through state discourses. Moreover, the paper suggests the need to challenge the state historiography, as the dominant unicentric narrative framework, with critical historiography.
