Un museo di popoli. Museum of peoples. That was how Conti Rossini, the famous Italian scholar, described the Ethiopian empire in his book Historia di Ethiopia in 1928. To date, that remains an accurate description of the multi-ethnic, multilinguistic and multi-faith Ethiopia. A little less than 80 ethnic groups, speaking twice as many dialects, inhabit the country. Despite its numerous ethnic groups, however, two-thirds of the 74 million population1 belong to three major ethnic groups. The Oromo are the largest ethnic group accounting for 34.49 per cent of the population, followed by the Amhara (26.89 per cent) and the Somali (6.2 per cent); the next four numerically strong ethnic groups are the Tigray (6.07 per cent), Sidama (4.01 per cent), Gurage (2.53 per cent) and Welayta (2.31 per cent) (See Summary and Statistical Report of the 2007 Population and Housing Census). With no single ethnic group accounting for the majority of the population, however, Ethiopia, like most other African states, can be appropriately described as a country of minorities.2 On the other hand, as a country that accepted Christianity, in its orthodox form, in the third century AD and practised it as a state religion until 1974, Ethiopia is often portrayed as a Christian state. The description of Ethiopia as a Christian state could, however, be misleading as close to 34 per cent of the population are Muslims by faith. 3

This chapter traces the role and place of ethnicity in Ethiopia’s political and constitutional development. The focus is to explore the political role of ethnicity with the view to bringing the present political and constitutional development into perspective. Although a discussion of the political and social forces that played out on the political terrain of a state is usually important for an informed diagnosis

of a country’s political malaise, these discussions are of particular importance in Ethiopia as they are at the centre of the current political and constitutional discourse. Ethiopia’s past is a very important part of the current debate on the organization of the Ethiopian state. As one author has put it, ‘differences over the present dispensation are fought as battles over historical interpretation’ (Andreas 2003: 144).