If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be?

There are so many places in the world that I would choose to live – Paris, Lusaka, Cairo, the Okavango Delta, just to name a few. However, if I had to choose one location, it would be Ethiopia.

Why? No, I am not Ethiopian. No, I do not have family there. I cannot speak Amharic, one of the official languages of Ethiopia. Yes, I realise there is warfare occurring there. Nevertheless, Ethiopia remains a nation of constant amazement for me, and I would consider it the greatest honour and privilege of my life for an opportunity to live there.

In Australia, similarly to most of the Anglophone majority nations, the Global South is ignored by our mainstream media. The majority of the world’s population live in non-English speaking countries, but our corporate controlled media reports on the world as if Africa, Asia, Latin America and so on do not share the same planet as us.

Caitlin Johnstone, a prolific political blogger, makes the above astute observation about the culture of our mainstream media.

When we in the West speak of the international community, we focus exclusively on those nations closely aligned with the United States and Britain. If we ever hear about Ethiopia, or sub-Saharan Africa generally, it is only with regard to famines (remember the 1980s Live Aid concert?), interminable fratricidal warfare, poverty, corrupt dictatorships (many of which are economically allied to the US or France), and general misery.

Our political and cultural conversations and connections (to the extent Anglophone Australians have any) is necessarily restricted to the trials and tribulations of people in US-aligned nations. Oh yes, we have heard about ancient Egypt, and we do have the occasional exhibition of pharaonic artefacts, which satiates our Egyptomania. I have written about this topic before.

Africa before colonisation, of which Ethiopia is a part, forms this impenetrable mysterious land, a region outside of our Greco-Roman preoccupation. The ancient Egyptians traded with the Nubians, a black African civilisation – but is about the extent of our awareness of sub-Saharan Africa in the BCE.

However, that curtain of impenetrability is lifting.

Ethiopia has an extensive and long lasting continuous civilisation. Ethiopians converted to an Orthodox Christian denomination long before the Romans. Christianity, similarly to its Coptic Egyptian counterpart, maintained its autonomy from strict Roman Catholicism. The Aksumite empire, according to archaeologist Michael Harrower, was one of the ancient world’s most influential empires, yet remains barely understood.

The Kingdom of Aksum (sometimes spelt Axum), dominated the areas of modern day Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia and Somaliland. Prospering through agriculture and trade, it was the first sub-Saharan African state to mint its own coinage.

It’s not just politics and religion that make Ethiopia truly fascinating.

Earlier I briefly mentioned archaeologists in the context of Ethiopian history. Well, there is another, related and important reason to focus on Ethiopia.

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the discovery of Lucy, the hominin fossil which revolutionised the field of paleoanthropology and human origins.

In November 1974, palaeontologist Donald Johanson and his graduate student Tom Gray, (and the team) excavated the approximately 47 bones of a fossilised skeleton of Lucy – Australopithecus afarensis – compelled European scientists to examine Africa (and in particular East Africa) as the cradle of humanity.

Charles Darwin, back in the 1870s, surmised that Homo sapiens originated in Africa. However, there was a conspicuous lack of hominin fossils – the story is in the bones. Lucy, while having ape-like traits, walked upright. Bipedal locomotion is a hallmark of anatomically modern humans.

Palaeontologists prior to Lucy regarded bipedal locomotion, the expansion of the brain, (primates generally have much smaller brains than humans), and tool making, as having evolved in tandem. Lucy puts that notion to rest; bipedal gait emerged millions of years prior to what we call intelligence. No, I am not suggesting that our hominin cousins were stupid. The evolution of symbolic thinking and consciousness however, was not a singular event.

What Lucy, and Ethiopian fossils, compel us to do is rethink the stereotypical linear model of ape-to-human evolution. Rather, the picture that emerges is one of a branching, multifaceted mosaic of hominin species, more akin to a delta than a river. The celebrity fossil status of Lucy has been a positive influence in reawakening interest in human origins among English-speaking audiences.

In fact, out of respect for Ethiopians, it is high time to rename Lucy Dinkinesh. Why? That is the name in Amharic, which means ‘you are marvellous.’

Yohannes Haile-Selassie, an Ethiopian paleoanthropologist and discoverer of fossils in his own right, is now director of the Arizona State University’s Institute of Human Origins.

I did not want to write too much about the current political climate in Ethiopia – the war with Eritrea, the Tigrayan question and so on. Perhaps that is the subject of a future blog article. However, I want to make an observation here. A few months ago, I wrote an article arguing that World War 2 began, not in 1939 as we have been taught with our Eurocentric vision, but in 1935 with Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia (then called Abyssinia).

The Ethiopians bravely resisted; the Italian military even deployed chemical weapons in that colonial adventure. Nevertheless, Ethiopia has its share of independence veterans. Courageously fighting against an attempt by an outside power to colonise their nation, sometimes I wonder what they think today. Their numbers are diminishing with the passage of time.

I wonder what they think of the Ethiopian government’s decision to closely integrate its military forces with those of the United States. Since 2001, Ethiopia’s authorities have allowed American military instructors and intelligence operatives to train its troops. Ethiopian soldiers have been deployed in the region, in accordance with the wishes of US foreign policy makers.

Ethiopia has become a close US ally in East Africa. Are Ethiopian soldiers being used as proxies by an outside power? I think so. Do not allow the fight against openly hostile colonialism (such as the Italian version in the 1930s) to blind you to the secretive, updated version of colonialism (namely, the United States) sneaking into the country with covert methods.

For all the reasons stated above, Ethiopia is the nation that excels in so many ways.