Message #44565

[Bianca]

Colonial advisers of the Abyssinian quasi-illiterate rulers





The usurpation of the name of Ethiopia by Abyssinia is absolutely of Western authenticity. Abyssinians believed that like this they would arrange a good PR campaign in Europe and America. Unfortunately, the practice did not help at all!

The Western countries view Abyssinia transvestite into Ethiopia as a marginal, poor, and starving state, abandoned to permanent underdevelopment. Despite all the self-humiliating tactics, Westerners did not offer Abyssinia any guarantee that they would help the country build its dam in the Nile (nearby lake Tana). The country, plunged into terrible civil war as the oppressed Oromos, Ogadenis, Afars and Sidamas, is impotent and fearful even of Egypt, one of the weakest and poorest countries of the Middle East. They anticipate that if they build a dam, the Egyptians will bring it down.

Yet, the Western advisors of Haile Selassie, who convinced him to change the country’s name, aimed at the Sudan mostly. I will help illuminate a story that has not been widely known. The key person in influencing Haile Selassie to rename his country was Jean Leclant, currently Permanent Secretary of the French Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres. Leclant was asked personally by Haile Selassie in 1952 to found the Service des Antiquites de l' Ethiopie, which he did at the same time another French Egyptologist, Jean Vercoutter, founded the Service of Antiquities of Sudan.