Bureaucratic Literacy, Oral Testimonies, and the Study of Twentieth-Century Ethiopian History

Despite Ethiopia's reputation for an ancient tradition of literacy, until relatively recently the ability to read and write was confined to a small percentage of the population. The country's most notable increase in literacy began in the early- to mid-twentieth century, paralleling the development of the ‘modern’ Ethiopian state. Within it, administrators stationed throughout the provinces came more and more to communicate with each other and to inscribe certain events in writing, but orality retained its importance as a significant feature of the country's political culture. Through analysis of court records, security forces reports, and administrative correspondence, this article explores the literacy–orality interface in Ethiopian governance from the 1910s to about 1950, and comments on the challenges of interpreting oral sources collected in the politicized climate of the 1990s. It concludes that particular caution should be exercised when working with post-1991 oral data, and proposes that Ethiopian archives from earlier periods may reveal more about patterns in daily governance than hitherto appreciated. Thus, amidst invigorated scholarly and popular debates about the ‘modern’ Ethiopian state and its interactions with subject peoples (and their and others' experiences under Ethiopian rule), it is proposed that historians should pay closer attention to a variety of widely available, but so far under-utilized official Ethiopian language sources, while keeping in mind the interplay of literacy–orality processes behind the recording of the documents.