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rfmcdonaldOn the 10th of this month, Ethiopundit posted a fascinating article, "Not just a river in Egypt", a fascinating overview of Egyptian-Ethiopian relations in history, particularly as they relate to the Nile.
The country of Egypt is much more cohesive than the country of Ethiopia, since the near-complete concentration of its wealth and its population on the shores of the Nile and environs ensures greater unity than the dispersal of Ethiopia across the Ethiopian plateau and surrounding lowlands. By the same measure, Egypt's dependence on the Nile for its existence--in particular, on the Blue Nile, which provides most of the Nile's waters and originates in Ethiopia--also ensures Egypt's interest in dominating Ethiopia so as to ensure the continued uninterrupted flow of the Blue Nile.
Ethiopundit argues that Egypt, generally wealthier and more technologically advanced and united than Ethiopia, has long had an interest in dominating and fragmenting a poorer Ethiopia. More's the pity, frequently Ethiopian governments--most recently and disruptively the radical Communist Derg--have collaborated in this goal. Concluding on a despairing note, Ethiopundit concludes that things will never change.
Ethiopian and Egyptian civilizations have had contact for thousands of years but it was after the advent of the Ottoman Empire that Egyptian government looked upriver and down the Red Sea with a strategic vision of their own ’Ethiopian Question’. The rather distant Nile threat has been used over countless centuries when invading Ethiopia for the sake of Imperial conquest (sometimes using the convenient banner of Islam) or simply to keep Ethiopia as fragmented and weak as possible.
Indeed fighting Egypt or the Ottoman rulers of Egypt has been one of the constants of Ethiopian history and the principal reason after about the 7th century that Ethiopia lost contact with the Middle East and Europe. Ethiopian Emperors have occasionally used the empty threat of the Nile to bargain on behalf of Egypt’s Coptic community (which for almost one thousand five hundred years until the 1950s sent Ethiopia her archbishops).
The country of Egypt is much more cohesive than the country of Ethiopia, since the near-complete concentration of its wealth and its population on the shores of the Nile and environs ensures greater unity than the dispersal of Ethiopia across the Ethiopian plateau and surrounding lowlands. By the same measure, Egypt's dependence on the Nile for its existence--in particular, on the Blue Nile, which provides most of the Nile's waters and originates in Ethiopia--also ensures Egypt's interest in dominating Ethiopia so as to ensure the continued uninterrupted flow of the Blue Nile.
Ethiopundit argues that Egypt, generally wealthier and more technologically advanced and united than Ethiopia, has long had an interest in dominating and fragmenting a poorer Ethiopia. More's the pity, frequently Ethiopian governments--most recently and disruptively the radical Communist Derg--have collaborated in this goal. Concluding on a despairing note, Ethiopundit concludes that things will never change.
