Haunting and Holding onto the Fragments of the Past: Historical Memory and the Body in the Face of State Violence in Ethiopia

Historical memories of the Aanolee massacre in 1886 haunt the current state of emergency and nationwide protests in Ethiopia.  In 2014, a monument of an amputated arm was erected at Aanolee by the ruling regime to cultivate ethnic hatred for political ethnicization.  The images of the amputated body mediate haunting historical memories at both experiential and symbolic levels.  Despite the government’s efforts to antagonize ethnic groups, Oromo transformed the meaning of haunting memories and space of Aanolee into new political subjectivities by uniting with other ethnic groups against the current political violence.  In this haunting, the historical trauma differs from the medical trauma because it has an opposite effect: instead of making victims helpless and embittered, it facilitates alternative political action and imagination by recasting implications of historical memories of the massacre. This phenomenon brings bodily dimensions to current anthropological understanding of “hauntology” in light of embodied history.