THE NORTH ATLANTIC IN THE VIKING AGE

The term North Atlantic describes the geographical area situated between modern Scandinavia in the east and the east coast of North America in the west; and from Greenland in the north to the south coast of England (see Map, p. xvi). This is the area that people from Scandinavia explored, raided, traded with and settled between c. 750 and 1050 CE. The Norse people who engaged in these expeditions are now called Vikings, and sometimes thought of as sea pirates. However, the word Viking is of uncertain origins. It has been linked to two Old Norse words vikingr (m.) and viking (f.), which refer to an individual who is away from home engaged in group activities, and a group endeavour also taking place away from home, respectively. In turn, these two words may have derived from Vik, The Oslofjord, Viken, The Bay, and/or vik, bay, which could indicate that a vikingr was originally an individual associated with one of these places, either a local or a sea pirate. The etymology of all these words is part of a complex and ongoing debate that has only been touched upon here. The term Viking has become synonymous with a whole society that flourished first in Norway, Sweden and Denmark and, later, in parts of the British archipelago, Ireland, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland and possibly as far west as the coast of North America. To the east, this society or culture spread into Finland, the Baltic and Russia and had trade networks that extended into the Byzantine Empire (the capital of which, Byzantium, is present-day Istanbul, Turkey), and along the silk route, possibly as far as China, although this is still debated. To the south, the Norse penetrated as far as the Iberian Peninsula in the Mediterranean and the north coast of Africa, setting up winter camps and raiding there between c. 859 and 862. Viking Age society was complex and it is not the aim of this volume to unpack what others have already done, and continue to do so well. For many cultures, including those of Scandinavia, the British Isles and Ireland, this period of history is now called the Viking Age.

In his exploration of overlapping territories and intertwined histories, Edward Said declares that “appeals to the past” are “among the commonest of strategies in interpretations of the present.” Ethiopians and members of other interrelated Horn of African groups living within a contemporary global Diaspora embody the tenets of Said's argument. Histories of migrants and migrations do not begin in medias res. Ethiopian history, topography, and culture are prominently referenced in both public and private articulations of Ethiopian identities within the Diaspora. Ethiopians living within the context of a Canadian Diaspora perpetually reference, invoke, revere, contest, and engage with representative elements of their cultural, political, and historical identity, fashioning unique forms of self-representation.

This Canadian case study is illustrative of the ways in which prominent signifiers of Ethiopian history throughout the twentieth century are integrated into self-representations by members of the Diaspora. With the exception of Mary Goitom's body of work, Canadian scholarship on the Horn of Africa Diaspora has largely focused on ethnic disparities as principal points for identity formation upon migration. This work instead examines the ways in which members of the Diaspora perpetuate and maintain preceding historical signifiers, as means of asserting both their heterogeneity and historicity.

As defined by Stuart Hall, the cultural identity of the Horn of Africa Diaspora is, by and large, comprised of elements “which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common.” Based on an analysis of selfrepresentations in contemporary Canada (whether they be textual, physical, and/or in narrative form), it is evident that Ethiopians take great pride in their long and rich cultural history, which precedes their dispersal into a global Diaspora.

Through the use of oral histories as illustrative case studies, this chapter underscores the ways in which the interplay of history, politics, and culture continues to shape representations and perceptions of Ethiopian and other interrelated Horn of Africa identities in Canada. To a generation of Ethiopians living in the Diaspora, being Ethiopian and narrating Ethiopian history are symbiotically connected with events that have transpired in that nation, as much as they are connected to perceptions of this history by the outside world, reinforcing the proclamation by interviewee Elias Omer that: “Ethiopia is significant, not only to who we are, but who we are not.”

Like most projects people have invested considerable time and energy into, this project began simply out of an appreciation for African literature. I spent many years reading and thinking deeply about African literature. At first, I read through the classics and earlier generations of African literature by engaging the work of Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Mongo Beti, Camara Laye, and Ama Ata Aidoo, to name just a few of the authors I drew inspiration from. From there, I began to read more deeply in contemporary African literature. Along the way, I engaged with major contemporary African authors such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Teju Cole, Uzodinma Iweala, Chris Abani, Fatou Diome, Taiye Selasi, Yaa Gyasi, and others. I was immediately drawn into their powerful stories. It became evident through a sustained engagement with this literature that the theme of migration, and its attendant themes of race and racism shifting identities, and the like, mirrored a lot of the African American literature reflecting the Great Migration. Works like Paul Dunbar's Sport of the Gods, Toni Morrison's Jazz, Richard Wright's 12 Million Black Voices, and William Attaway's Blood on the Forge were constantly in my thoughts as I engaged this new generation of African literature in relation to their African American literary ancestors. Like the African American migration novel, this new generation of African writers grappled with similar themes, albeit in a fashion often charting international migratory patterns. For example, many African American writers wrote about heading north to escape racial and political violence or to find better job opportunities. These themes are reflected in the African migration novel and solidified my desire to undergo an intense study of this body of literature.

My friend Cajetan Iheka and I often communicated about what new African literature we were reading and what aspects of the texts we drew inspiration from; we shared and collectively constructed syllabi and taught classes on Black migration narratives that compared African American, African, and Caribbean migration narratives. We tossed around the idea of producing an edited collection on these works. We left the themes and author selection quite open, not wanting to restrict contributors to a certain time frame or to a particular thematic concern. The result was a collection entitled African Migration Narratives: Politics, Race, and Space.

The 2019 Netflix drama Joy tells the story of Joy and Precious, two African women from Nigeria who live in Austria working as street prostitutes. The title character, Joy, is a seasoned sex worker who is close to paying off her sixty-thousand-euro debt to Madam, herself a former prostitute, who helped Joy and Precious settle in Austria.1 Precious has only recently arrived and is just beginning sex work. The film opens with an unidentified young woman in the house of a juju practitioner in Nigeria. The woman wants to go to Europe, and the juju practitioner is performing what viewers learn is a common ritual for women who are being funneled into the sex trade industry. The ritual is said to protect them on their journey to Spain, Germany, or whatever country they are traveling to. Viewers soon learn that it is a ritual designed to ensure the obedience of young women who wish to go to Europe and work in the sex trade out of economic desperation. During the ritual a shrine is constructed, and the women are told that if they fail to deliver money as instructed, then the powerful shrine will be used to inflict harm on them from afar. Throughout the ritual the unidentified young lady is forced to repeat “If I call the police on my master, this shrine shall kill me.” The film subsequently shifts to the title of the film, then to the streets of Austria where viewers are introduced to both Joy and Precious (1:08–6:09).

The rest of the film delivers a profound insight into the lives of African women in the diaspora who find themselves caught up in the sex trade. The movie ends with Joy paying off her debt to Madam, only to be arrested by immigration—presumably based on a tip from Madam—and sent back to Nigeria where we see Joy plotting to return to Europe. What the film dramatizes is ripped straight from reality. According to Princess Inyang Okokan, a former victim of sex trafficking in Turin and other places in Italy who now helps African women leave the sex trade, the rituals are often done by practitioners of juju who prey on young, impoverished, rural women seeking a better life abroad (“Sex Trafficking”).

Introduction

The Ethiopian diaspora in North America was largely constituted by people prompted to leave or flee Ethiopia following the 1974 revolution in Ethiopia, or those who were forced to overstay work or study visas to evade the violence or turmoil. Conflict-generated diaspora groups, like this particular wave of migrants, have an inherently complex social, political, and emotional relationship with their countries of origin. Much of this complexity is manifested in the diaspora-state relations of emigres, but it also seeps into the personal and everyday discourses and practices that characterize diasporan lives. While there have been subsequent waves of forced and voluntary migrants from Ethiopia, each of these waves has a unique shared experience in terms of the conditions of their departure and the nature of their reception and settlement in the West.

Berg and Eckstein argue that pre- and post-emigration experiences may be more significant in defining generations of migrants and their children than birth and age cohort. They developed a conceptual framework termed “historically grounded generations” and argue “if migrants from any one country uproot at different times with different lived experiences, they would constitute different historically embedded generations.” Using this framework as a starting point, I approach the large cohort of migrants who fled Ethiopia during the Derg regime in the 1970s and 1980s and settled in cities across North America as a particular historically grounded generation. This involves appreciating how the socio-political environment in Ethiopia before their migration and the nature of their departure from the country has profoundly shaped their post-migration lived experiences, including their settlement patterns, social relations, diasporic identities, and homeland engagement. As I discuss further below, this should not obfuscate the heterogeneity of experiences within this cohort of migrants, nor should it detract from the agency of these individuals in charting their own life courses. Instead, thinking through a specific “historically grounded generation” as an analytical lens is meant to alert us to some of the structural processes that connect the groups of people within this cohort, and the sociopolitical points of reference that these individuals often find themselves navigating as they govern their own lives.

The Book of Bones and Gilbert Gatore's The Past Ahead

It has been over twenty-five years since the Rwandan genocide. The genocide was largely ignored both inside and outside of the African continent. Nelson Mandela, who was elected president of South Africa in 1994, brought attention to the crisis. Outside the continent, attention to the crisis was more pronounced; yet action to stop it was all but nonexistent. In February of 1994, Amnesty International expressed concerns about arms being transferred to Rwanda and ending up in the hands of militia groups (“Rwanda: Arming the Perpetrators of the Genocide” 8). The profound failure of the Western world to try to put an end to a genocide that could have easily been stopped with a limited number of forces has largely been forgotten. Bill Clinton, speaking of his failure to respond to the genocide, stated that it is one of the biggest regrets of his presidency. He said in a CNBC interview in 2013 that “if we’d gone in sooner, I believe we could have saved at least a third of the lives that were lost” (Flanigan). Unclassified documents now reveal the Clinton administration was aware of a “final solution” against the Tutsis prior to the start of the pogrom, which cast doubt on his claim that only a third of the lives would have been saved (Bryer & Clinton). Perhaps Clinton failed to act due to having previously faced scrutiny for the Black Hawk Down blunder in Somalia that left nineteen American troops dead, dragged through the streets of Mogadishu: the spectacle of which was aired repeatedly on the news. The event still weighed heavily on an American populace who were hesitant to throw their support behind a military engagement in Africa, depleting national treasure, and risking the lives of American soldiers.

Confronted with erasures and distortions of their past, Black diaspora communities seek to recuperate and retell collective histories in service of a shared present and legible future. However, as Stuart Hall posited in 1990, such recuperation is not a mere “unearthing,” but a recreation of history that produces and is produced by collective identity. Diasporic identity does not stand apart from the signs and stories that seek to represent it but is formed by those very evocations of the past. This process is less concerned with a singular position of truth (though it may be corrective of common distortions) or a location of origin (though it may hold a real or imagined site of reference). Instead, diaspora rearchives history by dynamically engaging both its emotional resonances and extant power structures.

An especially powerful genre of historical narrative employed to produce collective identity is biography. The story of a life can be made to represent a people or scaled down to the unit of the individual, in all its specificities and contexts. What then, must we do with the story of a life, in the words of poet Lemn Sissay, “that's not happened”? What power exists in the biography of a child, for example, who has been made famous for historical occurrences not of his own doing? In the Ethiopian diaspora, one such life has long animated the imagination of writers and storytellers: Prince Alemayehu, son of Emperor Tewodros II (1855–68). Current debates about inter-country adoption, repatriation, and the diaspora's terms for migration and displacement are negotiated across the worlds Alemayehu reached beyond his own volition.

In March 2019, the director of London's National Army Museum handed two locks of Emperor Tewodros's hair to Ethiopian Minister of Culture and Tourism, Hirut Kassaw. The hair was taken in the wake of the Battle of Maqdala (1868)—one of Britain's most expensive military expeditions in the nineteenth century—along with over three hundred and fifty manuscripts, dozens of royal treasures, and the emperor's son, Alemayehu.

Introduction

According to a report by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) published in 2018, more than 244 million people across the world live in countries other than their country of birth; indeed, by the end of 2016, over 22.5 million people were refugees (IOM 2018). The same IOM report indicates that 16 million Africans live in other African countries, with another 16 million living outside of the continent altogether. Nonetheless, in recent years migration from sub-Saharan Africa has attracted increasing attention from scholars and European and African policymakers alike, focusing on the flow of migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea.

The international migration of Ethiopians is not a recent phenomenon at all. But Ethiopian mass migration has become more prevalent in recent decades. The complex political and security situation in the aftermath of the 1974 revolution and the protracted conflict that followed (domestically and internationally) serve as a critical juncture in Ethiopian migration (Semela and Cochrane 2019). At this time, political dissidents and the intelligentsia sought opportunities and took refuge elsewhere, while ordinary people who opposed the Derg military regime (1974–91) fled persecution and reprisal. In the later stages of the Derg regime, new insecurities emerged (both physical and political), resulting in waves of migration in the late 1980s and early 1990s, including after that regime had been toppled (Estifanos n.d.). The past two decades have witnessed a growing stream of people moving from the countries in the Horn of Africa—especially Ethiopia—through Sudan and Libya or other alternative routes, and into Europe. Even though a huge number of lives are lost along the way, migrants are still determined “to try their chances” in the face of very real, existential threats.

The literature on migration largely focuses on discovering why migrants originating from developing countries want to travel to developed nations. Reasons include structural differences in labor, income, capital, and more between regions and rational decision-making, whereby individuals decide to move to regions with less intense labor and high wages (Arango 2000, 285; Jennissen 2007, 413). On the one hand, this individual decision-making can be seen on a household level, that is, as a means of diversifying risk (Massey et al. 1993, 439; while, on the other hand, the concept of migration networks might give us a more universal picture, whereby networks themselves spread and fuel further migration (ibid., 448).

Wilfried N’Sondè's The Heart of the Leopard Children and The Silence of the Spirits

Wilfried N’Sondè's The Heart of the Leopard Children and The Silence of the Spirits allow our investigation of the migratory imagination to explore two novels centered on the postmigratory condition in the suburbs and projects of Paris to showcase the expansive imaginary capacity of the African migration novel. The migratory route carved out by the protagonists from the Republic of Congo to Paris is often overlooked if only because of its underrepresentation. The Republic of Congo (colloquially known as Brazzaville) is often overshadowed in historical discourses and our collective imaginary by the Democratic Republic of Congo, no doubt because of the latter's tumultuous colonial and postcolonial history that has garnered significantly more scholarly attention. Historians have been busy producing massive and popular tomes such as King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism by Adam Hochschild, Congo: The Epic History of People by David Van Reybrouck, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa by Jason Stearns, to name just a few of the monumental historical studies that have recently emerged.

On the literary front, however, the creative works emerging from the Republic of Congo have been gaining increased attention due in no small part to Indiana University Press's commitment to translating and publishing Francophone African literature by authors from the Republic of Congo in its Global African Voices series. Wilfried N’Sondé is one author the series is committed to translating and publishing. N’Sondé is often classified as an “Afropean” author because he is firmly integrated in and, more importantly, contributes to European culture (Thomas “The Heart of the Leopard Children” xi). He hails from Brazzaville, was raised in Paris, and is a practicing musician living in Berlin. His literature carries the traits of an Afropean sensibility and aesthetic.

The soldiers as referenced in the above quotation are those who fought in the Nine Years’ War, 1596–1603, between what was termed the Gaelic order of lordships and the rule of the Tudors in Ireland. At the start of this war, Sir Henry Wallop, the English Treasurer at War, had petitioned Sir Robert Cecil, Secretary of State, to request money to buy Hibernia (Irish) mantles to protect their soldiers against the weather and the Irish agues (strains of typhus) as evidenced in detail in the quotation. However, the marginal comment greeted the request with a warning that the wearing of this mantle would function as a mechanism to associate the civilised (England) too closely with the primitiveness of the Irish identity. In fact, by 1600, mantles in the Irish style were issued to the army, possibly in response to the war dispatches that reported more soldiers dying of ‘poor food, poor lodgings and the raw, wet Irish climate than through any military engagements’. Wallop was not alone in his observations of the underlying science of how the mantle was used to protect health in that ‘raw, wet climate’.

Introduction

Approximately 20 percent of Canada's population are immigrants. Along with Eritrea, Uganda, Ghana, and Nigeria, Ethiopia has become one of the primary countries sending immigrants to Canada. As a result, a growing Ethiopian immigrant community is beginning to form a significant diaspora within the Canadian population. Immigrant economic integration has become a key government priority; however, the processes of immigration and settlement are inherently stressful, and therefore integration necessitates that the psychosocial well-being of immigrants be considered. As one of the largest groups of African immigrants to Canada, Ethiopians address well-being for the most part by opting to utilize and contribute to communal mechanisms in their diasporic community that support health and well-being. For Ethiopians, health is derived both from a state of equilibrium within the body and a balance between the individual and the external world. Communal mechanisms are integral in settlement and integration because, being aligned with Ethiopians’ traditional social roots, they attend to their mental, physical, spiritual, and emotional well-being, which are disrupted as a result of migration.

This chapter will explore the ways in which a series of communal mechanisms— the forming of a diasporic community, the establishment of religious institutions within that community, Mehaber (a collection of individuals with a common interest or identity that meet regularly) and Iddir (informal insurance)—exist as systems of support that offset the mental health risk factors associated with migration and integration. This exploration focuses on how these practices are shaped by the ways in which their well-being is threaded between their homeland and the host country through their interactions with transnational social fields. This chapter will discuss how these multidimensional (social to economic) communal mechanisms organize well-being, and how well-being is symbiotically organized by community. This chapter has important implications for: (a) how well-being is conceptualized, understood, and practiced cross-culturally in settlement and integration work; (b) the way well-being, as lived through community practices, structures responses that support further well-being; and (c) how cultural mental health interventions can be advanced through community mental health approaches that conceptualize community as transnational. Last, readers should note that there is not a one-dimensional story of the Ethiopian immigration experience. This work acknowledges the complicated, nuanced, and diverse experiences that make up the Ethiopian immigrant story and, as such, this chapter presents one aspect of a vital part of diaspora life seldom researched.

Introduction

Zemzem is a young Ethiopian woman in her early twenties who had lived several years in the Middle East. When we met in a small cafe on Bole Road, she was dressed in a black abaya, her hair covered with a head scarf, and accompanied by her brother and his wife. Zemzem's young and timid appearance disguised her extensive life story, and when she began to talk, she hardly came to a halt. Born in a village in the south of Ethiopia, she grew up with an aunt in Addis Ababa because her parents were unable to provide for her. When she was sixteen years old, Zemzem migrated to Qatar to take up paid domestic work for an Indian family. When her employers went on pilgrimage to Mecca, she joined them but got lost at the Kaaba, between hundreds of thousands of pilgrims. She stayed in Saudi Arabia, had numerous jobs, and was deported during the large-scale deportation campaign of the Saudi government in 2013. When we interviewed her in August 2014, Zemzem was living with her brothers in Addis Ababa and desperately looking for a job. She would like to set up her own business, but if that did not work out, she was planning to migrate again.

Zemzem is one of the millions of Ethiopian women who have migrated as domestic workers to the Middle East in the past twenty years, and in doing so have become part of the Ethiopian diaspora. While labor migration was restricted under the socialist regime of Mengistu, freedom of movement has become a constitutional right under the government that came to power in 1991. Ethiopia has become one of the main “sending countries” of domestic workers to the oil-rich countries on the Arabian Peninsula and to Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt (see de Regt 2010; Fernandez 2010; 2020; Minaye 2012). In this chapter, I will use the experiences of young Ethiopian women who migrated to the Middle East to study issues of mobility and immobility. The public discourse in Ethiopia about women's migration to the Middle East emphasizes women's immobility; many spend their lives in the houses of their employers and face abuse and exploitation. Yet, a closer look at their life stories shows the many different instances of mobility and the moments in which they are able to exert some agency, albeit under restricted circumstances.

This important event in the life of the Norwegian King Harald Greycloak (b. c. 935, d. c. 970 CE), described in Old Norse by the Icelander Snorri Sturluson in his thirteenth- century history of the Norwegian kings, Heimskringla, appears to lie at the root of some conclusions that have been drawn about the origins of the shaggy pile weave textiles in Norway, known as röggvarfeldur or röggvarvefnaður in Iceland. Vararfeldir is another term used to describe woven mantles with a piled surface that had been in vogue around Northern Europe from the sixth century and survived to the late medieval period. Their true origins are to be found in Antiquity, with the earliest documented examples of this cloth type appearing in Bronze Age Sumeria, 5,000 years ago (see discussion on pp. 69–72, below).

Media enable a (re)imagining of new political subjectivities at a time when old conceptions of belonging and citizenship are constantly being contested. While allowing for greater democratization of the public sphere in which individuals can now express opinions and engage in conversations, the lack or difficulty of regulation is causing the rise or reification of political communities based on narrow and exclusivist understandings of identity. People are empowered and regaining a voice but are at the same time divided, through misleading information, indoctrination, as well as narrow and constraining debates. In Ethiopia, as elsewhere, digital media more than others offer the lens through which to interrogate local and diasporic narratives about history, memory, historiography, nation-building, and national identity. Debates over such issues as ownership and belonging (native versus immigrant) are part of a broader—at times raging—conversation about being, becoming, and belonging in a nation that is changing in ways that are simultaneously liberating and disempowering. This chapter uses social media discussions, from home and in the diaspora, on Ethiopia to explore questions of history, politics, and belonging in the age of intolerant nativism and contested globalization.

A Brief Note on Methodology

A study of an intensely polarized media environment, social media in particular pose their own challenges. This, to some extent, has to do with how one chooses which issues, narratives, social media sites, and personalities to explore, as well as and why these choices have been made. Any attempt to produce knowledge on such a complicated and constantly evolving subject requires methodological rigor in the collection and analysis of data. The research for this chapter begins with the following hypotheses: that Ethiopia's social media sphere (that is, social media discussions on Ethiopia from within and without) is considerably diverse; that it is constantly evolving; and that it is increasingly polarized. These evolving features of the social media landscape are reflective in many ways of a similar development within other domains of the Ethiopian media sphere.

My sampling strategy was developed accordingly to show the complexity and dynamism of Ethiopian, specifically diaspora-based, social media on the one hand and its growing polarization on the other. I used Facebook as the principal social media platform where the vast majority of online conversations on Ethiopia occur. I also engaged Twitter, which is another, albeit less common, platform for Ethiopian online conversations.