By Abiyot Negera
Seven years after the imperial regime was overthrown by a popular revolution in Ethiopia, I was born on the 23rd of September 1981 in a small rural village in Wollega. My given name at birth was Tola which means the good one in Afaan Oromo. Despite the expectation that my mother would labour greatly because I was her first, she gave birth to me easily. I didn’t cry, but silently slept during the coming five days. When the village women gathered for a birth ritual on the fifth day of my birth (a ritual locally called Shanan), my grandmother named me Tola, thinking that Waaqaa (the Oromo term for God) blessed the family with a good baby boy who hadn’t troubled his mother with labour and crying. Later, my father changed my name to Abiyot when he registered me for school. The term Abiyot was popular in Ethiopian political discourse between 1974 and 1991 and my father seems to have been influenced by that because he was serving in the local Kebele administration (Kebele refers to the lowest administrative unit in Ethiopia). Abiyot means ‘revolution’ in Amharic. Surprisingly, the name Tola stands for peace and goodness but Abiyot is a name associated with conflict and radical change.
Just a few months after I started school with this new name, my father was detained. His colleagues in the Kebele administration duped him into borrowing public money for them as he was the treasurer. When an auditor found the financial gap and asked my father to return it, he turned to his colleagues, but they denied having taken any money from him. Our properties were sold to settle this issue. Within months, my family went poor and my father led an unstable life for many years. So, I had to work hard to support myself from early on. I undertook petty trading to buy clothes and stationery for myself when I was in elementary school. As I was academically strong, I provided academic support to my friends, and they provided me with materials in return. Despite many life challenges, I managed to enter university and earn a degree: Bachelor of Education in History from Dilla College of Teacher Education and Health Sciences (Ethiopia), and later a Master of Philosophy in Indigenous Studies from the University of Tromso (Norway).
University education introduced me to feminist theory. As a fan of deconstructionist theories that question totalising narratives and truth regimes, I found feminism illuminating particularly on three critical issues. The first is its take on how power subtly works to inculcate internalised oppression without the victim noticing it. The second is how feminism deconstructs the essentialised/naturalised views of women and their roles in society. The third is on how feminism connects women and nature (e.g., ecofeminism) and conceptualises their oppression in terms of their mutual domination by the patriarchal system. I believe that feminism is a global movement that aspires to ensure gender equality through resource mobilisation and knowledge production. Feminism is important, but its practical implementation should be properly tailored to the different contexts. Women living in different contexts have different experiences, needs and priorities. In regions like Africa, for instance, an economic empowerment model that focuses on individual choice and independence to the neglect of women embeddedness in social relationships may end up achieving the opposite. I believe that a context-sensitive implementation of feminist principles plays a crucial part in creating an equal world for all.
My greatest ambition is to support vulnerable people so that they can fulfil their life goals. I aim to establish a grassroots organisation that directly works on the empowerment of local communities. Besides my personal experience with poverty, my academic training in Indigenous Studies contributed to this belief. We should always include vulnerable groups in the work that we do. This not only benefits them, but also helps us experience alternative ways of being and knowing. As a senior researcher at Includovate, I use this knowledge daily. My name is Abiyot Negera.
Abiyot Negera is a PhD candidate at Addis Ababa University and a Senior Researcher at Includovate. He has a Master degree in Indigenous Studies from the University of Tromso, Norway. Abiyot has ten years’ research experience, including working on the Ethiopia-wide socio-economic assessment for the project “Stemming Irregular Migration in Northern and Central Ethiopia (SINCE),” financed by the ILO. He has experience completing evaluations for UNICEF and has conducted a national policy analysis on the Ethiopian Women’s policy review. He can speak Afan Oromo, Amharic, and English.
Includovate is a feminist research incubator that “walks the talk”. Includovate is an Australian social enterprise consisting of a consulting firm and research incubator that designs solutions for gender equality and social inclusion. Its mission is to incubate transformative and inclusive solutions for measuring, studying, and changing discriminatory norms that lead to poverty, inequality, and injustice. To know more about us at Includovate, follow our social media: @includovate, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram.
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