Originally this site was only a mirror of Sellassie Family Web @ www.angelfire.com/ak/sellassie, but with time each webpage gets it own life and forms. There are many new pages here and the entire direction is different -- it's not just our family place anymore. One year of cyber existance proved that Sellassie Family is big and indeed is world wide.
If you want to stay in touch and to know about the changes and news, please subscribe to SELLASSIE LIST, FORUM or/and BOOK CLUB.
There are no academic studies about relations between Ethiopian and Rastafari and this research is filling this gap, done at the Anthropology Dept. Ethiopian attitutes (in Ethiopia and abroad) toward Rasta are not discussed yet -- this is the aim of Esther's work.
Esther would appreciate the list's help with her research. I'll make more online polls, but if the people on Sellassie List would distribute the Questionnaires around, it could be great. Especially, the written statements would be of help (narratives). Any suggestions and recommendations are welcome. You might send everything directly to e_antohin Thanks
It is not easy to talk of the African diaspora on the internet: it is a very broad and articulate phenomenon since the ties among Africans living abroad, and between the latter and their respective homelands and communities of origin, are strongly supported by the global network today. An initial analysis, however, allows us to establish at least 4 topic areas concerning the presence of the African diaspora on the internet: the phenomenon as such (that is, the diaspora as an "object" of interest and study); the diaspora as a political and strategic theme; services for the diaspora; networking among diaspora members. *
The website "Ethiopian diaspora.info" which had been funded by the Italian government is an information website which is dedicated to provide timely, relevant and accurate information to the Ethiopian community abroad.
The Ethiopian Diaspora : The Ethiopian Diaspora was virtually unknown until approximately 100 years ago...
Fourth Annual Ethiopian Film Festival : The EFF will be held at the Lincoln Theatre. EFF supports independent Ethiopian filmmakers by providing them a forum in which they will screen their films to the public.
EthioIndex to webcast a LIVE Internet audio call-in discussion in Amharic "Status & Performance of Ethiopian Community Associations in North America"
SEED : Escaping the violence associated with these changes has become all to common to many of us. Today, Ethiopians are dispersed through out the globes as temporary immigrant, naturalized citizens and as refugees. An estimated two hundred thousands of us are said to live in the United States alone.
tigrai.org: Tigrai-net believes that the Internet Technology makes the world smaller and smaller. The ability to communicate and exchange information and across distance has enabled more individuals to participate in the Internet /cyber technology building a nation toward development regardless of their locations. As a result tigrai-net purpose is to foster educational, and benevolent activities, to preserve and advance the Ethiopia culture, customs, and language using an Internet technology.
The book ‘Ethiopians & Rastafari’ is based on research conducted in cultural anthropology. The main aim of this book is to give an account of the Ethiopian experience, as a new diaspora in the United States. It also explores the question why Ethiopians and Rastafarians who share ‘Ethiopia’ or ‘Ityoppia’ as a general point of reference – have historically been at odds.
This study is based on the theories of identity, reflexivity and diaspora and examines related concepts such as symbolic identity, ethnic consciousness and myth of election. The book utilizes surveys and interviews of first and second generation Ethiopians in the United States in order to derive the prevailing attitudes and perceptions of Ethiopians with respect to the Rastafarian movement which has not been articulated till the present time.
This work is also biographical, as it depicts real life accounts of the author’s journey as one member of the Ethiopian Royal family. She endured the Marxist dictatorship from 1974 to 1977. During this time she witnessed the imprisonment of her family including parents, death of her mother while in detention, escape from her country and the trials of adjustment to a new life in the process of becoming Ethiopian American.
Note: The book may be purchased on line at: lulu.com by entering the title.
References Cited
Archbishop Yesehaq 1989 The Ethiopian Tewahedo Church: An Integrally African Church. New York Vantage Press
Bastide, Roger African Civilizations in the New World. New York: Harper & Row Publishers
Bourdieu, Pierre 1998 Practical Reason. Stanford University Press
Bourdieu, Pierre translator Nice, Richard Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Burke, Peter Historians, Anthropologists, and symbols. Stanford: Stanford University Press
Chevannes, Barry 1994 Rastafari: Roots and Ideology. Syracuse University Press
Crummey, Donald 1999 Land and Society in the Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia. Chicago: University of Illinois Press
Forsythe Dennis 1999 Rastafari: Healing of the nations. New York: One drop Books
Geertz, Clifford Editor 1963 Old Societies and New States: The quest for modernity in Asia and Africa London: The Free Press of Glencoe
Durkheim Emile 1915 The elementary forms of the religious life. New York: Free Press
Haile Sellassie I. Editor Marcus Harold G. 1994 My life and Ethiopia’s Progress. Lansing: Michigan State University Press volume II.
Hausman, Gerald, Editor 1997 The Kebra Negest: The Lost Bible of Rastafarian wisdom and Faith from Ethiopia and Jamaica. New York: St Martin’s Press
James, Wendy and Johnson, Douglas H., Editors 1988 Vernacular Christianity: Essays in the Social Anthropology of Religion Presented to Godfrey Lienhardt. Southampton: Ashford Press
Klass, Morton 1995 Ordered Universes: Approaches to the Anthropology of Religion. Oxford: Westview Press
McFarlane, Adrian A., Nathaniel Murrel S., and William Spencer D.
Chanting down Babylon. Philadelphia: Temple University Press
Rubenson Sven. 1976 The Survival of Ethiopian Independence. New York: Africana Publishing Company
Smith, Christian 2003 Moral, Believing Animals: Human Personhood and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Tiruneh, Andargachew 1993 The Ethiopian Revolution 1974-1987 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Ullendorff, Edward 1966 The Ethiopians: An introduction to country and People. London: Oxford University Press 1967 Ethiopia and the Bible: The Scheweich Lectures. Oxford University Press
NB. "The migration of the well-versed and faithful followers of Christ from countries of the Middle East into Ethiopia occured at that critical period when doctrinal schism was prevalent within the Ecumenical Church. Because these pious men were divinely called to make their refugee in Ethiopia with their theological knowledge of the primative and pure apostlic teachings, their advent into Ethiopia was a blessing for Ethiopians and a milestone in the Consolidation of Ethiopianism." -- Ermias Kebede Wolde-Yesus, Nibure Id, "Ethiopia: The Classic Case: A Biblical Nation under God"
"Those piles of ruins which you see in that narrow valley watered bythe Nile, are the remains of opulent cities, the pride of the ancient kingdom of Ethiopia. ... There a people, now forgotten, discovered while others were yet barbarians, the elements of the arts and sciences. A race of men now rejected from society for their sable skin and frizzled hair, founded on the study of the laws of nature, those civil and religious systems which still govern the universe." -- Count Rossini Volney "Ruins of Empires"
Ethiopia and the Origin of Civilization
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ethiopiawinet/message/736
ANCIENT ETHIOPIANS OF THE GOLDEN AGE
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ethiopiawinet/message/303
GREAT HABSHIS IN ETHIOPIAN/INDIAN HISTORY
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ethiopiawinet/message/307
quotes:
"The history of Christianity, like the history of all great religions and social movements, is strewn with the wrecks of words, wrenched from their original meanings, widened or narrowed, and forced into a bewildering variety of vessels that church their ways in seas of semantic confusion.
The Church of Africa south of the Sahara has acquired and added to the many Christian verbal transmogrifications that came originally from the north. In its turn, it has produced its own eccentric ecclesiastical etymology, of which, perhaps the most striking example is the story of Ethiopianism." -- George Shepperson "Ethiopianism: Past and Present"
Ethiopianism and Afro-Americans in Southern Africa, 1883-1916
The Bible as ideology: Ethiopianism in Jamaica, 1930-1938
Ezekiel 30:9 - In that day shall messengers go forth from me in ships
to make the careless Ethiopians afraid, and great pain shall come upon them, as in the day of Egypt: for, lo, it cometh.
Psalm 68:31: Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon
stretch out her hands unto God.
Amos 9:7 : And the Lord Said: : "Are ye not as children of the
Ethiopians unto me, O children of Israel?"
Numbers 12:1 - And Miriam and Aaron spake against Moses because of the Ethiopian woman whom he had married: for he had married an Ethiopian woman. And the cloud departed from off the tabernacle; and, behold, Miriam became leprous, white as snow: and Aaron looked upon Miriam, and, behold, she was leprous.
Mathew 12:42 - When the judgment comes, the Queen of the south, will stand there with you and condemn you.
HIM Haile Selassie: "You must remember that Ethiopia is like Sleeping Beauty, that time has stood still here for 2,000 years. We must take great care, therefore, not to overwhelm her with changes now that she is beginning to awaken from her long sleep."
"I shall be cast into prison for your sake, but my spirit shall go out of jail and fight for Ethiopia"
"Then Shall the children of Ethiopia return to their own land and there establish a light with no nation shall compare, nor will there be any power sufficient to douse it."
"Mothers of Ethiopia, the convention has triumphed, your sorrows have brought joy to Ethiopia, your tears have anointed her soil with a blessing, your cries have awakened her children throughout the earth, yea in the corners of the unknown world are they aroused, and is prophesying, saying prepare ye the way for a redeemer."
"And there appeared a light matchless in its beauty. Straightway the whole celestial host shouted and there appeared millions of angels dancing in the light singing, "Behold! Behold Ethiopia! the bride of the master. Her day has come at last! The Lord has received her hand. Her night has forever passed."" -- Shepherd Robert Athlyi Rogers "The Holy Piby"(1924)
Sir Henry Rawlinson: "Recent linguistic discovery tends to show that a Cushite or Ethiopian race did in the earliest times extend itself along the shores of the Southern Ocean from Abyssinia to India. The whole peninsula of India was peopled by a race of their character before the influx of the Aryans; it extended from the Indus along the seacoast through the modern Beluchistan and Kerman, which was the proper country of the Asiatic Ethiopians; the cities on the northern shores of the Persian Gulf are shown by the brick inscriptions found among their ruins to have belonged to this race; it was dominant in Susiana and Babylonia, until overpowered in the one country by Aryan, in the other by Semitic intrusion; it can be traced both by dialect and tradition throughout the whole south coast of the Arabian peninsula."
"If Ethiopia's history and archeological treasures could be marketed, dug out like diamonds and somehow sold, I speculate, this country would be rich!". -- Judith Reynolds Brown "Faranji: A Venture into Ethiopia"
"The wheel of fortune never ceases turning and one day, perhaps
tomorrow, you might be bowing to them[Ethiopians]." -- Virginia Morell "Blue Nile-Ethiopia's River of Magic and Mystery"
"The new age that began after the disappearance of Atlantis was marked at first by the world-wide dominance of Ethiopian representatives of the black race. They were supreme in Africa and Asia ... and they even infiltrated through Southern Europe. ... During the present era-that is the last 10,000 years-the white race...has come to possess the world. According to the occult tradition, Semitic peoples developed wherever the immigrating white colonists from the north were subjugated by the black ruling class, and inter-mixture occurred, as in oldest Egypt, Chaldea, Arabia and Phoenicia." -- Eugen Georg "The Adventure of Mankind"
Ethiopianism.com: Promoting the divinities of Ethiopia and Christ's Vision of Judgment through Queen Sheba and her Lambs.
Ethiopia and the mythology of Ethiopianism Ethiopianism and the African
Methodist Episcopal Church in South Africa, 1896-1912.
http://web.uflib.ufl.edu/cm/africana/authA-M.htm
The Poetics of Ethiopianism
http://www.fishernews.org/articles/dubois.htm
Garvey was a firm believer in Ethiopianism
http://communities.msn.com/Blackside/blackhistory.msnw?action=ShowPhoto&Pho
toID=29
Bob (Marley) cried out about his Ethiopianism and the origin of man.
http://incolor.inebraska.com/cvanpelt/baaro.html
"Ethiopianism in Jamaica"
http://www.iupui.edu/~raac/html/mcalister.html
Black nationalism and Ethiopianism
http://www.rel.tcu.edu/SYL/01F/30343.pdf
"in the service of her Ethiopianism"
http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m2838/1_33/54421508/print.jhtml
Holy Zion! A Study of Ethiopianism
http://debate.uvm.edu/dreadlibrary/skowera.html
Joke of the Day : Last fall, Russian archaeologists dug down 300 feet and found traces of copper wire dating back 1000 years. They concluded that their ancestors had a telephone network a millennium ago. Not to be outdone, French scientists drilled down 400 feet, finding traces of optical fiber that were 2000 years old. They gloated that their ancestors had had digital phones 1000 years before the Russian analog system.
Joke Continues: A week later an Ethiopian scientist reported, "after digging to 500 feet, Ethiopian scientists have found absolutely nothing. This proves conclusively that 3000 years ago, our ancestors were already using wireless phones."
Ethiopianism.com: Ethiopia is the metaphysical location where the
spiritual and physical bind . Ethiopia is the location of the Garden of Eden, site of the tree of life, where original sin occured. Through Ethiopia we can & must redeem the sins of mankind and those of Adam and Eve through Christ's vision . The fate of Ethiopia is the fate of the Earth. Cure the ills of Ethioipia today and God will help us cure the ills of the world tomorrow through the metaphysical reciprocal exchange of spiritual grace. [Gen 2:13 Gen 10:6 Gen 11:31 Psalm 68:31 Amos 9:7 Ezekiel 30:9 Luke 11:31 Rev. 5:5 ]
If the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin. --Charles Darwin
Liberty is always unfinished business. --anonymous
NB. "The migration of the well-versed and faithful followers of Christ from countries of the Middle East into Ethiopia occured at that critical period when doctrinal schism was prevalent within the Ecumenical Church. Because these pious men were divinely called to make their refugee in Ethiopia with their theological knowledge of the primative and pure apostlic teachings, their advent into Ethiopia was a blessing for Ethiopians and a milestone in the Consolidation of Ethiopianism." -- Ermias Kebede Wolde-Yesus, Nibure Id, "Ethiopia: The Classic Case: A Biblical Nation under God"
