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Constructions of CitizenshipBy: Teodros Kiros (PhD)Sculpting a citizen is no easy task. It is an exceedingly difficult art, which requires talent, patience, endurance and tolerance. There are various kinds of citizens as there are and regime types, flittingly appropriate for the citizen types. At the minimum, there are three types of citizens and three types of regimes which sculpt citizens. There are first, docile citizens; second, there are obedient ones; and finally, there are (few in number, and getting much fewer in contemporary Ethiopia) revolutionary citizens. Ancient and modern and contemporary Ethiopian states have and gone. Each of these states has actually attempted and succeeded in constructing citizens which perfectly fit their agendas. Thus docility, obedience and a revolutionary temperpement have been carefully chosen and systematically constructed to produce the desired citizen subject. The ancient Feudal Ethiopian stage produced simultaneously a docile and obedient citizen subject, who responds to every whim of his/her master inside the house and outside on the fields and the production centers of the Ethiopian Feudal State. A long string of brilliant Ethiopian writers have described this docile and obedient subject. The most famous novel, Fikir Eske Mekaber is worth rereading as a novelistic documentation of the construction of the docile citizen. Numerous historical works have also documented the same phenomenon. Charterstically the docile subject of the feudal state does not use her agency to demand change. Fear of death and the weight of responsibility does not permit the heroic step of dismantling the feudal apparatus; in this the docile Ethiopian citizen subject shares numerous similarities with her other African brethren victims of the colonial apparatus that governed by using force and ideology to perpetuate itself. The Ethiopian Feudal State also used force and ideology to intimidate any docile subject who even dared to entertain using her agency in the interiority of her dream space. In this sense the Feudal Ethiopian state was exact and merciless in the sculpting of the appropriate citizen type. Obey or die was the motto of the feudal state. Capitalist democratic states also, as we have in contemporary Ethiopia, also use the same tactics as the Feudal State in perpetuating themselves. Docility and obedience are preferred to the autonomous revolutionary spirit which is theoretically enshrined in the revolutionary constitution of the ruling regime. In the beginning, the ruling regime, which sprouted out of the student movement of the Ethiopian sixties, did mean well, when it gave a pride of place, to the Ethiopian citizen subject, who willingly said farwell to docility and obedience, and embraced autonomy, disciplined rebellion, and heroic agency to demand change, and create possibilities. The revolutionary subject took her constitutional rights seriously and lovingly. The revolutionary subject is always a thinker-dreamer and dreamer-thinker. For this revolutionary subject, as we witnessed recently, demanding a change is a right and duty, which she is willing to embark on, however, grave the consequences. Also, the fact that the leaders of the ruling party were themselves at one point thinker-dreamers and dreamer-thinkers, who went to the battlefield to simultaneously overthrow remnants of Feudal State, masquerading as Derg, was itself a catalyst, which emboldened the recent taxi drivers, the politically conscious people who voted at the booth, and the student dreamers, who gave their lives, to do the same. The rituals of memory should enable the ruling regime to encourage the construction of a revolutionary democratic citizen, who can sculpt citizenship, only if she is allowed to protest, march, call for meetings, and disrupt business as usual. A revolutionary constitution should marvel at the construction of a citizen subject who shuns obedience and docility, and in their stead enshrine the virtues of autonomy and rebellion disciplined by a revolutionary spirit. I appeal once again to our revolutionary readers to encourage the revolutionary subject to make full use of her agency as orchestrated in the revolutionary constitution. Go to SOURCE of article |