L'ultimo impero cristiano. Politica e religione nell'Etiopia contemporanea (1916-1974)

Only country in sub-Saharan Africa to be characterized, as well as independence for long-defense, even for the not European Christian roots, Ethiopia has returned the attention with the recent war with Eritrea. His life, so tragically bound to the memory of the Italians during the Fascist occupation, had found its stability in the formula of the confessional state, legitimized by the Ethiopian Church, direct descendent of the Coptic Church in Egypt. Using archives of unreleased material in English and Italian diplomats and religious, the author analyzes the parable of Ethiopia during the last long reign of Haile Selassie, highlighting the problems of the cohabitation generated by ethnic-religious fragmentation and the contradictions arising from a conception of the state whose confessional character was destined to struggle with the social and political transformations of the XXth century, with the secessionist forces and the new secularist instances widespread in the country. The attempts at reform, initiated by Haile Selassie since the twenties, and the international success achieved in the sixties with the Pan-Africanist leadership could not offset the internal elements of crisis - primarily economic, but also religious and political - and ended up breaking against the will to preserve the traditional Amhara-Christian foundation and the building of the imperial sovereign. On the other hand, because of the inability of the new opposition movements to transform into political party organizations and to start fights claim on the political front, the army remained the only arbiter of the crisis: the coup of 1974 marked the final culmination of a state that, for centuries in Africa, had founded the independence and stability on the ethnic-religious identity, a factor that was fatal in the changes of the social and political context. The book is a new approach to the history of contemporary Africa, which, although intertwined with colonial experience, regains his epoch-making changes in the specific thickness of the XXth century.