Ethiopia is preparing for national dialogue, also known as agärawi məkəkər. It is going to dialogue with itself as a means of seizing the violence spreading in the body politic. Political violence with its different intensity and form has been one aspect of Ethiopia’s political history. Despite their prevalence, violent moments are dehumanizing and destructive. However, they are not invincible social prisons that lock human society in the abyssum of dehumanization. Society can make such moments and recast them as a site for moral imagination (Lederach
2005) and social creative acts to transcend the dehumanizing and destructive elements. Violent moments can be used to mobilize social creative power against instrumentalized political violence. From the rich African library written and non-written; historical and metaphysical forms of the past, this generation can bring usable wisdom to transform the entrenched violence of our time. I like to share with you one of the pearls of wisdom we may learn from it as we prepare for dialogue, among others to seize the moment of our won violence.

In Ethiopian hagiosophy, there is a powerful story of violence and the possibility of imagination to transcend it. I used the term hagiosophy to refer to our (myself and a few colleagues at AAU) engagements with hagiography as a site of philosophy. It is an ongoing intellectual aspiration to locate Ethiopian written and oral sacred text from liturgy and historiography into philosophy mainly as one mode of decolonizing political philosophy.

The usable hagiosophy I am sharing with you today found in the 15th-century hagiographic text (Gädlä Krəstos Śämra) of saint Krəstos Śämra whose saintly imagination, reflection and transcending to the metaphysical binary to find the root cause of sin, destruction, and violence. Her journey began with the violence she inflicted upon her slave. She grossly sent flames into the servant’s mouth and killed her. She was seized by her capacity for this violence. She captured this moment and began to pray and imagine and struggled for a new possibility to transcend this violence. She prayed to be reunited with the dead slave’s body and soul. Her prayer listened and God resurrected the victimized slave.

In this hagiosophy, we learn how one could seize the moment of violence; use it as a time of reflection, critique, and soul searching to address the immediate and structural sources of political violence.

The new possibility began with this reconnection with the dead. What it means to resurrect the dead in the contemporary political real mis worth discussing. At least in our national dialogue remembering the dead and commemorating the victimized souls of our violence should be a priority. As survivors who have witnessed and lived or even participated by commission and omission in the spreading violence, we shall connect, commemorate and remember the dead. Krəstos Śämra inspiring entitlement begins with the dead and then goes to the survivors.
She further kept praying to find the structural and root causes of violence, offense, and sin in the world and the human condition. She articulated the human condition saying ‘there is no wood that does not smoke, and a human being that does not offend.” If to be human is defned by the ability of sin, offense, and violence, forgiveness is the response instead of criminalizing all humans. Criminalizing all humans leave the world as a place of criminals only as M. K Gandhi stated well “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind”.
Considering forgiveness as a foundational response to the violence Krəstos Śämra kepton searching for the original and the source of this human condition. To her it was the original sin, that is the confict between God and Satan the source of all sins and violence on earth. She prayed and was allowed to travel to the metaphysical world to ask forgiveness to save the offenders, and sinners and reconcile the original confict between God and Satan.

In this hagiosophy, we learn how one could seize the moment of violence; use it as a time of refection, critique, and soul searching to address the immediate and structural sources of political violence. Such action is about taking responsibility at the individual and community level to transcend the violence and its destructive impact. Her unending quest for forgiveness to the offenders, including her attempt for the original offender Satan to be pardoned, taught us the power of forgiveness to create possibilities for the surviving society: both the victim and the perpetrator.
Moreover, the hagiosophy of Krəstos Śämra enlightens us on how to navigate and creatively act in search of addressing the structural and root cause of violence, without such response violence, remain as intrinsic to human and society’s condition. Our national dialogue, as a rare political process, must expose the structural cause of violence. Similar creative acts and responses to Ethiopia’s ongoing political violence are needed so that the community far and near can recast and seize the moment to address the destructive trend in the transition and the root, structural and historical causes of violence in the country.

Our national dialogue, as a rare political process, must expose the structural cause of violence.

Ethiopians missed the opportunity to build a political community through dialogue, and there are many missed opportunities to re-new the existing state and rebuild the political realm through dialogue. The latest addition is the moment of political violence we are inhabited since the 2018 political openings. Capturing this moment is an indispensable task to transcend the dehumanizing and destructive effect of the spreading violence.

The process of moral imagination requires being refective of personal responsibility for political violence and acting towards transcending it and we do this by acknowledging the relational subjectivity we are in.

In academia, the process of rebuilding a divided society affected by political violence is made intelligible through the notion of peacebuilding (Galltung 1975). Scholars underline that the ultimate goal of PB is seizing the violent moment through moral imagination and the transformation of conflict into peaceful action by working deeper into the causes of such conficts. What we learn from hagiosophy of Krəstos Śämra is a pre-modern project of peacebuilding that transcends villages and countries. Her imagination was a universal peacebuilding project. Many societies in the continent today are cited for their exemplary role in sizing and transforming violent moments. As we embark on this exercise our imagination shall be as wide as the vision of those societies who left their legacies by transcending the violent moment that conditioned their life.
The process of moral imagination requires being refective of personal responsibility for political violence and acting towards transcending it and we do this by acknowledging the relational subjectivity we are in. As we learn from the hagiosophy of Krəstos Śämra, capturing the moment requires accepting our agency in the making of violence and peace. Acknowledging that political violence is occurring in relational mutuality would enable us to mobilize our creative social power for transcending violence and its impact. The imaginative journeys of Krəstos Śämra to transcending the human and social condition can teach us humans are not prisoners of their structural conditions.
Reference
Lederach, John Paul The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace: Oxford Scholarship Online, 2005.
Galtung,John.Peace,WarandDefense:Essaysin Peace Research, ed. John Galtung (Copenhagen: Christian Ejlers), 1975.

This article is an exerpt from my ongoing research project as Fellow of the African Peacebuilding Network (APN)