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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Conflict, Heritage and the Internet. The Case of the Anywaa Diaspora
| Panel |
80. Memories of own country: maintaining social networks across boundaries
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| Paper ID | 682 |
| Author(s) |
Meckelburg, Alexander
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | Gambella, today Ethiopia’s south-western most regional state, is connected to a long history of conflicts. These took place either among the indigenous communities and the central government of Ethiopia, they were later influenced by the war in the southern Sudan and recently by the run for political power in the new framework of the Ethiopian federal system. Whatever conflicts there have been they were mostly perceived as conflicts of the Anywaa and the Nuer.
Apart from that an unrecognized conflict emerged among the Anywaa and the so called highlanders. The highlanders, although in the local context they are treated as if they were a homogenous ethnic unit are far from that. They are mostly workers of the local administration, or embedded in the service sector and only a few are left from those many thousands that had been resettled to the area during the socialist era in the 1980s. All of them derive from various ethnic units of the Ethiopian highlands.
An outrage of collective violence from the highlander’s side towards the Anywaa took place in December 2003. Though this peak of violence had a longer history of road ambushes by Anywaa militias and violence from the Ethiopian military toward Anywaa civilians, its aftermath saw the emergence of Internet-Pages by the Anywaa community abroad that promote the view that a genocide was taking place against the Anywaa committed by highlanders and the Ethiopian government.
This presentation therefore does not solely focus on the memory of the diaspora from the Horn of Africa and this specific spot, that is by demography rather the southern Sudan, than it focuses on the modern medial means the diaspora uses to broaden the resistance towards the marginalization within a multiethnic society. The terms heritage, culture and self-determination are globalized in the Internet and become pillars in, what in this paper shall be named “cultural survival”.
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