Regime change without cultural transformation is empty and cultural
transformation without regime change is Blind
By Teodros Kiros

The specter of revolution is haunting modern Ethiopia. We Ethiopians rightly
want regime change, but the necessary cultural transformation is not there,
although it ought to be.

There is much that I admire about us Ethiopians, which I enumerated in my last
piece, Ethiopianity and Independent Thinking, in which I wrote and with which I
would like to begin my reflections.

Ethiopianity and independent thinking
By Teodros Kiros | January 3, 2011

I love being an Ethiopian, and I am honored to have been born to Ethiopian
lands; I am humbled by our sublime mountains designed to nurture spirituality,
manifest in the birth of the great thinkers who grew up there; my soul is
pervaded by the depth of thought that the ravines and valleys inspire in me; my
eyes are drunk with the beauty of the lush and green of the south, which greet
me,

when I land from Ethiopian Airlines to visit my homeland; my heart vibrates when
it listens to the roaring sound of the saxophone and the sharpness and power of
the trumpet in classical Ethiopian music, how many times have I shed tears of
passion as Tizita, pierced my sensitive heart in the darkness of a lonely
night; how often have I fallen in love with those round and bright Ethiopian
eyes, resting on the ravishing bodies of our women; how tirelessly do I admire
our dance and the cuisines that accompany them; how desperately have I wished
that I could master all our ethnic dances and consume their cleansing
fragrance, when one is possessed by them.

These features need to be buttressed by a foundational cultural transformation,
which would then ground the mighty fortresses of a new Ethiopian regime. I
fully understand our passion for a regime change, which is long overdue; but I
also want every Ethiopian to embark on the path of cultural transformation. 
This is a categorical imperative.

As a writer, my vocation is guided by keen observation of people and all that
they do. Years of careful observation of the Ethiopian cultural scene and
political behavior have led me to make the following propositions.

Regimes have come and gone in our lives. We are still leaving with the legacies
of these regimes. At the moment a coterie of brilliant scholars are deeply
engaged in assessing the connection between forgiving the forgivable and the
unforgivable, such the Derg�s excesses of its violent past.

This monumental event of our past is bound to repeat itself until after we
collectively attend to our individual conditions dispassionately and wisely. 
Every Ethiopian must ask the following question, everyday and every night as a
moral exercise of the care of the self. The question is: how is my soul?

To ask this question is to point at your own self, before you point at others;
it is furthermore an exercise of humility. Examining the condition of your
soul is a way of attending to the internal relationships among your reasoning
capacity, the state of your desires and your spiritedness. Before we act and
speak, we must pay attention to the conditions of our individual souls. We must
examine our actions by asking further questions,

What have I done today?
Whom did I lie to today?
Whom did I inadvertently hurt today?
Whom did I belittle today?
How well did I control my envies and jealousies today?


These are fundamental questions, which propel the winds of cultural
transformation.

Every Ethiopian ought to know that our country is contaminated by cultural
decadence, which is going out of control. Friendships, marriages and
collegiality are infested by the DDT of cultural decadence, that we are not
even aware of, but which we must attend to as the activity of the soul.

Our souls, like our bodies need tending and watering from the fountain of
culture. Culture is nothing more than the moral organization of the self, the
self�s soul. We have a moral duty to put our own houses, that is our individual
souls in order, by carefully and consistently attending to the internal
interaction of reason, desire and spiritedness, as a matter of everyday duty.

If we develop new habits of attending to the conditions of our souls, before we
know it, we will develop new ways and new habits of interacting with one
another. The venoms of destructive ethnicity, envies and jealousies will be
cleansed from our souls, and we will thus ready our lovely Ethiopia, for a
genuine regime change. Once we change ourselves deeply and seriously no leader
or leaders of future regimes will play us against one another; other wise
regime change on the crucible of a decadent culture is empty.


Ethiopia is indeed ready for regime change but without a change on the
superstructure of culture, the change is vain. I assure you that we are going
to bitterly complain about future regimes, unless we change individually and
collectively and ready our nation for a regime change by cultivating a
population of Ethiopians who are quietly attending to the conditions of their
souls, with the help of meaningful prayers, prayers with which our nation is
historically blessed.

Prayers must be accompanied with the care of the self in its quest of
enlightening itself and putting its own house in order.

Teodros Kiros
Professor of Philosophy and English (Liberal Arts)
Berklee College of Music