Browsing by Author "Matshanda, Namhla Thando"

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    Political identity as temporal collapse: Ethiopian federalism and contested ogaden histories
    (African Affairs, 2023) Matshanda, Namhla Thando; Thompson, Daniel K
    Since the 1980s, analyses of African political identities have emphasized identity manipulation as a governance tool. In the Somali Horn of Africa, however, politicians’ efforts to reinvent identities confront rigid understandings of genealogical clanship as a key component of identity and political mobilization. This article explores how government efforts to construct a new ‘Ethiopian–Somali’ identity within Ethiopia’s ethnic-federal system are entangled with attempts to reinterpret clan genealogies and histories. We focus on efforts to revise the history of clans within the broader Ogaden Somali clan group and trace the possibilities and limits of these revisions in relation to legacies of colonialism as well as popular understandings of Ogaden identity. Drawing on feldwork and archival research, we show that political struggles over Somalis’ integration with Ethiopia orient around Somali clanship, but that clanship is not a mechanical tool of mobilization, as it is often portrayed. We suggest that genealogical relatedness does not equate to political loyalty, but genealogical discourse provides a framework by which various actors reinterpret contemporary events by collapsing history into the present to imbue clan, ethnic, and national identities with political signifcance.
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    Rethinking political crises in the Horn of Africa : local approaches to the territorial border in Ethiopia's eastern borderlands
    (2014) Matshanda, Namhla Thando
    Political crises are often more interconnected in the Horn of Africa than in other parts of the continent. The region challenges established notions of statehood and the trajectory of state formation in Africa. This paper argues that the Horn of Africa exhibits dynamic processes of state formation that differ from those found elsewhere on the continent because of the diverse meanings attached to territorial borders in the region. The paper singles out Ethiopia as a case where these meanings can be observed and examined. The paper traces how local actors in Ethiopia’s eastern borderlands along the border with Somalia perceive and operationalise the border. The main argument of the paper is that the border underlines the borderland identity of local populations and is also a source of their livelihoods. However, this formulation occasionally challenges the relationship between the borderlands and the Ethiopian state and between the latter and neighbouring countries.