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This essay provides a comparative sketch of the political history of Ethiopia and Congo since the sixteenth century. It argues that Congo and Ethiopia, despite similar political characteristics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, had, by the late-nineteenth century, evolved in opposite directions. On the eve of colonialism, Congo was a shadow of its former self, fragmented by centuries of transoceanic slave trade. Ethiopia, on the other hand, entered the twentieth century not just unscathed by the slave trade, but rather, having been strengthened by it. The divergence between the two kingdoms lay in their unique positions within the oceanic slave trade. Before the sixteenth century the servile population of Congo, besides being relatively insignificant, was made up of foreign-born war captives. Overwhelmed by external powers and internally divided and weakened, Congo would become a major victim of the transatlantic slave trade in the long-term. Ethiopia, by contrast, not only protected its Christian subjects from the Indo-Mediterranean slave trade, both before and after the sixteenth century, but its rulers also used resources from the peripheral slave trade to further bolster centralization. Thus, while Congo, in its fragments, succumbed to the European scramble for Africa with little organized resistance, Ethiopia began the twentieth century in a state of anticolonial defiance and with a centralist political tradition akin to authoritarianism.1
Introduction
Africa in the sixteenth century consisted of two significant powers: the Bantu kingdom of Congo and the Solomonic empire of Ethiopia. The historic Congo kingdom, often referred to as Old Kongo, encompassed the coastal territory and its immediate hinterlands between what is now northern Angola and the northern shores of the Zaire River. In the 1880s, as a private real estate of King Leopold II, Congo's territorial extent conflated by a multifold, covering much of present-day Central Africa. Sixteenth-century Ethiopia, or historic Abyssinia, sprawled from the Red Sea in the north to the valley of the Awash River in the south. By the late-nineteenth century, even as it lost Eritrea to Italian colonialism, Ethiopia too had almost doubled up in size as a result of Emperor Menilek's imperial expansion.
Unlike their abrupt physical transformations, Ethiopia and Congo followed a protracted and divergent path in their modern-day political evolutions. During the sixteenth century both kingdoms had...