Cartographic Discourse and Intra-State Border Disputes: The Question of Wolkait-Tsegede in Contemporary Abyssinia/Ethiopia

Samuel Tsegai, PhD Student

One of the sticky issues at the center of the bloody war in Northern Ethiopia is a territorial contestation between the Tigray and Amhara regions. The horrific conflict has been mainly over territory, but it is also tied with history, memory, and identity. The fierce war on the ground has been preceded and accompanied by equally fierce, bitter, and partisan battles on the realm of historical memory and archive. Cartographic discourse has been a particularly potent arsenal employed in the battle of narratives. Premodern and modern Western maps of Ethiopia, itineraries, and travel narratives dating to the sixteenth century are summoned as incontrovertible historical evidence to conclusively show that the contested territories have been historically an integral part of a geographically discrete and bounded Amhara or Tigrayan ethnic homelands. Maps are not only used as supposedly objective tools of claim-making to contested territories in debates conducted among the elites. A proliferation of maps, or logo-maps, are often used by ordinary people to declare identification with and situate their affective investment in different ethno-national spaces. In this paper, I intend to interrogate the various problematic assumptions underpinning the cartographic discourses and I offer an alternative reading of maps: a) as visual artifacts whose productions are informed by the ideological persuasions and motivations of European mapmakers, technical and epistemic advances and constraints within which mapmakers operate, b) as relatively recent historical by-products of territorialized, bounded, and mapped ethnic imaginaries of the administrative powers involved in centralizing and modernizing the Ethiopian state. And c) as a map discourse that has seeped out into a general spatial understanding of land and ethnicity among the population which channel and reinforce their affinities for and allegiance to their respective ethno-nationalist identities toward specific territories

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 Presented in Session 22. Mapping Diversity from the Red Sea to the Gulf: Ethiopia, Turkey and Iran