The Plight of Mixed Ethnic People in Ethiopia: Exclusion, Fragmentation, and Double Consciousness

Several millions of mixed ethnic people live in Ethiopia. They have been living there for centuries. Their presence benefited the country by creating conducive socio-political and spatial environments for an interethnic relationship among the 80 plus ethnic groups of Ethiopia. However, in the early part of the 1990s, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) led regime reorganized people and space along a single ethnolinguistic line by treating mixed ethnic identity as an erasable category. This was done using patrilineal affiliation as the only relational system via the 1995 Constitution and the Kilil system. Subsequently, people with mixed ethnic identity suffered greatly when the EPRDF’s patriarchally oriented institutional arrangements excluded them from its ethnic-based relational system. I would like to bring into focus the plight of mixed ethnic people using lived experience as an analytical tool to create awareness and to effect change. My findings show that the EPRDF’s relational system has been negatively impacting mixed ethnic people for the past three decades, by fragmenting their family unit, and by excluding mothers from their family unit. Also, this discriminatory relational system exposes mixed ethnic people to double consciousness by forcing them to investigate their own identity via a single ethnic lens. In other words, mixed ethnic people were pressured to adopt an inadequate ethnolinguistic criterion as the basis of their identity. This unrelatable socio-political system adds further harm against mixed ethnic people by denying them spatial representation, which makes them vulnerable to internal displacement and violence. In this view, the thesis calls for an inclusive socio-political and spatial system to liberate mixed ethnic people and women from ethnic and gender-based violence, discrimination, and constitutional and spatial biases.