Paper short abstract:

Heroes serve political ambitions. The different sequences of state/nation-building in Ethiopia since 1991 and the way national heroes are reinvented reveal two essential functions of these particular national figure in Ethiopia : reinventing the nation, and legitimizing one’s power at the head of the state.

Paper long abstract:

The making, disappearance or reinvention of heroes reveal, beyond the latter's particular characters, specific sequences of nation-building and state formation. The relationship heroes thus establish between state(s) and society(ies) raises, at least, three sets of questions. First, how and above all by whom some figures or groups are proclaimed, reinvented or erased as national heroes? The second question revolves around the term 'nation': which nation is at stake? By which processes nations and heroes are defining each other? A third important question to be raised concerns the circumstances in which heroes appear or disappear in national and official historiographies. Heroes' images are not only reshaped under particular historical contexts, but also manipulated in order to support and legitimate specific political, ideological, social or economic projects.

Out of the Ethiopian case, this paper connects sequences of state/nation-building on the one hand, and the (re)invention of national heroes on the other. Based above all on official empirical material (speeches, interviews, national celebrations), I propose an interpretation of the mechanisms through which heroes are being exhibited by the EPRDF, the leading party since 1991.

Complex state/nation-building strategies reveal multiform uses of past, reinvented and new national heroes under the new regime. These complete rather than exclude each other, showing how successive regimes can to reinvent heroes, and how these national figures remain malleable. The study of national heroes thus reveals the perception of the nation by officials, and how these aim at using heroes in order to legitimize their control of the state.