Paper short abstract:

The building of the post-colonial city is ultimately related with the re-making of the past. Based on ethnographic research, this paper presents Jigjiga’s memorial landscape in the making and highlights the significance of the material consolidation of national history in a violent frontier.

Paper long abstract:

The regime change in Ethiopia in 1991 marked a radical departure from the oppressive Derg regime and promised the cultural liberation of societies in the country's peripheries. For Somalis inhabiting the eastern Ethiopian lowlands, in particular, the creation of an ethnic federal system under the successive regime opened space for the search for Somali origin and identity within Ethiopia, and for an alternative writing of histories. Somali liberation, however, did not result in the consolidation of an academic field in a "search for counter-histories" that allowed the demythologization of Ethiopian historiography and its totalizing effects for the peripheral lowlands. In contrast, it mobilized memorial politics in and around material constructions in the city of Jigjiga, the capital of the newly created Ethiopian Somali region. This paper approaches Jigjiga as a post-colonial city whose material formation is ultimately related to the re-making of the past. It demonstrates how re-writing of national history re-configured the city's memorial landscape along its infrastructural formation with twofold consequences. First, memorial politics fetishized material constructions, animating buildings and monuments and allowing dead political leaders to resurrect as embodiments of the state and its foundational violence. Second, it involved a complex interplay between oblivion and memory - destruction and construction - through which the myth of the state was reconfigured in order to persist under ethnic federal rule in Ethiopia. Based on ethnographic research, this paper highlights the significance of the material consolidation of national history in the context of violent struggles in the Ethiopian Somali frontier.