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Ethiopia: Keeping Her Biblical Name Intact

The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba: George Frideric Handel

Related Article: How A Myth Built Ethiopia - The Story of the Queen of Sheba

This is the last of my Beshir posts - the main one being here:

A Critique of the Film Faya Day by Jessica Beshir

This is the last of my articles on Faya Dayi, which is nominated for  the Documentary Film feature at the 2022 Oscars.

Faya Dayi nonetheless, will not win. It is too specific, too arcane, and too controversial - a film about drugs, with special effects and eulogies? Also, the Ethiopia of PM Abiy, who himself is of part Oromo - the ethnicity of Faya Dayi's protagonists - is involved  in the betterment of these Oromo people, as he is for all of Ethiopia. And Beshir never acknowledges this historical moment of "country building," remaining an ethnic secessionist throughout. 

The Oromo are part of Ethiopia, as PM Abiy states clearly his Prosperity Party. And the majority of Oromo associate themselves with the greater Ethiopia, unlike Beshir, as she aligns herself the America-based, friction-igniting, anti-Ethiopia Oromo community, and taking example from the Black Lives Matter, disruptive, movement, all the while residing in her New York apartment, thousands of miles away from these Oromo youth whom she used for her "documentary" film. 

I end this following article, Ethiopia: Keeping her Biblical Name Intact,  with "Ethiopia is for all Ethiopians. Once again, this Biblical country keeps her name in tact, and holds her people together in peace."

Here's why.

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Khat is the main protagonist in Jessica Beshir’s film Faya Dayi. This plant, chewed for its mild euphoric effect, leads and guides the direction of the film. But it is a protagonist which camouflages the truth of these Harari-Oromo youth of southern Ethiopia. And Faya Dayi is now a contender for the Oscars, shortlisted in the “Documentary Feature” category.

Beshir hides from us, the viewers, the content and reality of her film behind the stylistic cinematic metaphor of khat’s trance, and takes us for a trip. Her film, which appears at face value to be about the devastations that khat causes these southern Ethiopian communities, is in fact a film with a political agenda camouflaged by khat, and which hooks the film’s audience into its spell.

Beshir plays with the naivete of the average documentary film audience, who is primarily from a Western county, and who has little information on the socio-political landscape of Ethiopia. 

It is difficult to keep up with the times, and with the global times. And infinitely more difficult to understand all the nuances, back stories, and other stories to thread together the truth of the information we receive in our Brave New World.

Beshir lives New York, plotting her next film against Ethiopia, and America, with and her false, distant, allegiance to the Oromo of Ethiopia. She is no friend of Ethiopia, nor of the West.

 

One prominent posting on her Facebook page has a Go Fund Me publicity for Brown Girls Doc Mafia (#GOFUNDBGDM),, whose website states:

 

Brown Girls Doc Mafia…fight[s]  inequality by building community and sharing resources, nourishing our creative brilliance, demanding access and visibility in creative and professional environments, enriching our community with the knowledge to sustain ourselves financially, and by cutting through oppressive industry structures to advocate for our members…[A]nd…challenges the often marginalizing norms of the documentary field.

 

 

 

The background image is of an unidentified (and unidentifiable) city, which the Black Lives Matter organizers used  in their May 2020 #DefundThePolice campaign. The image with its logo has gone viral, with others, like the BGDM adding their own twist. In fact, BLM’s website makes it easy to download the right size for the preferred social media posting. The well-manicured hand of a black woman holds a cardboard make-shift BLM sign, and two men are on their cellphones, busy following the latest #BLM. These are no revolutionaries.

 

BLM’s Global Network (a separate but associated organization) Linked In page informs us:

 

“We are unabashedly black radical abolitionists who understand that the world we live in isn’t the world that has to be.”

 

One other  the websites where this image is posted, Canada’s LGBTQ2+ The ArQives, posted this image on June 2020, indicating that the posters were for the George Floyd marches.:

 

We stand in solidarity with those protesting the police murder of George Floyd, anti-Black police brutality, and everyday state violence against Black, Indigenous people and all people of colour…[W]e call on our community to protest current instances of state violence and anti-Black racism. #BlackLivesMatter.

 

But no matter the location. #BlackLivesMatter is a global cause. And Oromo Lives Matter. cause.

 

A closer inspection of the image shows the back of a protester's hoodie with a Malcolm X image, and his words “A man who stands for nothing will fall for anything.” 

 

 

“Just as guerrilla warfare is prevailing in Asia and in parts of Africa and in parts of Latin America, you've got to be mighty naive, or you've got to play the black man cheap, if you don't think some day he's going to wake up and find that it's got to be the ballot or the bullet.” Malcolm X, from his “Ballot or Bullet” speech in 1964

 

Also posted at Beshir’s Facebook page, “Justice for George” is demanded by a corn-rowed rebel, whose mask-strapped face will not deter the riot police’s tear gas. Or is the the invisible virus she’s afraid of? The image is "a protestor in Milan, Italy" according to the entertainment Extra TV. Why not? Justice is global.

 

 

 

But it not just apparently peaceful protests, with make-shift cardboard signs that Beshir is showing us, but also burning buildings.

 

Fist-raised rioters stand with an Arby’s restaurant burning in the background. A google image searched shows that this image is from various media reports of a Minnesota BLM protest in 2020.

 

The CNN website that posted this image  describes it as:

 

Protestors demonstrate outside a burning fast food restaurant in Minneapolis on May 29 [2020]. 

 

 

Further images on Beshir’s Facebook page show negroid men with naked torsos.

 

One has his face is covered with chain “jewelry,” while the other stands before a red smoke/cloud, which looks like the aftermath of a fire. Slavery, and revolt of the slave, or at least of the black man, appear to be the metaphorical premise behind these images.

 

 

 

The photographer's'biography says:

 

…[Okobe - which is apparently the working name  of Black-Spanish photographer Sergio Aparicio] work explores many themes such as the dystopia between race, racial politics, and identity through capturing the reflection of melanin to translate this social dilemma to his artworks.

 

These images are actually not the all-out revolutionary images that Beshir’s Facebook page implies. They are staged fashion/photography shoots by Black Spanish  photographer Sergio Aparicido, who goes by a Ghanaian name Okobe, but who appears to make his living as a fashion photographer using black bodies, and with an S&M and racial subtext. He is not capturing images of protests going up in flames, he is staging them.

 

And his Facebook page has a series of these images.

 

It is no accident that Beshir is drawn to these images. They elucidate Beshir’s political and social views - Free Oromia. And it is no accident that Beshir attracted Black activist Hollywood filmmaker John Ridley, who interviewed Beshir on Faya Dayi. Ridley is best known for his 2013 screenplay for the film 12 Years a Slave, for which he was also executive producer. He won a "Best Writing, Adapted Screenplay" Oscar for it.

 

As it happens, in 2013, I wrote and article on my Reclaiming Beauty website about this film, Depicting Slavery as a Horror Show, about “a freed slave, who gets kidnapped and sold back as a slave.”

 

In the article, I quote another reviewer of the film, and his harsh critique:

 

For McQueen [the director of the film], cruelty is the juicy-arty part; it continues the filmmaker’s interest in sado-masochistic display, highlighted in his previous features Hunger and Shame. Brutality is McQueen’s forte. As with his fine-arts background, McQueen’s films resemble museum installations: the stories are always abstracted into a series of shocking, unsettling events. With Northup (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor), McQueen chronicles the conscious sufferance of unrelenting physical and psychological pain....

 

The sado-masochists are white slave owners.

 

I wrote my  reactions to this film:

 

I closed my eyes when the black freed slave, who was later kidnapped, was caught, hanged and lynched.

 

I tried to find a shot of this scene, but it is available nowhere on the internet. It is too terrible to view, as the director and his many aides well knew. I was caught in those few seconds of horror. Perhaps it is a good thing that I saw it (I think I was meant to see it), in order to realize with anger what a disgusting human being this director is, and how pathetic people are to allow themselves to be manipulated by him not just in this film, but in other guilt-filled and exaggerated, and often false, depictions of the lives of blacks as slaves.

 

But I did find the scene for this article. Perhaps the horror was too much to contemplate then, and I stopped my search, or used less extreme words.

 

Screenshot of hanging, then lynching, of hanged freed slave, from Film 12 Years a Slave

 

This all reveals itself in during an interview Beshir had with Black activist Hollywood filmmaker John Ridley, who is best known for his 2013 screenplay for the film 12 Years a Slave, for which he was also executive producer. He won a "Best Writing, Adapted Screenplay" Oscar for it.

 

Ridley goes through the requisitory questions on Faya Dayi during his interview with Beshir: “Why did you make this film? How did you make this film?” But the most revealing part of the interview occurs when Ridley asks Beshir:

 

One of the things and I want to talk…a a couple of technical things in this film that are really particular. This is a monochromatic film extraordinary…a black and white film…again I love that choice. There's something about monochrome that is it just really actually in my opinion focuses one on on story, on elements and all of those things

 

There's something interesting though that you'd said about Harar the city. It's a very colorful place. It's one of the most colorful places you'll ever see in the world. It bursts with color. [And] yet you choose to make a monochromatic film. 

 

Beshir replies describing her aesthetic choices, before she comes to the crunch of the matter, and the purpose of her film when she talks of revolt of the southern Ethiopia Oromo youth, the Queerroo:

 

Yes Harar is very colorful…That was not the story that I was trying…to tell.  The story comes with a lot of melancholy. 

 

To see what these youth were going through in their lives. And you know people making very tough decisions at a very young age. You know the kid like Muhammad.  You know, when I met him he was only 12 years old and now you know he was 14 and he was already making decisions to go in the desert where a lot of them end up getting used for for organ trafficking.

 

Continues Beshir:

 

Or the Queerroo youth, the Oromo youth, they call them Queerroo…that truly sacrifice so much in order to bring about change. And and that's when the the former prime minister resigned and we got the new one. And they still are feeling like their their fight was not uh is not yet um they haven't found an answer back from from the government [for] what they're looking for.

 

So all of all of these things I feel like the black and white you know was holding it better you know, that sense of of true melancholia that people are feeling at this moment in time, you know.

 

Subtly, and with impassioned articulation, Beshir suggests that revolution is necessary, and even good, to exact change for the Oromo. And it is these youth, many teenaged-boys, these Queerroo rebels, who can be the avant-garde. The Oromo are the Blacks Americans of Ethiopia, and the Queerroo should come to their rescue with their BLM-type movement.

 

What Beshir never discusses is that the Ethiopia of the last twenty years, under the harsh yoke of various socialist and communist regimes, attacked all ethnicities. And the reality is that some, such as the Amhara, received the harder edge of the stick. If she truly wishes to discuss the history of the Oromo, then one aspect of Ethiopia’s history she cannot avoid is that the Oromo still have their land, and their language, and their culture. If the pre-Communist Ethiopian rulers, the predominantly Amhara Emperors, were indeed so malignant, then why didn’t they destroy the Oromo? 

 

An article by Dr. Girma Berhanu, a professor and researcher at the University of Gothenberg in Sweden, and a writer at the Ethiopian online paper Borkena,  describes of this Queerroo as a violent subdivision of Oromo youth.

 

He writes that the Queerroo transformed 

 

from a peaceful non-violent political movement calling for achievement of a democratic country, whereby no citizen will continue being marginalized and disregarded, into the now overwhelmingly radicalized rampaging extreme ethnocentric anarchist mobs.

 

Girma Berhanu continues in another article, quoting a report from an associate:

 

Hundreds…killed during a recent attack on mostly non-Oromos in the Oromo region…“This land is Oromo land,” they chanted…Thousands were injured and most of the victims are members of the Amhara, Gurage etc. ethnic groups. The reports which just arrived, detail horrible killings, looting and other violence targeting non Oromos.

 

And more on the reaction of a friend who lived through some of this:

 

In July 2020, a disheartened friend of mine wrote to me:

 

I’m puzzled and perplexed by what is happening at home in Ethiopia. The Oromo youth is simply pilling down the onion of Oromo civility. Pumped with empty bravado and false pretext history for decades since the days of the Derg regime*, the youth has turned out to be wild, partial, ethnocentric, and without any humane empathy in them. To this youth Ethiopia is synonymous to Amhara. Even some close friends have cut connections with me because of my stand on united Ethiopia. I’m not sure how to cure and rekindle sense of unity in the minds of this furious and fiery Oromo youth. 

Various new forms of destabilization narratives, and hate speech openly uttered by the political elites as well as some sections of groups of the Queerroo, have been repeatedly documented. Most of those speeches incite hatred and conflicts, apparently intended to destroy the peacefully woven inter-ethnic relationships prevailing in the country. These hate speeches have very recently resulted in killings of hundreds up to thousands of civilians, mostly non-Oromos in the Oromo region. Thousands were injured and most of the victims are members of the Amhara, Gurage etc. ethnic groups. The reports which are still arriving detail horrible killings, looting and other violence. The attacks were driven by a misguided urge to fully get rid of non-Oromos from the entire region.  Schools, hospitals, business centers, places of worship and public facilities were attacked and destroyed, and houses and villages burned down. According to local reports, there were incidents whereby the local security forces collaborated with the killers.

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[*Derg means 'committee' or 'council' in an old Ethiopic language (Geez). Formed after the1974 revolution, its official name was the Coordinating Committee of the Armed Forces, Police, and Territorial Army. Later they renamed it Provisional Military Administrative Council. - source]

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But truth comes out in history books. The Amhara, the leading ethnic group throughout most of Ethiopia’s history, never excluded the Oromo through malevolence. Instead, they included them in their “Greater Ethiopia” sphere, where the Ethiopian world view was to keep these different peoples, including the Oromo, in their own lands, where they maintained their cultures and their languages, under the umbrella, and protection, of a Greater Ethiopia.. 

 

These years of devastation and oppressive regimes that Beshir talks about occurred mostly during the “Derg” ruled years, and consequent decades of social/communist rule, where there was a general devastation of all Ethiopians.

 

Ridley, responding to Beshir’s black and white filming aesthetic (“...I feel like the black and white you know was holding it better…, that sense of of true melancholia that [the Oromo] people are feeling at this moment in time, you know.”), and tuning in on her political perspective, her agenda, replies:

 

Oh I absolutely know. And one of the things that I really appreciate about this film, you talk about the young men and just their internal monologs as they talk about leaving the country[...] You know we call them over here… the coyotes. People who's going to get you across the border and things like that. 

 

And these are kids you know they're about the age of our sons and to to hear them having to make these choices and feel like that's the only choice they could make. 

 

This was a film that was so beautiful and yet in the moments where you just feel these decisions and it's like the only decision they could make. 

 

Not about you know where am I going to go within this country to do things you know the things that young normal people would make that you would hope. Am I going to go to college. Am I going to get a job. Am I going to travel. 

 

That was one of the things that was really impactful to me was that juxtaposition of this beauty with these very difficult choices and then really thinking about how does that, how do I contextualize that in my own life. What would I think my kid had to say you know “I’ve got to flee this country.” It was beautiful. It was powerful.

 

The other thing that really struck me…It’s one thing to be out in the fields and there is light…There are any number of moments that are in the dark where you’re filming things in the dark. You know it’s just difficult to film in the dark, and even more so you really didn’t have a crew. You’re pretty much by yourself out there.

 

The poor Queerroo, with such international associations - the BLM, the Mexican Coyote-handled “immigrants.” Filed alongside all the oppressed of the world, with their elite Global strategists, such as Beshir, working hard, apparently on their behalf. 

 

I write in a recent article, published at various Ethiopian online papers:

 

On a practical level, something which Beshir never discusses, if she were to be of any help to these Oromo youth, on whose backs she made this film, her obligation is to provide them with educational and drug treatment centers: no more flickers on a cinema screen, but real, on the ground, centers of rehabilitation. 

 

PM Abiy has been doing this for the past couple of years: helping the Oromo.

 

If Beshir were really up to it, and not in her mental cinematic mood, which apparently isn’t going away any time soon, she would contact these local Oromo centers, and why not, PM Abiy himself, to go ahead with putting her money where her mouth is. 

 

Instead, Beshir lives in her smart Brooklyn apartment, plotting her next film against Ethiopia through various America-based Oromo organizations,, and with her false, distant, allegiance to the true Oromo of Ethiopia.

 

Half Oromo/Half Amhara Prime Minster of Ethiopia, Abiy Ahmed Ali, helping the Oromo [Source]

 

Beshir replies to Ridley’s praise:

 

You know I have to say that this film truly you know now in retrospect it was an invitation for life to for me, an invitation to live. What I have been wanting to do for for so long…Of course it was never easy never, nothing was ever easy, but that was, those were the places where I felt in complete peace and and [it] gave me so much joy…so you know that was a  beautiful journey for me… and just framing something was like healing, the shooting, it was part of that healing, you know.

 

Ridley ends the eulogizing interview:

 

Yeah, there was a quote that you gave, and to me it summed up how you were able to make this extraordinary film, and that was “Filming it was a way to respond to what was moving me…” 

 

And I will be honest, this is really one of the most moving films, not just documentaries, one of the most moving films, one of the most meditative films, that I’ve seen in quite a while…[And] as somebody who’s been doing this for a while I feel, and I mean this, very renewed, very energized to go out and do the things that I want to do and people will flow to it, I really believe that. Jessica, the film is remarkable. And I can’t thank you enough for joining us and sharing your story…And I will say I’m so excited to see whatever it is you’re going to do next…

 

Oromo secession is pushed by Oromo radicals, of which Beshir is a part. The majority of Oromo have no desire to separate from Ethiopia, and want to be part of Ethiopia. They know that without Ethiopia, there would be no Oromo, as has been their  historical reality.

 

This globalist elite, and their intricate, exclusive, support network, eventually (always) have their underground schemes exposed. And Beshir, interviews with Hollywood activist filmmakers aside, hardly has a “follow up” film to further exploit these Oromo youth. Weakened radicals and secessionist groups no longer hold the attention of the world, nor even of the Oromo. And Ethiopia is now in another chapter of her history, where a Prime Minister is delivering the promises that he made for his reelection with his his “Prosperity Party,” and redeeming his  2019 Nobel Prize win for Peace, for a peaceful and united Ethiopia. The bill states:

 

“The commission’s establishment will pave the way for national consensus and keep the integrity of the country,” the bill states.

 

PM Abiy’s message to Ethiopia, in this time of precarious peace is that:

“National reconciliation...will enable us to maintain our unity…[I]t's a given that Ethiopia will benefit from reconciliation”

Ethiopia is for all Ethiopians. Once again, this Biblical country keeps her name in tact, and holds her people together in peace.