Ethiopianism in Africa

The collection of ideas known as Ethiopianism developed in the 1700s by Anglophone diasporic Africans in Britain and North America and promoted the idea that Ethiopia—equated with all Africa—not only had a glorious past, but was promised a glorious future if Africans united under God. These themes became the subject of the writing of most black trans-Atlantic intellectuals of the 1800s, including Alexander Crummell and Edward Wilmot Blyden, and had far-reaching effects in a number of African societies south of the Sahara. Ethiopianism helped to lay much of the groundwork for many movements such as the spread of an “African” identity, the growth of African-focused history, the promotion of African-run educational institutions, the exploration and popularization of “African” cultural customs, the rise of African nationalisms and anti-colonialism, the creation of the Pan-African Movement, and the beginning of a separatist church movement. The influence of these ideas reached its peak in Africa from the 1870s to the 1920s, and made an undeniably important impact on the growth of African Christianity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This chapter explores the influence of Ethiopianism on education, politics, and religious and cultural movements in Africa through examining the ideas and movements of some of its key intellectual, religious, and political figures.