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"The earlier Ethiopians used zämänawinnät to denote western civilization and ‘they meant something that time brings and something that is transient. In so saying, they implied that they were not backward; rather, they were temporarily pushed back by a civilization that time brought’."

— Messay Kebede

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More quotes by Messay Kebede

"The student revolutionaries of the 1970s were repeating the same error the first intellectuals made: they considered Ethiopia ‘as a society which must be destroyed and built anew’."

"None of the Ethiopian intellectuals took up ‘renovating Ethiopian traditional values’ and as a result ‘modernization became Westernization’."

"Modernization in Ethiopian appears to be a movement that was conceptualized ‘in terms of conflict between tradition and modernity, not in terms of modernity going in for the revival and enhancement of tradition’.

"The students were driven into an ideological radicalism that wished to make Ethiopia the chosen land of Marxism-Leninism, much like their forefathers had made Ethiopia the chosen land of Christianity."

"The introduction of western education was problematic as it declared that ‘other countries can become civilized only when they follow Europeans as their example’. The cyclical understanding of time and history was replaced by one that suggested that time was linear, leading to European civilization as the endgoal."

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Messay Kebede (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.