David Egan Philosophy

February in the United States is Black History Month. So for this monthly newsletter I thought I’d contribute a short essay on Zera Yacob (1599–1692), one of Africa’s greatest philosophers. I should say before I begin that Yacob is a relatively new discovery for me and learning about him is just one of the many treasures that await you on Peter Adamson’s wonderful History of Philosophy podcast.
 
Ethiopia has a remarkable history and cultural tradition that’s unknown to most outsiders. In the early 4^th century, the Kingdom of Aksum in northern Ethiopia became the second state to adopt Christianity as its official religion—after Armenia but before the Roman Empire. The 3^rd century Persian prophet Mani (whence the word “Manichean”) named Aksum as one of the four great powers of his time, alongside Rome, Persia, and China. Ethiopian royalty claimed descent from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba and the Ark of the Covenant is claimed to reside in a sacred church in Aksum to this day.
 
Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity has close ties to the Coptic church in Egypt but evolved independent of the Western church based in Rome. Those divergent paths reconverged when Portuguese Jesuits arrived in Ethiopia in the 16^th century, and collided forcefully when Emperor Susenyos I converted to Roman Catholicism in 1626. His son and successor, Fasilides, restored Orthodox Christianity as the state religion and expelled the Portuguese Jesuits, but inter-religious strife continued through the 17^th century.
 
As is so often the case, politically tempestuous times made for philosophically fruitful times.
 
Born into a poor farming family near Aksum, Zera Yacob received a traditional Ethiopian education and showed great intellectual promise. A rival falsely denounced him to the Emperor Susenyos as an anti-Catholic rebel, and Yacob had to flee for his life. Yacob escaped to a cave, where he lived as a hermit for two years before Fasilides’s rise to the throne in 1632 made it safe for Yacob to return. During his period of isolation, Yacob developed a philosophical outlook he would later publish in the Hatata (“Investigation”) of 1667.
 
Scholars have drawn parallels between Yacob and another major thinker of the 17^th century, René Descartes. Descartes begins his Meditations by withdrawing into a room where he undertakes a program of methodological doubt so as to reconstruct his beliefs upon a more secure rational foundation. Yacob did something similar in his cave. He began by calling all his beliefs into question, including his belief in God. Using a variant of the cosmological argument, by which one infers the existence of God from the necessity of a first cause, Yacob restored his confidence in God’s existence but determined to rebuild this faith on a rational foundation.
 
Reflecting on the religious conflicts of his time—in addition to rival sects of Christianity, Islam had also made inroads in the Horn of Africa—Yacob resolved to use reason to determine which aspects of these religious traditions did indeed derive from God and which were the inventions of contentious humans.
 
Consequently, Yacob challenged many of the received practices of his times on rational grounds. Polygamy can’t have been part of God’s plan, he reasoned, since God made an equal number of men and women. Likewise, God created them equal, and so, he reasoned, far ahead of his time, that men and women should be equal partners in marriage. (His own marriage seems to have been an equal and happy one.) Similarly he opposed slavery on the grounds that God would not have created all people equal if he had intended some for slavery.
 
Central to Yacob’s thought was a principle of harmony. What makes an action good or bad is the extent to which it increases or diminishes the harmony in the world.
 
Yacob’s writings first came to be known to European scholars in the 19^th century thanks to an Italian, Giusto d’Urbino, who brought the thinking of Yacob and his student Walda Heywat to wider attention. Since the early 20^th century, controversy has surrounded d’Urbino’s discovery, with some scholars describing the Hatata as a forgery perpetrated by d’Urbino himself. The controversy remains unsettled but the scholarly consensus seems to lean toward the authenticity of Yacob’s and Heywat’s writings.
 
I spent a month in Ethiopia in 2013 and visited Aksum and many other of the country’s wonders—I visited the historic cities of Bahir Dar and Gonder, spent a week hiking in the Simien mountains, and several days gaping at the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela, among other things. It’s a country like none other. Many who haven’t visited are familiar with its distinctive cuisine of stews laid out on spongy injera flatbread and with the haunting gallop of Ethiopian jazz. But there are things you can only discover by visiting. Like the food and the music, the art and architecture of Ethiopia are unlike anything anywhere else, and of an ancient pedigree. The rugged landscape is even more ancient. I kept a blog of my journey, in case you want to read more, and compiled a collection of photos.
 
During my visit, a number of Ethiopians told me proudly that theirs was a country of over eighty different ethnic groups, but that they lived in harmony, unlike neighbouring Somalia, which is composed of just one. Ten years later, there’s less cause for celebration. A combination of ambition, political overreach, and blinkered stupidity has resulted in violence across the country, nowhere more so than in the northern region of Tigray. The ancient capital of Aksum is in the heart of Tigray and was the site of a massacre in late November of 2020, in which Eritrean forces killed close to a thousand civilians. The total death toll from the conflict is in the hundreds of thousands, dwarfing casualty numbers of the more widely reported war in Ukraine.
 
If bad times make for good philosophy, Ethiopia may be due another Zera Yacob. But one could hope instead that the country might benefit from Yacob’s teaching about harmony.
 

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2. The legend of Alexander the Great spread far beyond the lands he actually conquered. Stories about Alexander were told as far afield as the Sultanate of Malacca in Southeast Asia and the Kingdom of Mali in West Africa. (source)
3. The surname “Shaw” may be an Anglicization of “Macghillesheathanaich.” (source)
4. There’s good reason to think that traditional taxi dispatchers—where you have to call a number and a human being answers and then communicates with a taxi driver to get them to go pick you up at the location you requested—are bafflingly somehow more efficient than digital platforms like Uber or Lyft. (source)
5. The first ever cricket international was played in 1844 between the United States and Canada. Canada won. (source)
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7. A “counter-enclave” is an enclave within another enclave. Currently there are two: a bit of the United Arab Emirates is situated within a bit of Oman, which is in turn situated within the larger territory of the United Arab Emirates, and likewise with a bit of the Netherlands within a bit of Belgium within a bit of the Netherlands. Until 2015, there was a similar situation between India and Bangladesh. (source)
8. In case you think German or Russian are tricky on account of their three genders, Yimas, a language from Papua New Guinea, has 11 genders. (source)
9. The Iowa State Fair has a husband-calling contest. (source)
10. The energy involved in presenting you with a single digital ad online amounts to something between 50mL and 500mL of carbon dioxide emissions. The number of digital ads presented each day is something in the range of 400 billion. (source)
11. After Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, the country with the fourth largest population of German speakers is Brazil. (source)