A History of Damot Gale Wäräda, 1941-2006

The understanding of history is not so much a matter of the power of explanation but how it is arranged in a ¿comprehensible plot¿. The historian¿s explanation means conveying the ¿plot¿ of history; it means how the narratives organize acts and events in order to render them comprehensible to readers. Substantial criticism has been raised concerning the problems of Ethiopian historiography in that it has a ¿centrist and elitist focus on the royal monarchy and the Orthodox Church¿. And it has not led to the production of a large corpus of publication on local history of the country. The political challenge to Ethiopiäs central state encompasses a contention of the unrepresentativeness of the nation¿s history which reflects only state history of the dominant military and political groups. Thus while the pages of Ethiopian history affirm the legitimacy of the state, they simultaneously evoke resistance and struggle from subaltern groups which have no space even in the margins of those history pages.