The Other Abyssinians focuses on nineteenth century Wᾶllo, Northern Shᾶwa Amhara districts, the neighboring Tuullamma Oromo elites, and the emergence of modern Ethiopia under Menelik. Yates is interested in how Wᾶllo and Oromo political elites were incorporated into the Ethiopian state. The author develops two key concepts, the first of which is somewhat familiar. The term Hᾶbᾶsha or Hᾶbᾶshaness is a pillar for the author's thesis to ‘challenge’ the rigidity of ‘the concept of ethnicity and ethnic categories such as Oromo, Amhara, and Tigrean’ (14). The Introduction and Chapter One develop an argument about ‘the Oromo Hᾶbᾶsha’, extending Hᾶbᾶshaness — previously reserved for Semitic speakers — to Cushitic speakers, like the Oromo. Chapter Two focuses on Wᾶllo, tracing the origin of the Yãjju dynasty, and the region's rise as the political center in northern Ethiopia. Chapter Three reconstructs the rise of Shãwan Amhara districts as Menelik's power base during the last years of Tewodros, the emperor who is generally credited with beginning to centralize political authority beyond the Amhara-Tigrean regions. The chapter considers how Gobãna, a noted Oromo war leader, supported Menelik to expand his authority over the Oromo-speaking districts. It is here that the author extends Hᾶbᾶsha identity to Gobãna's Cushitic-speaking Oromo followers, thereby associating Hᾶbᾶsha with the centralization of Ethiopian political authority. Chapter Four traces Mohammed Ali's rise as the leader of Wãllo under Emperor Yohannes IV, who had him converted to Christianity with a baptismal name Mikael. Mikael later married Menelik's daughter to cement a dynastic alliance, helping the latter rise to power following Yohannes IV's death in 1889, and in the victory over the Italians at Adwa in 1896. Chapter Five narrates how Menelik centralized his power, with a new capital city, Addis Ababa, as the center of modern Ethiopia, followed by a concluding remark on Hᾶbᾶsha in Ethiopia. The foregoing issues are central to understanding Ethiopia's late nineteenth and early twentieth century history, and Yates deserves credit for engaging a very complicated set of scholarly and political debates. He gets some things right, and others wrong.

Over the first six decades of the twentieth century, scholars defined Hᾶbᾶshaness and Ethiopianness as one and the same. The term Hᾶbᾶsha defined the historical origin and identity of the Tigreans and the Amhara as descendants of Semitic-speaking immigrants from South Arabia, and the ancient northern Ethiopians. Scholars credited Tigreans as the founders of the ancient state of Aksum, and the Amhara as the founders of the so-called Solomonic Dynasty in 1270, to which all subsequent Ethiopian kings claimed ancestry. These same scholars often argued that Tigrinya and Amharic were ‘superior’ languages because of their Semitic origin and the Sabean script. Following this logic, both Aksum and the successor modern Ethiopian state, were considered Semitic outposts. Proponents of this point of view typically dismissed Cushitic-speaking Oromo and the other non-Semitic-speaking communities — that comprised the majority of Ethiopia's population — as somehow less ‘true’ or ‘authentic’ Ethiopians. It was only with Donald Levine's 1974 monograph that this perspective was refuted, replaced with the notion of the ‘Greater Ethiopia’ as a ‘multiethnic society’.Footnote ¹ Yates intervenes in this century-long debate in a surprising way, by arguing that Hᾶbᾶsha identity ought to be extended to the Oromo and the other groups in Ethiopia beyond the Amhara and the Tigreans. The author seems to believe that extending Hᾶbᾶshaness will help to unify Ethiopians by supplanting linguistic-cultural categories with imaginary political identifications.

The book's coverage is expansive and ambitious. Yet the author's methodology is fundamentally flawed when it comes to the history and usage of his critical term Hᾶbᾶsha. Scholars today consider Aksum as ‘an African civilization’, to avoid the old implication of Sabean immigrants and mixed ancestry.Footnote ² But the author relied on an open internet source to revive the idea of mixed heritage (1n1 and 26n84), then extended it to populations the category usually excluded. Moreover, in its original meaning Hᾶbᾶsha meant ‘free booter’ and ‘mercenary’ and emerged in the context of Aksumite intervention in South Arabia and ‘their impact as foreign invaders on the local people’.Footnote ³ It is of exogenous, not indigenous origin, and was an occupational, not ethnic category. Given this, most scholars of archeology and linguistics have either labeled the concept Hᾶbᾶsha ‘outdated’ or ‘obsolete’.Footnote ⁴ Even if it has any value, the latest research on the meaning of Hᾶbᾶsha within Ethiopia suggests that in contemporary usage it indicates Amhara, Tigrean, and other Ethio-Semitic speaking groups such as the Gurage and Adare; and within these communities it is associated with cultural markers such as food and clothing. A recent study suggests that when focused on cultural markers the term excludes the Oromo and many others in Ethiopia.Footnote ⁵ In order to make his argument, the author seems to have overlooked the latest work on ancient Ethiopia and has instead tried to redeploy the concept as a cultural bridge. He also overlooks the evident fact that their supposedly shared Hãbãshaness has not led to Amhara and Tigrean unity, while seemingly discounting that from the Oromo perspective, ‘Hãbãsha are… identified with a history of suppression, war, plundering… and victimization’. Footnote ⁶ It is very difficult to see what is gained by making the term even more widely spread.

Yates is more successful with his second major concept, which considers the important role played by supposed ‘others’ in the history of Ethiopian state centralization. The author demonstrates how both Mikael and Gobᾶna ‘were considered as outsiders’ despite their elevated title of Ras, while imperial authorities constructed the Oromo as ‘the ultimate “other”’ (2 and 13). Yates pinpoints the foundational passage in Fetha Nᾶgᾶst from which the imperial authorities drew their justification for drawing distinctions between the state's diverse peoples: ‘the king you appoint must be one of your brethren’ (37). The Fetha Nᾶgᾶst along with the Glory of the Kings were the documentary basis for dividing the peoples of Ethiopia into those entitled for power and ‘alien’ others (38). Thus the medieval Christian Zagwe were labeled as usurpers just as were the nineteenth century Christian Yᾶjju. This theme of othering could have been developed beyond Tewedros's era for Menelik's Ethiopia. Evidence for this comes from Hãbtã-Giyorgis: in 1909 the minister of war contrasted Shãwan Amhara or ‘true Ethiopians’ with people in the conquered regions of the south, Tigray, Gojjam, and Gondar.

The history and legacy of othering in Ethiopia during the nineteenth century is usefully applicable in postcolonial Africa, where authoritarian elites have often created a category of ‘other’ in order to consolidate their power and privilege. We can cite numerous examples: in Sudan, where the othering process began first as the north versus the south and then between so-called ‘Arabs’ and non-Arabs;Footnote ⁷ or in Zambia, where the founding president and long retired Kenneth Kaunda was listed as a non-citizen illegal alien marked for deportation;Footnote ⁸ to the Ivory Coast, where the loser of the 2010 presidential contest, Laurent Gbagbo, labeled the winner, Alessane Ouattara, a non-Ivorian and refused to concede and transfer power.Footnote ⁹ Yates successfully demonstrates how othering has been a tool of governance well before the postcolonial era. Rather than his effort to extend the original meaning of Hᾶbᾶsha linked to plundering and violence, and as such considered outmoded, into a pan-Ethiopian identity, his focus on ‘othering’ as a tool of governance is widely useful and important. But the book's contribution lies in the utility of applying the Ethiopian theme of othering to broader African historical studies.