Misplaced Pages

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This is an archive of past discussions about Habesha peoples. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Definitions of Term

Taking this to talk to avoid an edit war. I shortened the lead paragraph today by removing the phrase "but in a broader contemporary sense includes all Ethiopian-Eritrean ethnic groups." I did this because the claim was not substantiated by the sources cited. SHIELD-1.0 then undid the change alleging that I violated a rule & cherry-picked sources. This seems unnecessarily antagonistic: There was certainly no violation of rules, & I didn't cherry pick sources: I examined the sources that previous writers had cited, & removed none of them. The edit summary reads: 'Deletion of sourced pertinent information in this manner is unacceptable and is in violation of Misplaced Pages rules POV-pushing via the use of cherry-picked sources.' I'm moving the discussion here to avoid edit warring. SHIELD-1.0: The three cited sources are:

1. Sarah Moore Oliphant's 2015 doctoral dissertation "The Impact of Social Networks on the Immigration Experience of Ethiopian Women"
2. Jonathan Miran's Red Sea Citizens
3. Messay Kebede's article "Eurocentrism and Ethiopian Historiography: Deconstructing Semitization" from the inaugural issue of the International Journal of Ethiopian Studies

I didn't add any of these sources & I've removed nothing. I can't find anything in any of these three sources that justifies this usage of the term. I don't have an ideological bone to pick here: I just think that if the term is used to apply to Ethiopians & Eritreans who speak non-Afro-Asiatic languages, the evidence for it doesn't come from these sources. What are you finding in them that I'm missing? Pathawi (talk) 06:53, 6 June 2020 (UTC)

Looking at previous discussions, I'm now seeing reference to Dr. Habesha Gaaffaa-Geeska Yäafrika's article "What do you mean by Habesha?" (published on Medium) which actually does substantiate this usage. It would be a more appropriate citation. Again: I have no axe to grind, here, with regard to the usage of the term itself. My concern is with citations that don't substantiate the claims for which they are adduced. Pathawi (talk) 07:00, 6 June 2020 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages is not a tool for propaganda and most mainstream sources refer to the Amhara, Tigrayan and Gurage as Habesha, not all inhabitants of Eritrea or Ethiopia. Neither does the image of the Ethiopian empire 1954 state that these are the native borders of the Habesha people. Last but not least the population estimate is based on the Eritrean and Ethiopian population estimates, which again includes many ethnic groups apart from Habesha.

Here is a great source that describes the meaning of Habesha encompassing the Christian highlanders such as Amhara, Tigray and Gurage --AlaskaLava (talk) 13:28, 6 June 2020 (UTC)

Google Books links drive me crazy: They so often just don't work (what's visible of book X to you in your country may not be visible to me), & they don't allow one to read the whole book. I was able to check the book itself, & it looks like this is the citation in question:

Prunier, Gérard and Éloi Ficquet, eds. Understanding Contemporary Ethiopia: Monarchy, Revolution and the Legacy of Meles Zenawi. London: Hurst & Company, 2015. pp. 17–23.

The description given there roughly matches my previous understanding of the term. I want to reiterate that I'm not advocating for one particular usage of the term "Habesha" (I know the term thru Arabic, & it seems entirely likely to me that Arabic usage in the Sudan differs from English usage in talking about Ethiopia & Eritrea), but simply that the claim for a broader usage was not supported by the sources cited. Obviously, as AlaskaLava says, Misplaced Pages isn't an appropriate forum for propaganda, but if there are multiple established usages it wouldn't be inappropriate to note this variation. However, this needs good citation, & the previous cited sources did not—as best I can tell—actually support this broader usage. Pathawi (talk) 15:33, 6 June 2020 (UTC)

@Pathawi: As I mentioned in previous discussions, Yäafrika's article is self-published. Later on I found out that the ostensible publisher, "Habesha Union", is also the name of blocked user Habesha Union (talk · contribs). (See Misplaced Pages:Sockpuppet investigations/Hoaeter/Archive#28 April 2020) This edit pattern has been going on for a while, and probably longer than that account's creation. The thing is, I am certain that at least one of the (reliable) sources did back up the assertion that, at least for some, "Habesha" is more-or-less synonymous with "Ethiopian" or "Eritrean." However, the previous editor(s) have not done themselves any favors by misattributing a given sentence to the wrong source (which has happened time and again) and now I can't remember in which source I read it. I'll just say that it's an attested usage, and if/when we can figure out the right source, it ought to be included. (I've said before that I have no problem with mentioning this interpretation of "Habesha", my problem is with the way that sources have been misattributed, or outright fabricated, along with other collateral damage like messy page moves.) -- Gyrofrog (talk) 15:49, 6 June 2020 (UTC)

I am wondering if/how to move forward where the upkeep of this article is concerned. In the past, several editors (and some associated sockpuppet accounts) who have been most actively involved with editing this article (from various points-of-view) have all found themselves blocked or topic-banned; see 2017 WP:ANI discussion. Other editors trying to mediate or mitigate have found themselves exasperated and/or burned out by their involvement in this topic area (again, see ANI discussion). One of the things that came out of that ANI discussion was a proposed discretionary sanction for all Horn of Africa-related pages. That seems rather severe, and repeat sockpuppeteers aren't interested in abiding by the rules anyway. All I know for sure, right now, is that about two days elapsed after this article's page protection expired, and we were right back to the old flareups that led to the protection. I don't think that's the way forward, in any case. -- Gyrofrog (talk) 16:16, 7 June 2020 (UTC)