Marie Huber **Developing Heritage – Developing Countries**

# **Africa in Global History**

Edited by Joël Glasman, Omar Gueye, Alexander Keese and Christine Whyte

Advisory Board:

Joe Alie, Felicitas Becker, William Gervase Clarence-Smith, Lynda Day, Scholastique Diazinga, Andreas Eckert, Babacar Fall, Toyin Falola, Matt Graham, Emma Hunter, Erin Jessee, Isabella Kentridge, Colleen Kriger, Kristin Mann, Patrick Manning, Conceição Neto, Vanessa S. Oliveira, Lorelle Semley, Ibrahim Sundiata

# **Volume 1**

# Marie Huber **Developing Heritage – Developing Countries**

Ethiopian Nation-Building and the Origins of UNESCO World Heritage, 1960–1980

Published with the kind support of the Gerda Henkel Foundation, Düsseldorf.

The publication of this work was supported by the Open Access Publication Fund of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

ISBN: 978-3-11-068023-2 eBook ISBN (PDF): 978-3-11-068101-7 eBook ISBN (EPUB): 978-3-11-068109-3 ISSN 2628-1767 DOI https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110681017

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For details go to https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

#### **Library of Congress Control Number:<PHONE_NUMBER>**

**Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek** The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

© 2021 Marie Huber, published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston The book is published open access at www.degruyter.com. Cover image: Pavilion of Ethiopia at Expo '67 © Benjamin News, 1967. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck

www.degruyter.com

# Acknowledgements

My name is on the cover of this book; it probably took me about as long as I required to finish it in order to also believe in my authorship. Celebrating one's achievements – I have learned – is just as much a part of professional growth as being open to reflection and criticism, or staying humble. This book being the revised version of my dissertation manuscript, the journey of its creation was long, took place against some odds, and through and through was interwoven with my private life. It is important to me to write this at the very beginning of my book, to contribute to a more honest, healthy and equal work environment in the academic field – one where excellence is measured as rigorously and as objectively as possible, while at the same time acknowledging that research is conducted and written down by humans in varied life circumstances, which is a beautiful and important fact, and the only way to bring forward the questions that matter.

In conclusion of my eight-year journey of preparing, researching, writing and revising for this book, being now able to write down the names of those who supported me throughout is easily the single most moving and rewarding moment of it. I want to start with thanking Sandrine Kott, who encouraged me when I most needed it, and who convinced me to pursue this project. Likewise, I want to thank Andreas Eckert, who gave me and my ideas an academic home at the Humboldt University in Berlin and helped me steer the project through some stormy waters. A special thank you also goes to Kiran Patel, who took the time – over his Christmas break nonetheless – to provide in-depth comments on and guidance for my first ever research proposal, helping me to bring it up to a competitive standard. Alexander Keese and Heike Wieters have mentored me on my career path with the kindness and the insights of senior colleagues that I believe are truly indispensable for any junior scholar. I want to thank Baz Lecoq, who allowed me to create courses out of my research work, and my students for a teaching experience that was truly fruitful to my research. Finding colleagues to discuss life, research and everything in-between meant a lot to me: Camille Louise Pellerin, Clara Rellensmann, Alexander Meckelburg, Dirk Bustorf, Stephanie Lämmert, Kerstin Stubenvoll, Laetitia Lenel, Dörte Lerp, Samuel Coghe, Sarah Bellows-Blakely, Daniel Tödt, Marcia Schenk, Christoph Kalter, Peter Lambertz and Lennart Bollliger. I consider myself lucky to know and have worked alongside you.

Of all the conferences and workshops I attended in relation to my research, two stand out in particular, one on the "Global History of Development" (2017), organised by Iris Borowy at Shanghai University, and one on "Heritage on a

OpenAccess. © 2021 Marie Huber, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110681017-001

Global Scale" (2017) organised by Andrea Rehling at the Institute of European History in Mainz. Both times, the discussions helped mature the ideas I presented in a chapter. To compose research insights into good quality academic writing is often a rather solitary, time-consuming undertaking. However, the final version of this book is also the work of helpful editors and commenters, especially Matthias Huber, Christine Whyte and Jan-David Miemitz. I also would like to thank all editors of the "Africa in Global History" series and the staff at De Gruyter, especially Rabea Rittgerodt and Jana Fritsche for their trust and support, and for making my research work a part of this cutting-edge, exciting new series. I could not have wished for a better place to publish my first book.

The decision to investigate the Ethiopian case came about after the project had already been in development for about two years. Without the generous and uncomplicated funding of the Gerda-Henkel-Foundation, I could have never followed through with this vision. During my two weeks as a visiting scholar at the Hiob Ludolf Centre for Ethiopian Studies at the Universität Hamburg, I was warmly welcomed into the community of Ethiopian Studies, a first and important step towards understanding Ethiopia past and present, to a degree adequate enough to produce a credible case study. A special thanks goes towards Andreas Wetter and his Amharic classes. The larger part of the research was conducted abroad, and I am very grateful for the archives and institutions which hosted me. The staff of the UNESCO archives division in Paris, in particular Adele Torrance, provided much help and insights, as did the conversation with Mechthild Rössler, director of the World Heritage Center. I appreciate very much the time she made in her busy schedule to talk to a young and inexperienced scholar. Without the support of the Centre français des études éthiopienne in Addis Ababa, I doubt my time in Ethiopia would have been nearly as productive and meaningful. I want to thank the staff and the other visiting scholars for practical support, great discussions and wonderful company: David Ambrosetti, Guillaume Blanc, Jean-Renaud Boisserie and Marco di Nunzio. While in Ethiopia, Benno Boer of the UNESCO regional office generously shared his time and resources to support my project and enabled an invaluable insight into UN-ESCO's work to me. On the more practical side, I have the école élémentaire Leonardo Da Vinci in Fontainebleau and the German Embassy School in Addis Ababa to thank for hosting my daughter during my research stays. I also want to thank Michael Mammo, who organised all my domestic travel in Ethiopia, and who became a dear friend, and Mekonnen, our trusted driver in Addis Ababa, without whom I could not have navigated the school hours and a fulltime research workload.

Friends and family come last, but of course not least. Eirik Høyer Leivestad was a worthy intellectual sparring partner in preparation for my defense. My parents have been relentless supporters, morally, financially, practically – having this kind of acknowledgment in your life is invaluable. Providing my children with a role model and a breadwinner has been among the strongest, most resilient motivations for my work, but they also brought me joy when things didn't go as planned and have kept me on my toes and made sure I took required time off. No words can adequately caption the role my husband had in my success, but I will try anyway: my most ardent supporter, editor, cook, comforter, critic, cheerleader and coach – my achievements would not have been possible if it wasn't for your companionship at every step of the way.

# Contents

#### List of Abbreviations XIII

#### Introduction 1

## Destination Ethiopia: Heritage sites for tourism development 21 Tourism planning in Ethiopia 21 UN-sponsored tourism planning for developing countries in the 1960s 24 Surveying Ethiopia's natural and cultural heritage 26 Doing cultural tourism in Ethiopia 35 Turning the heritage sites into destinations 39 Consulting and the tourist gaze: UNESCO's cultural tourism development projects 43 Tourism as vehicle of heritage-making 52

#### Heritage as image of the nation 56

Establishing images of Ethiopian exceptionalism during the 1960s and 1970s 56 The foreign image of Ethiopia 63 Expatriate hobby-archaeologists 67 Historicising the national territory 73 Heritage and the claim to Greater Ethiopia 78 Heritage and territorial conflicts in the Horn of Africa 82 Monopolising heritage-making through cultural assimilation 86

#### Building up Ethiopian heritage institutions 94

Western Ethiopian Studies and the rise of academic and state historiography in Ethiopia 94 Establishing cultural and natural governance in Ethiopia through heritage institutions 98 Foreign research interests and the creation of Ethiopian heritage institutions 104 The compound effect of UNESCO's involvement 106 The "boom years" – making Ethiopian heritage World Heritage 113

#### World Heritage and Ethiopian local realities 119

A glimpse into the role of locals for research and conservation projects 120 Marginalisation of traditional conservation knowledge through international standards 121 The normative effect of internationalism and universalism 126 Colonial and imperial legacies of international heritage conservation 129 Land use conflicts arising from claims to heritage 137

#### "On the ground" of the international bureaucracy of Ethiopian World Heritage-making 144

Ethiopia and UNESCO: strategic cooperation in the Global Sixties 144 Ethiopia as a voice for developing and African countries in UNESCO 149 Foreign expertise and financial aid for Ethiopian state modernisation and diplomacy 150 Ethiopian personalities in UNESCO 158 Ethiopia: model country for heritage development projects 160

Conclusion 168

Sources 175

Bibliography 182

Appendix: ETO Publications 199

Index 201

Figure : Ethiopia – A "Rift-oriented " map of relief, rivers, and territorial identities, Understanding Contemporary Ethiopia: Monarchy, Revolution and the Legacy of Meles Zenawi, edited by Gérard Prunier and Éloi Ficquet. London: Hurst, , p. xvii–xviii.

# List of Abbreviations

# Introduction

The small northern highland town of Lalibela is Ethiopia's single most important Christian pilgrimage site, mainly because of its 12 rock-hewn churches from the twelfth century. Remotely located at an elevation of 4,500 metres, the town had been difficult to access by road until an airstrip, serviced by a domestic connection from Addis Ababa, was opened in 1959. While interested foreign visitors sometimes had made their way to Lalibela since then, a big change was underway from 1965 on. In that year, Princess Ruth Desta, granddaughter of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie I, arrived in Lalibela, entrusted by the emperor to supervise and accelerate the construction of the Seven Olives Hotel, the first high class hotel in the region, and the first to accommodate tourists rather than pilgrims, for it to be completed in time for the visit of Queen Elizabeth II in February 1965. Once completed, Swedish and American missionaries were put in charge of managing the hotel project. Unfortunately, the Queen's visit to Lalibela was suspended after the Queens Flight deemed the rugged, unpaved airstrip as not safe enough for a royal visit. Despite this, the preparation of tourist infrastructure and promotion of Lalibela as a tourist attraction were successful and 1965 marked the year of an ever-increasing influx of international tourists to the town. During the months she spent in Lalibela, Princess Ruth committed herself not only to the hotel project but also to the restoration of the churches, which were difficult to access, and heavily affected by centuries of rainfall that had been eating away the delicate sandstone, and a large-scale international restoration project started in the same year. It was in fact a collaborative effort between the International Center for the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments (IC-CROM) and the US-based International Fund for Monuments, and dispatched a number of European conservators and technicians under the guidance of an Italian architect-restorer. The funds and expertise came from these organisations, while the Ethiopian government administered the projects.¹

This first project was the overture to 20 years of extensive international cultural and natural conservation projects in Ethiopia, funded and expertly managed by foreigners commissioned by the Ethiopian government, culminating in the awarding of the title of UNESCO World Heritage to seven Ethiopian heritage sites between 1978 and 1980. The number of heritage sites was remarkable

Cheques and spreadsheets in NALE, <IP_ADDRESS>, Lalibela Committee; International Fund for Monuments, Lalibela-Phase I: Adventure in Restoration (New York: International Fund for Monuments, 1967); Ivy Pearce, An Ethiopian Harvest: A Collection of Experiences Garnered (Worthing: Churchman, 1988), 116–18.

OpenAccess. © 2021 Marie Huber, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110681017-003

then, in the first years of the World Heritage Programme, and is now, for an African country anyway. The mise-en-valeur of the Lalibela churches and other Ethiopian monuments for touristic purpose and representative state visits demonstrated at once the glorious past and the progress underway in Ethiopia, and turned Lalibela and other heritage sites into a stage to showcase the past, present and future of the nation. Antiquities and, in a similar manner, the Ethiopian highlands, at that time, were not only established as the official national heritage; they became one of Ethiopia's most valuable assets, or patrimonial resources.²

The story of Ethiopia's national heritage and its making with the help of foreign and international aid during the 1960s and 1970s sits right at the centre of politically, socially and economically turbulent times. It is not possible to comprehend Ethiopian nationalism and its relevance for internationalism without understanding how developmental and national identity politics were related, and how ideas of progress and history were constructed and instrumentalised by the governing elites.

More broadly speaking, I want to show that through national heritage' the International materialised in the developing world, during the what can be called the modernist, foreign aid era of development during the 1960s and 70s of the twentieth century. More specifically, my aim with this book is to show that the making of World Heritage happened intertwined with national heritage and how development thinking was conducive to the politicisation of heritage in a developing country.

The international involvement in the conservation of Lalibela and other Ethiopian heritage sites was part of a global process, the colluded rise of the concept of universal heritage and national heritage, catalysed through international organisations, at a time when the importance of Africa and African countries in the world shifted towards a new role. A place where this was most significant and evident is Ethiopia. Understanding the links between Ethiopia, UNESCO and the World Heritage programme during its initial phase provides insights into the complex processes of knowledge production of nation-states in the new international world order shaping up during the "Global Sixties".

The modern Ethiopian state came into being when, from 1889 on, Emperor Menelik II built diplomatic relationships with Europe to acquire technology and expertise, secured the international recognition of Ethiopian sovereignty and expanded the state territory into the south. The nation and its boundaries would

Lisa Breglia, Monumental Ambivalence: The Politics of Heritage (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 30.

remain fragile and a threat to government integrity and state power for the following decades, and references to the past were invoked to stabilise the rule over Ethiopia. When the prince regent Ras Tafari was crowned as Emperor Haile Selassie I in 1930, he legitimised his rule with references to the 3000-year-old Solomonic, biblical tradition, an image he knew would resound well with the international political stage and in return strengthen his interior position as a central power in opposition to the ruling Ethiopian elites of princes and landowners. After the military revolution in 1974, the socialist Derg renounced the more recent past as a feudal, centralist and absolutist period, but propagated the Pan-Ethiopian empire and its historical continuity, underpinning a violent and expansionist authoritarian rule that lasted until 1991.

This official version of Ethiopian national identity was not only subject to political tactical and strategical manoeuvres of the government. At the same time, Ethiopia became a very important symbol in the African decolonisation and nation-building process as well as in internationalist movements of Pan-Africanism, the Non-Aligned-Movement and Communist-Marxist Internationale. Ethiopia's supposed historical exceptionalism as Africa's longest-lasting empire and ancient civilisation provided a strong counter-narrative to the colonial paradigm of the impossibility of self-rule for contemporaries in the 1960s from within and external to Ethiopia, and Ethiopian nationalism constituted the new African political nationalisms, as well as Pan-Africanism, during that time to a significant degree. Ethiopian history, in this understanding, alluded to key features for nation-state-building that were thought to be missing in other African countries: a tradition of sovereign rule.

As I will show, the conservation efforts in Lalibela, orientated towards its accessibility for an international audience, were part and parcel of the Ethiopian nation-building process, not only because they framed an existing religious heritage site and lieu de mémoire as national heritage. They demonstrate that heritage conservation was not only a technical matter, but also included the allocation and management of resources.³ Conserving the monuments in Lalibela as national heritage was part of a state-building and modernisation process, constituted of development-led thinking and planning, which ensured that the nationstate-building in Ethiopia happened on the terms of those in power. During the 1960s, the development paradigm superseded other issues in global policy and

William Logan, Michele Langfield, and Máiréad Nic Craith, "Intersecting Concepts and Practices", in Cultural Diversity, Heritage and Human Rights: Intersections in Theory and Practice (Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2010), 17–18.

development planning dominated the political language in African countries.⁴ The conservation of monuments and nature involving UNESCO during the 1960s and 1970s delivered a legal instrument for exclusion and repression of ethnic and cultural groups, for threatening livelihoods, by allowing the Ethiopian government to map national claims over existing territories.

It is easily overlooked that, contrary to the role of Ethiopia as a symbol in the anti-imperial struggle, the Ethiopian state was in itself a colonising empire. Ethiopian historiography was dominated by the idea of a greater Ethiopian state, including the territories of Eritrea and the Ogaden region inhabited by Somali people, located in the East of Ethiopia at the Ethio-Somalian border. Throughout the twentieth century, this idea of a greater Ethiopian state was utilised and conceptualised within the political framework of establishing Ethiopian imperial rule. Western and Ethiopian scholars and intellectuals alike produced a dominant version of Ethiopian history which in the 1980s began to be challenged by a re-reading from the periphery, through the emerging fields of Oromo, Somali and Eritrean studies. Institutional heritage-making in Ethiopia therefore had a decidedly international dimension and the political dimensions of national heritage in Ethiopia relate to the historiography and political thinking in Ethiopia throughout the twentieth century.⁵

Even though it has been widely discussed how students and peasants, especially those from southern Ethiopia, mobilised the national question in pre-revolutionary and revolutionary Ethiopia, we know very little about the institutional response to these positions. State institutions concerned with implementing national and international policies considerably shaped the imaginaries underwriting the intellectual discourse of Ethiopian nationalism. Today, after decades of history writing under strong state censorship, the ethnic federalism politics of the past 20 years gave way to histories of the contestants of Ethiopian identity, and their ethnic nationalisms, be they Tigrean, Oromo or Amhara, calling for a deeper investigation of the politicised nature of the official Ethiopian heritage and the Ethiopian World Heritage sites.⁶ I hope to contribute to these recent his-

Andreas Eckert, ""We Are All Planners Now." Planung und Dekolonisation in Afrika", Geschichte und Gesellschaft 34, no. 3 (2008): 396.

Sara Marzagora, "History in Twentieth-Century Ethiopia: The "Great Tradition" and the Counter-Histories of National Failure", The Journal of African History 58, no. 3 (November 2017): 425–44; Alessandro Triulzi, "Battling with the Past: New Frameworks for Ethiopian Historiography", in Remapping Ethiopia: Communism and After, ed. Wendy James, Donald L. Donham, and Elsei Kurimoto (Oxford; Rochester, NY: James Currey, 2002), 280–85.

Pietro Toggia, "History Writing asaState Ideological Project in Ethiopia", African Identities 6, no. 4 (2008): 319–43, https://doi.org/10.1080/14725840802417869; Bahru Zewde, "A Century of

toriographies of Ethiopian nationalism by analysing a set of institutions and their engagement with foreign and international actors, to show how much Ethiopian nationalism was comprised of validation through internationalist and Western frameworks.

Furthermore, many studies of the history of the Ethiopian state focus on ruptures, crises and conflicts.⁷ A more extensive institutional history of the Ethiopian state has yet to be written, but the investigation of the two (natural and cultural) conservation authorities as well as the analysis of government publications aimed at an international audience in this book demonstrate that this history is one of a continuous evolution running steadily (and in parts unaffected) under the rough political current. To better understand this history of Ethiopian state institutions, I suggest that the state-building process has to be analysed vis-a-vis the nation-building process – and as one that took place during a time when new international ideas and institutions became more relevant than ever, during the beginning of the Global Cold War, decolonisation and the end of empire.⁸ If nation-building, as some argue, is the establishment of a national identity aimed at constructing the cultural legitimacy of a country,Iargue it functioned as the front end of the new internationalisms. And to keep with the metaphor, I suggest to think of state-building, meaning the establishment of a bureaucratic infrastructure, and means of governance beyond the state administration, as the back end.⁹ In Ethiopia, where no frame of bureaucracy and administrative infrastructure had been left behind by a colonial power, the lack of state bureaucracy presented a significant obstacle towards the implementation of international assistance programmes. Building an administrative and bureaucratic infrastructure was a key element of Haile Selassie I's imperial consolidation pol-

Ethiopian Historiography", Journal of Ethiopian Studies 33, no. 2 (2000): 1–26; Christopher S. Clapham, "Rewriting Ethiopian History", Annales d'Éthiopie 18, no. 1 (2002): 37–54, https:// doi.org/10.3406/ethio.2002.1013.

Donald Nathan Levine, Greater Ethiopia: The Evolution of a Multiethnic Society, 2nd ed. (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Alain Gascon and Roland Pourtier, La Grande Éthiopie, une utopie africaine. Éthiopie ou Oromie, l'intégration des Hautes Terres du Sud (Paris: CNRS, 1995); Wendy James et al., eds., Remapping Ethiopia: Socialism and After (Oxford: James Currey, 2002).

Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin, "Rethinking the History of Internationalism", in Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History, ed. Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 4–5.

Jeffrey James Byrne, Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization, and the Third World Order (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 8; Béatrice Hibou, The Bureaucratization of the World in the Neoliberal Era: An International and Comparative Perspective (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 10.

itics, and many ministries and state departments were built up during the 1960s with the help of bilateral and international assistance. The Ethiopian heritage institutions are exemplary of the huge scale of institutionalising and indigenising Western knowledge production and state bureaucracy in developing countries that started in the 1960s, facilitated by the UN.

Development and the concept of raising and levelling standards of living on a global scale was part of the UN founding idea, and was inspired by three main concerns and experiences.¹⁰ Firstly, European post-war reconstruction and, secondly, an overall technocratic thinking that had extended its reach into the economic sphere, and which became prominent during the financial strains of both world wars. Thirdly, the debates surrounding the increasing instability and difficulties of European colonial politics were important conceptual building blocks for the particular concept of development as it should unfold as a major concern of the UN. The aforementioned aspects of development as a reconstruction effort, and development as a technical solution to social problems, thereafter connected "the economies of European reconstruction and the geography of colonial development".¹¹ The notion of underdevelopment quickly diversified into the distinction between economic weakness as a consequence of war, and the more structural weakness that resulted from colonisation or was declared to be rooted in a general under-civilised state of some societies, in effect continuing colonial argumentations. Technical internationalism became a new political action framework that looked towards social engineering and interventionist economic policies as a pathway to prosperity.¹²

For a history of the term development see: Albert Sanghoon Park, "Does the Development Discourse Learn from History?", World Development 96 (2017): 52–64; for an overview of the UN-System and development see: Amy L.S. Staples, The Birth of Development: How the World Bank, Food and Agriculture Organization, and World Health Organization Have Changed the World, 1945–1965 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006); Olav Stokke, The UN and Development: From Aid to Cooperation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009); and Marc Frey and Sönke Kunkel, "Writing the History of Development: A Review of the Recent Literature", Contemporary European History 20, no. 2 (2011): 215–32, https://doi.org/10.1017/ S0960777311000075.

Daniel Speich Chassé, "Technical Internationalism and Economic Development at the Founding Moment of the UN System", in International Organizations and Development, 1945– 1990, ed. Marc Frey, Sönke Kunkel, and Corinna R. Unger (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 23–45.

Gilbert Rist, The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith, trans. Patrick Camiller, 3rd ed. (London; New York: Zed Books, 2008); Speich Chassé, "Technical Organizations", 30 –32.

In the process of decolonisation, many new states joined the UN System and caused the UN to undergo a metamorphosis during this decade, when these socalled developing countries gained a majority representation in the UN General Assembly and presented a Third World bloc that acted as an "alternative 'we' to both imperial incorporation and national separation".¹³ This new majority pushed for a programmatic shift towards development as empowerment and as a major responsibility of the international community, coining the 1960s the First UN-Development Decade. According to this new understanding of development, the UN was supposed to provide mainly technical and request-driven assistance through their specialised agencies and replace the earlier top-down and donor-driven aid programmes.

It is within this framework that the notion of development as a predominantly economic enterprise was conceived, and visions of the future shifted from technocratic, social-engineering solutions towards an idea that providing funds and knowledge would help the states "develop" solutions by themselves. This notion would dominate development policies and actions for the following decades. After 1955 there were no specialised agencies or organisations in the UN system whose programmes were not permeated in some way with the concern for economic development. Some, like the World Bank, simply turned into development agencies.¹⁴ Others contributed to relevant policymaking within their areas of specialisation. The development decade resulted in a large-scale expansion of a global development-industry, as the UN resolutions resulted in a re-framing of existing initiatives.

In 1966, the UNDP was founded in an attempt to merge existing development programmes and to streamline and prioritise the UN assistance programmes according to the new development paradigm. The UNDP was supposed to act in a coordinating role, distributing existing funds among the UN specialised agencies, among them UNESCO, as well as running separate programmes specific to more acute concerns. Nearly all UN activity in the new developing countries became the domain of UNDP,¹⁵ including the follow-up project to the first restoration efforts in Lalibela, which entailed the conservation of a larger number of Ethiopian monuments. Fostering economic development through tourism to her-

Frederick Cooper, "Writing the History of Development", Journal of Modern European History 8, no. 1 (2010): 17; Chloé Maurel, Histoire de l'UNESCO: Les trente premières années. 1945–1974 (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2010), 141–42.

Michele Alacevich, The Political Economy of the World Bank: The Early Years (Stanford, CA; Washington, D.C.: Stanford Economics and Finance; World Bank, 2009).

Craig N. Murphy, The United Nations Development Programme: A Better Way? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 78–79, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511618000.

itage sites was introduced as the key reason to provide funds for this project, which considerably accelerated the conservation of selected sites and monuments. As a part of this project, international experts, sent by UNESCO, manned the departments for cultural heritage and wildlife conservation, drafted legislation, inventoried antiquities, mapped national parks and prepared the World Heritage nomination for submission to UNESCO. How much the UN special agencies and their experts were a formative influence for the state- and nation-building process can be studied in Ethiopia, where a dense layer of experts was woven into the growing Ethiopian state-bureaucracy, to be found in every sector of government activities, most of them dispatched by a UN special agency, be it UNESCO, FAO, WHO or others.

As outlined above, from their inception, development efforts were characterised by technocratic and paternalistic thinking, by the act of defining others as deficient and being entitled to know how they can be helped, causing an inherent structural hegemony of the very concept of technical assistance.¹⁶ Development shares several characteristics to the discourse identified as Orientalism by Edward Said, in producing, from the standpoint of an assumed Western cultural hemisphere, realities of the world that dictate "politically, sociologically, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively."¹⁷ International organisations engaged in and further advanced this mode of systematising the world in Western terms, rendering Africa, Asia and Latin America into underdeveloped representations of Europe and North America. To show the power dynamics underpinning both the discourse and practice of development, the manifold activities labelled as or identified as development cooperation have to be analysed by combining the study of the concepts, institutions and theories with the study of their implementation, meaning the activities and projects that took place as development efforts as well as mapping the stakeholders and looking at the way they talked about it.¹⁸

Frederick Cooper, "Modernizing Bureaucrats, Backward Africans, and the Development Concept", in International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge, ed. Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), 64–92; for a more recent state of the debate see Emmanuel Akyeampong et al., eds., Africa's Development in Historical Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 3.

Hubertus Büschel and Daniel Speich, "Konjunkturen, Probleme und Perspektiven der Globalgeschichte der Entwicklungszusammenarbeit", in Entwicklungswelten: Globalgeschichte der Entwicklungszusammenarbeit (Frankfurt a.M.: Campus, 2009), 9.

Since the 1970s, critical positions have been established, arguing that development in the international system effectively was a neo-colonial effort, identifying many of the same mechanisms and effects that had characterised colonial control.¹⁹ Recent historical studies of development planning and politics, however, show that they were also utilised in many African countries by political elites to reinforce the nation-state-building as well as acquisition of funds for the benefit of the few rather than the many. I want to support these findings by shifting attention from the dichotomy of Western and non-Western, developed and underdeveloped, hegemony and dependency to the complex power dynamics and relationships at play behind development projects. Following heritage-making, state-modernisation and development, I argue, connects actors and institutions historically in a shared process of knowledge-production and world-making.

Many works analysing the impact of global heritage policies and international organisations on a local level suffer from ascribing agency to an international organisation, such as the UN, but even more so for the UN special agencies such as UNESCO, in their totality.²⁰ International organisations were from the beginning not only political arenas or diplomatic stages, but also large-scale bureaucracies²¹ and derived much of their authority from expertise and operated on the basis of rules that experts had defined.²² Recent historiographies of international organisations analyse them as knowledge-producing institutions, with a special focus on experts that fulfilled a crucial role as brokers and mediators between

Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London; New York: Verso, 2018); Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).

Christoph Brumann and Lynn Meskell, "UNESCO and New World Orders", in Global Heritage: A Reader, ed. Lynn Meskell (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), 27. The paper provides an extensive literature review.

Michael N. Barnett and Martha Finnemore, Rules for the World: International Organizations in Global Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); John G. Hadwen and Johan Kaufmann, United Nations Decision Making, 3rd ed. (Alphen aan den Rijn: Sijthoff & Noordhoff, 1980); Jarle Trondal et al., Unpacking International Organisations: The Dynamics of Compound Bureaucracies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010).

As Peter M. Haas explains, the knowledge-based interpretation as a reaction to uncertainty, or, simply speaking, a set of problems a state actor sees itself confronted with, is essential to the creation of institutional solutions on a state and, in the case of the UN, inter-state level; Peter M. Haas, "Introduction: Epistemic Communities and International Policy Coordination", International Organization 46, no. 1 (1992): 3–4, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818300001442; Maurel, Histoire de l'UNESCO, 261–75.

the local, national and international sphere.²³ International organisations, and the experts employed in their service, formed a global communication elite in control of information and knowledge about both their member states and the organisations' inner workings as the top nodes of a "long distance network".²⁴ To contribute to broaden the empirical base for understanding how this expert hegemony was produced and reproduced on a daily basis, this book looks into the work behind the scenes and into the bureaucratic and administrative conditions and into the offices of the staff of UNESCO's headquarters in Paris, UNESCO's Addis Ababa office, the offices of IUCN in Morges, ICOMOS in Paris and ICCROM in Rome, and those of the Ethiopian counterparts.

In order to become compatible to the UN system and the financial and knowledge resources available through it, Ethiopia needed to provide the language and institutional counterparts for collaboration on the operational level. International experts and Ethiopians trained abroad ensured the compatibility for the development aid programmes. The heritage expertise commissioned through UNESCO rendered an existing network of heritage sites and their history into a language that could be computed by the operational guidelines of the international bureaucracies. This serves as an example for the specific, internationalist style of knowledge production which considerably shaped the emerging bureaucratic infrastructure in many countries, while the power relations and the knowledge production related to the development discourse remained anchored in the headquarters of the UN agencies, in Rome, Paris and New York.²⁵

Ibid.; Wolfram Kaiser, Writing the Rules for Europe: Experts, Cartels, and International Organizations (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Davide Rodogno, Bernhard Struck, and Jakob Vogel, Shaping the Transnational Sphere: Experts, Networks, and Issues from the 1840s to the 1930s (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015); Sandrine Kott, "International Organizations: A Field of Research for a Global History", Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History 8 (2011): 446–50, https://doi.org/10.14765/zzf.dok-1641.

Gunnar Folke Schuppert, Wege in die moderne Welt: Globalisierung von Staatlichkeit als Kommunikationsgeschichte (Frankfurt; New York: Campus, 2015), 39; Frederik Schulze, "ANT und Globalgeschichte: Ein erster Eindruck", in Techniken der Globalisierung: Globalgeschichte meets Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie, ed. Debora Gerstenberger and Joël Glasman (Bielefeld: transcript, 2016), 281–90, https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839430217-013; Rosemary O'Leary, "The Bureaucratic Politics Paradox: The Case of Wetlands Legislation in Nevada", Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 4, no. 4 (1994): 443–67.

I would argue that it is conceptually fuzzy who exactly can be considered a Western or non-Western expert. Most regularly, African elites with European training were acting as cultural brokers, even though they were not necessarily regarded as such in Europe; Martin Rempe, Entwicklung im Konflikt: die EWG und der Senegal, 1957–1975 (Wien; Köln; Weimar: Böhlau, 2012), 61, 239–40; Philipp H. Lepenies, "Lernen vom Besserwisser: Wissenstransfer in der "Entwicklungshilfe" aus historischer Perspektive", in Entwicklungswelten: Globalgeschichte der Entwick-

The new international order forming in the 1960s was underpinned by various internationalisms, which African voices constituted to a significant degree.²⁶ With the rise of the new multilateral and Third-World internationalisms, political leaders worldwide had to reformulate the national identities they claimed to represent, in a more far-reaching global process. In this context, African intellectuals acted as representatives of sovereign, independent nation states and actualised the discourse of a particular African identity and intellectuality. Various projects emerged to rewrite African history as Africa's own history, with some of them casting African history as a decidedly un-modern, un-industrial history, and eventually interpreting the postcolonial period as African enlightenment.²⁷ From today's viewpoint, this process was in many ways not an emancipation but a renewal of the mechanism of producing knowledge about Africa within the Western academic system, rendering the supposed act of emancipation into a rewriting of African history as a universal, Eurocentric history in the service of new political elites.²⁸ The re-appropriation and emancipation of heritage-

lungszusammenarbeit, ed. Hubertus Büschel and Daniel Speich (Frankfurt a.M.: Campus, 2009), 49–54; Andrea Rehling, "Kosmopolitische Geschichtsschreibung und die Kosmopolitik des UNESCO Weltkultur- und Naturerbes", in Bessere Welten: Kosmopolitismus in den Geschichtswissenschaften, ed. Isabella Löhr and Bernhard Gißibl (Frankfurt a.M.: Campus, 2017), 389–92; Rist, History of Development, 74. Although it is fruitful to see them as a group, it is important to understand that expert communities are far from being homogenous, as the individuals in them have different backgrounds, motives, incentives and levels of agency.While I don't provide a detailed comparison of the biographical background of the experts, I came across Indian, Swiss, Polish, British conservators and education experts, all working in Ethiopia as "foreign experts". It would be enlightening, for example, to further investigate the colonial trajectories in the experts' biographies, meaning people who received expert status in a colonial context, regardless of the provenance.

Byrne, Mecca of Revolution; Christoph Kalter, The Discovery of the Third World: Decolonization and the Rise of the New Left in France, c. 1950–1976 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Bahru Zewde and Congrès international des historiens africains, eds., Society, State, and Identity in African History (Addis Ababa; Bamako: Forum for Social Studies, 2008); Messay Kebede, "Eurocentrism and Ethiopian Historiography: Deconstructing Semitization", Intejethistud International Journal of Ethiopian Studies 1, no. 1 (2003): 1–19; Andreas Eckert, "Afrikanische Intellektuelle und Aktivisten in Europa und die Dekolonisation Afrikas", Geschichte und Gesellschaft 37, no. 2 (2011): 244–74; Brenda Cooper and Robert Morrell, "The Possibility of Africa-Centred Knowledges", in Africa-Centred Knowledges: Crossing Fields and Worlds, ed. Brenda Cooper and Robert Morell (Woodbridge, Suffolk: James Currey, 2014), 2–6.

Bogumil Jewsiewicki and V.Y Mudimbe, "Africans' Memories and Contemporary History of Africa", History and Theory 32, no. 4 (1993): 1–11, https://doi.org/10.2307/2505629; Paulin J. Hountondji, "Knowledge of Africa, Knowledge by Africans: Two Perspectives on African Studies", RCCS Annual Review 1 (2009): 121–31, https://doi.org/10.4000/rccsar.174.

making therefore formed a relevant issue in the process of decolonisation—having a national heritage meant having a national identity and belonging to the community of sovereign nation states.²⁹ UNESCO served most prominently as a framework to promote the importance of history and heritage as a strategy for empowerment and fostering the nascent national identities of the new member states in the era of decolonisation; in other words, providing development-aid for nation-building.³⁰ The General History of Africa, initiated under the first African Director General of a UN-agency, Amadou-Mahtar M'Bow, was the outcome most indicative of this trend.³¹ With the Ethiopian example, I support the critical analysis others have provided so far on the role of African historiography, inventing traditions, and as a part of it, identifying cultural and natural heritage to augment national identity. Looking through the lens of UNESCO, in the files I studied to understand UNESCO's cultural and natural heritage politics during the 60s and 70s, I found evidence of similar entangled histories of universal heritage and national identity like that of Ethiopia in several other countries at the time, for example Egypt, Indonesia, Burma. However, I have only included references to other national contexts where they serve a comparative purpose. The main focus in this book will be on the Ethiopian case study, seen as an example of a global trend towards a growing importance of national identities. This trend occurred between theoretical and practical internationalisms with the institutionalisation of national heritage as an integral part of the internationalist project that would result in the 1972 UNESCO World Heritage Convention and the World Heritage List of 1978 onward.

The history of the concepts of "heritage" and "conservation"³² as universal principles is one that originates within the context of European and US postwar internationalism at a time when there was an ever-increasing, all-encom-

Andreas Eckert, "Ethnizität und Nation in der Geschichtsschreibung zu Afrika seit 1960", Comparativ: Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte und vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung 11, no. 4 (2001): 17–30.

Andrea Rehling, "Universalismen und Partikularismen im Widerstreit: Zur Genese des UNESCO-Welterbes", Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History 8 (2011): 414–36, https://doi.org/10.14765/zzf.dok-1644.

Unesco International Scientific Committee for the Drafting of a General History of Africa, General History of Africa, vol. 1–8 (Paris; Berkeley; Oxford: Heinemann; UNESCO; University of California Press, 1993).

A concise summary of the variation of the interpretation of the term heritage can be found in: Astrid Swenson, ""Heritage", "Patrimoine" und "Kulturerbe": Eine vergleichende historische Semantik", in Prädikat 'Heritage': Wertschöpfungen aus kulturellen Ressourcen, ed. Dorothee Hemme (Berlin: Lit-Verlag, 2007), 53–74.

passing emphasis on the symbolic inscription of things as heritage all over the Western world.³³ In this history, UNESCO acted as the main driving force behind a global engagement with these and other concepts related to heritage, such as authenticity – taken to be the guiding principle behind the conservation of historic monuments and landscapes in a specific national context – thereby detaching them from the French and Anglo-Saxon traditions in which they arose. Such traditions have evolved in an entangled manner with scientific disciplines and specialised professions such as art history, archaeology for cultural heritage, as well as biology and geography for natural heritage. With the nineteenth century European imperial expansions, the "discovery" of treasures and adventures became a systematic team effort between these disciplines and politics, approaching the extra-European territories in search of monumental remains of narratives that formed part of the Western historiography, such as the Levant and the Horn of Africa.

World Heritage, as defined in the UNESCO World Heritage Convention, however, was a global phenomenon, not unilaterally originating and spreading from Europe but engaging with and reacting to emerging nationalism in developing countries. The public debate about the restitution of African cultural goods from European national museums to their places and cultures of origin is an actualised version of debates which originated within UNESCO during the 1970s, and the long-term projects for the conservation of cultural heritage in Ethiopia under the guidance of UNESCO can serve as a case study to illuminate the ambiguity of the debate of African heritage and African cultural property in Western institutions. The understanding that African states and historians did not necessarily find Western involvement in their cultural or natural heritage problematic complicates some of the political positions which call for complete restitution of African objects housed in European museums in no unclear terms.³⁴ During the 1960s, Ethiopia simultaneously issued restitution claims to the United Kingdom and Italy, exercised rigorous control of foreign archaeologists excavating Ethiopian historical and pre-historical sites, and cooperated with Italian conservators and French archaeologists, inviting them to be involved in the project of re-writing Ethiopian national history. While neither these restitution cases nor UNES-CO's involvement were part of my studies, I believe reading the history of the establishment of Ethiopian national heritage sites with the extensive involvement

Markus Tauschek, Kulturerbe: eine Einführung (Berlin: Reimer, 2013), 10–13; Eric Hobsbawm, "Introduction: Inventing Traditions", in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1–14.

Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, Restituer le patrimoine africain (Paris: Philippe Rey, 2018).

of UNESCO can provide important historical context and an understanding of the actors, networks and interactions that the global heritage-making entailed.

The concept of universal heritage was related to the discourses of nationalism, imperialism, colonialism and their "principles that aspired to build a totality in which everybody would be included but not everybody would also have the right to include."³⁵ In practice, this meant that the concepts and scientific methods related to the Western heritage discourse translated into an elaborate and specific set of formal standards for the conservation of natural and cultural heritage, making these academic disciplines and their experts, now labelled conservators, into gatekeepers, who gained relevance from this institutionalised setting, combining a universalist discourse with a worldwide practice.³⁶

The study of heritage as part of the development discourse and practice, others have argued, helps to understand memory and heritage-making in the nation state as a global history, and why this process regularly involved external actors and their imaginations of a particular national history and identity.³⁷ I want to add to this field of critical heritage studies with a historiography of the operationalisation phase of international organisations during the 1960s, when a renewed outwards expansion of Europe resulted in the application of Western concepts and technologies of heritage on a global scale and consequently integrated heritage in the development discourse, as a way to better the cultural integrity of underdeveloped countries.³⁸ Conservators, that is Western heritage experts, positioned themselves as actors and facilitators in a development process that was guided by a strong culturally rooted paradigm. Their discourse and practice was critical for the application of conservation in African countries and the build-up of international conservation policies in new nation states and it is

Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 160–61.

The requirements for the elaboration of standards evolved significantly over time, having today reached a point where it is expected that several years of preparation work are potentially necessary for a site to comply with all the requirements for a successful application; Thomas M. Schmitt, Cultural Governance: zur Kulturgeographie des UNESCO-Welterberegimes (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2011), 368–72.

Laurajane Smith, Uses of Heritage (Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2006), 42–43; Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad, "Introduction", in Memory in a Global Age: Discourses, Practices and Trajectories, ed. Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 2; Kendall R. Phillips and G. Mitchell Reyes, eds., Global Memoryscapes: Contesting Remembrance in a Transnational Age (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2011). David Held, Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 39.

key to the analysis of history, politics and the production and instrumentalization of national identity in past and present African states.³⁹

Without denying the notion of a Western discourse as a crucial influence in shaping the history of countries constructed as the non-Western "Other", I want to complicate our understanding of how conservation evolved in a developing country and help explain why heritage presents today one of the most important assets—financially, socially and politically—for many African societies.⁴⁰ Heritage-making, from a state perspective, is not only an institutional and scientific but also a territorialising practice. Heritage can be a legal instrument, regulating ownership over the site in question, and conservation law can legitimise expropriation, an issue of concern especially for agrarian or pastoralist societies and indigenous people, where land-use and land rights are the most pressing. As a result, heritage has to be also seen as a tool of governance, an aspect that is most relevant in developing countries because it allows new argumentation and legitimation for governments to infringe on customary land rights. Heritage, like development, is what Arturo Escobar has described as a "pervasive"⁴¹ discourse and practice, because it runs through all aspects of a society in its implementation, including legislation, land use, institution building, policymaking and identity construction. This aspect of heritage as a governing practice is central to understanding why the development paradigm has politicised heritage even further. As an answer to the numerous works studying heritage culturally, looking at the processes of cultural memory and imagined community that lead to the invention of a collective past, this book delivers a detailed account of bu-

Winfried Speitkamp, ""Authentizität" und Nation: Kollektivsymbolik und Geschichtspolitik in postkolonialen afrikanischen Staaten", in Nationale Mythen – Kollektive Symbole: Funktionen, Konstruktionen und Medien der Erinnerung, ed. Klaudia Knabel, Dietmar Rieger, and Stephanie Wodianka (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005), 225–43.

More generally on the "other": Said, Orientalism; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ""Can the Subaltern Speak?": revised edition, from the "History" Chapter of Critique of Postcolonial Reason", in Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea, ed. Rosalind C. Morris (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 21–78; Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture: With a New Preface by the Author (London; New York: Routledge, 2012); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); used on specific examples: Marija N. Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Derek Peterson, Kodzo Gavua, and Ciraj Rassool, eds., The Politics of Heritage in Africa: Economies, Histories, and Infrastructures (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Unfortunately, the volume follows a colonial/contemporary distinction which makes it more difficult to generalise the findings.

Escobar, Encountering Development, 6.

reaucratic and institutionalised processes of heritage-making, the varied "on the ground" practice complementing the discourse of heritage.⁴²

In my study of Ethiopian national heritage I drew on two sets of sources in particular: First, I relied on images of Ethiopian heritage, as they circulated in tourism promotion material and government publications, to gain a better understanding of the imaginations, visual representations and ideas that were constructed in the service of the nation state and aspiring national elites. Second, I took a close look at official correspondence and mission reports to comprehend the making of heritage, concrete actions, and the bureaucratic and legal processes created around and behind heritage which significantly shape the actual outcome and production of heritage. This includes documents of the World Heritage Committee and the respective departments within UNESCO that provided assistance and reviewed nomination files (changing names and organisational structure several times over the course of the research period), further documents from the ICCROM, the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), the agents carrying out operations in Ethiopia (especially UNDP), Ethiopian state-affiliated actors (the Ethiopian delegation in Paris and the government executive, i.e. ministries for culture and sports, and agriculture and environment), as well as research institutions, the Institute of Ethiopian Studies at Addis Ababa University (IES) and the Institut éthiopien d'études et de recherches, the preceding institution of today's Centre français des études éthiopiennes (CFEE).

However, not all these perspectives were equally accessible during the time of my research. The UNESCO archives had extensive holdings concerning all aspects of UNESCO's relations with Ethiopia, allowing insight also in the activities of UNDP, ICOMOS and IUCN. The country, department and issue-based files contain mainly correspondence and notes as well as reports, enabling a deeper look into the everyday work of the UNESCO secretariat and the connections and net-

Camila del Mármol, Marc Morell, and Jasper Chalcraft, "Of Seduction and Disenchantment: An Approach to the Heritage Process", in The Making of Heritage: Seduction and Disenchantment, ed. Camila del Mármol, Marc Morell, and Jasper Chalcraft (New York: Routledge, 2015), 3; David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses, 3rd ed. (München: C.H. Beck, 2006); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised ed. (London; New York: Verso, 2006).

works of the individual departments.⁴³ This complemented the official documents, such as reports of meetings and the Director General, of which UNESCO provides a large body of files in digital form, including films and photographs, and many files concerning the World Heritage Programme from its inception, including Committee meetings and the documentation for all World Heritage sites. IUCN, ICCROM and ICOMOS all have archives or libraries that can be accessed and which I visited, which contain some grey literature as well as photographic material that is otherwise unavailable, but they do not keep regular archives that enable an investigation of the institutional backstory through correspondences and internal reports. No such contact or entry point is available in the case of UNDP at all. As a matter of fact, a particular closed-gate politics is practiced, making the institution unavailable for historical inquiry in a direct avenue. I had to rely on copies and transcripts which were part of files I accessed at UNESCO and Ethiopian archives. Combining all of these sources, I achieved a vivid image of the process-driven nature and a day-to-day practice in the offices and field offices, an on the ground view into the UN during the 1960s.⁴⁴

Despite the main official language of Ethiopia being Amharic, many government affairs were conducted in English and I used these English-language sources for my analysis. Unfortunately, the National Archives of Ethiopia only holds some material from the imperial ministries up to 1974, and the existing material is scarce. For example, the complete file on the Lalibela project, which went on for several years, is comprised of only twelve individual documents. The two conservation authorities, the Authority for Research and Conservation of Cultural Heritage (ARCCH) and the Ethiopian Wildlife Conservation Authority (EWCA), have internal archives and libraries that I was permitted to access. The Library of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies and the Kennedy Library, both part of Addis Ababa University, were a fruitful source of Ethiopian government publications and tourism-related material. Other archives and libraries I visited to obtain Ethiopian government publications, tourism promotion press material and re-

I would like to give a special mention of one of the most crucial categories of sources this study is built on: UNESCO (and to a small extent other UN agencies) mission reports. Published reports are accessible through the online repositories of the UN agencies; they are numerous and very dense in terms of content. They contain invaluably operational details and technical information about development projects and the cooperation between international organisations and national governments. They also usually include expert evaluations, which reveal mindsets and expectations of international experts. I argue they represent a body of literature in its own right, and that more methodological debate on this literature would be desirable. Kott, "International Organizations", 1–2.

search works from the 1960s–1980s include the New York Public Library,⁴⁵ the Hiob Ludolf Center for Ethiopian Studies at Hamburg University, the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin,⁴⁶ the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) Archives and Library⁴⁷ and the Berhanu Abebe Library of the CFEE in Addis Ababa.

To try bring some balance into the lack of Ethiopian government documents versus the extensive holdings of the UNESCO archives, I used academic and other publications, such as travel guides and personal memoirs, written during the period in question, the 60s, on the topics of heritage, conservation and Ethiopia. It is important for all this literature published in the 1960s and 1970s to be read critically and they function more as a primary source here than as secondary source or literature reference. The works of Margery Perham, Donald Levine, John Markakis and Nega Ayele, Richard and Sylvia Pankhurst (to name just a few), all renowned scholars or stateswomen at the time, contain many views and paradigms, among them essentialist, colonialist and racist ones, that are extremely problematic from today's viewpoint. This book is based on research efforts with a focus on providing an overview over the manifold types of sources that can be useful for understanding the relationships and processes occurring between countries and international organisations. And while for many of the sources cited here it would be desirable to go deeper into their individual analysis, regarding the context of their production, authorship and whereabouts, I understand this work as a proposition on how to write African history as global history, pairing disparate types of documents and sources so as to open up many new lines of inquiry.

As an addition to my analysis, I had the opportunity to conduct a few personal interviews with experts involved in the Ethiopian World Heritage sites, namely Yonas Beyene, from the Ethiopian Authority for Research and Conservation of Cultural Heritage and former Ethiopian delegate to the World Heritage Committe, Prof. Dr. Hans Hurni, Professor for Geography in Berne, Switzerland, who worked as an expert in wildlife conservation in Ethiopia for over twenty years and who was personally involved in the nomination process of the Ethiopian natural heritage sites, especially the Simien National Park; and Dr. Jean Renaud Boisserie, Director des Recherches at the CFEE. Most helpful information

Particularly the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Science and Industry Library, which had a collection of all Ethiopian development plans.

The Staatsbibliothek holds some years of the Ethiopian Herald.

The SOAS Archives hold several personal files of British researchers and diplomats, documenting their activities in Ethiopia, including confidential reports and private correspondence with people in Ethiopia.

regarding the history of tourism in Ethiopia was provided to me in an email exchange, and a short personal meeting, with the journalist Arefaynie Fantahun.

Ethiopia officially uses the Ethiopian calendar, but all dates have been converted to the European calendar format for continuity. As regards the transliteration of Ethiopian names and terms, I followed the English or French transcription used in each individual primary or secondary source, which may have resulted in some inconsistencies.

#### Chapter Synopses

1. Tourism was part of economic development planning in African countries, building on colonial images of Africa; culture and wildlife were considered economic resources; cultural tourism and conservation of monuments for tourism were part of UNESCO's programme in the 1960s; in cultural tourism projects, the development paradigm was merged with a tourist gaze on cultural and natural heritage in developing countries; tourism development plans in Ethiopia resulted in a selection of heritage sites most suitable for tourism; their image and symbolic value was amplified through tourism promotion.

2. Ethiopian nationalism relied on the Aksumite paradigm, stressing Ethiopian exceptionalism and the need for a unified Greater Ethiopia;adistinct visual language of Ethiopian nationalism emerged, of which historical monuments formed a key part; Western narratives and imaginations of Ethiopia and archaeological research interests of expatriates supported the construction of an official Ethiopian national identity; Ethiopian heritage served representation and communication in an international and Pan-African context; cultural assimilation politics fostered an Amhara-dominant national identity.

3. Western Ethiopian Studies were established in the nineteenth century; the 60s witnessed a renewed academic and state effort of re-writing Ethiopian history and the building-up of state institutions for research and administration of history and heritage; diplomacy and foreign research interests were crucial for the operations of state institutions, most researchers were foreigners in the beginning; through UNESCO, numerous conservation and heritage-making projects took place, providing the administrative and formal prerequisites for Ethiopian World Heritage nominations.

4. Some examples show that research and conservation projects depended on local actors and their knowledge, who in turn tried to reap benefits from the collaboration; heritage projects were characterised by a structural marginalisation of traditional conservation knowledge; the international standards and scientific principles and their universalist underpinning had a strong normative effect on heritage traditions; the colonial and imperial legacies of international heritage conservation were embedded in the international organisations; severe land use conflicts arose from claims to heritage, to the detriment of inhabitants of heritage sites and their surroundings.

5. The bureaucratic side of the implementation of heritage followed other paradigms and rules; strategic goals were influencing the cooperation of UNESCO and Ethiopia on both sides; Addis Ababa gained location value as a African diplomatic hub; Ethiopia was envisaged as voice for other African countries in the UN and UNESCO; foreign advisors and foreign aid were part and parcel for state modernisation in Ethiopia; personal connections and education background of Ethiopians in UNESCO were vital for project orientation and implementation; Ethiopia was chosen as UNDP model country for large-scale projects, with the seven-year heritage project as first examples.

# Destination Ethiopia: Heritage sites for tourism development

In 1963, the UN Conference for International Travel and Tourism in Rome issued Recommendations on International Travel & Tourism, declaring tourism to be "a vital element in the framework of the United Nations Development Decade".⁴⁸ In the subsequent campaign, the governments of developing countries were strongly encouraged to prioritise the tourism sector in their development plans.⁴⁹ The UN International Tourist year in 1967 provided a strong visual outcome of this programme, in addition to the 1966 UN ECOSOC policy, "inviting the international financing agencies to provide the developing countries […] assistance for the promotion of tourism."⁵⁰ At the same time, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) released a recommendation "urging […] particularly the developing countries to promote tourism, which makes a vital contribution to their economic growth."⁵¹

#### Tourism planning in Ethiopia

The widespread enthusiastic forecasts regarding the economic potential of tourism development for African countries, produced during the 1960s, were received with open ears in Ethiopia. Modern tourism in Ethiopia started with the national airline, Ethiopian Airlines (EAL). Founded in 1946 in partnership with the private US-corporation Trans World Airlines (TWA), EAL was crucial for national integration and economic development in Ethiopia, and a big asset in rebuilding the image of the country. The airline was a very successful enterprise, earning profit soon after its founding, and gaining a reputation for its services. Addis Ababa became a relevant African hub for air travel, which in turn strengthened Ethiopia's power and relevance on an inter-African as well as an international scale. Establishing domestic air trade routes fast forwarded Ethiopian national integra-

United Nations Conference on International Travel and Tourism, Recommendations on International Travel and Tourism (Geneva: United Nations, 1964), 17.

Marie-Françoise Lanfant, "Tourism in the Process of Internationalization", International Social Science Journal 32, no. 1 (1980): 15.

UNESCO General Conference, "Resolutions of the Fourteenth Session, 1966" (1966), 62. Ibid., 63.

OpenAccess. © 2021 Marie Huber, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110681017-004

tion, because it increased mobility and connections between existing urban centres, and the capital.⁵²

As early as 1950, EAL began to promote package tours within EAL's domestic flight routes to the international audience residing in Addis Ababa, which was composed of diplomats, foreign experts and their families.⁵³ As most of these expatriate residents were remunerated from external sources, and this particular kind of domestic tourism presented a means to absorb a part of this foreign exchange into the Ethiopian national economy, from the 1960s Ethiopian airlines advertisement started targeting the North-Atlantic market.⁵⁴

In the context of tourism, experts argued for investment in conservation to increase the destination value of heritage sites. Consequently, in Ethiopia, like in most African countries, national parks and monuments were part of the tourism commission's responsibility, and the conservation and general investment in the sites of cultural and natural heritage turned into aspects of development planning. In the second five-year development plan of 1962, "the pleasant climate, mineral hot springs, natural beauty, historical monuments and hunting possibilities […]" were seen to "constitute untapped sources of the national wealth and offer great possibilities for the development of planned tourism."⁵⁵ The plan foresaw selected government investment in building hotels and other accommodation, and opening tourist-information centres abroad. Further plans included the restoration works on historical monuments, and the development of one selected site with additional facilities as a showcase-project. As a side note, the establishment of game-reserves and national parks as tourist attractions was included in the "Fishing & Forestry" section of the plan.⁵⁶

With the establishment of the Ethiopian Tourism Organisation (ETO) in 1964, the government acknowledged the increasingly central role of tourism for economic growth. The ETO was responsible for several aspects related to tourism development in order to systematically address existing problems. In its duty-free

Ethiopian Airlines, Bringing Africa Together (Addis Ababa: Ethiopian Airlines, 1989), 100– 103; Theodore Geiger, TWA's Service to Ethiopia (Washington, DC: National Planning Association, 1959), 62–71.

Travel News, no date, in: NALE <IP_ADDRESS>, Ethiopian Airlines.

I argue to understand this as a strategy of the Ethiopian government to monetise Addis Ababa's role as a diplomatic and international hub, through the luxury hotels, the high import tax on luxury goods and the duty-free shops of the ETO. Vojislav Popovic, Tourism in Eastern Africa (München: Weltforum, 1972), 91. Several brochures in: NALE <IP_ADDRESS>, Ethiopian Airlines; Addis Ababa became the most important African hub for air travel, Geiger, TWA's Service, 71.

Imperial Ethiopian Government, Second Five Year Development Plan, 1963–1976 (Addis Ababa: Berhanenna Selam Printing Press, 1962), 240.

Ibid., 150.

shops, "King Solomon's Mines", they sold "tourist art" handicraft articles in addition to regular duty-free items such as liquor and tobacco. These articles resembled traditional cultural items and were specifically designed and produced in workshops operated by the ETO. This created additional income, enabling the ETO to expand and operate tours and car-hires. The ETO and EAL also operated a number of tourist-hotels, meaning hotels suitable to host international travellers and tourists. Most importantly, the ETO developed a marketing strategy as well as extensive tourism promotion material.⁵⁷

Tourism was stated in the third five-year development plan of 1968 as the key to bettering the country's economic well-being. With neighbouring countries such as Kenya held up as positive examples, "it was envisaged that much more attention will be given to the possibilities of tourism as a potential source of foreign currency than has been possible in the past."⁵⁸ A more integrated, inter-sectoral approach turned tourism in a government responsibility and the new, coordinated development plan for tourism defined very clearly the central role of the government in the tourist industry.

A decade of more extensive tourism planning followed these assessments. In the 1969 a grand Ethiopian Tourist Development Plan was commissioned from an Italian planning firm. The high expectations for tourism were detailed out in this plan. In just eight years the investment planned for tourism was believed to have returned equivalent benefits in full, in addition turning a capital investment of 92 million Ethiopian dollars into a total income of 450 million Ethiopian dollars within thirteen years, with indirect benefits believed to be four times as high.⁵⁹

To reach these goals, great investment in tourism was needed. "The lack of necessary infrastructure, the lack of special air fares making it possible to include Ethiopia in East African and all-African tours, the lack of travel promotion in overseas markets"⁶⁰ all presented difficulties that had to be overcome. The Ethiopian government reached out for international assistance for tourism planning. The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) conducted an independent assessment and stated that "tourism would be the second most important source of foreign trade for Ethiopia (following the export of coffee)". The Bank was convinced of tourism as a crucial factor for economic

Ayalew Sisay, Historical Development of Travel and Tourism in Ethiopia (Addis Ababa: the author, 2009), 92; Tafesse Habte Selassie, "Tourism", in Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, ed. Siegbert Uhlig (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010), 973.

Letter from Belai Abbai to Malcolm Adiseshiah, 4.1.1968, UNESCO X 07.21 (63) pt. iv.

Ianus. Organizzazione per gli studi e le ricerche di economia applicata S. p. A., Ethiopian Tourist Development Plan (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1969), 12.

Popovic, Tourism in Eastern Africa, 97.

development, as it seemed capable of considerable expansion.⁶¹ Subsequently, a World Bank loan for the development of tourism—including the preservation of sites and monuments—was approved.⁶²

At least in the funding proposals and consultants' reports, tourism was played up as a cure-all of Ethiopia's development problems. Not only would it earn the revenue necessary for further economic development, it would also initiate key infrastructure projects such as transportation and electricity that had failed to be realised in their own right.

#### UN-sponsored tourism planning for developing countries in the 1960s

The roots for tourism as it became an item on the agenda of international development programmes go back to the European, and more particularly British, tradition of the nobility touring other countries as part of their education, also known as the Grand Tour. The transformation of work-life-organisation that took place with the industrialisation in European societies brought a new availability of leisure time, which was often combined with a desire to travel for recreational purposes. The introduction and elaboration of paid holidays since the 1920s made way for the concept of leisure time that could be spent travelling elsewhere. This became feasible for a significantly large number of workers, a contrast to previous times where travelling for recuperation and education had remained a privilege of the upper and middle classes. The ever-growing number of salaried workers that were entitled to paid holidays contributed to the growing volume of travel that had begun to be classified as touristic. The stabilised political situation and the rapid economic growth after the end of the Second World War in Western Europe, Australasia and North America and the large-scale economic, social and technological changes occurring alongside resulted in a tremendous rising of tourist numbers and a booming tourism sector. The extent of available investment eased the expansion of necessary infrastructure and the increase in disposable income caused a significant yearly growth of the sector. Finally, the technological innovations of motorisation, the expansion of railway and road infrastructure and the introduction of air travel made mass transportation easier, less time-consuming and affordable.⁶³ In the contemporary understanding of the 1960s, tourism was distinguished as a decidedly modern,

Project report, no date, in UNESCO 069:72 (63) UNDP pt. vi.

Letter from M. Jiminez to Bruce Stedman, 13.3.74, in UNESCO 069:72 (63) UNDP pt. i.

Manish Ratti, History and Geography of Tourism (New Delhi: Rajat Publications, 2007), 22–24.

European phenomenon, not least because only a certain percentage of the world's population was able to engage in such travel. In tourism development planning, non-Western and pre-modern forms of travel, such as pilgrimage, were not included.⁶⁴ For tourism planners, the world was clearly divided into those who travel and those who are travelled to, the Western and Non-Western countries, and domestic tourism was something that did not exist in developing countries.⁶⁵

The growth of tourism eventually turned it into a powerful factor in economic development, quickly acquiring importance in many national economies, increasing the business of tour operators and all branches of the hospitality industry, be they accommodation, food or entertainment. International organisations and networks were formed, the most important of these being the International Union of Travel Organisations (IUOTO), established in 1946. IUOTO concerned themselves with issues relating to travel conditions, especially visa and passport regulations, but also joint regional advertising and the definition of standards. To strengthen its policymaking capacities and following a majority vote backed largely by developing countries, in 1974 IUOTO was transformed into the UN World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) and elevated to the ranks of a UN special agency, excluding the private sector members.⁶⁶ The UNWTO, in undertaking more targeted attempts to centralise tourism policies internationally, brought forward important global tourism policies like the 1980 Manila declaration and the 1982 Acapulco Document.⁶⁷

Most noteworthy about the work of these international organisations is the fact that the recommendations and policies explicitly stated tourism to be a critical factor for challenging global inequality. In the official resolutions and statements, tourism was explained as a mechanism to redistribute the resources of rich societies to poor ones, contributing to the restructuring of the international economic system towards the New International Economic Order. Among econ-

Dennison Nash, "Tourism as a Form of Imperialism", in Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism, ed. Valene L. Smith, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 33–52, https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812208016.37.

Krishna B. Ghimire, ed., The Native Tourist: Mass Tourism within Developing Countries (London; New York: Earthscan, 2001), 8–11.

World Tourism Organisation, "Creation of the Inter-Governmental World Tourism Organization", ATR Annals of Tourism Research 2, no. 5 (1975): 237–45; United Nations Conference on International Travel and Tourism, Recommendations.

"Manila Declaration on World Tourism", UNWTO Declarations 6, no. 4 (30 October 1980): 1–4, https://doi.org/10.18111/unwtodeclarations.19<IP_ADDRESS>; United Nations World Tourism Organization, "Acapulco Document", August 1982, http://www.e-unwto.org/doi/pdf/10.18111/un wtodeclarations.19<IP_ADDRESS>.

omists and other international development experts, tourism held a particular value for developing countries to materialise economic potential and surpass their "under-development".⁶⁸ The biggest advantage of tourism, in their opinion, was that it was a non-threatening export industry, offering a product that was not in any competition with the domestic industries of the Global North.

Mass-tourism on a global scale was, despite the exploding numbers of tourist arrivals during the 1960s, largely confined to the Western hemisphere. The vast majority of arrivals were registered in Europe and Northern America, meaning it was Europeans traveling inside of Europe or American or Canadian citizens traveling inside Northern America. A smaller number of tourists from these Western countries travelled to non-Western countries, generally neighbouring ones. Tourism business did not yet exist in most developing countries, yet, this favourable development was readily projected onto regions rich in potential destinations all over the world, such as South East Asia, Latin America and East Africa by planners and politicians. The increase in global revenue from foreign tourism by 75% between 1958 and 1963 seemed to justify the build-up of tourism as the universal remedy for countries lacking a developed industrial sector or natural resources ready to exploit.⁶⁹ Many planners, entrepreneurs and politicians predicted rising numbers of tourists to developing countries, resulting in a steady growth of tourism, a growth that would divert cash flows from the prosperous countries of said tourists straight into the national economies of their destinations.⁷⁰

#### Surveying Ethiopia's natural and cultural heritage

With economic development becoming the ultima ratio for all sizeable amounts of funding within the UN system, tourism was a welcome opportunity to connect a chronically under-financed activity, the conservation of cultural and natural sites, to existing cashflows.⁷¹ It was a generally accepted fact that there was a lack of funds for conservation in developing countries, and that tourism could serve as a potential source for these funds. Some experts went even further, stat-

Emanuel de Kadt, World Bank, and UNESCO, eds., Tourism: Passport to Development? Perspectives on the Social and Cultural Effects of Tourism in Developing Countries (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), xiii; Lanfant, "Tourism", 19.

N.N., "1967 – International Tourist Year", UNESCO Courier 19, no. 12 (1966): 6.

Popovic, Tourism in Eastern Africa, 188.

This is the general tone of the numerous reports and papers, illustrating the cultural tourism discourse in UNESCO, in: UNESCO 069:72:380.8 A 193.

ing that the conservation of monuments and wildlife presented the only major potential for tourism in most developing countries, as people would not travel so far simply to spend leisure time at a beach. Cultural and natural heritage, in most developing countries, was considered an attraction at the core of a destination.

International nature conservation experts agreed that African fauna, flora and habitat was the most urgent conservation problem of the time.⁷² In 1960, Julian Huxley, former Director General of UNESCO, African wildlife biologist and prominent spokesperson for eugenics and geo-engineering, embarked on a mission for UNESCO, "to investigate the problem" of conservation and wildlife in East and Central Africa.⁷³ After touring the national parks of Rhodesia, and Nyasaland, Tanganyika, Kenya, Uganda and Zanzibar, Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique) and eastern Congo and South Africa he wrote: "The situation can still be saved provided that the conservationists can induce African governments and the African public to understand and follow an ecological approach".⁷⁴

After this first mission, international conservation experts sought for more effective ways to interest African governments in natural and wildlife conservation. A special project for "Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources in modern African States" was conducted by IUCN and FAO, with the intention of assisting interested countries in establishing wildlife conservation strategies. The framework of this "African Special Project" went back to an IUCN decision in 1960, after which two designated experts started to travel and promoteanumber of Eastern African countries. The FAO/IUCN African Special Project encompassed two approaches to natural protection— conservation as well as resource mobilisation. At the 1961 conference in the context of the special project, European and US-American wildlife experts and African politicians concluded that only through the economic incentive would natural conservation be successful in African societies. In his speech, the Tanganyikan Minister of Lands and Surveys, T.S. Tewa, explained:

It must, however, be said that the almost mystical and romantic regard for wild animals which some people have, has often puzzled the peoples of Africa. To many Africans, the

Gerald G. Watterson, ed., Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources in Modern African States: Report of a Symposium Organized by CCTA and IUCN and Held under the Auspices of FAO and UNESCO at Arusha, Tanganyika, September 1961 (Morges: IUCN, 1963), 3, https://por tals.iucn.org/library/sites/library/files/documents/NS-001.pdf.

Julian Huxley, "The Conservation of Wild Life and Natural Habitats in Central and East Africa: Report on a Mission Accomplished for UNESCO, July–September 1960 [Serial No. NS.61/ D.31/A]" (Paris: UNESCO, 1961).

Ibid., 12.

elephant is a dangerous agricultural pest, the lion a savage killer of men and stock, and the wildebeest an unwelcome competitor for scarce grazing. Residents in Africa expect protection from damage by game and they expect to see that where human interests and those of animals conflict, the interests of animals are allowed to prevail only in carefully chosen and restricted areas. But if the mass of my countrymen are to be enlisted in the ranks of conservationists, they will need to be convinced not only that the animals in these restricted areas, that is the Parks and Reserves, can be more use to them alive than dead, but that the money necessary to preserve them would not be better spent on more schools and doctors. In other words, they will expect us to see that what they are told is "their heritage", however valuable it may be as a cultural asset, can still be made to earn its keep. Can this be done? I believe it can—through tourism.⁷⁵

After the experts had made their initial tour, where the idea was introduced to the new African national governments, the Ethiopian government proved particularly receptive to the concept.⁷⁶ Ethiopia was included in Julian Huxley's 1960 report, together with some other African territories of which he delivered an assessment by proxy, based on reports of IUCN observer G.G. Watterson. In this brief section, the value of Ethiopian wildlife was measured exclusively in terms of interest and attraction for a Western audience: "Ethiopia possesses fine mountain scenery, wonderful canyons, large upland areas with a cool climate, and many sites of great historical and archaeological interest. There is still a fair abundance of interesting wild animals, especially in the south of the country, but it is being seriously and rapidly reduced by illicit killing." In 1963 Akalework Habtewold, Ethiopian Minister for Agriculture, submitted a request to UNESCO, asking for assistance for the development of national parks and the protection of wildlife in Ethiopia. In his address to the DG and the General Assembly of UNESCO, Akalework Habtewold stated: "It is our wish to manage and develop national parks and wildlife reserves in such a way as to secure the preservation of their flora and fauna, provide centres of biological and ecological research, and contribute to the growth of the national economy, especially through the development of tourism and game cropping."⁷⁷

T.S. Tewa, "The Value of the Tourist Industry in the Conservation of Natural Resources in Tanganyika", in Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources in Modern African States – Report of a Symposium Organized by CCTA and IUCN and Held under the Auspices of FAO and UNESCO at Arusha, Tanganyika, September 1961, ed. Gerald G. Watterson (Morges: IUCN, 1963), 337, https://portals.iucn.org/library/sites/library/files/documents/NS-001.pdf.

T. Riney and P. Hill, "FAO/IUCN African Special Project: Interim Report on Ethiopia" (Rome: FAO, 1963), 1–2.

Julian Huxley et al., "The Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources in Ethiopia [Serial No. NS/NR/47]" (Paris: UNESCO, 1963), 6.

The request was met positively: "Fully conscious of the scientific, cultural, educational social and economic importance of the natural habits, of the wildlife, constituted by a large variety of species, some of which are endemic, of the remarkable landscapes and archaeological sites of Ethiopia which represent an inheritance of universal interest the DG decided to support the request."⁷⁸

In 1963, a further UNESCO mission was dispatched to Ethiopia, composed of senior experts from European and American institutions of wildlife conservation. It was headed by Julian Huxley, with the other members of the mission L. Swift, former Director of the Division of Wildlife Management, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Dr. Barton Worthington, Deputy-DG of the United States-based charity organisation Nature Conservancy, and Professor Theodore Monod of the Musée national d'histoire naturelle in Paris. Julian Huxley had been on a mission concerned with "The Conservation of Wild Life and Natural Habitats in Central and East Africa" in 1961, leading him to include second hand information about the relevance of Ethiopian wildlife and scenery, prompting a recommendation to consign a mission to further investigate on the matter.⁷⁹

The mission's main concern was, per definition of the request, wildlife, but corresponding with the DG's feedback, the final report contained remarks on cultural monuments as well.⁸⁰ This indicates that all actors involved understood national heritage as a portfolio of sites, and in a way that it would inherently encompass both natural and cultural sites. During the short period of two weeks, the experts produced little more than very general recommendations, emphasising the lack of conventional, functional government institutions required to practice conservation in the first place. The report also contained, however, a suggested selection of sites, namely the "Managasha National Park", "Matahara Proposed National Park in Awash", "Abijatta Lake Proposed National Park", a "Proposed National Park in the Rift Valley" and "A Scenic National Park at the Source of the Nile.⁸¹ Another mission from UNESCO embarked to Ethiopia, during 1964/1965, carried out by Leslie Brown, former Director of Agriculture in Kenya, and Major Ian Grimwood, former Chief Game Warden of Kenya, in order to "provide assistance to the Ethiopian Government in the field of conservation of nature and natural resources, their restoration and enrichment." The consultants themselves described their missions as leading to positive results,

Ibid., 6.

Huxley, "The Conservation of Wild Life", x.

John H. Blower, "Wildlife Conservation and National Parks: Ethiopia – (Mission) September 1965–September 1969 [Serial No. 2351/RMS.RS/SCE]" (Paris: UNESCO, 1971), 6; Huxley et al., "The Conservation of Nature", 9–16.

Huxley et al., "The Conservation of Nature", 32.

highlighting specifically the establishment of a government authority for wildlife, the Ethiopian Wildlife Conservation Organisation (EWCO). Remarkably, as with Huxley et al., Grimwood and Brown referred in their reports to the proposal for the establishment of a conservation board in charge not only of wildlife but also "archaeological resources".⁸² The proposal went as far as to claim that only tourism would provide the justification needed for the board to successfully carry out conservation:

The present wildlife potential of Ethiopia is insufficient to support a large tourist industry on its own, in face of competition from nearby East African countries where game is more plentiful and more easily seen. The richness of Ethiopia's fauna lies more in its uniqueness than in the spectacular number of variety of animals to be seen, which tends to make it of less interest to the general public. The country has, however, historical sites and antiquities such as are to be found nowhere else in Africa south of the Sahara. It also has some of the grandest scenery in the world. Only by the inclusion of such attractions into the first major tourist circuits does it seem likely that a large enough flow of visitors can be created to provide the Board with the means to carry out its present primary task of saving some of the country's rarer animals.⁸³

The idea that African natural heritage on the one hand needed protection from African people and on the other hand was a promising economic resource combined racist and paternalistic thinking and shaped the tourism planning in many newly independent nation states in Africa. The parallels to the international programmes for the conservation of built heritage are striking: tourism appeared as an issue among international heritage experts from the 1950s on, and came with a distinct economic rationale. It was mentioned as early as 1949 as one of the "problems of common interest to organisations concerned with […] sites and monuments of art and history" in a meeting of experts, taking place at UNESCO.⁸⁴ Tourism, and more specifically the economic potential of tourism as regards historic sites, was a factor that arose from the international perspective on historic monuments and the creation of the idea of a global heritage landscape. Monuments, sites and nature were already features of tourist destinations in Europe, so the principle was transferred to the new international scope, and

Blower, "Wildlife Conservation", 6; Ian R. Grimwood, "Conservation of Natural Resources: Ethiopia – (Mission) November 1964–February 1965 [Serial No. WS/0865.66 REV.AVS]" (Paris: UNESCO, 1965); Leslie H. Brown, "Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources: Ethiopia – (Mission) 30 December 1964 to 1 April 1965; Report [Serial No. WS/0865.192/AVS]" (Paris: UNESCO, 1965).

Brown, "Conservation of Nature", 2.

Unesdoc, Georges Henri Rivière, "Meeting of Experts on Sites and Monuments of Art and History; Paris; 1949".

the idea of economic profit from tourism to benefit the conservation of monuments was expressed in proposals, such as the 1951 plan to adopt an international convention that would institute a special tourist tax for the preservation of monuments and museums.⁸⁵

The intertwining of the growing relevance of tourism and the development paradigm turned cultural and natural heritage into an economic resource, and provided a unique chance for UNESCO to enter the development playing field. By 1960, while mainly involved in educational efforts of technical assistance, UN-ESCO's division for cultural heritage saw itself at the intersection of both of the main arguments for tourism: the idea that tourism could promote international understanding and education, as well as the requirement to develop cultural heritage as a resource in a responsible manner, and felt obliged to advance both causes.⁸⁶ Tourism, for UNESCO, promised to be a highly effective pedagogic tool, aiming to present the monuments as teaching institutions for history. UNESCO initially saw itself as only concerned with tourism in cases where tourism development projects carried a cultural component.⁸⁷ Its contribution to tourism aimed to counterbalance the purely economic interest in tourism research and planning with educational, cultural and scientific impulses.

In 1962, tourism was stated to be an important means of action in the first plan of proposed action for UNESCO's international campaign for monuments.⁸⁸ UNESCO's division of museums and monuments commissioned a study to evaluate tourism statistics, in order to develop a concept for an "international fund for monuments."⁸⁹ These concerns were motivated by an acute shortage of funds for the aspirations of international conservation experts. They turned to a more strategic planning, considering what would produce the most promising positive public response.

In the context of the first UN Development Decade, the conservation of natural and cultural heritage and the promotion of tourism and the concerns of development were combined into a momentous plan called "Associating the preservation of cultural property with the development of tourism":

Ibid., Preliminary Study on the advisability of international measures for the institution of a special tourist tax, submitted to Executive Board, Paris, 12.1.1951.

UNESCO, 72/EX/Decisions, Art. 10, 1966.

Letter from J. Hardouin, no date, in: UNESCO 069:72:380.8 A 193.

Template letter from DG René Maheu to ministers of member states, 31.7.1962, in: UNESCO 069:72 A14.

Letter from Giorgio Rosi to Conrad André Beerli, 2.8.62, in: UNESCO 069:72 A14.

How can money be raised for the restoration of protection of the world's heritage of monuments? A new Unesco [sic] plan offers an answer—turn the monuments into paying affairs. Unesco […] suggests, that countries should turn their cultural assets into economic ones by giving priority to monuments in programmes of tourist development. […] Unesco is studying how funds for such projects can be obtained from regional and international organisations and through the U.N. Development Programme, since the tourist industry is seen as a key factor in economic development.⁹⁰

In practice this resulted in a number of expert missions concerned with tourism, based on requests from developing countries. Between 1966 and 1980 alone, missions were carried out to the following twenty-three countries: Algeria, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Cyprus, Ecuador, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia (Bali), Iran, Libya, Malta, Mongolia, Nepal, Nicaragua, Kenya, Pakistan, Peru, the Dominican Republic, the United Arab Republic and Thailand.⁹¹ The tourism development missions between 1966 and 1980 were all very similar in terms of the initial task outlined, and consisted of assisting the government in developing recommendations on the establishment of tourism as a source of economic development, and in giving directions for developing existing resources of natural or cultural sites to a standard sufficient for their touristic exploitation. Operating strictly on the premise that historical sites and natural beauty presented the only potential points of touristic interest in all of the aforementioned countries, the consultants travelled to assess the respective sites in question, and the country in general, according to their destination value. In most cases, the experts were affiliated not with the field of tourism or economic planning, but rather with the fields of architecture, art history or natural science. Nonetheless, they were tasked with analysing the tourism potential, and counted hotel beds and smooth surface road-kilometres, evaluated the quality of service and attractions offered, and delivered investment and profitability recommendations. Finally, they developed concrete plans and proposals, ranging from legislative and administrative changes to social and urban planning, as well as specific restoration works.

In Ethiopia, Lalibela was the first site of extensive international cooperation and official engagement with the Ethiopian government to restore the monuments and provide for their conservation. Initially, Ethiopia requested to launch

N.N., "Cultural Tourism: The Unexploited Treasure of Economic Development", UNESCO Courier 19, no. 12 (1966): 11–13; Unesdoc, "UNESCO. Executive Board; 72nd Session; 1966," n.d. Decisions taken during the Sixth Review of Operational Projects financed from UNDP, UNFPA and under funds-in-trust, May 1982, in: UNESCO 069:72 (63) UNDP pt. ixb; surely a comparative study of all the countries would bring fruitful insights regarding the influence and role of these missions.

an international safeguarding campaign modelled after the Nubian Monuments Campaign. Even though UNESCO did not want to commit to a full-sized safeguarding campaign immediately, "they wanted to prove that His Imperial Highness' appeal to them was met with favour, they approved the idea of sending immediately to Ethiopia, at their own expenses, an expert to make financial estimations and technical suggestions about the restoration, provided that the Ethiopian party took charge of the local expenses (hotel and transport) of the said expert."⁹²

This resulted at the beginning of 1965 in a joint suggestion by UNESCO and the American Society of Archaeology to the International Fund for Monuments, a newly founded American organisation (whose Chairman was Colonel James A. Gray), which "immediately agreed to make the Lalibela Project the first one to be launched by the new organization."⁹³ These efforts were later considered by UNESCO and UNDP staff as a kind of preparation for further successful international projects in Ethiopia.⁹⁴

Soon after the works in Lalibela began, UNESCO's first mission concerned with the institutional advancement of Ethiopian heritage-making dispatched Richard Howland, Professor for Archaeology and Art History, Secretary-Treasurer of the U.S. National Committee of ICOMOS and chairman of the Department of Civil History at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., in 1967 to bring forth "practical recommendations and suggestions […] for those who have the heavy responsibility for developing an Antiquities Administration for Ethiopia."⁹⁵ This endeavour resulted in a report entailing Recommendations for the Organization of the Ethiopian Antiquities Administration. The technical director of the Lalibela project, architect Sandro Angelini of ICCROM, oversaw and planned the restoration work, but returned for follow-up missions with a more general scope.

Ian Grimwood and Leslie Brown had already stated in their report that only tourism would provide the justification to install conservation institutions that could successfully carry out "the primary task of conservation, believing that

S. Pierre Pétrides, Memorandum on the Project for Restoration and Conservation of the Monuments of Lalibela, in NALE, <IP_ADDRESS>, Lalibela Committee.

Ibid.

Such as the ETH 74/14 project: "Lalibela was also the place where the project could record massive progress of work – succeeded in close cooperation with the local administration and the church itself." Draft report of the Tripartite Meeting from 27.1.1978, in: UNESCO 069:72 (63) UNDP, pt. vi.

"Recommendations for the Organization of the Ethiopian Antiquities Administration: Ethiopia – (Mission) February–March 1967 [Serial No. 89/BMS.RD/SHC]" (Paris: UNESCO, 1967), 1; Richard H. Howland, "Journey to Ethiopia's Past", UNESCO Courier 20, no. 11 (1967): 39–42.

conservation alone would not provide enough priority and incentive in the eyes of the Ethiopian government."⁹⁶ Indeed, the issue of cultural and natural heritage attracted attention as an item of development planning due to its potential for creating tourist destinations and establishing tourism as an economic sector in Ethiopia. In 1968 the Ministry for Planning and Development submitted a request to UNESCO to send an expert for legal and organisational aspects of cultural heritage, so as to build a systematic foundation for the development of sites of cultural heritage as tourist destinations.⁹⁷

The Cultural Heritage division of UNESCO had its eye on Ethiopia, as did the UNDP regional representative in Addis Ababa, with the objective in mind to execute a larger-scale project, combining development planning, tourism and conservation of monuments, and presented this possibility to the Ministry of Planning in 1968.⁹⁸ In pointing to the possibility for a larger amount of funding to be made available as a follow-up to the initial project, UNESCO managed to secure the interest of the Ministry of Planning, which added considerable weight to the cause of conservation. Together with the economist Louis Mougin, in 1968 Sandro Angelini offered a report titled Proposals for the development of sites and monuments in Ethiopia as a contribution to the growth of cultural tourism.⁹⁹ Two years later in 1970, the consultant B.G. Gaidoni conducted a study on Cultural Tourism: Prospects for its Development.¹⁰⁰ All of these missions contained, in parts, recommendations to the institutional organisation of the heritage-making institutions as well as the legislation regarding heritage.

Tourism presented a recurring component of all conservation activities in Ethiopia. For many it carried a promise of salvation for developing countries, and several targeted activities guided by that belief were initiated within UNESCO and other institutions like UNECA and FAO during that time. These included surveying the touristic potential of countries based on economic prospects or infrastructural investment schemes that aimed to improve the standard of tourist destinations and make them more accessible. In this zeitgeist, another

Grimwood, "Conservation of Natural Resources", 2.

Letter from Belai Abbai to Malcolm Adiseshiah, 4.1.1968, in: UNESCO X 07.21 (63) AMS, pt. ii.

Response to letter from Malcolm Adisehsia to Belai Abbai, 14. 2.1968, in: UNESCO X 07.21 (63) AMS, pt. ii.

Sandro Angelini and Louis Mougin, "Proposals for the Development of Sites and Monuments in Ethiopia as a Contribution to the Growth of Cultural Tourism: Ethiopia – (Mission) May–June 1968 [Serial No. 893/BMS.RD/CLT]" (Paris: UNESCO, 1968).

B.G. Gaidoni, "Cultural Tourism; Prospects for Its Development: Ethiopia – (Mission) September–October 1969 [Serial No. 2031/BMS.RD/CLT]" (Paris: UNESCO, 1970).

of Sandro Angelini's missions in 1971 finally brought a concrete working plan for the development of individual sites alongside the "Historic Route" to the table.¹⁰¹

#### Doing cultural tourism in Ethiopia

In the eyes of the heritage experts, the existing heritage sites were merely a few diamonds in the rough, loosely strewn across the country. The international experts perceived a dire need for structural improvement, conservation and image promotion. Gaidoni, the only UNESCO expert dealing with Ethiopian tourism development with a specific background in tourism expertise, travelled along the "Historic Route" and, although he admitted that the monuments needed restoration and protection from vandalism and weathering, his main concern was the lack of destination value from the presumed tourist's point of view. In addition to the improvement of hotel facilities, the service and number of available beds in general, his assessment was characterised by the idea that the monuments alone would not create enough value to make travel there worth the tourist's while and money. For Lake Tana, he proposed, after an initial restoration of the churches on the Lake's islands, the addition of sailing clubs, fishing lodges, bathing establishments and more, to "insure [sic] that visitors will come". For Gondar, he suggested a golf course, tennis courts and bowling grounds—clearly having the European/British upper-class tourist in mind.¹⁰² And, for Lalibela: "Entertainment is totally lacking. At least a small cafe or bar should be built […]. A miniature golf and a swimming pool would add diversion for the tourist, because visiting the churches in the villages […] would take more than one day."¹⁰³

With all the modernisation and addition of leisurely facilities for the tourists' sake, however, he cautioned that "the alteration to the character of the locale and to the landscape that these suggested changes would inevitably introduce, must be confined to the already urbanized areas" so as "not to alter in the least the appearance and authenticity of these other localities". He wrote further that, "It would be a pity to destroy the possibility of the elation of discovery."¹⁰⁴ Most noteworthy are Gaidoni's suggestions to not only improve the monuments as sights, but also to establish a showcase of local arts and crafts, as well as per-

Sandro Angelini, "The Historic Route: A Work-Plan for the Development of the Sites and Monuments: Ethiopia – (Mission) June 1971 [2468/RMO.RD/CLT]" (Paris: UNESCO, 1971). Gaidoni, "Cultural Tourism", 24.

Ibid., 38.

Ibid., 17–18.

Figure 2: Historical Route, Gaidoni, 11.

formances for the purpose of tourist entertainment. He suggested to enable the government to take ultimate control over the manner of representation of the varied local ethnic identities of Ethiopia.

In accordance with the idea that tourism to the country's heritage sites would improve economic development, the first natural and cultural conservation consultancies and projects were concerned as much with tourism as with the heritage sites themselves.¹⁰⁵ In the project reports, the internationally acclaimed architects, art historians and wildlife experts who were sent on these consultancy missions by UNESCO relentlessly emphasised the contribution that the development of historical monuments and sites would provide towards the growth of tourism.

The experts' assessment of the tourism potential of individual heritage sites and their surrounding regions had a direct influence on which sites were given priority in the direction of international funds and national institutional capacities for conservation. Furthermore, it influenced the general programmatic direction of heritage-making in Ethiopia. Grimwood and Brown emphasised in their reports that a large enough touristic potential would only be created with a combined promotion of natural and cultural heritage, acknowledging at the same time the greater relevance and potential of cultural heritage as opposed to natural heritage. Consequently, the efforts taken in the following years were mainly in the areas of cultural heritage conservation and presentation.

As regards wildlife conservation, tourism underwent a transformation during this period from game safaris towards an emphasis on natural observation and photo safaris, and this process caused the proper development of a consistent strategic approach to suffer. The planning of the "Historic Route" influenced the establishment of natural heritage insofar as the distribution of resources goes. The Simien National Park was chosen as a focal point for these efforts as it was adjacent to the planned "Historic Route", and promised to provide touristic potential because of the unique mountain-riff-scenery as well as the rare species present.¹⁰⁶

After more than ten years of consultation and conservation efforts through UNESCO's experts, the conditions for heritage-making had matured enough by 1974 to take the next step towards shaping the Ethiopian national heritage in accordance with the universal standards of heritage. Yet despite several preparatory missions, Ethiopian heritage was still not in a position to launch the safeguarding campaign that had been requested and envisaged for it. As another preparatory step, a seven-year project entitled Presentation and preservation of selected sites was launched in 1975, funded and organised by UNDP and admin-

Huxley et al., "The Conservation of Nature"; Brown, "Conservation of Nature"; Grimwood, "Conservation of Natural Resources"; Angelini and Mougin, "Proposals for the Development"; Gaidoni, "Cultural Tourism"; Angelini, "The Historic Route".

Gaidoni, "Cultural Tourism", 49.

istered by UNESCO.¹⁰⁷ This project was deemed necessary to build up in the first instance the national capacities for receiving and putting to use international donations for safeguarding that would be made available with the campaign launch.¹⁰⁸

Originally the project ETH 74/14 was titled The Development of Cultural tourism: preservation and presentation of sites and monuments¹⁰⁹ and with the new raison d'être of heritage sites as tourist destinations, the project qualified as one of the "sharper focus and greater impact potential […] projects which are economic but which have maximum multiplier effects"¹¹⁰ that UNDP tried to establish as a priority in Ethiopia. Although after a personal visit the UNDP resident representative Alan Elliott was doubtful in internal correspondence about the realistic possibilities, in the official language of reports and requests and also correspondence with the Ethiopian authorities, the promotion of tourism was enthusiastically defended and fostered by UNDP and UNESCO representatives.¹¹¹ After the first several missions, UNESCO acknowledged that the government would need more assistance to "promote tourism and increase the value of cultural heritage and natural sites."¹¹²

After the 1974 revolution, the government still desired the development of tourism, but its valuation shifted.¹¹³ The declaration on "Economic Policy of Socialist Ethiopia by the Provisional Military Government of Ethiopia", issued on February 7, 1975, stated that, "It should, however, be emphasised that the conservation of wildlife, birdlife, etc. particularly of the rare species, and the preservation of the antiquities will be viewed primarily as national objectives in their own right and not only as a means of attracting foreign visitors."¹¹⁴ Although in the UNDP country programme for Ethiopia for the period 1983–86 the UNDP still stated "the high importance which the Ethiopian government accords to the dimension of culture in the development process",¹¹⁵ the development of heritages

UNDP/ETH/74/014, Terminal Report, 1.

The campaign was acknowledged by UNESCO's General Conference in 1976 (resolution 19 C/4.126), but not implemented until 1988; International campaign to safeguard the principal monuments and sites of Ethiopia—campaign strategy and action plan 1988–1997, May 1988, in: ARCCH, 14–1, UNESCO, Folder 1.

Project proposal, no date, in: UNESCO 069:72 (63) UNDP, pt. i.

Memo from E. Amerding, in: UNESCO 069:72 (63) UNDP pt. i.

Memo from A. Elliott to Director BMS, 21.1.69, UNESCO X 07.21 (63) pt. v.

Memo from Director BMS to DG, October 1970, in: UNESCO X 07.21 (63) pt. vi.

Aleme Eshete, The Cultural Situation in Socialist Ethiopia (Paris: UNESCO, 1982), 19.

Quoted in: Ayalew Sisay, Historical Development of Travel and Tourism in Ethiopia (Addis Ababa: the author, 2009), 162, 163.

Letter from J.B. Kabore, to Mr. K.F.S. King, UNESCO 069:72 (63) UNDP pt. ixb.

sites as destinations was no longer considered as important. In reality not only the re-orientation of the political paradigm but mainly the ongoing political and military conflicts presented a strong inhibiting factor for all tourism activities. Travel bans and states of emergency made large parts of the "Historic North" inaccessible to foreigners for almost a decade. In the years between 1983 and 1988, the tourism sector had a very low priority, as over a third of the national budget was allocated to defence and internal security. The nationalisation of all private hotels, tour operators and agencies prevented any possibility of foreign private investment. Furthermore, tourism suffered from the continuous lack of infrastructure and from insufficient marketing.¹¹⁶

UNESCO and UNDP representatives attempted to adapt the project guidelines to the new political directions and paradigms of a new administration which refused to see culture as complimentary or to be simply employed in the service of tourism and economic development, and emphasised how "for the preservation of cultural heritage, in this context a development of cultural identity would provide important guidelines for economic development, in which tourism components were not vital, but would be a result."¹¹⁷

#### Turning the heritage sites into destinations

While the development of tourism never did accomplish what had been predicted in the 1960s, the promotion of tourism and the scientific expert evaluation of heritage sites were however of major importance in helping create a tourist image of Ethiopia. Experts agreed early on that any planning had to revolve around creating a strong image of Ethiopia that would have a specific appeal to tourists. According to the UN tourism expert Vojislav Popovic, Ethiopia's main asset in terms of tourism was, in fact, not the mass-tourism market flowing into coastal resorts or which looked for easy, pre-arranged "wildlife-coast" pack-

The independence of Eritrea resulted in the loss of some of the most promising tourist destinations along the Red Sea coast, according to: Frederick A. Frost and Tekle Shanka, "Perception of Ethiopia as a Tourist Destination", Ethiopia in Broader Perspective: Papers of the XIIIth International Conference of Ethiopian Studies 348–50 (1997). Until the 90s, the tourism brochures from the 60s and 70s presented the only tourism promotion material available and they are today still sold at souvenir stalls at the tourist destinations, supposedly because no new ones exist in sufficient quantity.

Draft report of the tripartite meeting from 27.1.1978, Project ETH/74/014, in: UNESCO 069:72(63) UNDP pt. vi.

ages, but its "appeal […] to the well-to-do, sophisticated sightseeing tourists".¹¹⁸ These were the experienced international travellers seeking out the unique and largely different attractions of Ethiopia: unspoiled nature, fascinating landscapes, numerous ethnic groups and "the long history of independent rule, the traditional dynasty whose origin is interwoven with legend of the pre-Christian era […which] make Ethiopia a country whose original features can very well be used to createatouristically very attractive image in the minds of the public and tour organizers."¹¹⁹

Like Popovic, Gaidoni stated that "the first and most urgent task in the process of building a tourist industry in Ethiopia must be the creation and diffusion of the tourist image of the country." He sketched out:

First, like Egypt, Ethiopia has its own unique architectural and historical reality, with sites like Gondar, Axum, and Lalibela as outstanding tourist offerings. Secondly, like Kenya, Ethiopia boasts the wildlife resources of its national parks, Awash, Simien, and Bale. Lastly, Ethiopia betters either Egypt or Kenya with its sunshine and sea beauty, Massawa, the Dahlak Islands, and in general the Red Sea coast. This Ethiopia can offer a triple image, but because Ethiopia is also an African country, this image must be thoroughly African. What I mean is this: Even if Ethiopia is building modern cities and new industrial enterprises, it has to offer the tourist points of interest he does not find at home, be that in Europe or North America. It is this other world image which must be established to attract the attention of the prospective tourist. The proper tourist image, then, is the first thing an ETO team of experts should establish.¹²⁰

The establishment of tourism as a state economic sector had a strong impact on both image production and the circulation of knowledge of Ethiopian heritage. In order to attract foreign investment and to promote Ethiopia as tourist destination on the international market, two government institutions were put in charge of tourism marketing concepts and campaigns: EAL and the ETO. Both institutions received foreign technical assistance and foreign advisors contributed significantly to the production and planning of tourism images and slogans. Tourism promotion experts from Germany, the UK and France, funded via bilateral programmes of technical cooperation, worked for the ETO, developing tourism promotional materials that would advertise the benefits of Ethiopia in the language of Western commercial advertising.¹²¹ EAL's early tourism promotion al-

Popovic, Tourism in Eastern Africa, 92.

Ibid., 90.

Gaidoni, "Cultural Tourism", 7.

At least six full-time advisors, two of which were responsible for the development of publicity, over a duration of several years, are listed in the following reports: UNDP, "Report on Development Assistance to Ethiopia in 1972 – Prepared by the Resident Representative of the UNDP

ready operated with catchy slogans, such as "The Wonderland Route" or "The Land of Queen of Sheba", alluding to the Western fascination with Ethiopian heritage and history.¹²²

The director of the ETO was Habte Selassie Tafesse, formerly head of the press and information department of the Ethiopian Imperial Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and head of Tourism in the Prime Minister's Office. He received his primary education and socialisation growing up in Athens as the foster child of a Russian Orthodox Christian family, and his secondary education in Alexandria, Egypt, where his Ethiopian birth father served as ambassador for Ethiopia. He received his higher education in the USA.¹²³ He brought a decidedly Western, state of the art expertise, and sense for marketing and image promotion to all areas of government publications directed towards a foreign audience.¹²⁴

After the establishment of the ETO in 1966, a full-scale marketing strategy was developed under his direction, including the slogans "The hidden empire" and "13 months of sunshine", which referred to the Ethiopian use of the Julian calendar as opposed to the Gregorian one, resulting in an additional month¹²⁵ and implying, in the marketing copy, not only the benefits of a consistently mild and sunny climate throughout the year but also that for the tourist more was to be found than expected in Ethiopia.¹²⁶ Habte Selassie also created Ethiopian Pavilions for the World Expositions in Montreal, Canada in 1967 (which can be seen on the cover image of this book) and in Japan in 1972, as well as regularly showcasing Ethiopia at the Internationale Tourismus-Börse (ITB) in Berlin. Part of this strategy was image production that established and curated the sites of cultural and natural heritage as touristic destinations. These images were orientated towards the Western interest in Ethiopia, focusing on exoticised images of "ethnic" faces and singling out monuments.¹²⁷

in Ethiopia," 41, 42; UNDP, "Report on Development Assistance to Ethiopia in 1973" (Addis Ababa: Office of the Regional Representative of UNDP, April 25, 1974), 46, 47.

Pamphlets, in NALE <IP_ADDRESS>, Ethiopian Airlines.

He spoke Greek, English, French and Russian but was not a native Amharic speaker.

Interview between Arefayne Fantahun and Habte Selassie Tafesse, May 2016 in Addis Ababa, notes kindly provided to me by Arefaynie Fantahun; Tafesse Habte Selassie, "Tourism". To balance out the leap year.

Ethiopian Tourist Organisation, 13 Monate Sonnenschein in Äthiopien, 1971.

The images of the posters to the thirteen month campaign were and are widely popular and can still be found serving as decoration in Ethiopian restaurants today. Personally, I have seen them in every Ethiopian restaurant I have visited so far, in Berlin, London and Oakland, CA. Furthermore, in Facebook-groups dedicated to sharing historical photos of Ethiopia, these images are frequently shown and continue to circulate.