An outsider is reminded immediately that Ethiopia is not merely an African state. Ethiopia is an ancient African civilization.
Your Excellency, the President of the Federal Republic of Ethiopia, your Excellencies, allow me please to just go on established protocol and indeed begin by saying, and forgive my voice, I have a slight cold, that it is with profound, profound humility and deep honor that I stand before you today here in Addis Ababa. To step into this hall is to stand at the epicenter of African self-determination.
I do not come merely as a neighbor who has crossed the border. I come as a brother returning to one of the foundational homes of our shared African family. My brothers and sisters, it was my sincere intention to be with you at the opening of this historic dialogue. But due to matters beyond my control, I was not able to be here. But we have followed keenly the ongoings that have taken place to this wonderful conclusion. And you have always been in my prayers and my commitment to the peace of this nation. And I wish to congratulate each and every one of you.
Addis Ababa is not only the historic capital of Ethiopia, it is the living capital of our continent. When the world listens to the voice of African dignity, it turns towards these hills here where the African Union resides. Africa gathers to deliberate, to dream, and to decide its own future. Allow me to thank the Ethiopian National Dialogue Commission for inviting us to witness this closing ceremony. The commission has looked monumental difficulty in the face and refused to blink. It has listened to thousands of voices to absorb the raw pain of history without flinching and from it to weave from all one single government of national consensus. That is indeed an act of patriotism of the highest order.
Ethiopia's history has always been one of resilience. This country has never walked an easy path, nor has it ever asked history for a soft destiny. Like gold refined in a furnace, the character of this nation has been tested by every manner of storm from within and from without. And each time Ethiopia has given something back to Africa.
In 1896 at Adwa, much of our continent was being parceled out under colonial rule. Ethiopians met an invading colonial army and defeated it. That was not only a clash of armies, it was a clash of destinies. It shattered the myth of European invincibility and it told every colonized African that chains could be broken and that dignity could be defended. The victory belonged first to Ethiopia, but the dignity it carried traveled across Africa and throughout the African diaspora. Adwa is Ethiopian history, but Adwa is also African history.
And this victory was not won cheaply. On that single day, Ethiopia laid somewhere between four and seven thousand of her children in the ground, and some eight thousand more came home carrying wounds that they would carry for the rest of their lives. They had come from Tigray, from Shewa, from Wollo, from Gojjam, from the Oromo lands, from every direction of this country. They did not fall as members of one ethnic group. They fell together and they are remembered together. Not one people won at Adwa, Ethiopia won at Adwa.
Then in 1936 at the League of Nations, the then Emperor Haile Selassie spoke not merely to plead for his country but to warn humanity that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. He spoke truth to power when the world preferred to be blind and he foretold the very conflagration that followed their moral failure. Ethiopia was occupied for five years, but Ethiopia was never made a possession. And when the emperor returned from exile, it was not only a throne that was restored, it was a hope for the entire continent.
In 1963, this city became the birthplace of the Organization of African Unity. Leaders from across the continent gathered here to declare that Africa would no longer be a pawn in the affairs of others. Ethiopia gave Africa a home, a sanctuary, and a voice. Therefore, as Ethiopians, you had freedom in 1896, consciousness in 1936, and unity for Africa in 1963.
And yet, my brothers and sisters, I have come to believe that the world knows Ethiopia's history far better than it knows the Ethiopian people. Let me be clear about where I stand. I am not an Ethiopian, but I cannot presume to tell Ethiopians their story because that story belongs to you. It belongs to your elders. It belongs to your communities. It belongs to the generations who have lived in it, defended it, celebrated it, and at times suffered through it.
I stand before you instead as a friend of Ethiopia, a country that has become to me a fond and second home. And sometimes a friend has the privilege of looking at a country from the outside and reminding its people of something extraordinary that they encounter so often that they may cease to see it. The riches of what they hold together. So allow me with humility to travel across this country.
To Tigray there is Axum, one of the great civilizations of ancient Africa. Trading across the Red Sea, connecting this continent to Arabia and the wider ancient world, there are churches and monasteries carved out of centuries of faith. And there is Adwa, of which I have already spoken. Moving through the north and central highlands into Amhara, one finds Lalibela, Gondar, Lake Tana, centuries of scholarship, literature, agriculture, and statecraft. An outsider is reminded immediately that Ethiopia is not merely an African state. Ethiopia is an ancient African civilization.
To the northeast you have the resilience of the Afar. The highlands fall away towards the lands of the Afar whose generations learned to build community in one of the most demanding environments on earth. Pastoral traditions, camel caravans, ancient salt routes, old connections to Djibouti and the Red Sea. The Afar remind an outsider that Ethiopia's history cannot be read from its mountains alone. Its lowlands carried trade, knowledge, and endurance.
Travel further east and another landscape appears. Among the Somali peoples of Ethiopia, there is a great pastoral civilization, livestock culture, customary institutions, Islamic faith, and an extraordinary tradition of oral poetry. These communities show how deeply Ethiopia belongs to the wider Horn of Africa. They also show what maps so often fail to explain. Borders may divide states, but they do not divide culture. Families, languages, trade, and tradition were here long before these modern boundaries.
Then you have Harar. Behind the walls of Harar Jugol lies a remarkable inheritance of Islamic scholarship, commerce, architecture, and exchange. For someone approaching Ethiopia from outside, Harar carries an important message. The Ethiopian story is both Christian and Muslim. Both traditions have ancient roots in this soil and both have built civilizations. Both belong within its national inheritance. And nearby Dire Dawa tells another story of railway commerce, of Somali, Harari, and other communities encountering one another. Dire Dawa proves that a crossing road can become more than a place on a map. It can become a place where cultures meet.
We move to the center, the Oromo heartland and the meeting of Ethiopia. Moving to the center, one encounters the vast landscape of Oromia and the Oromo people and discovers something that deserves far greater international recognition, the Gada system. An indigenous African tradition of governance and social organization carrying with it ideas of leadership, generational responsibility, deliberation, law and community. Africa is too often spoken about as though our ideas of governance must always have arrived from somewhere else. The Gada system tells us otherwise. Africa possesses political wisdom of its own and Ethiopia holds an extraordinary reservoir of it.
In Oromia, one also finds the coffee landscapes, agricultural and pastoral traditions, music and an immense contemporary contribution to this country's economy and life. And then surrounded, one reaches Addis Ababa. This is where Ethiopia meets Ethiopia. And this is where Ethiopia meets Africa.
And again, still moving, we travel southwards. One meets the people of central Ethiopia, the Gurage, the Hadiya, the Kambata, the Silte, the Halaba and others with their traditions of agriculture and earnest cultivation of enterprise, commerce, migration and community organization. They demonstrate that nations are not joined by institutions alone. People join countries themselves through business, markets, marriage, migration, work, friendship and shared opportunity.
And we continue further to the south and the diversity deepens. Amongst the Sidama, there is coffee culture, strong community institutions, a tradition of renewal and social cohesion. Travel on and one meets the Wolayta, the Gamo, the Gofa, the Ari, the Konso, the Basketo and many, many others. The agroforestry of Basketo and the histories and institutions of Konso, the cultures of the Gamo, Gofa and Ari each deserve to be understood in their own right. And here the lesson is striking. There is no peripheral Ethiopian culture. Some communities may be smaller. Some histories are less widely known abroad, but nonetheless, each of them is Ethiopian.
We move to the southwest into the lands of Kaffa, Sheka, Bench, Majang and other neighbors. And one finds forests, biodiversity, and generations of indigenous environmental knowledge. And one finds something that connects Ethiopia to almost every corner of the world through their coffee. A plant whose deepest heritage lies here and has traveled around the continent.
And looking at Ethiopia's long search for peace, I cannot help thinking that there is wisdom in simple tradition. Human beings from all these different communities being able to understand one another and that happens much better when people are willing to sit together.
We move to Gambella and we meet the Anuak, the Nuer, the Majang and others, the Berta, riverine pastoral traditions and communities whose connections extend towards South Sudan and the wider Nile region. Gambella challenges the picture of Ethiopia the world is usually shown because Ethiopia is not only highlands and ancient stone churches. It is also rivers, forests, wetlands, pastoral plains and Nilotic culture.
Ladies and gentlemen, having traveled if only in words from the north through the northeast across the east into the center and down through the south across the southwest and into the west. Let me tell you plainly what I see. I do not see one people. I see many people. I do not see one culture. I see an extraordinary assembly of sophisticated cultures. I do not see a history that can be explained through one region, one language, one faith or one political tradition. And because I belong to none of these communities perhaps I have the privilege of saying something very simple from outside. I do not see any one of these people without the others. I see Ethiopia.
Think of a tapestry and you have many here in Ethiopia woven in a single color. It would be flat, dull, and lifeless. It is the contrast of a tapestry, the friction and the deliberate blending of differently colored threads that makes it breathtaking. Ethiopia's greatness was never written by one hand. It was written by many hands. It was woven thread by thread by the Amhara, by the Oromo, by the Tigrayans, by the Sidama, by the Somali, by the Afar, by the Gurage, by the Wolayta, the Gamo, Anuak, and so many, many more. Each brought a language, a song of wisdom, of governance, of trade, of enterprise. No single thread is a whole blanket and no blanket is whole once a thread is pulled from it. So your diversity, my brothers and sisters, should never be treated as merely a political problem to be managed. It is an extraordinary national resource.
The question is not which people own Ethiopia and no outsider should presume to answer such a question. The stronger question is this. What has each of Ethiopia's peoples contributed to the civilization that they share? Once you ask it in that way, the map begins to look different. The administrative boundaries may remain but the roads cross them, the rivers cross them, commerce crosses them, languages cross them, faith crosses them, families cross them, history crosses them. So our map of this beautiful country shows us where Ethiopian regions are. But it is you, the people who show us what Ethiopia is.
The north needs the south. The east needs the west. The highlands need the lowland. The city needs the countryside. And Ethiopia needs all of its people.
There are those beyond our continent who look at the diversity in Africa and see a vulnerability. They wait for the mosaic to shatter so that they may say, 'We told you so.' Today you in Ethiopia are rewriting that expectation. You are showing them that differences can be the very mortar that holds the blocks of a state together. As our ancestors said, when spiderwebs unite, they can tie up a lion.
My brothers and sisters, permit me now to speak of something harder. And let me speak of it gently as a friend must. There is no home anywhere on this earth where a voice has never been raised in anger. There is no family on earth that has not known a hard word at its own table. A season of silence between people who love one another. A difference that seemed at times too wide to cross. However, we must always remember that what makes a family is not that it never quarrels. What makes a family is that it remembers afterwards that it has only one home.
This house has known such a season. And its cost cannot be spoken of lightly. It was not counted in arguments won or lost. It was counted in the lives of thousands of souls, Ethiopian souls, mothers, fathers, children, the very old who were lost because of a difference in a point of view. People who share one country, one history, one destiny. Many harvests went ungathered. Clinics stood without medicine. Families were parted and some were never made whole again.
I do not raise this to open a wound. I raise it because every one of those souls is the reason this dialogue matters. They are the argument for everything you have done in this chamber. No political disagreement anywhere on this earth is worth what a season of violence costs. And every Ethiopian in this hall, I'm sure, already knows that.
And this is where a brother earns a name. When a neighbor's house catches fire, you do not stand at your fence and comment upon the flames. You run towards it. When that season came upon Ethiopia, Africa did not turn away. Our sons sat with your sons in search of a way forward. Not to arbitrate for you, not to impose terms on you, but to hold a door open while Ethiopians walk through it themselves. That is what family does. We did not come to decide anything. We came to sit with you until you decide it. And unity is not only inherited. It must be chosen again by every generation and sustained with every fiber.
So ladies and gentlemen, when we say African solutions to African problems, this is not isolationism. It is mature sovereignty. We possess the elders who understand mediation. We possess the legal minds who understand governance and the spiritual depth to forgive. And let us be clear that the blueprint for our development cannot be imported in a briefcase from abroad. It is written here in our capitals, in our parliaments, in our villages and in the hearts of our people.
What happens in Addis Ababa does not stay in Addis Ababa. When your neighbors look across the border and see Ethiopia reconciling, they take courage for their own struggles. When Ethiopia chooses peace, trade routes open, economies steady, and our shared borders grow more secure. When Ethiopia embraces dialogue, the whole continent gains confidence, and those who insist that Africa is a place of perpetual crisis are quietly answered. Because we cannot have a prosperous continent where the heart of Africa is in distress.
So let it be said as simply as it can be said, differ indeed as every family does. Argue as every household under heaven does, but live and let live, and love one another. For when all the arguing is done, you will still have just but one home. Ethiopia for all of you. And it will still be ancient and it will still be beautiful and it will still be yours.
So as a Kenyan who has come, today is a special day for me because it was Ethiopia that inspired the forefathers of this continent, including my own father who in 1931 in a rented room in London as a young man pinned up a flag in his room. And it was not the flag of Kenya because Kenya did not exist. It was the green, gold and red of Ethiopia. That student, Jomo Kenyatta, for him as a colonized man and for many colonized people across the world, your flag was proof that African nations can and could stand free.
When Kenya became independent, Mzee Kenyatta set protocol aside and made it known that Ethiopia's leader would be his first visitor. Many roads in Nairobi are named after your great leaders. And in fact, in 1970, as one of the first, the Emperor and Jomo Kenyatta signed a treaty settling our common boundary. And you consider what that means. On a continent where inherited borders have caused so much grief, Kenya and Ethiopia sat down and drew the line together and since have never fired a shot across at each other, not once, and that is a choice.
So today is not only significant for me being here in Ethiopia, but also at a personal level as today exactly marks 40 years since the demise of Jomo Kenyatta. And I am honored today to demonstrate that habit of standing together and will continue to do so.
Today I stand here as your neighbor. Your peace is not a favor. Your peace is the condition of your own rest. And peace is a condition for all of us in our region. So permit me to close with two blessings because this nation has always carried two great faiths. It is written that blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God and it is written humanity is but a single brotherhood. So let us make peace with each other, brethren. Blessed then are the builders of bridges for they shall be remembered as the guardians of tomorrow and blessed are the united for they shall inherit not despair.
From north to south, from east to west across every region and among every people. May Ethiopia's extraordinary diversity become not a reason to stand apart, but a reason to build together. For as our elders say, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. My brothers and sisters, what you are concluding today is just the beginning of a journey. I am a realist and I do not expect that you will have agreed on every single aspect. But my prayer for all Ethiopians today is that you will embrace dialogue as the path to a great Ethiopian dialogue that encompasses all those who are here and those not present here today. Reach out to all so that your gift to the future generations shall see an end to death, bloodshed, and destruction as together you walk down a path of dialogue, inclusion, peace, and prosperity.
May Ethiopia's journey inspire Africa. May Africa's unity inspire the world. And may peace be our shared everlasting inheritance. I thank you, Mr. President. I thank you, Commission. God bless you all. And God bless Ethiopia. God bless Africa. Asante. Thank you very much.
