Ethiopia has fired back at Egypt’s latest statement, warning of its unilateral actions concerning the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam.
The Ethiopian Foreign Ministry issued a statement on Wednesday using the same old accusations against Egypt of standing behind unrest in the Horn of Africa.
It slammed Egypt’s demands to respect the historical old treaties, describing them as “colonial era mentality” as it used big words like “Pan-Africanism” because Egypt is Africa’s white man, as Egyptians are not black enough.
The thing is that this Ethiopian statement, like the rest of old Ethiopian statements, plays on certain sentiments in Africa to win hearts and minds in a wicked way, twisting facts and history.
Unfortunately, the Egyptian government does not use the same playbook Ethiopia is using. It actually uses international laws in a lawless world.
This post aims to set the facts and history straight regarding colonial-era treaties.
Among the main Egyptian demands per the international laws organizing the rivers across borders is Ethiopia’s recognition and respect as an upstream country to the historical Nile River Water Shares of both Egypt and Sudan as downstream countries based on the historical Nile Water treaties, especially 1902,1929 and 1951, which Ethiopia labels as colonial treaties”
Interestingly, Ethiopia’s modern diplomacy often relies on a powerful narrative — that it is the only African country never to have been colonised.
It’s repeated in schools, documentaries, and political speeches, framing Ethiopia as the proud exception to Africa’s colonial story — the continent’s “real-world Wakanda.” Yet the deeper one digs, the more contradictions begin to appear.
What I cannot understand is how the current regime insists it was forced into accepting “colonial-era treaties” when, by its own celebrated narrative, Ethiopia was never colonized.
If Ethiopia was truly the unbroken, unconquered “Wakanda” during the great scramble for Africa, then the story becomes even more complicated — because the country was invaded twice, and in neither instance did the Ethiopian state sign anything related to the Nile, starting with the 1902 treaty.
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Lake Tana, the source of the Blue Nile in Ethiopia
in 1870s. |
But we can’t start with the 1902 treaty without going back in time to 1889.
In 1889, the Kingdom of Itay and the Ethiopian Empire signed the Treaty of Wuchale after the Italian occupation of Eritrea. It was signed in the small Ethiopian town of Wuchale, from which the treaty got its name.
