The ‘Other’ as ‘Yene-Bitte’: Reimagining an Ethiopian Ethics of Moral Responsibility

Abstract

In today’s world otherness has been a source of disruption of coexistence.  Othering based on ethnicity, race, color, sex, and economic status have been a threat to human dignity and existence.  In Ethiopia, ethnic-based otherness disrupts the solidarity of the country and has led millions of people to displacement, hunger, death, and unceasing conflicts.  The notion of the ‘other’ is a central concept in ethical theories and moral philosophy.  The other is the locus where ethics and politics overlap and materialize.  In this article, I seek to construct a moral responsibility of the other using the common Ethiopic term Yene-Bitte, a term used to identify beggars.  Yene-bitte is a blended Ethiopic word from yene or ye’ene meaning ‘mine’, ‘myself’, ‘someone or something that belongs to oneself or the I’ — it indicates both selfhood and belongingness or possessions.  Bitte also has the meaning of ‘the one that is like me’, or ‘my identical’ or ‘my twin’, a ‘close acquaintance’.  Thus, yene-bitte means the one that is like myself or the one that is like me.  Drawing from Emmanuel Lévinas and Paul Riceour, the article rehearses some of the theoretical considerations on the notion of the other vis-à-vis moral responsibility, thereby situating the notion of the yene-bitte as an Ethiopian ethics of moral responsibility that seeks moral responsibility through recognition of the other and also reveals its embodiment in a profound theological anthropology.  Revitalizing such social practice is indispensable in construing otherness and in harnessing moral responsibility in a disrupted state like Ethiopia.