Book reviews

Bodybuilding, billiards and other Ethiopian pastimes

September 3, 2025

Erkki Vettenniemi
University of Jyväskylä

*Katrin Bromber*
**Sports and Modernity in Late Imperial Ethiopia**
219 pages, paperback, ill
Martlesham, Sf: James Currey 2024 (Eastern Africa Series)
ISBN 978-1-84701-375-0

While it’s true that ‘Ethiopia’ and ‘sport’ don’t rhyme, if you are astute enough to substitute sport with running, rhymes and rhythms no longer matter. Ethiopia, the land of world-beating runners! At least that’s how most observers, including the German Africanist Katrin Bromber, traditionally think. ‘I began my research in summer 2009 with the aim of learning more about [Ethiopian] long-distance running and its historical development,’ Bromber reminisces in the opening pages of her relatively recent monograph. Having settled in Addis Abeba, she soon realized that mere running is ‘only one of numerous athletic practices’ known to Ethiopians – strictly speaking to the inhabitants of the Ethiopian Empire.

The outcome of her scholarly toil is a surprisingly slim, yet ground-breaking tome titled Sports and Modernity in Late Imperial Ethiopia. Based on interviews, (mostly) Ethiopian archives and previous literature, including theses published in Amharic which the author apparently learnt, the monograph is a solid contribution to the fields of Ethiopian studies and sports studies. It covers the better part of the twentieth century with the calamitous 1974 coup providing a convenient cutoff year.

Among other things, the military coup proved that any attempt to modernize an autocratic empire tends to devour the modernizers themselves. Haile Selassie’s timid, well-meaning reforms were not enough to some of his more radical subjects, many of whom were infected by Marxism-Leninism. Modernization, of course, is a fiercely contested concept and Katrin Bromber doesn’t fail to discuss the varied interpretations of zemenawīnet (Amharic for modernity). To cut a long and winding story short, modernization in the sphere of sports was meant to ‘shape modern subjectivities’ in Ethiopia, which is to say that the human body was perceived ‘as a site to mould the modern personality.’ This was true not only in the Ethiopian Empire but also in the Ethiopian governorates of Africa Orientale Italiana (1936–1941) that put a temporary end to Haile Selassie’s rule.

Bromber would surely have benefitted from Henning Eichberg’s seminal oeuvre which she acknowledges only in a roundabout way, never letting the German-Danish scholar speak for himself.

Unfortunately, Bromber never problematizes sports to the same extent as modernization. While she duly differentiates modern sports from traditional sports such as wrestling and genna (a distant relative of field hockey), a subheading ‘Beyond sports proper’ strikes me as a rather spurious locution. What might a collection of ‘proper sports’ look like? Is it merely a synonym for modern sports? Bromber would surely have benefitted from Henning Eichberg’s seminal oeuvre which she acknowledges only in a roundabout way, never letting the German-Danish scholar speak for himself. If she had taken Eichberg seriously, she might well have decided to ditch the titular ‘sports’ and resort to ‘body cultures’ instead.

On a less serious note, Bromber’s unfamiliarity with the basic terminology of athletics occasionally gives rise to unintended humour. Ethiopians hardly practice or even know of a sport called ‘pool vaulting,’ and it’s equally questionable that they organize races in ‘medium’ distance running – unless, of course, mediumship sessions are mysteriously connected to pool parties.

That said, a history book which couples Ethiopia with bodybuilding, hiking, scouting, wrestling, and billiards is bound to broaden not only the lay reader’s mind. Also, the author seeks to make sense of the hazy origins of physical education in early twentieth-century Ethiopian elite schools. The very first physical education teachers had to work ‘against a rather negative perception of sports as a punishment for pupils who had misbehaved,’ she argues, adding (probably with tongue in cheek) that PE used to belong ‘to the catalogue of punitive measures.’

One of the only five pictures in the book features a local table tennis player in the 1950s. Table tennis appears to have been imported by postwar YMCA activists, one of whom subsequently chanced upon a ‘vigorous and acrobatic’ game in Addis Abeba. Almost half a century later, to my utter surprise, I repeatedly lost impromptu table tennis games to loose-jointed young Ethiopians in remote villages which, I presume, no YMCA employee had ever visited. Were the local boys victims of cultural imperialism? Had they given up on traditional sports such as genna and horse riding? These are the kind of issues that Katrin Bromber is happy to hand over to other academics.

Postage stamp issued by Ethiopia, that shows Emperor Haile Selassie and Trinity Church, Addis Ababa, circa 1947. (Shutterstock/ilapinto)

That Ethiopia is a multiethnic nation and, more than 50 years after the coup that deposed Haile Selassie, still a de facto empire, doesn’t concern Bromber either. Maybe there’s no wrong with that, though she did set out to ask ‘in which societal context modern sports emerged’ in Ethiopia. Could it be, then, that sports contributed to the creation or at least consolidation of national identity in the country also known as Abyssinia?

Ethiopian scouts were initially city boys, and their hikes ‘around the country worked to instil nationalism,’ according to the author. No evidence is provided, however. ‘Arguably,’ she suggests elsewhere in the book, ‘by conquering vast distances of several thousand kilometres by car … the Ethiopian Highland Rally [1965–1973] constructed several overlapping and interpenetrating spaces through a specific sporting practice, the involvement of imperial political symbolism, and historical links between Ethiopia and Eritrea.’ Maybe, maybe not, though I cannot quite grasp the meaning of interpenetrating spaces. Intersecting dirt roads, perhaps? Be that as it may, I dare suggest that this specific rally meant absolutely nothing to most Eritreans who cheered for their own racers in Asmara. (They still do, as I have witnessed more than once.) None of the Ethiopian Highland Rally routes even reached Eritrea, Bromber finally concedes, although many Ethiopians ‘remember it that way.’

The rally episode truly is a textbook case of a theoretical construction (sportive nationalism) taking precedence over empirical facts. Besides, Haile Selassie had recently annulled the Federation of Ethiopia and Eritrea, which triggered a savage civil war severing the ‘historical links’ between the two countries. But this is not the first nor the last time plain evidence is discarded in favour of an academic argument.

A central figure in another picture in Bromber’s study is Onni Niskanen, one of the founders of the Ethiopian Highland Rally and a keen participant in it. He is also the smiling, towering figure on the front cover and, unsurprisingly, the most-cited non-Ethiopian in the book. Born in Finland, the young Onni (Finnish for happy) migrated first to Sweden, then to Ethiopia as one of the ‘Swedish experts’ invited by Haile Selassie after WWII. Apart from coaching most of the internationally known Ethiopian runners until 1974, he set up the hugely popular Inter-School Athletic Association competitions, chaired the Ethiopian Red Cross, and either initiated or participated in so many other endeavours that a full reckoning of them must be left to his future biographer.

A weighty biography of Onni Niskanen is indeed long overdue. As Katrin Bromberg points out, Niskanen’s personal archives, including hundreds of photographs, are available but ‘largely under-researched.’ Her monograph and Tim Judah’s brilliant biography of Abebe Bikila provide a perfect launchpad for a research project which could tentatively be titled ‘The Smiling Swede: Onni Niskanen and the Modernization of Ethiopian Body Cultures with an Exhaustive Overview of His Humanitarian Activities.’