Modernisation from the Shadows: Conspiracy, Monasticism and Techno-Utopia in the Amharic novel Dertogada

Abstract

The Amharic novel Dertogada (2009) was a smash hit in Ethiopia, launching Yismake Worku’s career as one of the most popular Amharic writers of the last decade. This paper explores Dertogada’s huge cultural influence by tracing its unique synthesis between the Amharic literary tradition, American spy thrillers and conspiracy novels, and postcolonial critique. Dertogada is a projection into the future of a series of questions about modernisation and the Ethiopian state that preoccupied Amharic authors throughout the twentieth century. We suggest that the conspiracy novel provides a model for connecting a technologically advanced surveillance state with an older, sacralised notion of the state based on the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. It is the very movement between techno-utopia and ancient religious wisdom, we argue, that lends the novel its particular popular nationalist impetus.