This book has examined the creative zenith of vernacular historiography in Ethiopia and Eritrea, a moment that coincided with the flourishing of the Ethiopianist branch of Semitic studies in Europe and North America. In light of this parallel, it is fitting to conclude this study with a brief reflection on the precise relationship between Ethiopian and Eritrean intellectuals and their Western counterparts. As this book has shown, the former made great use of the latter's published scholarship, while the latter relied to a considerable extent upon indigenous sources and so-called native informants. But what of actual intellectual collaboration?

This is a complex question. Until the second half of the twentieth century, the two groups interacted within the context of formal and informal imperialism in the Horn of Africa, and this setting influenced the dynamics of their relationships. The connection between knowledge and power is most overtly manifest in Italian anthropological scholarship that had intelligence or administrative dimensions. But a subtler tendency was also widespread. Although foreign specialists depended upon the testimony, tutelage, and research of their indigenous colleagues, they often minimized or failed to acknowledge the significance of these relationships in their academic publications. This practice effaced these early indigenous contributions to the field of Ethiopian studies, over-westernizing the genealogy of the field and institutionalizing an unequal intellectual partnership.

This situation was by no means unique. In 1938, Jomo Kenyatta (1894– 1978), the Kenyan intellectual and British-trained social anthropologist, castigated “the professional [academic] friends of the African,” who in his view “monopolize the office of interpreting his mind and speaking for him,” and who believe that “an African who writes a study of … [their] kind is encroaching on their preserves. He is a rabbit turned poacher.” In Kenyatta's estimation, anthropologists like Louis Leakey (1903–1972) were thus not the moderate or even radical critics of the colonial situation they believed themselves to be, since their own profession replicated its inequalities through a de facto race-based glass ceiling. Kenyatta hoped to shatter this barrier with his own study of the Kikuyu,Facing Mount Kenya, which he believed was an authoritative, rigorously scientific, and politically useful account of his society and the harmful impact of British colonial policy upon it.