Ethiopians love to brag about the script they inherited from the Sabeans as the only native script in Sub Saharan Africa but a close inquiry into the history of Ethiopian education dispels any notion that highlander culture was literate or educated one. For starters literacy was complete rarity in Ethiopia with many emperors include famous ones such as Tewadoros, Menelik, and Yohannes IV along with noblemen and generals like Ras Alula could not read nor write nor even sign their own names. The Amharic disdain for higher learning and literacy is sufficiently expounded upon in the popular Amharic proverb “The worst of beasts is the scorpion and the worst of men is the debtera (scribe)”. Ethiopian peasants were infinitely worse in this in this regard as educated scribes were considered sorcerers who could bewitch. Western Ethiopianists attribute this hatred of higher education and critical thinking to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church which stifled logic in place of mysticism. According to one tale young clergymen were taught of a man who pondered on the logical question of the Trinity and was swallowed up by the earth.
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