Memory from the Margins

Abstract

This chapter introduces the book’s central question: how does a memorial museum dedicated to past violence contribute to democracy? The response draws on survivor accounts, and the discourses of transitional justice, memory studies, and museum studies, explored in relation to the Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum, a small memorial museum established and managed by civil society actors in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa. The study spans the period of the rise and subsequent decline of faith in the ability of truth-telling mechanisms to contribute to emerging democratic practices. It takes stock of how today’s doubts might be informed by an understudied case from the margins. Ethiopia and museums are marginal in the study of transitional justice; and the Red Terror is marginal within Ethiopian history. When memory emerges out of the margins, it interrupts the current dispensation of power, altering who has propriety to speak and what concerns can be heard. However, there are no normative guarantees in this disruption: a memorial project’s socio-political contributions are contingent on a particular context that evolves over time.