What the Hatata claims for human reason

The Ethiopian Highlands have, since at least the fourth century, sustained an unbroken tradition of written scholarship in Ge'ez — a Semitic language with its own script, its own grammar, and a corpus of theological, historical, and philosophical texts that stretches across more than a millennium. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church preserves and produces this corpus to the present day. It is one of the longest continuous traditions of African written intellectual production — and one of the least known outside Ethiopia and its diaspora.

Within that tradition, one work stands out as something unusual even by Ge'ez standards: the Hatata — "The Inquiry" — composed in 1667 by a man named Zera Yacob, who began the text as an autobiography and ended it as a philosophical treatise on reason, ethics, and the freedom of the individual mind.

The biography is part of the philosophy.

Zera Yacob was born in 1599, near Aksum — the ancient northern capital of Ethiopia — to a poor farming family. He was educated in the traditional Ethiopian schools: psalter, sacred music (zema), poetry and hymns (qene), and scripture interpretation (sewasewa). He became a teacher and scholar. Then, in around 1630, his country broke under the weight of a religious crisis: the Emperor Susenyos I, under Jesuit influence, had converted from Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity to Roman Catholicism and was attempting to force the change on his subjects. Yacob, refusing to convert, was denounced and fled. He took with him a Bible and some gold and walked south. Near the Tekezé River, he found a cave in the highlands and lived in it for two years as a hermit.

What he did in that cave was think. Decades later, at the request of his patron's son, he wrote the Hatata — a treatise that begins with the story of his exile and unfolds, by careful steps, into a philosophical argument about how a human being ought to determine what is true.

The argument is this. God has endowed every human being with lebuna — reason, understanding, the light of the mind. Every human has it. It is the same in the Christian, the Muslim, the Jew, the so-called pagan. It is given so that we might use it. And what it tells us — when we strip away the inherited dogmas of priests and scholars and listen to it directly — is that many of the claims our religious traditions hand down are false.

Yacob applied this method to the questions of his time. On slavery, he wrote that scripture's permission of slavery cannot have come from God, since reason teaches us that all humans are equal — and what reason rejects, scripture cannot deliver. On religious discrimination: "All men are equal in the presence of God; and all are intelligent since they are his creatures; he did not assign one people for life, another for death, one for mercy, another for judgment." On marriage, he wrote in favour of the equal dignity of women, against the standard view of his day. On fasting and dietary law, he wrote that what is good for the body is given by reason; what is given by tradition without the witness of reason is mere custom.

This is a striking position to find in 1667, in a cave in the Ethiopian Highlands. It is also a position with which a reader trained in Western philosophy will hear an echo. Descartes' Discours de la méthode was published in 1637, thirty years before. Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration, with its argument for religious tolerance, appeared in 1689 — twenty-two years after. Yacob's text reaches conclusions structurally similar to both, written in a different language, in a different intellectual context, by a man with no plausible exposure to either.

A century-long debate has followed: is the Hatata what it claims to be?

The text was discovered in 1852 by an Italian Capuchin missionary, Giusto da Urbino, in the Ethiopian Highlands, and sent to Paris. In 1920, the Italian orientalist Carlo Conti Rossini argued that the Hatata was a forgery — written by da Urbino himself, then attributed to a fictional Ethiopian philosopher. Conti Rossini's argument carried for several decades. It was also reinforced in 1935 when Conti Rossini, by then a colonial administrator in Italian East Africa, published an article titled "Ethiopia Is Incapable of Civil Progress" that drew on his Hatata refutation as part of the case that Ethiopia required civilising rule.

The Canadian Jesuit scholar Claude Sumner, who taught at Addis Ababa University for decades, published a detailed rebuttal in 1976. Subsequent Ethiopian and international scholars — Amsalu Aklilu, Alemayehu Moges, Getatchew Haile, Teodros Kiros — have defended Ethiopian authorship. A new critical English translation, by Ralph Lee, Wendy Belcher, Mehari Worku, and Jeremy R. Brown, was published by De Gruyter in 2023; the translators are firm in their judgment that the text is what it claims to be. The debate continues — a smaller number of scholars, including the French Ethiopianist Anaïs Wion, still hold the forgery view — but the contemporary consensus in Ethiopian studies and African philosophy has moved back toward authenticity.

Whichever way the debate ultimately settles, the philosophical content stands on its own. Read today, the Hatata's argument — that reason is given equally to every human being, and that this reason is the proper basis on which to test what we are told — is as urgent as it was when Yacob first wrote it in a cave above the Tekezé. We live in a moment when inherited claims are issued in great volume, by traditions of every kind, religious and secular. Yacob's discipline is what to do with them: hold each one up to the lebuna you were given, and see what survives.

Ethiopian philosopher, scholar, and the pupil whose request set Zera Yacob to writing the Hatata. Son of Habtu, the wealthy merchant who took Yacob in after his years of exile and made him teacher to his household. The Hatata begins as a response to Walda Heywat's question.

After Yacob's death in 1692, Walda Heywat composed his own Hatata — the Hatata Walda Heywat — extending Yacob's method into practical ethics: the conduct of family life, the obligations of friendship, the proper relations of master and servant, the treatment of women, the limits of inherited custom. Where Yacob's work is the diagnosis, Walda Heywat's is the application. The two treatises together form a small but real corpus — one of the only sustained seventeenth-century African philosophical schools of which we have written texts in their own language.

What is striking about the pair is not just that they exist, but that they speak to each other. Yacob is the master; Walda Heywat is the pupil; the texts cite each other; the philosophical lineage is intact across a generation. Whatever else the authorship debate establishes, it does not establish that Ethiopian intellectual life in the seventeenth century could not produce sustained philosophical writing across teacher and student. The two Hatatas are themselves the evidence that it did.

What inherited claim — handed to you by tradition, family, profession, or nation — have you never tested against your own reason?

— Wisdom of Africa

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