The Invention of a Mission: the brief establishment of a Portuguese Catholic minority in renaissance Ethiopia

Abstract

Like many concepts in the social sciences, the notion of cultural minority entails some degree of falatious labeling. In the Ethiopian context - and in the specific case here presented - that is particularly true. In a way, many Ethiopian cultural minorities, being demographically not that minor, have had historically strong pretensions to become cultural majorities(1). Ethiopians like to think of themselves as a minority within the African context, and thus as part of a Christian, historical, and literate, cultural dominant group; the monophisite Ethiopians thought and think of themselves as a minority within Christianity; the Jesuit (referred to in this article) were to some extent a minority in Portuguese ecclesiastical and political life during the counter-reformation years (dominated by Dominican views); the Portuguese were a minority within the catholic community in Ethiopia...