#ትሰማ Unmasks a Power Struggle Over Culture in Ethiopia

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A campaign against gender violence ignites a wider cultural debate.

The ongoing campaign **#**ትሰማ has emerged in Ethiopia at the intersection of two difficult questions: why does justice for women and girls so often fail, and how should Ethiopian society respond to demands for change?

The campaign, whose name means “Let Her Be Heard,” has grown through public attention to cases of violence against women and girls and what supporters describe as failures of investigation, accountability, and justice. Its message extends beyond individual cases, arguing that they reveal wider problems in how such violence is investigated, prosecuted, and remembered.

The campaign has drawn particular attention to cases including those of Zewdu Haftu, Keneni Adugna, and Heaven Awot. Supporters argue that these should not be treated as isolated tragedies but as evidence of a broader pattern in which public outrage is followed by weak accountability, delayed proceedings, missing evidence, or an inadequate institutional response.

#ትሰማ therefore calls for more than awareness. It urges the Ethiopian government to recognize violence against women and girls, including femicide and sexual violence, as a national crisis requiring coordinated action, accountable leadership, public funding, measurable implementation, and greater transparency.

Much of the campaign’s visibility has come through social media, where supporters have shared stories, changed profile pictures, signed petitions, and called for solidarity and institutional action around one demand: that women be heard before their suffering becomes another public tragedy.

Critics, however, hear gender-justice language alongside debates about feminism, sexuality, and gender identity, and wonder whether the campaign is part of a broader cultural transformation increasingly influenced by Western social norms.

These reactions should not be reduced to a choice between supporting women and defending tradition. #ትሰማ brings together competing questions about justice, institutions, gender, and culture. The deeper question is what these demands reveal about power, what should change, and who should have a voice in deciding.

Many Feminisms

Critics of #ትሰማ often speak of feminism as though it were a single, coherent ideology. Yet anyone familiar with feminist scholarship will encounter a wide diversity of perspectives—so wide that the term is often more accurately used in the plural, as “feminisms.” There are Christian, Islamic, black, liberal, socialist, radical, and other feminist traditions, each shaped by different intellectual, cultural, and political contexts. They differ over family, religion, sexuality, reproductive rights, and the relationship between biological sex and gender.

Some embrace contemporary understandings of gender diversity, while others reject them. Some regard traditional family structures as sources of inequality, while others seek to preserve them while reforming unequal relationships within them. What unites these traditions is not agreement on every question, but a shared concern with the status, rights, and experiences of women.

These differences matter once feminism enters the wider debate around #ትሰማ. A campaign against femicide does not, by itself, establish a position on gender identity. A demand for institutional accountability does not settle questions of sexuality, family, or religion.

When gender activists of the campaign do not articulate which feminist commitments they hold, they risk reproducing the same simplification they criticize in their opponents. A recent work edited by Meron Zeleke and colleagues may provide useful insight into how transforming gender-based violence in Ethiopia need not depend on a universal feminist framework.

At the same time, some activists may understand gender justice as requiring broader cultural reform. That is a legitimate argument, but it should be made openly and distinguished from the campaign itself, rather than attributed to #ትሰማ simply because some of its initiators hold that view. The important distinction, then, is not whether feminism and gender justice ever intersect—they clearly can— but whether commitment to one should be treated as a prerequisite for commitment to the other. It should not.

Cultural Anxiety

The anxiety surrounding #ትሰማ is easier to understand in context. The campaign did not emerge from an abstract debate about gender, but from cases involving women and girls who were killed, abused, or denied adequate justice. Its initial force therefore comes less from ideology than from grief, anger, and demands for accountability.

Yet its demands extend beyond individual cases. By calling on the state to treat violence against women and girls as a national crisis, #ትሰማ also calls for institutional change: clearer responsibility, adequate resources, stronger monitoring, and accountability when institutions fail.

This is where cultural anxiety enters. Gender is woven into family, marriage, inheritance, child-rearing, religion, authority, work, and social responsibility. Changes in how gender is understood can therefore affect relationships and expectations far beyond the immediate question of violence. Some Ethiopians may worry, as a result, that a campaign for gender justice could contribute to broader changes in family, sexuality, or social norms.

Such concerns should be neither dismissed nor treated as proof of anything. The broader commitments of some participants do not establish a coordinated agenda for the campaign as a whole. Cultural anxiety deserves to be heard, but cultural discomfort cannot, by itself, justify violence, discrimination, or institutional indifference.

The important question, then, is not whether #ትሰማ will produce cultural change, but how such change is understood and contested. That leads to a deeper question: what do Ethiopians mean when they invoke culture, and who has the authority to define it?

Whose Culture

Critics sometimes speak as though Ethiopian culture were a fixed inheritance threatened by feminism. But culture has never been static. Marriage, education, work, family relationships, and women’s participation in public life have all changed through gradual adaptation and difficult contestation. The question is therefore not whether culture changes, but who decides what changes, and whose experience defines what should remain.

This matters because social arrangements do not distribute power equally. Those who benefit from—or have been socialized into—an existing order may experience greater equality as a loss of authority or stability, while those who have endured its injustices may see it as a recovery of dignity. What looks like cultural consensus may sometimes reflect who has historically been given the authority to define morality, family, respectability, and acceptable behavior.

This does not make every tradition oppressive, nor does reform require cultural erasure. Ethiopia does not face a choice between preserving culture unchanged and surrendering it to ideas perceived as foreign. All cultures survive by preserving some practices, adapting others, and discarding those that no longer serve the changing needs of their people. An Ethiopian woman demanding protection from violence is not necessarily rejecting her culture, just as a man rejecting domestic violence is not necessarily rejecting his ancestors. Both may simply be asking whether inherited arrangements can be made responsive to changing needs of Ethiopia society as a whole.

Reformers, however, have responsibilities too. Family, religion, community, mutual obligation, and shared moral expectations can provide belonging and stability. Reform that is perceived to dismiss these dimensions may create resistance rather than solidarity. Cultural change therefore requires participation and humility. It should not be dictated by those with the loudest platforms, nor should cultural preservation be controlled exclusively by those who have historically held the greatest authority.

Women, young people, religious communities, rural and urban communities all belong to Ethiopian culture. They do not stand outside it because they question parts of it. A living culture contains disagreement. It changes through the arguments its people are willing to have.

Beyond Outrage

#ትሰማ now faces a choice: remain a cycle of public outrage that moves from one case to the next, or turn attention into sustained pressure for institutional reform. Its deeper demand is not simply that victims be remembered, but that violence against women and girls be treated as a systemic problem requiring coordination, resources, measurable action, and public accountability.

Beyond the abstract dialogue on feminism lie the more consequential questions. Why do investigations fail? Why are cases delayed? Why do survivors lose faith in the justice system? Who holds officials accountable? How can evidence be protected while due process is preserved? These questions may attract less attention than a viral case, but they reach closer to the roots of the problem. The goal should be a justice system in which women do not need to go viral to be taken seriously.

That does not require ideological uniformity. #ትሰማ can work alongside feminism without making feminism a condition of participation, demand gender justice without requiring agreement on every question of gender, and challenge harmful practices without treating Ethiopian culture as the enemy. Those seeking wider cultural reform should argue for it openly, while those who support the campaign but reject such changes should be equally free to say so. The debate should move beyond feminism versus culture, or progress versus tradition. Those defending tradition should ask what they are protecting and why; those seeking change should ask what is unjust and what is worth preserving. Both should distinguish evidence from assumption.

#ትሰማ can hold two questions together: How do we ensure that women are protected and heard? And how do we decide which inherited arrangements should remain and which should change? The first concerns justice. The second concerns power. They cannot, in the end, be separated.

“Let her be heard” should mean more than allowing a woman to tell her story. It should mean listening to what her experience reveals about institutions, power, and the social arrangements that determine whose suffering becomes visible and whose is normalized. Listening does not require agreement. It requires hearing both those who experience injustice and those who fear that change may weaken forms of belonging they value.

A mature society does not have to choose between justice and culture. It must ask what justice requires of its culture, what in its culture is worth preserving, and who gets to participate in deciding. That may be the harder meaning of #ትሰማ.

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While this commentary contains the author’s opinions, Ethiopia Insight will correct factual errors.

Main photo: A TikTok creator posts a viral video of herself painting a mural in support of the #ትሰማ campaign, August 2026. Source: Social media.

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