Quote by Zera Yacob: “He who oppresses another is not a man.”

True humanity, for Yacob, is not just a biological fact — it is a moral standard. When you deliberately harm or subjugate another person, you are failing at the most basic requirement of being human. This strips the oppressor of the dignity they claim while denying it to others.

Yacob wrote the Hatata in the era of the Ethiopian-Oromo wars and ongoing regional conflict, and he himself had experienced unjust persecution by the king. The seventeenth century also saw the Atlantic slave trade at an early peak, making meditations on the ethics of human subjugation urgently relevant.

Ethiopian philosopher of the seventeenth century whose Hatata — written around 1667 — presented a rational, empirical philosophy of ethics and religion independent of any European Enlightenment influence. He is considered one of the first African rationalist philosophers and remains under-read in Western philosophy curricula.