WI - African Legalism?

I was wondering what might happen if an emperor decided to copy peter the great and rule his Orthodox Church.
Could happen if Zara Yaqob decides to resolve the dispute between the two factions of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church through choosing to back either of them instead of fostering compromise. IMO, it’s more likely to occur in the immediate aftermath of the Adalese occupation in the 16th Century where Gelawdewos takes over administration of the Church as apart of the general reconstruction process and ends up transforming it into an arm of the State.
 
Centralized government doesn’t work to well in Africa. Take Mali they had a bill of rights putting down the law of the land. One of the reasons Mali worked was because it was decentralized. Centralized governments in Africa west Africa especially tend to fail.
May I ask why centralized African governments apparently tend to fail?
 
Centralized government doesn’t work to well in Africa. Take Mali they had a bill of rights putting down the law of the land. One of the reasons Mali worked was because it was decentralized. Centralized governments in Africa west Africa especially tend to fail.

One of the world's oldest centralized governments was in Africa. You have a point in Subsaharan Africa though, I think the easiest place would be in Sudan.
 

Deleted member 67076

May I ask why centralized African governments apparently tend to fail?
Its always been much harder for African states to curtain freedom of movement and corral populations into areas that centralized states can manage.

Part of this is an overabundance of usable farmland, low population density relative to anywhere else in the world, traditions of regional autonomy alongside wealth in people vs wealth in land, linguistic diversity, and the ability to just literally pack up the village and move if they dont like the tax man.
 
To kickstart discussion in this thread, I came up with the scenario below:

Observing the instability and rampant regionalism in Ethiopia upon coming to power, Zara Yaqob (or Emperor Constantine I) manages to successfully establish a centralized government but is faced with the issue of how to maintain the centralization of government around Debre Berhan. This leads to Zara Yaqob putting institutions in place to prevent Ethiopia from falling to the instability and regionalism that had been present prior to his centralization directives - this includes Zara Yaqob promulgating an edited Fetha Negast, a document that was to act as a de-facto Constitution in Ethiopia. The Fetha Negast codified his reforms, placed an emphasis on maintaining stability, checks-and-balances at the regional administrative level, established a merit-based aristocratic rank system (to phase out the Mesafint's dominance), etc. and came to act as a guiding hand in assisting his successor (whether that be Baeda Mariam I or Saga Amlak) in governing Ethiopia.

Thoughts? Criticism?
 
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