Radicalism and Cultural Dislocation in Ethiopia, 1960–1974 (review)

Messay Kebede's book reopens the debate over the question of why the students who benefited most from Emperor Haile Selassie's educational policies chose Marxism-Leninism over liberalism as the guiding ideology for transforming Ethiopian society during the 1960s and 1970s. The author defines liberalism as "the protection of individual rights achieved through such means as the rule of law, limitation on state power, freedom of expression and organization, and support to private enterprises through the expansion of the free market economy" (2). He argues that the major reason that Ethiopia's intelligentsia of the 1960s and 1970s became vulnerable to Marxism's utopian promises was that their modern education under Haile Selassie had "caused cultural cracks into which radical ideas, which were then in vogue, were injected" (4). According to the author, modern education, introduced by the imperial regime, divorced the educated elite from their traditional roots, rendering them incapable of spearheading a societal renovation such as those that transformed Meiji Japan or Gandhi's India.

In his discussion of the genesis of the radical student movements, the author provides vivid vignettes of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when urban sophisticates and rural aspirants to social mobility clashed culturally and ideologically in the shared milieu of the university. He captures the ideological tenor of the day and the utopianism of the converts to Marxist-Leninism by remembering students agonizing over the wretched conditions of Ethiopia's peasantry. Yet despite his capacity to bring to life the lived experience of those heady days of student activism, Kebede's conclusion— that the ideological mismatch between Ethiopian culture (with a presumed socialist affinity) and imperial policies (based on capitalist principles) provides the key to understanding the ascendancy of radicals over moderates—is, in the end, more puzzling than persuasive. Nor is the mystery unraveled when Kebede proposes that Haile Selassie's "Eurocentric" educational policies led to a "cultural colonization" of the educated youth who, in the absence of a renovated traditional culture, became self-hating nihilists capable only of imitating the West rather than constructing a viable political alternative able to meet the diverse needs of the Ethiopian polity. He lauds Meiji Japan and Mahatma Gandhi's India, whose rulers did not "expel" traditional (religious) education from the national curriculum, thereby avoiding a "spiritual hunger" haunting their modernizing citizenry (101). "The great tragedy of Ethiopia," he asserts, "is . . . that it did not produce domestic, homegrown intellectuals, who might have conceived of modernization as an upgrading of traditional culture" (100).

Although he has a novel view of the politics of post-1945 Ethiopia, where modern education was prioritized as a vehicle for socioeconomic development, Kebede's views are not buttressed by lucid, reasoned arguments or empirically supported by data; his arguments often leave the reader baffled about what actual alternative education he is suggesting. Nevertheless, his emphasis on reexamining the role of culture in the events that led to the ignominious demise of Ethiopia's last emperor focuses our attention on questions that are deserving of a more systematic inquiry. A more nuanced analysis of these questions would have avoided the generalizations that weaken the book's bold interrogation of the role of culture in shaping the political choices of a particular generation.

In the absence of a comprehensive analytical framework, Kebede's assessment of the failure of Ethiopian intellectuals to defend traditional values such as "compassion for the poor," the "abnegation of the monk, and . . . the bravery . . . of the warrior" is difficult to reconcile with the realities of the 1960s and 1970s when the national curriculum included—nay required—that students pass the Amharic language exams and undertake explications du texte of fictional novels of the Italo-Ethiopian wars such as Ger-macaw Takla Hawaryat's Areya: Tarikawi Leb Weked (Areya: Historical Fiction) (Berhanena Salam, 1968 [1960, Ethiopian calendar]), to name only one. Kebede posits an "affinity between socialist ideology and Ethiopian...