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Ethiopian Student Movement

The Ethiopian Student Movement refers to the revolutionary uprising of university (and some high school) students in Ethiopia, against Emperor Haile Selassie I’s regime, mainly during the 1960s up until 1974 when he was deposed. The students protested several policies of the Emperor and his parliament, demanded several reforms (one of their most famous slogans being "Land to the Tiller"), and espoused Marxist-Leninist socialist philosophy. Both domestic university students and diasporic students in European and American universities were active in the movement, and were joined by high school students in Ethiopia.

While some have hailed the movement for spearheading the revolution against the Emperor and accelerating political and social change in Ethiopia, others have criticized it for starting a process that destabilized the country and interrupted its organic evolution into progressivism.

The Ethiopian Student Movement was the beginning of a long tradition of student activism in Ethiopia, as demonstrated by the Oromo protests that have intensified since November 2015.

Background

The Ethiopian Student Movement was one of several student movements around the world that marked the 1960s,, such as the "German Baader-Meinhof group, the Italian Red Brigades, the Black Panthers of the USA, and the Tupamaros of Uruguay." As such, Ethiopian students took inspiration and lessons from other movements while also paving their own avenues for protesting oppression.

One of the early radicalizing processes, according to prominent Ethiopian historian Bahru Zewde, was the enrollment of scholarship students from other African countries at universities in Addis Ababa starting in 1958. This opportunity for higher education was first provided by Emperor Haile Selassie to twenty-six African students from newly independent African countries. Through their interaction and intellectual exchange with these African scholars, their greater exposure to colonialism elsewhere in Africa, coupled with Ethiopia's increasingly central role in Africa and visibility among international organizations (such as the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa), Ethiopian university students in Addis Ababa came to acquire a vigorous pan-Africanist bend, a heightened political awareness.

Another is the feudal and imperialist nature of Haile Selassie's regime, which took after that of the reign of Emperor Menelik II (1889-1913), who not only modernized but also completed the work of consolidating and centralizing Ethiopia, started by his predecessors Emperors Tewodros II (1855-1868) and Emperor Yohannes IV (1871-1889). Particularly the last twenty years of the nineteenth century in Ethiopian history, Addis Hiwet explains, saw "a ferocious process of conquest, annexation, incorporation and subjugation of peoples and territories—the creation of a typical pre-capitalist empire-state," a phenomenon which he terms "military-feudal-colonialism." Being "a product of his country's history and culture," then, Emperor Haile Selassie built an empire that has come to be criticized, by students and scholars alike, for its economic and social inequality as well as political oppression: the rich ruling class of Ethiopia enjoyed great luxuries while the masses were uneducated, and destitute; Amharic was imposed as a dominant language; a policy of cultural assimilation was adopted to instill a pan-Ethiopian identity even though Ethiopia was made up of diverse peoples and cultures; and highland Ethiopian society, which was strongly male dominated, ensured that the role of women was limited to "procreation and house-keeping."

Another major event that catalyzed, even "birthed," the growing activism of Ethiopian students, who later staged a strong and historically pivotal movement against Emperor Haile Selassie, is the failed coup d'etat of 1960. Haile Selassie was seen as a sacrosanct figure whose legitimacy was defended by Article 4 of the Revised Constitution of 1955, declaring "By virtue of His Imperial Blood, as well as by the anointing He has received, the person of the Emperor is sacred, His dignity is inviolable and His power indisputable." Thus, it came as a shock to students and the general public alike when, in mid-December 1960, brothers Mengistu Neway and Germame Neway tried to overthrow Haile Selassie while he was on an official visit to Brazil for a week in mid-December 1960. Students in Addis Ababa were inspired, and even took to the streets of the capital to support the cause, continuing to question the status quo afterward. Thus, though the coup failed, it was a revelatory moment for Ethiopian youth. Bahru Zewde cites the memories of one of them as follows:

The first time that I heard anyone criticizing the emperor  .  .  . was during the attempted coup d’etat in 1960. Most of us were aware that there were things that were seriously wrong in our country. Indeed, we could observe a lot of injustice around us. Because of our upbringing and the brainwashing at school we were led to believe that all the problems of the country were created by the government officials who were betraying the trust of the emperor. We surmised that the emperor did no wrong. The accusations leveled at the emperor at the time of the attempted coup d’etat and the attempt itself served as an eyeopener for most of us.

After witnessing this major opposition to the emperor's hitherto-unquestioned power, students took the torch and lent more structure to the opposition, which had been carried out somewhat haphazardly. Bahru Zewde even goes as far as asserting that "Ethiopian student unions effectively became political parties, with their annual congresses, their resolutions, their power structure and their exhortative songs."

Another part of the radicalizing process was students' reading of Western philosophers. Marxist-Leninist readings that informed their philosophy, particularly for the majority of their fight afterward. In addition, Ethiopian diaspora students both in Europe and North America, and also some students in Ethiopia, read the works of Herbert Marcuse,Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy as well as Frantz Fanon.

Beyond such literature, another chief factor that contributed to the radicalization of Ethiopian diaspora in North America was the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, which impressed them due to its strong traction and pan-Africanist ideology.

Ethiopian diaspora also sympathized with Vietnam during the America-Vietnam War, and drew inspiration from Mao's China and Cuba, especially Che Guevara.

Ideology and goals

The Ethiopian Student Movement was a dynamic organization that underwent several structural, ideological, organizational and other changes throughout the years. However, it is largely understood to have been a Marxist-Socialist critique of then Ethiopian society. It was not long after the 1960 coup and the students' initial political awakening that a "semi-legal group" called Crocodiles (The Crocodile Society), was somewhat covertly founded by students to discuss and spread Marxist ideology among the student body in 1964,, or possibly even in 1963, according to Balsvik. Jon Abbink writes that it was almost impossible to resist the lure of the utopia promised by Marxist ideology at the time. However, he explains that this adherence to Marxist ideals was rooted not in rational thinking, but in the "generational effervescence for change and political drama, fueled by sincerely idealistic but misguided ideals," and laments the uncompromising and unyielding stance of the adherents for their ideas. From a temporal standpoint, the movement has also been said to be a post-WWII phenomenon organized by post-WWII student intelligentsia.

The chief goal of the movement was to fight against the different forms of oppression that existed in Ethiopian society and instead advocate for causes like fairness, justice, and development. It was "anti-feudalist" and “anti-bourgeoisie” in response to the socio-economic disparity between the ruling class and the masses, and it was "anti-imperialist" and "anti-capitalist" in response to the national and ethnic oppression.

Bahru Zewde outlines two major themes of the causes championed by the movement—the National Question and the Woman Question. The National Question was a multidimensional and critical revisiting of crucial questions like what Ethiopian identity meant, who could rightfully claim to be Ethiopian, what Ethiopian unity meant for the diverse peoples that constituted the country, whether self-determination of different nations and nationalities of Ethiopia could or should meaningfully extend to secession, particularly pertaining to the growing voice of Eritrean nationalists. Several questions were raised, histories contested, explanations given, and resolutions recommended at gatherings, and on independent journals disseminated by the different student groups, both in Ethiopia and abroad.

The Woman Question was a response to the hundreds of years of oppression that Ethiopian women had faced on an intersectionality of multiple identities, including gender and class. The growing study of the oppression of women in Ethiopian society (in organizations like the Worldwide Ethiopian Women's Study Group) led to the establishment of an independent women's association to espouse their interests, in a time when even the most progressive of men refused to acknowledge their equality. Though the Woman Question and their subsequent action may have brought women together and bolstered their understanding of gender issues, the primacy of their cause was sometimes questioned by their own peers in factions, such as the Sennay Lekke group, within the student movement that claimed that women were oppressed on the basis of class and thus that their fight should align with the rest of Ethiopia's class struggle and not gender. Any social change, however, would take time because, according to an Addis Zemen report (a major newspaper in Ethiopia), even in the Ethiopian Women's Welfare Association at the time had an all-male group of officers. Bahru Zewde argues that the student movement took advantage of women's support while neither putting them at the forefront of the leadership, or compensating them with the liberation and rights that they had been fighting for. On the contrary, Alem Habtu, former student activist who served in the executive council, and even presided for a year, in the Ethiopian Students Association of North America, later renamed Ethiopian Students Association of North America (ESANA and ESUNA, respectively), criticizes Bahru Zewde's coverage of the Woman Question as too harsh. He instead cites from memory a few female leaders who served in the executive council at different times: Misrak Elias in 1967-68 and Zenebework Tadesse in 1971-72. Alem Habtu also adds that Zenebework Tadesse was a leading feminist and also contributed a 46-page article to Challenge (ESUNA's journal).

Key Figures and Organizations of the period

Organizations:

• Student organizations:
  • USUAA: University Students’ Union of Addis Ababa. Their journal was entitled ታገል (Tagäl, or Struggle). The USUAA lent great strength, even militancy, to the movement when it was established in 1967.
• Diaspora organizations:
  • ESUE: Ethiopian Students Union in Europe, their journal was called ታጠቅ (Taṭäq, or Take up arms.)
  • ESUNA: Ethiopian Students Union of North America. Their journal was called Challenge. It was formerly known as ESANA (the Ethiopian Students Association of North America).

• Political Parties:
  • EPRP: Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary Party (የኢትዮጵያ ሕዝባዊ አብዮታዊ ፓርቲ) [1]
  • Meison: All-Ethiopia Socialist Movement (better known by its Amharic acronym መኢሶን [Mä'isan, short for የመላው ኢትዮጵያ ሶሻሊስት ንቅናቄ). [2]
  • Both the EPRP and Meison had Leninist tendencies, but had key differences in certain areas. One important difference, for example, was that even though they both acknowledged the Leninist provision for the right of self-determination for nationalities, "EPRP argued for the right to include the option for secession whereas Meison held that such a right ought to be exercised only within the “limits of Ethiopia’s sovereignty.” Both parties coalesced from and capitalized on the student movement, but while some like Bahru Zewde argue that the "student unions themselves became political parties," others like Alem Habtu, who was himself a member of Meison, argues instead that the assassination of prominent student leader, Tilahun Gizaw, was a critical signal of the need for armed struggle, and thus "the underground parties [EPRP and Meison] killed the Ethiopian Student Movement as an autonomous, self-actualizing movement and gave birth to one that is a mouthpiece and instrument of one or the other Marxist-Leninist party."

People:

• Takkele Welde Hawaryat: was a patriot leader who was vehemently opposed to Emperor Haile Selassie I for abandoning his country and seeking asylum overseas during the Italian Occupation of Ethiopia in 1936-1941. Takkele Welde Hawaryat died in November 1969 during a shootout with the forces of Haile Selassie I in the outskirts of Addis, where he had gone to assassinate the Emperor.
• Tilahun Gizaw: was an active student leader in the student movement. He was assassinated on December 28,1969, by secret forces that the regime set up to counter student protests. Though these prominent figures were killed, their legacy was memorialized forever as Tilahun Takele, a famous pseudonym adopted by Berhane Meskel, the author of a very influential journal entry,The National Question (“Regionalism”) in Ethiopia.
• Wallelign Mekonnen: was a popular student activist from Wollo, Ethiopia, who is thought to embody to the essence of the Ethiopian Student Movement to this day. In his struggle, he was imprisoned for five months for his dissent, but went on to work at the Ethiopian Road Authority. His satirical ridicule of the emperor in his article Le-Awaju Awaj (which roughly translates to "a declaration/announcement back to he who has declared") easily circulated and gained popularity throughout Addis Ababa, and ridiculing those in power, according to prominent African intellectual Achille Mbembe, is a way of opposing and resisting oppression. Wallelign Mekonnen was murdered by government secret police on-air after a failed attempt to hijack an Ethiopian Airlines plane in December 1972.
• Martha Mebratu: was a female student activist, assumed to have been the girlfriend of Wallelign Mekonnen. Fanta describes her as "a beautiful woman, but extremely uptight." Marta was also killed in the failed hijack attempt, along with Wallelign Mekonnen, at the hands of secret police; Fanta suspects she was also the point person who helped connect different parties in the planning stage.
• Andrias Eshete: a prominent memner of ESUNA. He penned a well-written rebuttal to Takele Tilahun's The National Question (“Regionalism”) in Ethiopia under a pseudonym, Tumtu Lencho. He was one of the famous early members of the EPRP. He was also involved in the opposition against the emperor's successor, Col Mengistu Haliemariam of the Derg, from his base in the US and only returned to Ethiopia in 1991 after the dictator was overthrown from power. In 2000, Andreas Eshete then joined the Philosophy department at Addis Ababa University, where he later served as president from 2002 till around 2011. During his presidentship, "he was credited with making the university’s senate accountable to the president, and shielding the university from political interference, allowing it to be managed independently."
• Alem Habtu: former student activist who served in the executive council of ESUNA as "assistant secretary-general (1965-67), president (1967-68), and editor of Challenge (1968-70)"
• Desalegn Rahmato: was once a leader of ESUNA, and was one of the first students to critically engage with the question of land. Although he was abroad when the 1974 revolution broke out, he chose to return to Ethiopia and started to teach at Addis Ababa University where he grew to be one of the most prominent sociologists in Africa.

Key events leading up to the Emperor's Deposition

Although students had remained largely quiet since the coup, they took to the streets once again to protest the oppressive and feudalistic land policies of the state and demand land reforms on February 25 1965. The Crocodiles Society helped propagate the news about the suffering of rural peasants and coordinate the uprising. Students were beaten and mistreated by the police on the streets, and no significant reform followed, but as the news reverberated among Ethiopian student associations around the world, it revived the morale of Ethiopian diaspora students. Dessalegn Rahmato, after his critical engagement with the topic of land and feudalism in Ethiopia in his Conditions of the Ethiopian Peasantry, argued that the slogan 'Land to the Tiller!' was usefully "subversive" and warranted not just simple land reform, but a more "fundamental' change.

In 1966, about 2,000 of the students staged a demonstration decrying the poor and inhumane treatment of beggars and homeless people, who were kept in at Shola camp right outside of Addis Ababa whenever there were official visitors from abroad. What the state called a "Rehabilitation Center," the students called "Shola Concentration Camp." They denounced the practice with slogans such as "Poverty Is a Crime in Ethiopia" or "Close the Shola Concentration Camp," and kept up their protest until they were ultimately barricaded from the grounds of the parliament by police who later dispersed them. Although in the short term, some of the conditions at the camp improved, the progress faltered, and some student leaders were arrested soon after.

Over the years, the movement grew to encompass more and more social issues such as defending civil rights (in 1967), and demanding "Education for All!" (in 1969) and even high school students became radicalized. The Ethiopian diaspora also staged their own protests, mainly several occupations of the Ethiopian Embassy in Washington, DC twice—first in March, and then again in July of 1969. Particularly the latter occupation, which lasted several days and culminated in the arrest of about 24 students from the embassy and the White House, attracted much international coverage from several news outlets including the Guardian, the Old Mole, and the Black Panther Newspaper of San Fransisco. It also received solidarity messages from "the Black Panther Party, Ethiopian Students Union in Europe, Union of Ethiopian Students in Germany ... [and] the Iranian Students Association in the United States, a chapter of the Confederation of Iranian Students (National Union)."

By the turn of the decade, the movement at home had also grown more militant, the regime more openly repressive, and the students more desperate. In fact, so eager were the students to see the downfall of the monarchy that they were willing to cooperate with anyone who opposed the system. The broader public also started to express its frustration with the regime—"teachers, taxi drivers, the unemployed," among many, were joined by students on a demonstration in Addis Ababa, thereby truly marking the coming together of different popular movements, social scientist Legesse Lemma notes. The Armed Forces also revolted in 1973 demanding higher salaries and benefits for their families, which students called out as being narrow self-interest.

Amid rising tensions across occupational and regional divides in the Ethiopian society, the accidental discovery, by university students and professors, of the Wollo Ethiopian Famine of 1973 that the Emperor and his cabinet had worked so hard to hide from public and international attention led to even more dissatisfaction with the regime. Moreover, inflation was rising due to oil prices. Many with funding emigrated out of the country to find an outlet from such tumult and nervous dooms-day prediction particularly in Addis, now the capital of a country at the center of international attention. Finally, the Emperor was deposed from power in September 1974 by the Derg military regime which was to rule the country for the coming 17 years.

Reactions and Criticisms

Protesting an oppressive system that was never prepared to deal with political opposition, the Ethiopian Student Movement was met with great disapproval by Haile Selassie's government, which was overwhelmed by the challenge the movement posed, particularly at it beginning. Hiwet writes that the regime tried to discredit and kill the movement through various means—"from outright intimidation of militant students to the spread of crude insinuations, labelling the emergent movement 'anti-religious', bent on destroying the 'traditions' and the 'integrity' of the country, 'elements duped by alien ideology'."

The student movement has been criticized for blindly going after the promise of utopia of Marxist/Leninist ideals without consciously weighing the relevance and possible consequences on Ethiopian society. Bahru Zewde has criticized The National Question ("Regionalism") in Ethiopia (written under the pseudonym Takele Tilahun) for the "paucity of empirical data to support such a strongly worded argument" and the greater weight placed on "ideological rectitude, i.e. strict adherence to the canons of Marxism-Leninism on the national question, than on an understanding of Ethiopian history or ethnography."

Similarly, a lot of the student activists have been criticized as impressionable idealists; Fanta criticizes Wallelign for espousing ideas that were ill-fitted for Ethiopian society or the progression of the country's history without a critical understanding of their practicality. He says that "If Einstein had regretted his invention, Wallelign would be regretting his own birth." Particularly regarding the rhetoric of ስር-ነቀል ለውጥ (Sir Neqel Lewt, or uprooting change) that students had advocated for to undo everything and refurbish Ethiopia all anew with their ideology, many have criticized the naïveté in the desire because it does more harm than good as "if a plant is uprooted, it cannot grow. It will obviously die."

Alem Habtu, looking back on the movement that he had been an active leader in, offers today's youth advice on a beneficial alternative to uprooting change—"learn from and about the past and build on it, not uproot it"

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