THE INTELLECTUAL BACKGROUND

My interest in the Ethiopian student movement goes back to 1968, the year of the global student revolution. It was then, whilst I was still a third year student at Haile Sellassie I University, that I contributed an article to the Journal of the Political Science Association, entitled ‘Some Thoughts on Student Movements: With Special Reference to Ethiopia’. I revisited that article recently, after composing most of the chapters of this book, and I was struck by the similarity of a number of the conclusions in both works. Appropriately enough, as promised in the title, the article began with a survey of the global student movement; rather ambitiously, it concluded with some bold recommendations. The article argued that the student movement was essentially ‘an adolescent rebellion’, underscoring the permanent tension between ‘the idealism, impatience, social vision of youth and the cool and settled attitude of adults’. Class origin, it went on, had little to do with student revolt, as was particularly evident in the Latin-American case, where a number of the student activists came from upper class families. Ultimately, so the global survey concluded, students lack the power to bring about the change that they so ardently desire, thereby being forced to rely on some other organized force like the army. This proved uncannily and tragically prophetic in the Ethiopian case!

Unlike the current book, which deals with both the domestic and foreign components of the Ethiopian student movement, the article focused entirely on the domestic scene. Interestingly enough, very much like the current study, it identified the years 1961–63 as marking a watershed in the history of the movement heralding its increasing radicalization.

The early twentieth century witnessed a vibrant intellectual discourse steered by the people described as ‘pioneers of change’ in Bahru (2002). This fascinating group of intellectuals, who happened to be the first to be exposed, directly or indirectly, to modern education, campaigned tirelessly for reform. They argued for administrative efficiency and social justice. The more advanced amongst them exposed the dependent nature of Ethiopia's political economy. Through their prolific writings in the fields of history and language in particular, they pushed the frontiers of knowledge. This vibrant discourse reached its zenith in the 1920s, with the weekly Berhanena Salam emerging as their preferred forum. In Tafari Makonnen (the future Emperor Haile Sellassie), they found a natural ally as he battled with the forces of tradition to introduce political and economic reform.

The coronation of Tafari in 1930 as Haile Sellassie marked the pinnacle of this reform movement. The progressive prince had come to assume absolute power, untrammelled any more by the forces of tradition that had checkered his ascent to the throne. In the first five years of his reign, he promulgated a constitution – the first of its kind in the country's history – that reinforced his ascendancy over the traditional nobility. He followed this up with the assertion of central government control over a number of the hitherto autonomous provinces, notably Gojjam and Jimma Abba Jifar.

The Ethiopian student movement produced a number of organizations both at home and abroad. The process was characterized by alternating phenomena of fusion and fission. We have already seen in Chapter 3 the emergence of the University College Union (UCU) at University College of Addis Ababa (UCAA) and of the National Union of Ethiopian University Students (NUEUS) as an umbrella national organization inside the country, as well as that of the Ethiopian Students Association in North America (ESANA, later changed to ESUNA when the Association was renamed a union) and the Ethiopian Students Union in Europe (ESUE). The second half of the 1960s saw the continuation of NUEUS, ESANA and ESUE and the replacement of UCU first by the Main Campus Student Union (MCSU) and soon after – as a matter of fact, within a year – by the University Students Union of Addis Ababa (USUAA). In a somewhat similar manner as NUEUS was formed at home, Ethiopian students abroad also set up an umbrella organization known as the World Wide Union of Ethiopian Students (WWUES) to co-ordinate the activities of the two regional organizations as well as that of NUEUS. Even more than its domestic counterpart, however, WWUES remained a shadow organization, with most of the main activities being undertaken by its constituent units, mainly ESUE and ESUNA.

What these developments underscore is the importance that students had come to assume in national politics. This came largely because the country's authoritarian tradition had allowed no space for the emergence of political parties.

There is general consensus that the driving force behind the Ethiopian student movement was rejection of oppression in all its forms. The protests and demonstrations that started to peak after 1965 were directed against one manifestation or another of that oppression. The ‘Land to the Tiller’ demonstration of 1965 had as its objective economic and social equity in the exploitation of the country's most important social and economic asset – land. In 1966, students rose in defence of the poor who were herded in shelters that were considered sub-human. The 1967 demonstration was in protest at the curtailment of the freedom of expression and assembly. The nation-wide protests of 1969, under the slogan of ‘Education for All’ drew attention to the increasing constraints placed on the poor sectors of society in educating their children. It is not surprising, therefore, that, starting in that same year, students began to turn their attention to two major glaring manifestations of social inequality: the oppression of nationalities and of women. That was the genesis of the two questions that came to have a prominent place in the student movement in the 1970s: the national question and the woman question.

THE NATIONAL QUESTION

Historical background

What was variously referred to as ‘the national question’ or ‘the question of nationalities’ came to be a predominant concern in the Ethiopian student movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As we now know, it has become a cardinal element of the political ideology and configuration of post-1991 Ethiopia.

GLOBAL CONTEXT

As these lines were being penned in 2011–12, the world was gripped by the series of popular challenges to authoritarian rule that has come to be known as the Arab Spring. The revolution that spread across the Arab world like a conflagration was set ablaze by the dramatic act of a Tunisian street vendor by the name of Mohammed Bouazzi, who set himself on fire after security forces overturned his vegetable cart, thereby depriving him of the right to earn his livelihood. The popular revolution that swept across the country did not stop until it got rid of the dictatorial and venal rule of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. The success of the Tunisian revolution ignited a series of popular revolts in Yemen, Egypt, Libya and Syria. After varying degrees of resistance and differing degrees of ferocity, almost all of the dictatorial regimes crumbled. Hosni Mubarak of Egypt resigned and was forced to face charges of causing the death of so many protesters. Muammar Ghadafi of Libya was finally hunted down, caught hiding in a gutter and summarily executed. Both rulers had pushed authoritarian rule to its most absurd limit by toying with the idea of dynastic succession. The wiliest of them all, Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen, made a safe exit after many twists and turns, including surviving an assassination attempt. These last three had each been in power for thirty years or more.

In the history of the Ethiopian student movement, there are years that stand out as defining moments. 1962, when the royal patronage that had characterized student-palace relations unravelled following the controversy over the College Day poetry recital, was one. 1965, when students came out onto the streets with the revolutionary slogan of ‘Land to the Tiller’, was another. But, few years rival in the dizzying cascade of events and their momentous significance as 1969. With understandable exaggeration, the chronicler of the movement, Randi Balsvik, entitles the section that describes those events as ‘The Revolution that Failed’. I have chosen the relatively more modest title of ‘Prelude to Revolution’, i.e. to that of 1974. It could also be characterized with some justification as Ethiopia's 1968, for it had all the hallmarks of the global student revolution, while marking at the same time the climax of years of student agitation in Ethiopia.

“EDUCATION FOR ALL”

Student protests in Ethiopia tended to have catch phrases that encapsulated the thrust of their demands. In 1965, it was ‘Land to the Tiller’. In 1966, students queried: ‘Is Poverty a Crime?’ The 1967 protest in defence of civil liberties has sometimes been described with a penchant for contradiction as the ‘Anti-Demo Demonstration’.

For about a decade and a half in the middle of the past century, Ethiopian students made a decisive and fateful intervention in the national affairs of their country. In a system that did not brook any formal political dissent, they effectively became His Majesty's Disloyal Opposition. They began rather tentatively, reciting poems of social and political satire that were barely tolerated by the imperial regime. They ended with hijackings of passenger aircraft and armed struggle. In between, they punctuated their struggle with annual, almost ritual, demonstrations and, in some extreme circumstances, embassy occupations. The cumulative effect of this unrelenting opposition was the eruption of the 1974 revolution, even if that event could not be attributed entirely to the student movement. The more than decade-long armed struggle in Eritrea, the disastrous 1973 famine in northern Ethiopia, and the energy crisis that attended the Arab-Israeli (Yom Kippur) War were other contributory factors. Neither did the impact of the student movement end with the eruption of the revolution. It continued to determine the contours and trajectory of post-revolutionary developments. The two leftist parties that batted it out for hegemony emerged directly out of the movement. While they were consumed by the revolutionary conflagration, the ethno-nationalist groups that arose in the periphery of the movement but were nurtured by its ideology, notably the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) and Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), endured to determine the post-1991 political configuration of the country.

THE INSTITUTIONAL SETTING

Secondary education is a post-1941 phenomenon in Ethiopia. It started with the founding in 1943 of the first secondary school, Haile Sellasie I Secondary School; in popular parlance, it became more famously known as Kotebe, after the locality in the eastern outskirts of Addis Ababa where it was situated. It was followed three years later by another school in the diametrically opposite western outskirts of the capital: General Wingate Secondary School, named after the charismatic British commander who led the British campaign of liberation in 1940–41 and went on to be a legend in the British Burma campaign. In other cases, elementary schools expanded to include secondary education. Such was the case with Tafari Makonnen School, already established in 1925. It was the Jesuit administrators of TMS (as it was more popularly known) who were deployed to establish the first institution of higher education in Ethiopia, the University College of Addis Ababa (UCAA). The person who was in the forefront of this undertaking was Dr Lucien Matte, director of TMS, who was asked by Emperor Haile Sellassie in January 1950 to start the college. The institution was initially intended to bear the name Trinity College – probably in an attempt to emulate the Cambridge institution of that name.