Almost unnoticed, in the wake of the overthrow of Emperor Haile-Selassie, the coming to power of the military, and the ongoing independence struggle in Eritrea, a band of students launched an insurrection from the northern Ethiopian province of Tigray. Calling themselves the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), they built close relations with Tigray's poverty-stricken peasants and on this basis liberated the province in 1989, and formed an ethnic-based coalition of opposition forces that assumed state power in 1991. This book chronicles that history and focuses in particular on the relationship of the revolutionaries with Ethiopia's peasants.
Revolution, civil wars, and guerilla warfare wracked Ethiopia during three turbulent decades at the end of the 20th century. Here, Tareke brings to life the leading personalities in the domestic political struggles, strategies of the warring parties international actors, and key battles.
Between the years 1964 and 1974, Ethiopian post-secondary students studying at home, in Europe, and in North America produced a number of journals. In these they explored the relationship between social theory and social change within the project of building a socialist Ethiopia. Ethiopia in Theory examines the literature of this student movement, together with the movement’s afterlife in Ethiopian politics and society, in order to ask: what does it mean to write today about the appropriation and indigenisation of Marxist and mainstream social science ideas in an Ethiopian and African context; and, importantly, what does the archive of revolutionary thought in Africa teach us about the practice of critical theory more generally?
A penetrating analysis, written with a rare combination of passion and balanced assessment...Gebru's interpretation is subtle and persuasive and his arguments break new ground' - Times Higher Education Supplement This highly praised study of popular protest and resistance in Ethiopia focuses on three important peasant-based rebellions that occurred between 1941 and 1970.'
This is a cultural history of the Ethiopian revolution that highlights the role of modernist Marxist ideas as they interacted with local, mostly rural, traditions.
Field study of post-revolutionary agrarian reform and social change in rural area Ethiopia - looks at the agrarian structure and social classes prior to 1975; comments on land reform legislation adopted up to 1982, land nationalization and land allotment, impact on use of agricultural technology, agricultural price, agricultural taxation, and emerging trends in agricultural development: discusses role, structure and leadership of farmers associations, etc. Bibliography and statistical tables.
The contributors examine ways in which the Ethiopian people can be involved in a more decentralized and democratic structure which will harness their resources, initiatives and capacities. This book will prove essential reading for all those with an interest in the transition to democratic forms of government in the developing world and in the future of Ethiopia in the post-Cold War era.
In the second half of the 1960s and the early 1970s, the Ethiopian student movement emerged from rather innocuous beginnings to become the major opposition force against the imperial regime in Ethiopia, contributing perhaps more than any other factor to the eruption of the 1974 revolution, a revolution that brought about not only the end of the long reign of Emperor Haile Sellassie, but also a dynasty of exceptional longevity. The student movement would be of fundamental importance in the shaping of the future Ethiopia, instrumental in both its political and social development. Bahru Zewde, himself one of the students involved in the uprising, draws on interviews with former student leaders and activists, as well as documentary sources, to describe the steady radicalisation of the movement, characterised particularly after 1965 by annual demonstrations against the regime and culminating in the ascendancy of Marxism-Leninism by the early 1970s. Almost in tandem with the global student movement, the year 1969 marked the climax of student opposition to the imperial regime, both at home and abroad. It was also in that year that students broached what came to be famously known as the "national question", ultimately resulting in the adoption in 1971of the Leninist/Stalinist principle of self-determination up to and including secession. On the eve of the revolution, the student movement abroad split into two rival factions; a split that was ultimately to lead to the liquidation of both and the consolidation of military dictatorship as well as the emergence of the ethno-nationalist agenda as the only viable alternative to the military regime. Bahru Zewde is Emeritus Professor of History at Addis Ababa University and Vice President of the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences. He has authored many books and articles, notably A History of Modern Ethiopia, 1855-1974 and Pioneers of Change in Ethiopia: The Reformist Intellectuals of the Early Twentieth Century. Finalist for the Bethwell A. Ogot Book Prize to the author of the best book on East African Studies, 2015. Ethiopia: Addis Ababa University Press (paperback)
