Preface

Donald L. Donham
Distinguished Research Professor of Anthropology
University of California, Davis

The Ethiopian revolution--that cultural earthquake that produced at once progressive social measures, prodigious killing, and the spewing forth of millions into what is now the Ethiopian diaspora--continues to haunt scholars, if not indeed all Ethiopians.  Elleni Zeleke grew up in exile and begins this wide-ranging study--part philosophy, part history, part anthropology--with an account of a genre of song in the post-revolutionary era called tizita, “memory.”  To Elleni as a child, such songs seemed only to rub salt into raw wounds.  She wanted to cure the adults of their backward-looking nostalgia.  But as she grew older, she discovered increasing layers of complexity in any such “cure.”  This book is the product of that journey.

The focus that Elleni brings to the revolution involves the Ethiopian student movement that began in the 1960s in Addis Ababa, as well as among Ethiopians studying abroad in North America and Europe.  It has long been appreciated that these students were critical actors in the 1974 revolution, and the present work is preceded by two other distinguished books on the Ethiopian student movement, by Randi Balsvik in 1985 and by Bahru Zewde in 2014.  What sets Elleni’s approach apart from both of her predecessors is an imaginative and productive identification with the early leaders of the student movement and, more importantly, with the kind of social theory they wielded, Marxism. This leads, through an examination of what Elleni calls knowledge production, to a different way of understanding historical materialism compared to the revolutionaries’. 

Since the late nineteenth century, Ethiopian intellectuals have studied the rest of the world in order to understand their own society’s “backwardness,” but that form of knowledge typically took the West (including its Marxism) on the West’s terms.  By the 1970s, one could even say that the Western university had played an essential role in the Ethiopian revolution.  Perhaps the most original aspect of Elleni’s work is her exploration of how these themes interrelate and her consequent attempt to construct a form of Marxism from a postcolonial point of view.     

This book led me to look back at some of the writings of Ethiopian students in the late 1960s.  I was, as they say, blown away by pieces like that of Walleligne Mekonnen.  But Walleligne, like many others, was soon dead.  In conversing with the ghosts of the students, Elleni aims to reinvigorate revolutionary theory.  Virtually all the great issues of the Ethiopian student movement--land, nationalities, the meaning of democracy--continue as critical questions in the country in 2019.  Can Ethiopians now somehow redeem the sufferings of the dead, escape their mistakes, while honoring their vaunting ambitions?  That, for me, is the final question this book poses.