‘Irrespective of what government rules Ethiopia, Ethiopia has always been committed to African independence and liberation.’ Thus spoke Meles Zenawi, long-serving helmsman of the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), at the 2000 summit of the Organization for African Unity in Lomé. Passionately defending Addis Ababa as Africa's diplomatic capital, Meles situated Ethiopia as being at the heart of a century-old Pan-Africanist project of expanding political, economic and cultural sovereignty and dignity. He emphasised that even the ‘reactionary’ Emperor Haile Selassie and the military dictatorship of the Derg stood by this fundamental mission, no matter their domestic ‘backwardness’. It was no coincidence that Meles invoked three Pan-Africanist icons – Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere and Nelson Mandela – known for their linking of intellectual emancipation, a reform of African regional order and internal liberation of their own societies. In doing so, Meles was affirming the centrality of liberation, in theory and practice, as integral to Ethiopian political modernity and self-imagination – past, present and future.
Ethiopia is an intriguing theatre to study: it was never colonised but an imperial power itself and Ethiopian exceptionalism within Africa and African Studies remains widespread. Simultaneously, there are few if any African states where ‘liberation’ has been so central in the politics of the last century – from the struggle against Italian fascism to the EPRDF's ‘War on Poverty’. Three monographs offer new perspectives on some of the questions the centrality of liberation throws up.
Elleni Centime Zeleke's book is the most ambitious of these. It not only aims to survey the ideological debates surrounding the Ethiopian Revolution (1974), but to trace their long-term impact on Ethiopian politics, while simultaneously rethinking the role of the social sciences in Africa. At the core of Elleni's inquiry is the Ethiopian Student Movement which provided the intellectual ammunition and street power that both helped unseat Haile Selassie and usher into power the Derg, but also shortly thereafter galvanised the armed opposition against Mengistu Hailemariam and his colonels. The Student Movement exemplifies the tendency that has existed in Ethiopia since the 1960s for scholarly work to intervene directly in the country's politics and to seek to endow political arguments with positivist legitimacy: ‘As agents of social change, the Ethiopian student movement seemed to perceive the work of linking theory to practice as the adoption of correct facts that would in turn lead to a new Ethiopian society’ (115). As she and other chroniclers of the students have noted, the infatuation with objective, scientific truth as the highest stage of political consciousness explains both the sheer energy fuelling the revolutionary movement and its dogmatic, violent tendencies toward those identified as enemies and (inevitable) losers of trans-historical processes. Seeing the movement as wrestling with the building of a nation-state, Elleni relies strongly on Partha Chatterjee's casting of Third World nationalism as a derivative discourse and the inevitable conflict between tradition and modernity that preoccupies it. For her, this tragically trapped the students in a theory that is unable to see past rigid dichotomies and to historicise (and therefore creatively rethink) its own conditions. The post-1991 ruling EPRDF (itself comprising former movement members) and its nationalist opponents have changed some of their revolutionary slogans, Elleni contends, but continue to think of political modernity in Ethiopia through forms of knowledge production strikingly similar to the axioms of almost six decades ago.
As a veteran of the struggle of the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF, the historically dominant faction of the EPRDF), Mulugeta Gebrehiwot Berhe offers an insider account that echoes the importance of the Student Movement in pursuit of liberation. Whereas Elleni is concerned with stressing the limitations under conditions of global capitalism of Ethiopian students’ theorising, Mulugeta's emphasis is on their praxis – especially the rebellion started in 1975 by radical Tigrayan youth. His main contribution is highlighting the significance of political organising in the TPLF struggle and the EPRDF state-building project that emerged from it. Laying the Past to Rest painstakingly details the maxim of local adaptation – of Tigrayan political culture, of land reform, of village administration and much more – as key to the TPLF's extraordinary victory in vanquishing the biggest standing army in Africa. The difference between the TPLF and its competitors (whether the Derg, the urban student elite or other liberation fronts) was not the degree of theoretical development or the magnitude of grievances of its social base. Rather, the decisive factor was its willingness to constantly evolve as a military force, as a local (later regional and ultimately national) government in waiting and as a learning organisation regularly questioning and overhauling its internal procedures. Yet if striking the right balance between democratic centralism and grassroots critiques gave it a decisive edge as a resistance movement, Mulugeta attributes the disappointments of its state-building project primarily to the political organisation losing its way after the contested 2005 elections. Despite what he sees as undeniable gains in terms of cultural-political rights and developmental outcomes since 1991, the ‘bureaucratization of the party’ (241, i.e. the weakening of political leadership, the diluting of membership requirements and loss of internal discipline) fatally wounded the EPRDF. The problem then for Laying the Past to Rest is not theoretical or ideological, but practical.
Jonathan Fisher recognises the importance of knowledge production and of political organisation yet makes the case for a social approach to debates about liberation in Ethiopia and beyond. His book is concerned with evolving understandings of security and their relationship with liberation, propositioning that the pivotal role of personal, transborder networks has so far been underestimated. Fisher stresses the ‘politics of affinity’ between Ethiopian revolutionaries and veterans of Uganda's National Resistance Movement, the Rwandan Patriotic Front and above all the Eritrean People's Liberation Front, drawing attention to the intense social and emotional bonds that have ‘bred resentment, mistrust, antagonism and competition and this has manifested in a range of violent conflicts and diplomatic realigments throughout the [Horn of Africa] since the late 1990s’ (16). Ideology and revolutionary praxis matter, Fisher acknowledges, but their embeddedness in human relations and concomitant collective aspirations and perceptions of betrayal explain both the growing dysfunctionality of the EPRDF that preoccupies Mulugeta and the limits to what the nation-state and positivist social science can deliver according to Elleni. Foregrounding the Ugandan, Rwandan and Eritrean experiences alongside those of EPRDF Ethiopia serves Fisher's purpose of comparative evaluation. Additionally, the regional lens highlights how the security elites in these party-states were so deeply inter-related that their personal connections underpinned tragedies such as the 1998–2000 Ethio-Eritrean War of Brothers and unleashed devastating internal purges that aborted hopes for democratisation in Addis Ababa and elsewhere.
Reading the three books together strengthens our grasp of the TPLF/EPRDF experiment in Ethiopia and its wider stakes. While much recent work investigates the state from below and both analytically and normatively rails against top-down perspectives, Elleni, Mulugeta and Fisher each provides rationales of their own to take African elites seriously in their theorising, organising and socialising and to do so in conceptually and empirically innovative ways. Moreover, contra an African Studies literature that remains dominated by a focus on patronage networks as central to power, they helpfully underline how much more there is to the high politics of state than ‘follow the money’-narratives that Western policymakers and advocacy organisations find so useful.
The value of Elleni's work lies not only in tracing some of the afterlives of the Ethiopian Revolution of 45 years ago. It is also situated in her challenge to the reader to ponder what meaningful democratisation of debates around knowledge, authority and indeed liberation entails in an African context. For instance, what happens when political subjects translate global frames of reference into local structures of power and instruments to contest hegemony? This line of thought is of particular importance in light of Ethiopia's long history as a policy laboratory, for domestic and external savants, whether in the form of Point Four educational assistance during the Cold War, novel notions of food security pioneered by Western consultants, the grand experiment of ethnic federalism or ideas of budget support in the post-Washington Consensus. Elleni is sceptical about the mechanisms through which knowledge in the Ethiopian context is rendered actionable; the revolving doors between politics, bureaucracy, NGOs and academia thus become more than mere professional opportunism but ensnarl the country's creative potential and alternative ways of knowing and acting. She notes: ‘Social science practice in Ethiopia must be understood as a site where academic practice, government policy, civil society activism and the social needs of local communities are … recombined in very fraught ways … The practice of policy-making becomes, at best, unclear, and at its worst is wrapped up in purposeful bewilderment’ (10). Elleni posits that the early literature of the Ethiopian Student Movement was already replete with troubling positivist linkages between theory and practice; casting these as a righteous, universal and therefore superior form of knowledge continues to disenfranchise citizens today, she trenchantly warns, ‘because the social sciences have been pushed to produce a direct benefit for society rather than being understood as a space that opens up a critical and philosophical dialogue on social reality’ (10).
The implications for political participation of the chasm between the promises of liberation and the complexities of actually governing Ethiopia (as well as Eritrea, Rwanda and Uganda) are an essential theme for Fisher's superb investigation of security, statehood and trans-border fraternity too. He is right to re-emphasise the point, made by other scholars in earlier work, that the TPLF/EPRDF project cannot be understood separately from the regional context in which it was launched and which it subsequently shaped – including on an intellectual and cultural level. For him, liberation as knowledge provides mental maps that are deeply relational: ‘ideological content has been embraced by the four post-liberation regimes, and their elites, not only to capture their ambitions around their own reformist regional roles, but also to characterise their expectations of neighbouring states’ behaviour’ (13). The politics of affinity central to the book entwine with the ‘politics of aspiration’. Their entanglement initially gave rise to grand ambitions of changing the African security landscape in the 1990s but ended up crashing in the anxieties of war – cold and hot – with their erstwhile brethren: ‘Indeed, linkages with one-time liberation war allies across the border would lead to accusations of disloyalty and fifth columnism being made by the movement leadership in the fluid context of political restructuring’ (215). These disappointments and the human emotions associated with them also help to explain the rising intolerance for dissent (internally and externally) and the rewriting of national and revolutionary history: particularly strong are Fisher's sections (Chapter 2) on the development of revisionist discourses by the TPLF/EPRDF (and its Eritrean, Rwandan and Ugandan erstwhile comrades) that posit that liberation occurred in quasi-total isolation, without external support, yet emerged nonetheless victorious. The book appropriately characterises these as partial, misleading and indicative of a tendency to emphasise the vindication of the movement (and especially its foremost leader) by selectively underlining certain historical facts and perceptions at the expense of others. Such historiography then also became a tool to stifle internal debates over reform of the state-building project.
In view of the years of power struggles and instrumentalisation of ethnic violence that is peaking with the renewed outbreak of large-scale war in Tigray at the time of reviewing, it is difficult to conclude then that the Student Movement, or the EPRDF that emerged out of it, succeeded in Laying the Past to Rest, as Mulugeta titled his memoir. The latter is beautifully dedicated to two comrades who perished chasing the dream of a liberated Ethiopia but one gets a sense that the author in his conclusion can't help but wonder what they would make of how much has been transformed by the Woyane struggle – and how many daunting problems still bedevil the country. The Nationalities Question still haunts Ethiopia; the transition from empire to nation-state remains incomplete; and authoritarianism has changed form but continues to be the fundamental hallmark of Ethiopian governments.
The three books cover an impressive amount of ground. Nonetheless, this reviewer felt himself hungry for more from the authors on two key dimensions of liberation. First, Elleni's work repeatedly and pertinently calls for placing the Ethiopian Student Movement, the Ethiopian Revolution and its legacies in a global perspective and examining what lessons it might offer for ‘thinking about social change and the trajectory of world history’ (256). But despite the book's grounding in historical materialism, it often struggles to articulate what this might actually entail, other than emphasising Chatterjee's challenge of pursuing nation-statehood under conditions of global capitalism. The latter remains a general concept in Elleni's chapters, sometimes lacking in historical contingency and nuance in relation to Ethiopia in the World, especially when it comes to the concrete manifestations of global ideas and material power in Ethiopia's political economy and/or what Ethiopia's experiences could (and, indeed, do) contribute to rethinking late capitalist development globally. In this regard, one potential avenue could have consisted of providing valuable empirical detail of how the forces of capital and understandings of sovereignty have changed over recent decades, what the specific ways are in which they have penetrated (or not) Ethiopia and how global ideas about developmentalism – those of General Park Chung-Hee, Enver Hoxha, Joseph Stiglitz and Kenichi Ohno for example – have interacted in a complex (and sometimes contradictory) manner with the ideological and material legacies of the 1960s and 1970s in Ethiopia and beyond.
Second, Fisher and Mulugeta, despite their impressive and broad canvas, underplay the constitutive role of extraordinary levels of violence in consolidating political order, during the liberation struggle and after it. Both recognise at the general level that the TPLF/EPRDF was (and is) an astonishing political vehicle to channel and contain violence, but its actual physical forms, its ideological origins and the omnipresent threat of it as a regulator of state-society relations remain de facto footnotes in their accounts. That is of course not how tens of millions of Ethiopians (or their neighbours in Eritrea and Somalia) see it. Fisher's preoccupation is with security, which is qualitatively different from violence. For his part, Mulugeta remains too loyal of a movement veteran to speak of the torture chambers, development-induced displacement and scorched earth counter-insurgencies in the Ogaden and Oromia that have all also characterised ‘liberation’ from the standpoint of the masses in whose name revolutionary struggle has been waged. Especially when thinking of political modernities in Ethiopia, a reckoning with what Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth described as the premise of meaningful emancipation remains essential, at least for this reviewer: ‘National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people, commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or the new formulas introduced, decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.’ Rethinking liberation by focusing on knowledge production, political organisation and social networks inevitably poses the question of violence again. In theory and, yes, in practice.
