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Revolution and Modernity in Maale: Ethiopia, 1974 to 1987

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Donald L. Donham
Donald L. Donham
Affiliation:
Centre for advanced study in the Behavioral Sciences
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Extract

For a long time now, people have pondered the ambiguity, at least in English, of ‘history’: the records men make, the records men write. In modern Chinese history, these are beginning to correspond. Revolutionary spirits like the famous writer Lu Hsün (1881–1936) felt that the old high culture was dead, and they resented being instructed, as it seemed, to rest quietly, uttering platitudes in silk-fan attitudes. They wanted to create (and destroy): to make-their own history, not to be politically stricken by forces from abroad, or culturally sterile at home, their past frozen solid in the present. The revolution they helped to foster in a cosmopolitan spirit—against the world to join the world, against their past to keep it theirs, but past—may be interpreted, in cultural terms, as a long striving to make their museums themselves.

Type
Forming National Consciousness
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 34 , Issue 1 , January 1992 , pp. 28 - 57
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1992

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References

This essay was prepared while the author was on leave from Emory University at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. I am grateful for financial support provided by Emory University and by National Science Foundation Grant BNS87–00864 made to the Center. For fieldwork in Ethiopia, I was supported by National Science Foundation Grant BNS87–18823. I wish to thank colleagues at the Center, Shelly Errington and Reginald Zelnik, for their comments and criticisms of this paper, as well as others: Peggy Barlett, Fredrik Barth, Donald Crummey, Michael M. J. Fischer, Alexander Naty, Dessalgn Rahmato, and Bahru Zewde. On such an inherently contested subject as revolution, I do not have to emphasize—but I will—that the responsibility for the following analysis is mine alone.

1 Levenson, Joseph, Revolution and Cosmopolitanism: The Western Stage and the Chinese Stages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 1.Google Scholar

2 Korn, David A., Ethiopia, the United States, and the Soviet Union (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 124.Google Scholar

3 See Johanson, Donald C. and Edey, Maitland A., Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981).Google Scholar

4 Northern Ethiopia has had an indigenous Christian Church since the fourth century.

5 Ethiopian Herald, September 4, 1984, p. 2.

6 Tocqueville, Alexis de, The Old Régime and the French Revolution (New York: Anchor Books, [1856] 1955);Google ScholarFuret, François, Interpreting the French Revolution, Forster, Elborg, trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1978] 1981);Google ScholarHuntington, Samuel P., Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968);Google ScholarSkocpol, Theda, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 As Edmond Keller points out, the Ethiopian revolution created greater external dependence, even as it strengthened the state internally. See his Revolutionary Ethiopia: From Empire to People's Republic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 264–71.Google Scholar In this respect, the Ethiopian example contrasts with those of France, Russia, and China. International dimensions are crucial to understanding recent Ethiopian history, as the collapse of the revolutionary state demonstrates, but they are not analyzed here.

8 The Ethiopian armed forces had expanded by a factor of approximately seven by the mid–1980s, according to Clapham, Christopher, Transformation and Continuity in Revolutionary Ethiopia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 109.Google Scholar

9 The comparable slogan from the early days of the Ethiopian revolution was “Ethiopia First.” The phrase was apparently intended as a call for a commitment to the nation itself and a repudiation of any adherence to narrower loyalties based on class, ethnic identity, or religion. As such, the phrase implicitly substituted the notion of equal citizens before a unitary nation for the old imperial idea of a hierarchy of ethnic groups dominated by Semitic speakers. See Lefort, René, Ethiopia: An Heretical Revolution?, Berrett, A.M., trans. (London: Zed Press, [1981] 1983), 78–79.Google Scholar

10 This was, in fact, Theda Skocpol's conclusion in States and Social Revolutions. See, however, her more recent views in “Cultural Idioms and Political Ideologies in Revolutionary Reconstruction of State Power: A Rejoinder to Sewell,” Journal of Modern History, vol. 57 (1985), 86–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Hunt, Lynn, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984);Google ScholarSewell, William H. Jr., “Ideologies and Social Revolutions: Reflections on the French Case,” Journal of Modern History, vol. 57 (1985), 57–85;CrossRefGoogle ScholarBaker, Keith Michael, Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 See Scott, James C., Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985)Google Scholar and Abercrombie, Nicholas, Hill, Stephen, and Turner, Bryan S., The Dominant Ideology Thesis (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1980).Google Scholar

13 All rural land was nationalized, and peasant families were given access rights of up to ten hectares, but only if they themselves farmed the land. Rural wage labor was made illegal, and the responsibility for allocating land was given to the new peasant associations. See Rahmato, Dessalegn, Agrarian Reform in Ethiopia (Trenton, New Jersey: Red Sea Press, 1985).Google Scholar

14 Arendt, Hannah, On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1963), 21.Google Scholar

15 Griewank, Karl, Der neuzeitliche Revolutionsbegriff (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969), 145.Google Scholar For a partial English translation, see “Emergence of the Concept of Revolution,” in Revolution: A Reader, Mazlish, Bruce, Kaledin, Arthur D., and Ralston, David B., eds. (New York: Macmillan, 1971), 13–18.Google Scholar By the early eighteenth century in France, the notion of revolution had apparently lost most of its cyclical connotations and referred instead to all sudden and unpredictable disruptions—upsets that justified, it was originally claimed, the growing power of the absolute monarchy. See Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution, 203–23, and Koselleck, Reinhart, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, Tribe, Keith, trans. (Cambridge: MIT Press, [1979] 1985), 39–54.Google Scholar

16 Baker, Inventing the French Revolution, 214.

17 Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983);Google ScholarGellner, Ernest, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983);Google ScholarChatterjee, Partha, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed Books, 1986).Google Scholar

18 Plamenatz, As John, “Two Types of Nationalism,” in Nationalism: The Nature and Evolution of an Idea, Kamenka, Eugene, ed. (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1973), 24,Google Scholar pointed out, “Nationalism, as distinct from mere national consciousness, arises when peoples are aware, not only of cultural diversity, but of cultural change and share some idea of progress which moves them to compare their own achievements and capacities with those of others.”

19 Levenson, Revolution and Cosmopolitanism, 26.

20 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 77–78.

21 Furet, François, Marx and the French Revolution, Furet, Deborah Kan, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1986] 1988), 3.Google Scholar

22 As I shall argue later, the Chinese revolution—a revolution in a more unambiguously non-Westem society than that in Russia and a revolution based among peasants more than among proletarians—probably affected Ethiopian intellectuals in the beginning more than the Russian. But by the time that the derg appropriated Marxism, the political split between China and the Soviet Union had occurred. In allying with the latter, Ethiopian leaders believed that they had to eschew all Chinese precedents. Not only was the Ethiopian state apparatus eventually designed to copy the Soviet example, but China was repeatedly and ritualistically denounced.

23 This is Benedict Anderson's apt phrase in Imagined Communities.

24 Levenson, Revolution and Cosmopolitanism, 23. A similar reading of Marxism in Ethiopia accounts, I believe, for the peculiar conjunction of almost incessant Marxist sloganizing in the country with report after report by foreigners that even members of the party did not really believe in Marxism, that is, in its Western, liberationist version. See Clapham, Transformation and Continuity, 10.

25 For an outline of the differences in outlook among Ethiopians during this period, see Hiwet, Addis, Ethiopia: From Autocracy to Revolution (London: Review of African Political Economy, 1975),Google Scholar ch. 3.

26 Quoted in Caulk, Richard, “Dependency, Gebre Heywet Baykedagn, and the Birth of Ethiopian Reformism,” in Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Ethiopian Studies, Hess, Robert L., ed. (Chicago: University of Illinois at Chicago Circle Office of Publication Services, 1978), 569–81.Google Scholar See also Addis Hiwet, From Autocracy to Revolution, 68–77.

27 Girmame had been educated in the United States and had a Master's degree in political science from Columbia University. For accounts of the attempted coup, see Greenfield, Richard, Ethiopia: A New Political History (London: Pall Mall Press, 1965),Google Scholar chs. 17–19; and Marcus, Harold G., Ethiopia, Great Britain, and the United States, 1941–1974 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983),Google Scholar ch. 5.

28 Balsvik, Randi Rønning, Haile Selassie's Students: The Intellectual and Social Background to Revolution, 1952–1977 (East Lansing, Michigan: African Studies Center, Michigan State University, 1985), 96–97.Google Scholar

29 Ibid., 94.

30 According to Marcus, Ethiopia, Great Britain and the United States, 6, United States assistance did not alter the course of local events.

31 Levine, Donald N., Wax and Gold: Tradition and Innovation in Ethiopian Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 92.Google Scholar Levine noted that members of the Ethiopian military, having had more experience overseas and having been trained in a highly rationalized profession, tended to be more impatient to modernize Ethiopia than the rest of the new elite (pp. 189–90). This observation was prophetic of later events.

32 This was a process that varied widely across Africa, and a number of factors appears to have been involved. One was probably the different ideologies of colonial rule. In French colonies, the educational system was theoretically geared toward producing Frenchmen (even if they were black), whereas in British colonies, the notion of local autonomy and indirect rule held out no such assimilationist possibilities. Indeed, British policy may have encouraged new elites to invent connections with a traditional past. Whether white settlers were present and whether the struggle for liberation involved peasant mobilization were probably additional factors that affected how notions of tradition were mapped onto the cultural construction of new nations. See Mazrui, Ali A., “Francophone Nations and English-Speaking States: Imperial Ethnicity and African Political Formations,” in State Versus Ethnic Claims: African Policy Dilemmas, Rothchild, Donald and Olorunsola, Victor A., eds. (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1983).Google Scholar

33 Ranger, Terence O., Peasant Consciousness and Guerrilla War in Zimbabwe: A Comparative Study (London: James Currey, 1985);Google ScholarLan, David, Guns and Rain: Guerrillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).Google Scholar

34 The idea of hibrettesebawinet, a sort of indigenous Ethiopian communalism, distilled from local historical experience and Ethiopian religion, parallels, in some ways, Tanzanian ideology. Promulgated by the derg in December 1974, it remained ideologically unelaborated and was officially supplanted by the notion of scientific socialism by mid-1976. See Rahmato, Dessalegn, “The Political Economy of Development in Ethiopia,” in Afro-Marxist Regimes: Ideology and Public Policy, Keller, Edmond J. and Rothchild, Donald, eds. (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1987), 157–9.Google Scholar

35 Fischer, Michael M.J. and bedi, Mehdi, Debating Muslims: Cultural Dialogues in Postmodernity and Tradition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990),Google Scholar point out the similar role in the shaping of Muslim fundamentalism played by Middle Eastern students studying in the West.

36 Dawit Wolde Giorgis, Red Tears, 9 – 1 1. Dawit was in the Ethiopian military when he was a student at Columbia University in the mid-1970s and was, therefore, not accepted into student Marxist circles as were others. He nonetheless enthusiastically supported the revolution during its early years. After serving as a high official in the party and heading the government's famine relief commission, Dawit defected and accepted asylum in the United States in December 1985. The book cited above attempts to justify its author's actions and to set out “what went wrong.”

37 Plamenatz, “Two Types of Nationalism,” 34.

38 Balsvik, Haile Selassie's Students, 294. Student leaders exhibited a “sense of historical mission, of being instruments in an inevitable process of change, of playing a role no other group was prepared to perform in Ethiopian society” (p. 295).

39 The chief exception was the Ethiopian Democratic Union. Led by former lords, the EDU never gained much support among the peasantry and by the late 1970s was no longer a significant actor in Ethiopian history.

40 Balsvik, Haile Selassie's Students, xiii.

41 Bates, Robert H., “Modernization, Ethnic Competition, and the Rationality of Politics in Contemporary Africa,” in State Versus Ethnic Claims: African Policy Dilemmas, Rothchild, Donald and Olorunsola, Victor A., eds. (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1983).Google Scholar

42 Persons could become Amhara by changing their names to Amharic ones, by learning to speak Amharic without an accent, and by converting to Orthodox Christianity. See Clapham, Transformation and Continuity, 23–26.

43 For a specification of that hierarchy, see Levine, Wax and Gold, 292, n. 11.

44 As might be expected, the strongest opposition to the revolution was, for the most part, still phrased in a Marxist idiom and came from those formerly privileged in the Christian empire but recently marginalized, namely, Semitic-speaking highlanders from Eritrea and Tegre. Particularly after 1987, these opposition movements became strong enough to check and even to reverse processes of state strengthening that I am analyzing here.

45 Quoted in Dessalegn Rahmato, “The Political Economy of Development in Ethiopia,” 157.

46 Krylova, Galina, “Natsional'no-demokraticheshkaya revolyutsiya v svete novogo politicheskogo myshleniya (naprimere Efiopii),” Narody Azii i Afriki, 1 (1989), 42–53.Google Scholar SeeHenze's, Paul B. translation, “Glasnost About Building Socialism in Ethiopia: Analysis of a Critical Soviet Article,” Rand Corporation Note N–3022–USDP, 1990, 21.Google Scholar

47 See David A. Korn, Ethiopia, the United States and the Soviet Union, 107, and Dawit Wolde Giorgis, Red Tears, 348.

48 Dawit, Red Tears, 30–31.

49 Korn, Ethiopia, the United States and the Soviet Union, 107.

50 See Donald N. Levine's statement of this theme in Wax and Gold.

51 On the public perception of Mengistu, see Lefort, An Heretical Revolution?, p. 74 and 278.

52 Clapham, Transformation and Continuity, 79.

53 The church was, of course, dispossessed of its lands, like other landholders; and the Archbishop at the time of the revolution was executed. Formally, the revolutionary state declared freedom of religion, and several Muslim holidays were officially recognized, along with previous Orthodox ones. But there were no campaigns against Orthodox belief itself, and the new Archbishop of the Ethiopian church (along with Muslim and Catholic leaders) often appeared during state rituals.

54 It is noteworthy that the new regime's major attempt to valorize the Ethiopian past centered not so much on peasants or working people but on national leaders, particularly Emperors Tewodros and Menilek II. On the destruction of old political symbols in the French and Russian revolutions see, respectively, Idzerda, Stanley, “Iconoclasm During the French Revolution,” American Historical Review, vol. 60 (1954), 13–26;CrossRefGoogle ScholarStites, Richard, “Iconoclastic Currents in the Russian Revolution,” in Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution, Gleason, Abbott, Kenez, Peter, and Stites, Richard, eds. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985).Google Scholar

55 On Mengistu's prospects under the old order, David Korn observes: “The senior ranks of Haile Selassie's army were not closed to commoners, but Mengistu, with his low-class origin, his very dark skin, his inelegant Amharic, and his record of obstreperousness, was an unlikely candidate to move to the top” (Ethiopia, the United States and the Soviet Union, 109). Dark skin would not have been so much a barrier as slave descent (though, ideologically, the two tended to be equated in imperial Ethiopia).

56 Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies, 291.

57 Scott, James C., “Revolution in the Revolution: Peasants and Commissars,” Theory and Society, vol. 7 (1979), 97–134;CrossRefGoogle ScholarThe Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976).Google Scholar

58 Lefort, An Heretical Revolution?, 108.

59 Frazer, James G., The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion, 3rd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1935).Google Scholar

60 For a fuller description, see my “From Ritual Kings to Ethiopian Landlords in Maale,” in The Southern Marches of Imperial Ethiopia: Essays in History and Social Anthropology, Donham, Donald and James, Wendy, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 71–73.Google Scholar

61 As I have explained elsewhere, commoners carried out horticultural operations in the order established by what has been called conical clans; see Donham, Donald L., History, Power, Ideology: Central Issues in Marxism and Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 94–103.Google Scholar

62 For the history of these processes in Maale, see Donham, “From Ritual Kings to Ethiopian Landlords.”

63 For a more extended treatment of these events see Ibid., 89–93.

64 On the importance of cooperative work to local social and political organization, see Donham, History, Power, Ideology, ch. 4.

65 I do not have detailed information on the ethnic identities of the students in Maale. Most appeared to identify themselves as Amhara. When some Maale interpreted the land reform as a call to get rid of their Amhara conquerors, the students in Maale specifically discouraged this view. The struggle, they said, was one of class, not of ethnic groups. This line was not universally taken by zemecha in the south; on the politicization of ethnicity that occurred in Welaita, see Lefort, An Heretical Revolution?, 113–4.

66 Walzer, Michael, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), 3.Google Scholar

67 Peasants in the north viewed the land reform differently. Despite the fact that Ethiopian intellectuals saw their society as feudal, in reality the system of land ownership in the north gave access rights to almost all peasants. Certainly there was no significant landless class. Moreover, the system of descent in Amhara areas emphasized the existence of kin and cultural ties between lords and peasants. With only a little luck, so the saying went, even a poor peasant could hope to rise to power and wealth. Even though such upward mobility was the exception, the fact that the culture of northern peasants held out the possibility was important. In such a context, the rhetoric of land reform had little appeal, and instead, the derg's commitment to erasing the old imperial hierarchy of ethnic groups (with the Amhara on top) was seen as indicative of an anti-Amhara bias. The fact that many members of the derg were not proper Amharas reinforced this perception.See Hoben, Allan, Land Tenure among the Amhara of Ethiopia: The Dynamics of Cognatic Descent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973).Google Scholar

68 The students understood both northern and southern Ethiopia as feudal. When the Maale elders pleaded for the return of the kati, the students understood this action as an (antirevolutionary) attempt to restore a lord. In fact, the kati had taken the Amharic title that lords enjoyed in the north, literally “one who has a father,” balabbat, when the office was incorporated into the imperial hierarchy. But the kati cum balabbat retained religious functions in Maale that no northern lord performed.

69 Clapham, Transformation and Continuity, 6.

70 Using the phrase, the state, may be misleading in some respects. The expansion of the governmental apparatus downward into local society was not entirely controlled from above; state agents sometimes acted for reasons entirely their own. Corruption, for example, was greatly expanded after the revolution because of the increased contexts in which power could be wielded by state agents outside of the surveillance of higher officials. The revolutionary state was, then, a differentiated and wobbly affair, even if it was a more impressive structure than its imperial predecessor.

71 Why Protestants, increasingly identified simply as Pentecostalists (pente), came to be seen as alien believers is a complex question. In part, the answer involves the lack of organizational hierarchy in Protestant churches; without such a hierarchy, the government found it difficult to attempt to control Protestants. Also, Protestants were much more closely identified with Westerners than, say, Catholics; hence they threatened to undermine the cultural definition of Ethiopianness. Finally, perhaps it is significant to point out that both Protestants and Marxists sought to define the terms of modernism, to occupy, as it were, the same discursive space.

72 Scott, Weapons of the Weak.

73 Skocpol, “Cultural Idioms,” 90 and the references cited therein.

74 This seems clearest in Furet's Interpreting the French Revolution, in which complex historical outcomes like the Terror are “deduced” from the workings of revolutionary discourse itself. In contrast, Lynn Hunt's Politics, Culture, and Class presents a more textured and complex analysis that includes provincial townsmen, and, more cursorily, peasant villagers, along with Parisian revolutionaries.