Leading Ethiopian historian Professor Bahru Zewde’s long-awaited book that covers the Ethiopian student movement of the 1960s and the 1970s hit shelves. The book, entitled ‘The Quest for Socialist Utopia’, describes the fundamental importance of the student movement in the shaping of the future Ethiopia, instrumental in both its political and social development, the publisher said. The book is based in part on oral interviews conducted in September 2005 with former members of the student groups. It 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.
Bahru, Emeritus Professor of History at Addis Ababa University and Vice President of the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences, served as a leader in Ethiopian and pan-African historical associations—as the principal figure in a second generation of historians of modern Ethiopia. He is author of A History of Modern Ethiopia, 1855–1991, Pioneers of Change in Ethiopia: The reformist intellectuals of the early twentieth century among many books and articles.
Professor Bahru told an interviewer recently that students played key political roles both before and after the revolution, when they became the main source of ideas, generally Marxist, for new avenues and institutions. There were also student militants, but the movement did not suffer its first fatality in a confrontation with the government until 1969. Because access to political texts was much better on the outside, Ethiopian students in Europe and the United States contributed mightily “on the theoretical side,” Bahru was quoted as saying. At the same time, African scholarship students from Kenya, Uganda, and as far as Nigeria shared their experiences in political organization and sometimes became leaders in the universities of Addis Ababa, the capital. The emperor initiated the African scholarships program in 1958, with some unintended consequences.