Ethiopia’s best-known human rights defender and one of the country’s most senior intellectuals, Mesfin Woldemariam has died from a coronavirus infection at the age of 91 in Addis Ababa. Family members announced that Prof. Mesfin had tested positive for the virus and had been hospitalized at St. Paul’s Hospital two weeks ago.
An ardent patriot and a scholar who had contributed much in his area of specialization, Mesfin was also the founder and the first president of the Ethiopian Human Rights Council (EHRCO). Public intellectual par excellence, he took it upon himself to engage the leaders and the wider public through his articles in the three regimes he had lived. In particular, he had come out as a harsh critic of the EPRDF regime, tirelessly writing bitingly critical pieces in the local papers. In 2004, along with other influential intellectuals and opinion-makers, he established The Rainbow Ethiopia Movement, which a year later was integrated into Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD), an opposition party that presented a serious challenge to the EPRDF regime during the election in 2005.
Peter Gill, in his book, Ethiopia and Foreigners: Ethiopia since the Live Aid (Oxford University Press, 2010), describes Professor Mesfin Wolde-Mariam as “a formidable fighter in every cause he has adopted.” “At the outset of his career it was famine. Then it was human rights. In later life it became outright opposition to the government,” he wrote.
Professor Mesfin taught geography at Addis Ababa University from 1959 to 1985. He was the author of a number of books, such as “An Atlas of Ethiopia,” the first of its kind, and “Introductory Geography of Ethiopia” which became a textbook for university students. He had also written several other monographs, such as “The Background to the Ethio-Somalia Boundary Dispute“, and “Somalia: The Problem Child of Africa“. His book on “Rural Vulnerability to Famine in Ethiopia: 1958-1977” and “Suffering Under Gods Environment: A Vertical Study of the Predicament of Peasants in North-Central Ethiopia” were published in 1984 and 1991 respectively. But the books that engaged him with a broader public were those written in Amharic languages, Agetuni (Detained), a work that provided a first-hand account of events leading up to the disputed 2005 election and its aftermath and ‘Mekshef Ende-Ethiopia Tarik’ (which literally means “ missing the mark, à la Ethiopian history”), a study that took issues with certain established approaches to Ethiopian history writing. The work had “definitely proved controversial and provocative, achieving the distinction of being the most reviewed book in recent memory,” a review in Addis Jornal blog stated.
Born in Addis Ababa in 1930, Mesfin started learning to read and write at the priest school and joined the then newly opened Teferi Mekonen School run by Canadian Jesuit missionaries. At the young age of 21, he took up a teaching job at Empress Menen Girl’s High School, and a few years later, he was appointed as an associate director of the Imperial Ethiopian Mapping and Geographical Institute which was established as a department in the Ministry of Education. He left the job for a teaching career at the University College of Addis Ababa, earning his B.A from India’s Punjab University in the meantime. By the time he was hired by the university in 1958, he became one of the few Ethiopian teaching personnel there.
Mesfin had been the principal player in the creation of the Ethiopian University Service, which was a degree requirement of Haile Selassie University and required students to do a year of national service. He wrote the proposal and submitted it to the president of Haile Selassie University in 1961 when he was head of the Department of Geography and “his ideas were undoubtedly important to the initiation of the program. He offered an answer to the questions students had raised about what they could for their country.”Randi Rønning Balsvik wrote in Haile Selassie’s Students: The Intellectual and Social Background to Revolution, 1952-1977.
Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has sent condolences to his family and friends. He described the late Mesfin as “an icon of the supremacy of thought, an exemplar of nonviolence activism,” and someone who was “a passionate defender for what he believed is right “.
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