In Search of an Explanation for the Ethiopian Revolution of 1974

Haile Selassie, Western Education and Political Revolution in Ethiopia by Paulos Milkias. Cambria Press, 2006, xxii + 364 pp. ISBN: 1-934043-41-9 Ethiopia had more than its due share of wars and social turbulence through most of the known periods of its long history (upwards of two thousand years). Perhaps only one century (the 16th) compares with the 20th for the extent and intensity of the external and internal wars that the country fought, the population displacements and movements, and the massive destructions of property and national heritage. A considerable proportion of this turbulence and these wars were generated by a veritable and bloody social revolution that scholars have compared with the great social revolutions of the world – the French, the Russian and the Chinese. It is argued that social revolutions are rare phenomena in world history and that they are even rarer in the African context. It is therefore a matter of great intellectual importance to explain this phenomenon when it occurred in Ethiopia. The revolutionary intellectuals did not by any means find it difficult to ‘understand’ it or to account for it. They saw a feudal monarchy in the kingship of Haile Selassie, a feudal nobility in the ruling class of the country, a subject peasantry in the rural producers akin to the French or the Russian ones before their respective revolutions, the petty bourgeoisie in the social group of teachers and students who agitated for the coming of the revolution and then provided the cadre (or the rebels) when it came. They characterised the country as backward, the economy as stagnant and the regime as oppressive. Thus, they concluded that this was a classic case of feudal oppression leading to revolution. This summary may sound like a caricature but it carries the essential arguments. The military government, which very quickly assumed the revolutionary mantle, went on to embrace the Marxist Leninist ideology and launched a massive propaganda that offered the above explanation, albeit in a much cruder form, to the people...