Foreword: Deciphering Education at the Heart of the Nation
p. 15-19
Texte intégral
1In 2018, at a time when educational issues are constantly being debated in the public arena, it is easy to understand that school policies are fundamental issues for a society. In France, the link between education and politics has evolved over a long period. The Ferry Laws (1879–86) responded to the revolutionary projects of the 18th century by introducing free, compulsory and secular primary education, outlining a vision of citizenship in which school played a fundamental role. During the 20th century, schools were invested with democratic hopes and perceived as actors of social transformation. In the post-war period, education lay at the heart of leaders’ concerns, as human capital had to be trained for the needs of a booming economy. On the international side, both UNESCO and NGOs proclaimed the importance of education for development, and the voices of humanists and feminists responded to these technical and economic objectives. Education is understood to be a resource capable of transforming individuals, encouraging the dominated—be they women, children, people with disabilities or from other minorities—and helping them to become more self-reliant. Educational issues have been taken up in a multitude of discourses on political, economic, social and even identity-related issues, encompassing issues that go beyond the nature of school curricula, who attends school or the characteristics of teachers. The school has become a prism for understanding how a state functions, revealing not only the objectives of its leaders but also the hopes of its citizens. For historians, education is a precious laboratory for understanding how our modern states are constructed.
2Pierre Guidi’s book opens with the public debate in southwestern Ethiopia generated by the promulgation in 1999–2000 of a new administrative and school language, WoGaGoDa, which was supposed to reconcile the four languages spoken in the surrounding regions. The petitions sent to the government drew upon the region’s history, its marginalisation under Haile Selassie’s regime (1930–74) and its gradual integration under the Marxist-Leninist Derg regime (1974–91), followed by the federal regime of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front. According to the petitioners, being educated and able to address the administration in the Wolaita language, a privilege that had only been obtained six years earlier, was a hard-won right that did not endanger the existence of both a Wolaita and an Ethiopian identity. The book moves back in time to discuss this process of identification with the nation and the educational dynamics that accompanied it. It seeks to understand how schools and aspirations to an education contributed to the integration of a peripheral region into the “Amhara” culture of the centre. Finally, it considers how the marginalised and voiceless have participated in the creation of the modern Ethiopian nation, even when they spoke in the Wolaita language in order to do so.
3In France and French-speaking Switzerland in recent years, the history of education has attracted talented historians who have taken the promises of education to heart, launching investigations in areas that have been worked on less extensively than the development of schooling in Metropolitan France. The French colonies are the subject of new research; within Europe, studies explore the transnational circulation of school models, and the history of progressivism in the United States is enjoying renewed interest1. Pierre Guidi’s book on Ethiopia complements this scholarship, offering not only a pioneering educational study of the country, situated within its tormented political trajectory, but also a fine example of the role played by schools in shaping national identities. By approaching this history through the “peripheral” region of Wolaita, Pierre Guidi brings to light school dynamics, similar to those seen in revolutionary France and the Third Republic; these dynamics reveal how education participated in power politics, while also offering a space where individuals and groups constructed an imaginary and identities that were the “matrix of the nation.”
4The relationship between the construction of a sense of national belonging and the school experience is addressed in this book using tools forged in historical communities that have nourished the emergence of a new world history attentive to the voices of the weak. Through his numerous interviews with actors in the school system, former pupils and peasants with low literacy skills, Pierre Guidi gives voice to their vision of the past, the school, its rituals, and its messages. His sympathetic and nuanced portrait of the effects of schools and their “national pedagogy” reveals how education participates in relations of domination in terms of language, class and gender: his study also shows, however, how the lessons of school can mitigate, or even challenge, this domination. During the literacy campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s, the poor learned to read, and especially to sign, in Amharic. The testimonies in the book reveal how important this mastery was for the people concerned, allowing them to cope with the demands of a paper-based administration. Although the Derg regime (1978–91) was not especially sensitive to democratic rights, it nevertheless promoted schools and schooling, which led one farmer who was interviewed to say: “It is the Derg that opened the door to freedom among humans. […] It made humans equal; it made the small and the big equal.”
5This exploration of the dynamics of schooling poses questions about a period that was rife with political turbulence, where the question of equality resonated differently according to gender or social groups in Wolaita. From 1941 onwards, Haile Selassie sought to impose a national school system. Pierre Guidi opens a broad window on the differentiating effects of this unifying policy. As one reads, one discovers some remarkable figures, such as Bogale Wallelu, who contributed greatly to an ideal of assimilation into the culture of the political centre in the 1940s. As in many colonial contexts, Wallelu wanted to use educated elites capable of countering the hold of an aristocratic class in order to fight “the power of darkness.” After him, the Governor Germame Neway—a young aristocrat who was educated in the regime’s elite institutions, and later in the United States at the Universities of Wisconsin and Columbia—arrived in Wolaita in 1958. A zealous reformer, he set up hundreds of literacy centres and left a deep imprint on the local collective consciousness as the first high-ranking official at the centre to promote the interests of the dominated against the local elite. He was succeeded by Wolde-Sema’et Gebre-Wold from 1963 to 1972. Working with the Swedish International Development Agency, he financed school buildings and promoted a sense of national unity in order to compete with Protestant schools. At the time of the fall of the regime in 1974, progress in schooling was undeniable but, as Pierre Guidi writes, schools still remained a male-dominated space.
6The years of the Red Terror (1974–78) had repercussions in Wolaita, with the Maoist-inspired zemecha movement that mobilised tens of thousands of revolutionary university and high school students in literacy and land reform campaigns. Oral histories reveal the educational convictions of these young men and women, and the way girls’ schooling gradually became a stake in school policy alongside that of boys. The Marxist-Leninist Derg regime that imposed itself in 1974 promoted schooling of the masses, brought girls into the school system, made school a way of life and placed the state at the heart of communities. Through a policy of building schools and literacy campaigns, the Amharic language spread among peasants on the periphery, despite the violent manner in which it was imposed; in the process, schools participated in the construction of national identities.
7There is no retrospective angelism in Pierre Guidi’s analysis, even though his assessment of the utopian dimension of the Ethiopian socialist project is very powerful. The dictatorship’s pedagogy was exercised through the vertical transmission of knowledge, which was supposed to contribute to autonomy. The teachers’ memories are uncompromising. For Elias Damtew, a teacher, school headmaster and civil servant in the Wolaita Zone Cultural Development Offices, communication was one-way, pupils had to listen and there was no room for discussion. In the socialist school in Wolaita, girls were much more present—they made up 40% of the pupils in both primary and secondary schools at the end of the Derg regime—but female teachers were still a very small minority: in 1990, 26% of the primary teaching staff and 6% of the secondary teaching staff were women. The school environment remained dominated by men, and there was gender-based violence, as the respondents testify, ranging from verbal insults to physical aggression. And yet, schools provided the tools that enabled adult women to organise themselves subsequently. Pierre Guidi offers the example of the “girls’ clubs” run by female student teachers in the 1990s–2000s as proof of this.
8One of the great successes of this study is that readers are taken into schools and the agricultural countryside when urban youth from the capital arrived during the literacy campaigns. In this way, school policy is portrayed at ground level. The reader watches the day begin with the raising of the flag, or discovers theatrical productions under Haile Selassie. Guidi describes the zemach’s “literacy kits” in the 1970s and the school gardens the Derg instituted to promote education through production. The dynamics of schooling are understood by the materiality of the school space, by the rituals that punctuate it and by the authority relationships that are established.
9History as a school subject is referred to in particular in order to gain an understanding of how a sense of national belonging was forged. Under Haile Selassie, unsurprisingly, the regime’s discourse made a hero of the enlightened monarch, but it also used textbooks imported from England or the United States because of a lack of resources. Other textbooks conveyed moral lessons. For young girls, the British nurse Florence Nightingale was held up as a model of female devotion. In spite of this openness to foreign models, the discourse vaunting the imagined Semitic and Christian nation constructed as well its own bogeymen, notably Muslims. The Derg’s rise to power transformed the national representation, and the past was reviewed through a teleological historical materialism that justified the choice of socialism and the power of the Derg. The Amharic textbooks, which promoted integration through language, spoke of equality, fraternity and openness (or transparency?); however, even in the regime’s educational tools, this “egalitarian” world remained marked by gender representations in which women were subordinated to men and confined to the roles of mothers and wives. As historians have shown in the case of European socialist countries, the Ethiopian socialist revolution did not succeed in erasing the hierarchy of the sexes.
10Always sensitive to differences in social origin and gender, Pierre Guidi shows how the different groups accommodated, appropriated or resisted the sirens of a schooling method that tended to integrate the Wolaita into the Ethiopian nation through the Amharic language, history lessons or working in the fields. The book reveals the complexity of the relationship between different groups and the requirements of a central power, analysing how young Protestants adhered to the educational project under Haile Selassie, or girls under the Derg regime. By going to school, obtaining teaching posts and acquiring positions in hospitals, the administration or commerce, the people of Wolaita participated in the redefinition of the Ethiopian nation. By encouraging us to look closely at this school system, with all the ambiguities surrounding its imposition from above, Pierre Guidi tells a masterful story from below and from the margins. May his method and message win over more disciples, allowing our history libraries to grow with studies that reveal the richness of education as an entry point into society.
Notes de bas de page
1 To mention just a few recent publications: Luc Capdevila, Femmes, armée et éducation dans la guerre d’Algérie. L’expérience du service de formation des jeunes en Algérie (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2017; https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pur.154622); Thuy Phuong Nguyen, Écoles françaises au Vietnam, de la mission civilisatrice à la diplomatie culturelle 1945-1975 (Amiens: Encrage, 2017); Sébastien-Akira Alix, L’éducation progressiste aux États-Unis. Histoire, philosophie et pratiques (1876-1919) (Grenoble: Presses universitaires de Grenoble, 2017); Damiano Matasci, L’école républicaine et l’étranger. Une histoire internationale des réformes scolaires en France, 1870-1914 (Lyon: ENS Éditions, 2015; https://doi.org/10.4000/books.enseditions.3851); Joëlle Droux and Rita Hofstetter (eds.), Globalisation des mondes de l'éducation. Circulations, connexions, réfractions (xixe et xxe siècles) (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2015; https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pur.89995).
Auteur
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Rebecca Rogers
Professor in History, Université Paris Cité.
ORCID : 0000-0001-5442-9492

Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Creative Commons - Attribution - Partage dans les Mêmes Conditions 4.0 International - CC BY-SA 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
Educating the Nation in Ethiopia
State, Society and Identity in Wolaita (1941–1991)
Pierre Guidi Simon Dix (trad.)
2024