Interlude 1
Schools and the Nation in the Mid-1970s: Negotiated Identities
p. 171-173
Texte intégral
1In the 1940s and 1950s, schooling in Wolaita was a uniquely urban phenomenon that mainly involved the children of political elites from the north and children of Wolaita who were co-opted and assimilated by the authorities. From the end of the 1950s, the idea that school education might be an instrument of integration through assimilation and social uplift began to make its way, very modestly, into rural areas, although the feeling of mistrust towards the dominant culture of the north did not disappear. One section of the population of Wolaita viewed the national space as a resource for emancipating themselves from the relations of domination that governed local society. The administration remained the main provider of employment for graduates. Social mobility worked well in the years of reconstruction and centralisation between 1941 and the early 1960s, but once the administration had been built and autocracy achieved, bottlenecks emerged. A timid demand for education arose in the Wolaita countryside just as the system’s capacity to absorb graduates was shrinking.
2At the same time, from the beginning of the 1960s, tensions arose in Soddo as more and more rural children arrived in schools. These rural young people were seen as a threat by the dominant minority, who lived off the exploitation of peasants. The school system’s objective of assimilation ran up against the local organisation of power. In addition, these pupils did not only come from economically exploited, politically dominated and culturally marginalised rural areas: the overwhelming majority came from Wolaita families who had converted to Protestantism. They had their first schooling in the education centres that had been temporarily set up by Governor Germame Neway in 1958–59 or in the Protestant schools that dotted the countryside from the late 1950s onwards.
3In people’s memories of rural Wolaita, Germame Neway embodied the defence of the oppressed against an arbitrary power. As for Protestantism, it had been appropriated by the Wolaita as a source of identity and moral regeneration in the face of the power that was oppressing them. The pupils from the Protestant countryside were determined to make themselves a place in the nation without, however, fully complying with the criteria of belonging imposed by the central government. They were willing to take an Amharic name and speak Amharic, but abandoning Protestantism to join the national Tewahedo Church would have cost too much. Thanks to their schooling, they had the ambition of becoming Ethiopians while also remaining Wolaita, of entering the national space without totally losing their identity and of taking their place in the nation, even if it meant having to force the door open. For the central government and Wolaita’s urban society “orthodox” Christianity was a pillar of national identity. It was just a short step to come to doubt the patriotism of those who refused to adopt the national religion, who were pouring into government schools in large numbers from rural Protestant schools that were difficult for the government to control.
4While students from rural areas can be seen to have been a privileged minority compared to the overwhelming majority, who remained apart from the movement towards schooling, their experience of school was not without violence. Teaching content and practices reminded them constantly that they were moving into the world of the “other”, a world in which they were not particularly welcome. Sarcasm and hostility from both teachers and students from the dominant class were often the response to their desire to move up the social ladder. Schools, which were supposed to encourage them, also put obstacles in their way. Nevertheless, the school system succeeded in creating an esprit de corps among the pupils, so that it was possible to speak of graduates as a social group in their own right. This was the result of the limited number of pupils who attended school, as well as the pedagogical arrangements in schools, which had specific political socialisation objectives. The students learned that they were to be the leaders of the nation, that their efforts were to be devoted to serving king and country for the common good, with the whole process being labelled under the category of “progress.” This discourse burdened them with heavy responsibilities, and this socialisation had the opposite effect for Haile Selassie’s regime: to its advantage in the 1940s and 1950s, and to its disadvantage in the two decades that followed.
5Between 1941 and 1974, the discourses and forms of political socialisation at work in schools remained unchanged. The emperor was still the man who had saved Ethiopia from Italian colonisation, the father who watered the country with his benefits, the enlightened guide who embodied the future. Students of the 1940s and 1950s wanted to serve their country by being loyal to the regime. Nationally, the two decades following the liberation from Italian occupation were a period of intense patriotism and a belief in a future of progress. Pupils in Wolaita were particularly exposed to this atmosphere, which strongly permeated the school space. The pupils of the 1960s and 1970s, like their elders, wanted to serve their country, but the context was now very different. The patriotic fervour of the 1950s and 1960s had faded, and nationalist pride in being the only uncolonised country in Africa gave way in the early 1960s to a bitter sense of being one of the poorest countries on a now largely liberated continent. This was blamed on the inertia of the regime. In Wolaita, the regime did not seem ready to reform a power system, an economic structure and forms of cultural discrimination that kept the vast majority marginalised. The rhetoric of progress to which students were constantly exposed had not been followed up. The regime had not kept its promises, and the pupils were no longer able to believe in Haile Selassie.
6However, they had absorbed the belief that they had to lead and serve the nation in the name of progress. Some were therefore inclined to reformulate the school discourse in terms of the discrepancies between it and the social realities of their region. This requirement presented itself to them at the same time as students in Addis Ababa, with whom they were in contact, were adopting the Marxist ideas that were circulating in university campuses internationally. As adapted to the Ethiopian situation, these ideas gave rise to demands expressed in the slogans “Land to the tiller” and "Education for all". While these slogans may not appear very original at first glance, they could not fail to be invested with precise content by the students of Wolaita, and in 1970, school propaganda about the emperor and progress seemed to be a pallid notion in the face of students and pupils who had rubbed shoulders with Marxism, and who were convinced that they had to guide the nation.

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