Chapter 6
The School Environment and The Revolution: From Political and Educational Mobilisation to the Red Terror (1974–1978)
p. 181-206
Texte intégral
1The four years between 1974 and 1978 saw the overthrow of Haile Selassie, followed by the gradual takeover of central power by the Derg military regime. This process ultimately led to a dictatorship by one man: Mengestu Haile-Mariam. Marxism-Leninism was adopted as the official doctrine of the state. The old political class—the landed aristocracy and high-level members of the administration of Haile Selassie’s regime—was replaced. The country’s economic structures were radically transformed by a wave of nationalisations, in particular the land reform of March 1975, which brought all land under state control. The class of melkegna and landowners was destroyed, which had a major impact in the south, where large estates and tenant farming were widespread. The education system was at the heart of the revolutionary processes in different ways. The new regime entrusted it with the mission of bringing the revolution to rural areas through literacy, political education and the implementation of agrarian reforms: it was the vector of the revolution that connected the peripheries with the dynamics of the centre. However, a significant number of revolutionaries did not accept replacement of the “feudal” system by a military dictatorship. In Addis Ababa, as in the provinces, high school pupils, university students and teachers fought for the establishment of a civilian government. This chapter looks at the dynamics at work in Addis Ababa and Wolaita, and examines these four years of social transformation through the experience of the school community and the position it occupied between the central power held by the Derg and the rural world.
1. Revolutionary events and the seizure of power by the Derg
2After the end of the 1950s and the completion of the process of centralising power, Haile Selassie’s regime entered a phase of inertia (Clapham 2007: 125) while the social expectations of large sectors of the urban population became more pressing. By the early 1970s, the ideas formed within the student movement had spread among the urban population. Members of the urban middle classes had graduated from university or secondary schools, which were the main places for the development and dissemination of social criticism. The regime’s rigidity stood in stark contrast to the political and social expectations of large sectors of Addis Ababa’s population. The disengagement was also apparent in the provinces. In the 1960s, violently suppressed revolts shook rural areas both in the north and south of the country (Gebru 1991). As the history of schools in Wolaita from the late 1960s shows us, there was a glaring gap between a regime that gave legitimacy to its existence through the idea of progress and the structural reality of oppression and misery that seemed destined to last forever. In the south, the contradictions between the imposed Amharisation project and the class interests of the local elites, who wished to maintain cultural distinctions in the name of reproducing social hierarchies, led to an impasse.
3While the number of unemployed graduates was multiplying in the cities, power was monopolised by a class that was barely changing at all. Because Haile Selassie only envisioned obedient civil servants, the ruling class was distinguished by a lack of imagination and political courage. As a result, it never earned the esteem of the population (Markakis & Nega 1978, 77). The example of Germame Neway in Wolaita, among others, revealed that no one who showed any initiative remained in office for long. The political elites in the south were a group of melkegna and landowners who were primarily concerned with maintaining control over their tenants. In short, those in positions of power worked to maintain a status quo that was crumbling on all sides. Meanwhile, the old emperor seemed to be in a state of weightlessness. While a terrible famine ravaged Tigray and Wello in 1972, and another decimated the peasants on his own estate a few kilometres north of Addis Ababa, Haile Selassie continued with his routine of making diplomatic visits, distributing diplomas to university and secondary school students in the capital, handing out official titles and rewarding loyal subjects.
1.1 Civilians: against the educational reforms and the rising cost of living
4It was in the context of these structural impasses that a series of sector-based demands converged and led to a revolutionary state of affairs at the beginning of 1974. The education issue was one of the causes of discontent that came together to precipitate the fall of the regime. In 1971–72, a vast project to review and reform the school system was begun by the Ministry of Education with a view to addressing the problems of widespread illiteracy and unemployment among young graduates (Tekeste 2006, 16). Called The Education Sector Review, it was funded by the World Bank, and began operating in early 1972. Its mission was to analyse the education system and its capacity to promote Ethiopia’s economic, social and cultural development, and to suggest avenues for reform (Teshome 1979, 184). More precisely, its primary task was to control access to secondary education so that there would not be an excessive number of young people in the labour market. The second was to develop a policy specifically directed towards rural areas that had been neglected until then.
5There was opposition to The Education Sector Review from the outset because of its elitist composition: key actors within the system such as teachers were not consulted. The Education Sector Review Report, which was completed two years later, in 1974, was classified as “secret,” thereby turning mistrust into hostility. Disclosure of the selected proposals quickly led to a strong feeling of discontent within the school community (Paulos 2006, 171). In particular, the proposal for the strict regulation of access to secondary education was seen as directly affecting the poorest, as the rich could go to one of the many private schools. On 18 February 1974, strikes and demonstrations broke out in the capital. Events turned confrontational when taxi drivers announced on the same day that they would be striking against the government’s decision to ban a fare increase, even though the 1973 crisis had led to a significant rise in the price of petrol. Students joined them, and luxury cars and public buses, the latter being the personal property of the emperor, were stoned (Bahru 2002, 231).
6On 22 February, the government suspended implementation of the Education Sector Review Programme. On 28 February, Prime Minister Aklilu Habte-Wold announced his resignation and that of his government, and Endalkachew Mekonnen, an aristocrat known for his liberal ideas, was appointed in his place. On 1 March, 5,000 students demonstrated, singing the Ho Chi Minh march. On 3 March, the Confederation of Ethiopian Labour Unions (CELU), the official trade union, joined the protesters. On 5 March, a tired and overwhelmed Haile Selassie announced a reform package on the radio, but by then the movement had spread too widely and the government was too discredited to satisfy the protesters. The general strike, which was already a de facto reality, was declared on 7 March. No sector of urban society remained outside the movement (Lefort 1981, 84).
1.2 The military: against their living conditions and the contemptuous attitude of officers
7Events were moving quickly in Addis Ababa as a result of the civilian population’s actions, and the military barracks had already begun to move. On 12 January 1974, the soldiers of the Fourth Division of the Negele military camp in southern Sidamo mutinied in protest against poor food, lack of water and the master-servant relations imposed by their officers. Shortly thereafter, it was the turn of the airmen at the Debre Zeyt Base to protest against their low wages. In February, the Second Division based in Eritrea mutinied, taking events to a higher level. On the night of 25–26 February, officers were arrested before the soldiers seized public buildings. A communiqué broadcast on Asmara radio made their demands known and called for a change of government (Lefort 1981, 82; Bahru 2002, 230). Between January and March 1974, these protest movements, which shook streets and barracks alike, set the revolutionary dynamic in motion. By the end of February, the military had begun to organise to coordinate their demands. On 28 June 1974, they publicly announced the existence of the Coordinating Committee of the Armed Forces, the Police and the Territorial Army, the official name of the Derg. It was a form of military parliament made up of a few hundred people, with representatives from every unit in the country (although the units quickly lost control over their representatives). The Derg set up a provisional military government, with Lieutenant-General Aman Mikael Andom as president and Mengestu Haile-Mariam and Atnafu Abate as vice-presidents (Bahru 2002, 233–34). State power was temporarily shared with the civilian government of Prime Minister Endalkachew Mekonnen (Andargachew 1993, 170), but on 22 July, he was dismissed from office. On 15 and 16 August, the Derg dismantled the Ministry of the Pen and the Crown Council, which were key institutions of imperial power, and in the weeks that followed it confiscated the enterprises belonging to the emperor and his family (Lefort 1981, 100). The coup de grâce came on September 11. A BBC documentary revealing the hidden famine of 1973 was broadcast on national television, interspersed with images showing the luxury in which the emperor lived. The next day, Haile Selassie was deposed (Bahru 2002, 235). On the same day, the Derg adopted the name Provisional Military Administrative Council and issued the first proclamations in its own name. On 24 November, it announced to a stunned population that President Aman Mikael Andom and 57 dignitaries of the former regime had been executed (Clapham 1988, 44).
1.3 Military power and civil opposition
8The civilians and military personnel who took part in the revolution must not be considered as homogenous or antagonistic blocks in all respects. First of all, there were links between the students and non-commissioned officers. Unlike many armies in which officer recruitment was voluntary, the growth of the Ethiopian army in the 1950s and 1960s was ensured by students selected from among the best in secondary schools being forced into a military career. Army officers stationed in the capital attended evening classes at Addis Ababa University and were permeated by the political atmosphere there (Clapham 1988, 34). There were also divisions within the military itself. The seizure of power by Mengestu Haile-Mariam thus involved the physical elimination of his Derg rivals.
9For their part, in the early months of 1975, civilians were divided over the correct attitude to be adopted towards the military. Both positions were represented by the two main parties from the student movement, the Meison (the Amharic acronym for the All-Ethiopia Socialist Movement) and the EPRP (the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party). The former adopted a strategy of a “critical alliance” with the Derg to form the intellectual component of the regime and strengthen its position through control of key organs of power (Bahru 2008, 434–35). For its part, the Derg was in dire need of civilian allies. Members of the Meison held ministerial positions and controlled important civilian institutions during the early years of the revolution, including the Yekatit ‘66 Political School for the training of cadres and the Provisional Office of Mass Organizational Affairs (POMOA), which was responsible for organising the masses (Clapham 1988, 53). For the EPRP, on the other hand, a military government could only lead to the establishment of a dictatorship, and in its members’ views, the students had not fought against Haile Selassie’s regime for two decades to achieve this. 1 It was the party with by far the largest number of members and supporters.
1.4 The adoption of Marxism-Leninism by the Derg and the revolutionary reforms
10Holding power but lacking a defined political line, the Derg adopted Marxism-Leninism within a few short months. The Ethiopia Tikdem! (Ethiopia First) Declaration of July 1974 was no more than a vague slogan, with only patriotic content and no coherent programme (Addis 1975, 109). On 20 December of the same year, the Ten-Point Programme was launched. Point 1 stated that Ethiopia would remain united, without “ethnic, religious, linguistic and cultural differences.” The first message, Ethiopia’s inalienable unity, was clear and was addressed directly to the Eritrean secessionists (Prunier 2007, 141). “Without differences” meant that the cultural domination of the Christian North was officially abolished. Point 3 announced a “specifically Ethiopian socialism,” using the neologism hebretesebawinet. The Ethiopian economy would be placed in the hands of the state in the name of the people (Lefort 1981, 122–23). The political content of the revolution had been defined by the student movement, and in order to assume power, the Derg had no choice but to adopt the discourse and the reforms demanded by the movement, which had provided the ideological weapons for the struggle against Haile Selassie’s regime (Bahru 2002, 244). The revolution was born out of intense aspirations for progress, and once in power following the violent elimination of its rivals, the Derg had to very rapidly commit itself to lifting Ethiopia out of exploitation and misery. By appropriating the socialist discourse and the project of the civilian opposition, the military was equipping itself with consistent intellectual weapons, a progressive discourse and a programme to be implemented—in a word, it was giving meaning to its seizure of the revolution (Donham 1999, 25). In this way, the Derg made all opposition to its power unwarranted by moving ahead of the civilians on the left, and turned itself into the spearhead of the revolution.
11On 1 January 1975, banks, insurance companies and all other financial institutions were nationalised. On 3 February, it was the turn of factories and private companies. In March, land reform, which the students had been demanding since the 1960s, was announced. This measure would conclusively transform the country’s social structures. All agricultural land was nationalised and the land returned “to the tiller,” which meant the destruction of the aristocracy, which was now deprived of its political and economic base (Clapham 1988, 46–47). By early 1975, Ethiopia was on the road to revolution. However, while the new government was able to implement reforms in the cities, this was not the case in the countryside, where its control was far from assured. This was to be the task of the National Development Through Cooperation Campaign, which is better known by its Amharic name zemecha (campaign), which was launched in December 1974.
2. The zemecha experience: the revolution in the provinces
12Inspired by the major campaigns in socialist countries, China and Cuba in particular, the zemecha was also based on the logic of the Ethiopian University Service, but on a very different scale: consisting of 48,000 students, secondary school students and teachers, the zemach (those who campaigned) were sent to the provinces to teach literacy, to win people over to the revolution and to implement land reforms (Lefort 1981, 144). The Derg saw at least two advantages in launching the zemecha. On the one hand, as a mobilising force, the school community would be far more devoted to socialism than provincial civil servants would be, while on the other it helped to move away from Addis Ababa a social group that was overwhelmingly hostile to a military government (Clapham 1988, 49). Indeed, their departure took place in an atmosphere of jubilation. During the parade organised for the departure on 22 December, those who had considered Mengistu a fascist a few weeks earlier now sang his praises (Donham 1989, 29). The zemecha is an absolutely central moment in Ethiopia’s recent social history. Students and teachers from Addis Ababa joined an equally numerous group of about 50,000 secondary school students from the provinces (Balsvik 2007, 52). The school community was given the central role of involving the whole country in the revolutionary process by teaching, working and sharing the daily lives of the peasants. The actors were profoundly impacted by this moment, and their experience of it merits examination.
Figure 11: Departure for the zemecha

Source: MOI, Ethiopia in Revolution (1977), 22.
13Although provincial schools took part in the revolution, attention was focused on Addis Ababa, where issues involving the entire country were at stake. Between the emperor’s removal on 12 September and the announcement of the zemecha at the end of December, Addis Ababa was in turmoil. In Wolaita, on the other hand, the atmosphere in schools was visibly expectant. As former student Tsehai Zerihun remembers:
“When I reach[ed] adolescent age, Ethiopian revolution came. That was Derg’s regime. At that moment all schools in Ethiopia were closed and everybody was forecasting the future, what will be the future, and we were expecting from Derg what policy will be given to the schools. Later on, they declared the zemecha.”2
14For two years, young pupils from the provinces who were at least in Grade 9 participated in the zemecha alongside teachers and students from Addis Ababa.3 The youngest were 16 years old, and the oldest were just over 20. For two years, schools were closed and the school community was mobilised in the countryside. Nationally, the zemach were spread over 51 centres and 397 stations (Lefort 1981, 144). Yemesrach Alula, a young woman from Wolaita, had just started attending the teacher training centre in Debre Berhan in northern Shewa when the revolution broke out. It was there that she was assigned as a zemach. She remembers that 100 boys and 28 girls slept in the same station as her, in separate barracks. They slept on mattresses on the floor and shared three meals a day with the farmers who fed them.4 There was one station per wereda, from which the hundred or so zemach were deployed daily to the villages. Their presence greatly transformed the atmosphere of the countryside. In Wolaita, Tsehai Zerihun remembers:
Fieldworkers were working during Majesty [Haile Selassie] also […] but they were not so many, like during the campaign. During Haile Selassie regime, you saw one fellow, in motorbike, in one wereda, like that. But after the campaign what do you see? In every wereda, 100, 200 youngsters were running here and there teaching the modern things.5
15The mission of the zemecha was to change people’s mentality and improve material conditions in the countryside; this is what must be understood by the term “modern.”
2.1 Teaching
16In order to teach reading, writing and arithmetic, the zemach were provided with “literacy kits” containing an Amharic alphabet and the exercises to be suggested. The alphabets were designed to be hung on a tree or nailed to a wall. The kits also contained three booklets. The first was made up of sentences to be read on topics relating to health and agriculture, the second consisted of exercises in oral Amharic and the third was a course in basic arithmetic, with exercises based on examples from rural life covering simple transactions such as carpentry and work in the field (Paulos 1980, 21). This basic education was aimed at the largest number of people, and was intended to be an initiation, a first step towards a general education that would support future social transformations.
We worked for the basic education campaign because we were secondary school students. Those who couldn’t read or write, who couldn’t sign, had to acquire this knowledge for the future, to raise their children. To have access to all kinds of technology, we have to learn. We taught a lot so that they would have the chance to learn. […] At that time, we were teaching reading to the peasants. When someone knows how to read, we can share information with them: what should we leave behind? What is the use of learning? At least read and teach it to your children. If the father knows how to read, if he knows the usefulness of school, he can make his child learn. When a child is educated, it is the family that is educated. 6
17Literacy was the first step towards creating an enabling environment for education in rural societies. Once families came into contact with education, they would ensure its renewal. Reading was seen as an essential prerequisite for social renewal, the lever on which future progress would rely. In a literate population, access to information and the circulation of ideas and techniques would be facilitated. Peasants would abandon those values and practices that were seen as obstacles to progress. Bringing education into the heart of families was particularly important for women, at whom the teaching by female students was more specifically directed. As mothers (or mothers-to-be), women needed to view their children’s schooling as normal practice. The zemach girls had to make sure that women sent “the children they gave birth to school. The Derg sent us to teach this.”7 In 1980, five years after the zemecha, the Ethiopian academic Paulos Milkias accurately summed up the prevailing view:
The Alphabetization Program of the zemecha was perhaps the most important single project of the campaign, since it is only through a literate enlightened citizenry that the pace of social and economic development in Progressive Ethiopia could be enhanced and broadened. (Paulos 1980, 20)
18The campaign required graduates and school pupils to participate in a programme of political and social construction (Paulos 1980, 23) aimed at peasants, who were perceived as being indistinctly conservative. This raised the ambiguity at play between a form of condescension and a sense of solidarity, a tension that had its origins in the school myth of progress and the binary reading it implied of a social world between modernity and tradition. Education gave those who had benefitted from it the right to lead those who had been “left behind.” According to the aims of the zemecha as proclaimed in the press, as many people as possible had to learn to read and write in order to close the gap between the illiterate and the literate. However, the zemecha inaugurated a form of pedagogy in which educated people left their ivory towers to make education a truly common activity that was open to everyone, regardless of age, gender, nationality or class (Paulos 1980, 19–23). While some authors have stressed the sense of superiority of certain zemach over the ignorant masses (Donham 1999, 45–58), solidarity and respect for the peasants was also widespread.
19Education had to be at the service of social transformation in accordance with a path of socialist development: first and foremost, the concept of equality had to be spread throughout society. The zemach had good reason to believe that they had been sent to announce equality for all (Balsvik 2007, 58). They believed that following centuries of feudal rule, peasants had incorporated the social order and naturalised their subjugation. In addition, the forms of discrimination and segregation suffered by artisans, who were considered impure (Pankhurst 1999), had to be brought to an end, the status of women had to be improved and the equality of all the nationalities who made up the Ethiopian nation had to be promoted. Donald Donham, who did fieldwork in Maale during the zemecha, witnessed speeches by zemach in which they exhorted peasants to learn how to recognise their true enemies, who were the lords and balabbat, not the blacksmiths and potters (Donham 1999, 46, 57). In Wolaita, Tsehai Zerihun put these ideas into practice. At the age of 16, she took part in the zemecha as part of an already well-established French Catholic association called Agri-Service Éthiopie, which agreed to follow the official guidelines. Within this framework, together with an expatriate from Belgium, Tsehai Zerihun organised a women’s cooperative. They both wanted to make the women farmers collaborate with the women artisans.
I remember we start this cotton spinning association. We made that cotton association purposely to make all mothers come together, discuss together. In Embecho, it is after Dubbo, there were pottery people, the pottery ladies were not allowed to join the other ladies. They have superstitions, they say… evil eye, buda, they call it buda. So we went to […] those they assume to be evil eye with Kami, the Belgium lady.
These ladies said: “Don’t go, especially don’t take the white lady, the buda will eat her, the spirit will make her sick.”
“We will see, we will check,” I said, “if the spirit makes her anything, if that spirit exist we will check,” I said.
When we entered the potters’ compound, they were wondering.
“What makes you wonder?” I said.
“Before you nobody came to us outside our society,” they said.
“Now we came to tell that you will have a cotton spinning association where you have spinning work together with those ladies living in this cooperative.”
“Oh! They may think that we will eat them, how can we go to there?” they said. They were wondering.
“No, we will put you together in such a big hall, you will work together, from now on this type of things will be avoided.”
So we brought them on the programme, we went again, we brought them, we brought the other ones. We started teaching them together, spinning cotton together, again selling together, getting benefit together. So, this was simply suspicion. We checked that there was nothing, nobody eats nobody.8
20Tsehai Zerihun says she does not know what the long-term impact of this initiative was, but reports that it worked well during the two years she was in charge of the cooperative. The young zemach also explained to the women that relationships within a couple had to be balanced.9 In Wolaita, this was particularly relevant to the practice of polygamy.
They were raising that their husbands had wives, three, four at the same area, one here, the other one here.
“They make us wild,” they say. So they were laughing and said, “Our life is very hard.”
The husband get[s] children from three wives, around 20 children. And they said, “He doesn’t suffer.” Why doesn’t he suffer? Because she works herself, she thinks for her children.
“Later, I will think for the children,” he said. So if it’s possible: one husband, one wife, family responsibility, to make him feel family responsibility.
Once in a month, we asked the women their convenient time and we go there, we collected all of them under a tree, under shade, and we discussed. First of all, we have to have family planning. Having birth for too many children and making suffering, disease suffering, food suffering, clothes suffering, suffering for everything is not good.10
21The Ethiopian student movement had shown little interest in the gender issue (see Netsanet, Zenebework, Original, and Yeraswork testimonies in Bahru 2010). Unlike other social concepts promoted by the zemecha, these ideas on how a family unit should function did not come from the socialist concepts that had been developed during the struggle against Haile Selassie’s regime. They corresponded, line by line, to those in the home economics textbooks used in Ethiopian secondary schools in the five years before the revolution.11 No change in gender relations was promoted: the aim was to try to mitigate the abuse, caused by male domination by encouraging couples to maintain balance and peaceful relationships.
22The different “nationalities” that made up the “nation” also had to be equal. On the occasion of the zemecha, after three decades of Amharic being imposed on schools, teaching materials were created in several different languages. The regime disclosed the attention it dedicated to the “nationality question” that had been so much a part of the student movement since the late 1960s. If Amharic was to be taught as a national language, literacy was also to be taught in vernacular languages. The first official evaluation, which was announced a year after the start of the campaign, reported that 4.5 million books had been published in Amharic, Tigrigna, Oromo and Wolaita languages (Lefort 1981, 144). However, Yaluse Mita, who taught in Wolaita throughout the campaign, does not recall any teaching materials in Wolaita language, although it was in constant use, for obvious pedagogical reasons.
There was no Wolaitigna at that time. When we went to teach in the countryside, there was nothing written in Wolaitigna. But we taught by translating, we are local children, we speak Wolaitigna. So we are Wolaita and with us there were others who came from all over Ethiopia who didn’t know Wolaitigna, but they taught and we translated. It was organized in Amharic and we translated.12
23As the young people from the capital did not speak the local language any more than the peasants spoke Amharic, local pupils, being bilingual, were indispensable to the teaching process. Educated Wolaita, young people, taught directly in the local language or served as translators. This was not the first time Wolaita peasants had been educated in their own language, of course. Protestant missionaries had taught the Bible using it in the 1930s, but local language education had almost disappeared as a result of the intensification of the central government’s Amharisation policy from the mid-1940s, clashing with the missionaries and local churches and banning vernacular teaching (Abebe 1998, 167–73.). But this was now a distant memory, and the differences were considerable: this time it was a large-scale policy, and the central state was promoting it.
24Along with literacy, the health programme was one of the campaign’s priorities. It included an educational component and a vaccination campaign. Education was entrusted to women in particular. Zemach girls taught courses on diet, hygiene, childcare and household management.13 The idea of transforming family practices and—by extension—society through women had been brought to Ethiopia by missionaries in the late 19th century, and had spread through the government school system from the 1930s, notably at Empress Menen’s Girls’ School (Guidi 2016). However, it was from the 1960s that home economics began to be developed as a subject in all primary and secondary schools throughout the empire. Courses in hygiene, childcare and home economics were specifically designed for girls.14 But the low level of girls’ schooling meant that it did not resonate very strongly. In the logic of mass education promoted by the zemecha, the minority of girls who had had a school education had to pass on the education they had received to women as widely as possible. According to official figures, almost one million people received health education. The programme also included the training of village health workers and a vaccination campaign: 1,500 midwives were trained, 224,028 people received the BCG vaccine and 965,806 people were vaccinated against smallpox and 63,856 against tuberculosis (Paulos 1980, 21, 28).
25The aim of bringing the revolution to the countryside through basic education was to transform society from below, starting from the family and the peasant village. Fundamental though it may have been, it was not teaching but collective work that occupied the bulk of people’s days.
2.2 Work
26The purpose of this work was to provide the countryside with an infrastructure and forge a cooperative and egalitarian spirit between those educated at school and the peasants, and then among the peasants themselves. In order to create a society in which the educated elites and the peasant masses would work together, and in which everyone would eventually have a literate education, their two worlds also had to understand each other. The condescension of the “learned” towards the “ignorant” and the peasants’ mistrust of the urban literate elite both had to be broken down so that they would give way to a horizontal sense of community. By working together, the zemecha aimed to shrink the boundaries between intellectuals and producers. In terms of infrastructure, an impressive amount of work was done. According to official figures, 155 schools, 296 clinics, thousands of health centres, 5,981 latrines and 2,452 waste pits were built; 2,269 wells and springs were scoured and cleaned; two million trees were planted; and 300,000 animals were vaccinated (Paulos 1980, 21). The regime’s use of the zemecha to glorify the revolution and give itself legitimacy may seem exaggerated, but there can be no doubt about the scale of the achievements and the effectiveness of collaborations. The interviews I carried out in Wolaita revealed that the zemach and the farmers were working together effectively and enthusiastically,15 and that the “basic development” was changing the face of the countryside.16 This confirms work done in other regions of Ethiopia, such as that by Ahmed Hassan Omer in the north of Shewa (Ahmed 2002).
2.3 The organisation of land reform: a break between the zemach and the Derg
27The literacy activities and shared work were in line with both the policy of the Derg and the wishes of the zemach. However, the implementation of the land reform gave rise to important differences. The Derg did not have the administrative means to implement a reform that would attack the rural ruling class directly, and so for this reason, the task was entrusted to the zemach (Clapham 2002, 15). At the beginning of 1975, government members at the local level were a long way from joining the revolution. By entrusting the zemach with the role of implementing the reform without giving precise directives, the Derg invested them with significant powers. In this period of transition, when there was relative absence of central authority in the provinces, the zemach had a great deal of room for manoeuvre. And, “the student activist wing […] had assigned objectives to the zemach that [went beyond] those of the Derg, and had given the zemecha a role that was not included among the Derg’s intentions and could not be found anywhere in their writings.” (Lefort 1981, 144) Many among the zemach considered that a real revolution had to be organised from below (Donham 1999, 33). It also seems that, emboldened by their education and their group’s militant past, they saw themselves as the legitimate leaders of the revolution.
28Events in local areas brought the peasants, the settlers and balabbat, the local administration and the zemach into conflict (Lefort 1981, 144). The last found themselves at the centre of power relations and local tensions. The events in Wolaita between the announcement of the land reform in March and the end of 1975 show how local contexts and national dynamics interacted to shape specific local situations. First of all, Wolaita may have been in a peripheral position nationally, but it enjoyed a level of regional centrality that was due in particular to its educational situation: there were only two secondary schools for the Sidamo and Gamo-Goffa regions, Yirgalem and Soddo, so Wolaita was a regional capital of education. The presence of secondary school students was an important factor there, and gave the zemecha a special colour.
29The campaign to eradicate thieves in 1970 and the campaign for the election of peasant judges in 1972–73 had revealed the Wolaita pupils’ aversion to melkegna, landowners and balabbats, whether they were from settlers or local families. The same was true of the peasants. As in most of the southern provinces incorporated at the end of the 19th century, which were characterised by particularly harsh power relations for the peasants, land reform was very well received in Wolaita. The disappearance of landlords meant the end of heavy taxation and the ousting of an elite that, from the villages to the province, had extensive political and judicial powers it often used in a discretionary and arbitrary manner. In a word, with the landlords, the power structure set up after the conquest of Wolaita in 1894 by Menilek II’s army disappeared, which meant the end of a situation that was perceived as a form of slavery. The desire to bring an end to a system that had been put in place by the central government and the settlers led to a regionalist drive (Lefort 1981, 162), a convergence of the class struggle to drive out the “rich” and a nationalist struggle to drive out the “foreigners” who had arrived from the north. But even though it may be true that the fall of the Haile Selassie regime and the agrarian reforms awakened nationalist feelings in the south, it is very difficult to disentangle or attribute priority to the two strands of class and nationality. The question of “nationalism” in the political consciousness of pupils and peasants needs to be tested against the facts. The property of the wealthy in Soddo was looted on 16 June 1975 by peasants and zemach. Their leader, Solomon Wada, was executed by the Derg in July. Nationwide, the autumn of 1975 saw mass desertions by zemach due to the proliferation of local conflicts with the regime’s cadres. At the same time, the EPRP ordered the zemach to return to Addis Ababa to overthrow the Derg. It was also from there that the EPRP spread out on a broad scale among the pupils of Wolaita. René Lefort points out that among the zemach who were working in the south, the students from Addis Ababa were hostile to the Derg, while local students were in favour of it (Lefort 1981, 141). This was not the case in Wolaita.
30The lack of precise directives from the government initially led to differences of interpretation concerning the political reorganisation of the countryside. According to Wanna Dea, a former Wolaita zemach, the regime sent schoolchildren to rural areas with the message to: “Go to the peasants, teach them and mobilize them, after that they can ask for their power, or they can form a party.”17 However, the Derg was thinking of integrating the peasant masses into a single party led from above, which would be a tool for control, whereas the zemach were thinking of a party created by the peasants so that they would be able to organise and represent themselves. The statutes and powers of the peasants’ associations, the new administrative units created by the agrarian reform, were not clear. The students wanted to turn them into a means of self-government, with judicial powers that would deprive the police and the judiciary of their roles in rural Ethiopia (Markakis & Nega 1978, 134–35). Numerous localised conflicts broke out as a result of the tensions between the Derg’s desire for leadership and the zemach’s dream of a rural democracy.
31Radicalisation in opposition to the regime began in Wolaita in the summer of 1975. The arrest of Solomon Wada played a central role in the break between the zemach in Wolaita and the regime. Those who had come from Addis Ababa left, while the Wolaita secondary school pupils stayed and continued to fight. The Wolaita EPRP committee was immediately formed under the leadership of Melaku Markos, an Addis Ababa University student from Dire Dawa, a city where the EPRP was a powerful force. Former Wolaita EPRP member Paolos Sorsa remembers:
It was mainly centred on the high school students and high school teachers. So I was among the firsts to organize the Party Committee, the Wolaita Party Committee […] in 1975, in the summertime. So, we were five, one professional from Addis Ababa University, he was the forty-ninth member of the EPRP central committee […] Melaku Markos […]. Melaku Markos being a high school teacher […], his main mission was to promote the ideas or the motto of EPRP to the Wolaita students. So the full organisational structure took place in 1968 Ethiopian Calendar [1975–1976] when we formed the regional party committee.18
32The EPRP spread gradually. Some of those who became involved had participated in the campaign to eradicate the thieves, while others had become involved in the movement against Haile Selassie’s regime in Wolaita shortly afterwards, in the early 1970s. They had already been in contact with the students in Addis Ababa before the revolution, but the militants were very few in number. From September 1975, the EPRP began recruiting in the villages, and from then on, the politicisation process intensified: “After that, we joined the EPRP. There was an EPRP base in the northern part, in the southern part, it was not the same […]. But after the zemecha, all was widely distributed in the southern part, especially in Wolaita. The EPRP had great power in Wolaita.”19 The EPRP membership structured opposition to the Derg, and also enabled the widespread distribution of brochures and newspapers. It was there that the pupils in Wolaita, who had mobilised against Haile Selassie’s regime “without knowing the ideology”20, became familiar with Marxism-Leninism. The EPRP magazine Democracia was particularly widely read and discussed in reading groups, which multiplied, as they had in the capital.21 Specific emphasis was placed on the need to fight the establishment of a military regime. According to former member Abraham Worku:
“At that time, we agreed with the EPRP’s option, it gives democracy to the people. At that time, there is no democracy. So, we heard the history of military governments, history from Nazi Germans, from Italian Fascists. And, in that time, military governments spread in Africa, most African countries were ruled by the military. This military government had no democracy. So, we struggle for the provisional popular government.” 22
33Students spread the demands for a civil government to rural communities. Discussions with farmers took place at secret meetings organised within the framework of farmers’ associations that were separate from those organised by the Derg: “We have set up farmers’ associations. Not the ‘peasants’ associations’ of the government. We, on the other hand, inside, secretly, with the peasants, those who were aware were all with the EPRP.”23 This was the same technique that had been used in Addis Ababa, where the state closely-monitored organisations that were clandestinely reproduced and affiliated to the EPRP (Markakis & Nega 1978, 155). In the clandestine farmers’ associations, the students tried to convince the peasants to organise outside the framework defined by the military. Abraham Worku recalls: “We told them, ‘If you organise your state, you will be free, you will have democracy rights. If you stay for the future with this state, you will see great oppression, there is no democracy, you will get the result for the future.’”24
34The term “your own state” must be interpreted to mean a democratic state organised from below, and not autonomy for Wolaita, let alone independence. Based on interviews with former students, Wolaita nationalism does not appear to have been a driving force in their struggle. The last generation of pupils in Haile Selassie’s school system did not think of themselves as being outside the Ethiopian political space. They were not questioning the nation as such, but rather the definition of the criteria for membership of it, and the relations of domination within it. It was a question of reformulating the nation, not of extracting oneself from it. While the EPRP defended different nationalities’ right to self-determination, it believed that an Ethiopian nation based on the will of all people to live together would reduce the risk of secession. The Wolaita pupils wanted to affirm the presence of their region and their people in the national political space. By joining the EPRP, the largest national political party at the time, they were taking their struggle from a local to a national level.
2.4 Farmers, the zemach and the Derg
35But what of the peasant world, whose consent was an essential element of the power struggle between the Derg and the zemach? Initially, the welcome given by the peasants to the zemach depended on how they conducted themselves. The pupils were imbued with the idea of progress. The idea was that they would take it to the countryside through education, by attacking forms of behaviour (conservatism, superstition and submission to authority) that were attributed to the peasant world indiscriminately and a priori. They shared the idea that knowledge acquired at school was the key to progress and that possession of knowledge conferred the right to lead (Tekeste 1990, 54). Nevertheless, studies in different regions have shown that the attitudes of the zemach varied widely. Different aspects such as their degree of politicisation, their social backgrounds and their level of knowledge of the society in which they found themselves explain this variety of attitudes towards and relations with the peasants. Donald Donham witnessed the arrival of zemach in Maale. Here is what he recorded in his field notebook:
Today, market day, for the first time, four zemecha students came to Bala… The leader of the group—a smiling, self-assured, almost arrogant young man about twenty—“lectured the people” as he said. […] With Mao’s red book in his hand, this handsome young man addressed the crowd at the market [in Amharic] in great oratorical style […] (Donham 1999, 45).
36A young man empowered by his education, his Marxist culture and the mission entrusted to him appeared to want to establish a vertical relationship with the population of a peripheral region, whom it seems he had everything to teach. He spoke in Amharic to a predominantly non-Amharic-speaking population. A few days later, the same group of zemach desecrated the sacred tomb of the kings of Maale and burned the bones before breaking the sacred objects and depositing them in the middle of the marketplace, a profane place par excellence (Donham 1999, 52–53). Members of the community went to the zemach to express their distress. The zemach had knowingly committed a grave desecration. They regarded the local religion as obscurantist, as a collection of superstitions that led to submission to religious authorities who deceived the population (Donham 1999, 57). Donald Donham witnessed an arrogant, childish and authoritarian attitude on the part of zemach who wanted to eradicate the past in defiance of what the population might think. Imbued with a sense of certainty that is a feature of messianic actions, they possessed the truth and the peasants only had to submit to their “new law” for their own good. Those who had complained left, and reluctantly accepted the decision of the zemach. In Kaffa, the local community’s response to a desecration committed by the zemach was not of the same tenor: zemach were killed (Lefort 1981, 162–63). The struggle for progress against obscurantism thus gave rise to acts the local population found unacceptable. Alexander Naty, in contrast, did not observe this type of attitude on the part of the zemach in Gamo-Goffa, not far from Maale (Naty 2002), and nothing like this seems to have happened in Wolaita either.
37There are several reasons for this. Wolaita had nearly a thousand secondary school pupils. The zemach from Addis Ababa joined the young people who were on their home territory. The local leader of the campaign was a teacher from the area (Lefort 1981, 162). The students who arrived from elsewhere in Ethiopia depended on the local pupils, who were indispensable translators, in all their daily activities. And many of these pupils were from rural families. Although they believed that peasants should be educated, they did not commit errors based on ignorance of local realities and condescension towards illiterate peasants: these peasants were their parents or the parents of their schoolmates. In this case, would the Wolaita pupils have allowed an attitude of contempt on the part of their elders from Addis Ababa? It is also true that because of its greater proximity to the centre, the relatively important development of education and the spread of Protestantism in the countryside, the realities in Wolaita were not the same as they were in the Maale studied by Donald Donham who wrote about the students’ sense of superiority derived from their school education as well as the contempt Christians in the north held for the “heathens” in the south (Donham 1999, 33). These two sources of condescension were greatly diminished in Wolaita.
38Yaluse Mita remembers very good relations with the peasants:
በእድገት በሕብረት የትምህርት ዘመቻ ወቅት ወደ አርሶ አደሩ በመዝለቅ ተቀባይነትን አግኝተን ነበር ፥ ደስተኛ ነበሩ ። በዚህም አርሶ አደሩ ሴቶችና ወንዶች በሁለት አመት ውስጥ ማንበብና መጻፍ ችለዋል።
During the education campaign, as we went among [the peasants] to teach, there was joy. The pupils were warmly welcomed, and within two years, both women and men among the farmers had acquired the ability to read and write.25
39Tsehai Zerihun’s experience of her work with women shows that women viewed the zemecha as a resource. The initiatives of the young zemach seem to have been adhered to by the women farmers, whether they were literacy activities, home economics classes or cooperative activities in the cotton mill.26 The interviews underline the fact that the literacy activities, the health programme and the collective work were an enriching encounter, and that as a result, the relationship between the zemach and the farmers was a warm one.27
40The analysis becomes more complex when one looks at the consequences of the implementation of the land reforms and the political conflict between school educated young people and the Derg. In general, the reforms were enthusiastically welcomed by the peasants in the south, who found themselves freed from the yoke of the melkegna and landowners. In a fine text published by the academic journal Afrique et Histoire, Demissé Tsiggé, a former student activist and now a writer, recalls: “As the land had been returned to the peasants, and the buildings and the tools of production now belonged to the ‘people,’ the Derg confiscated the support of the workers from us” (Demissé 2004, 369). The beneficiaries of the reforms would thus have been won over to the cause of the military regime. The case of Wolaita bears witness to a more complex, and above all more evolving, reality. Initially, as seen from the periphery, it was the zemach and not the Derg who brought land reform to the countryside. The Wolaita who were former members of the EPRP tell of strong support from the farmers:
“The relations between the zemach from the Campaign for Development Cooperation and the farmers were very good. Let me explain. Those who were able to bring about this change were the students, the schoolchildren. Because when we arrived in the countryside, we chased away the melkegna from the time of Haile Selassie. ‘Let the land be shared among those who don’t have it, in the future you will eat what only the oppressor used to eat.’”28
41For the first three months, from March to June, there can be no doubt that the zemach and the farmers were united against the former melkegna and landowners. The night of 16 June 1975, when 60,000 peasants accompanied the zemach led by Solomon Wada to plunder the homes of the wealthy, should be interpreted as an insurance taken out against their eventual return rather than as an act of revenge. The main objective was to disarm them in order to make their dispossession final after the redistribution of land that had begun in March. René Lefort testifies to the fact that the disarming of the zemach, the prohibition against leaving their camp and the subsequent arrest and execution of Solomon Wada by the Derg led to the peasants being unable to understand a regime that finally seemed not to fully support them (Lefort 1981, 162).
42Relations with the peasants were transformed with the changing balance of power between the military regime and its civil opposition. During the course of 1975, with a view to limiting opposition to the land reforms by former local elites, university graduates and teachers were appointed to administrative positions in the provinces, and in 1976, in order to put an end to the turmoil in the southern countryside, the Derg decided to take a firm grip of the situation. One of the measures was to renew the administration of the provinces once again by appointing military or civilian personnel who supported the regime (Markakis & Nega 1978, 150–51). The zemach lost all support from the administration, and found themselves isolated. In addition, the Derg was gradually able to strengthen its grip on the rural population by packing the farmers’ associations with its supporters, just as it was able to do in the cities through the neighbourhood residents’ associations, the kebele. The Derg was then able to expand its propaganda and repression against the opposition into rural areas. According to Abraham Worku: “The farmers appreciated, they cooperated with us. But after the state propagated, ‘EPRP members are members of the previous state. They want to bring back the previous life conditions to Ethiopia.’”29
43Oral sources point to a rapid decline in the ties with the peasantry. Propaganda worked because it was essential for the peasants to ensure that the gains made by land reform were sustained. However, once the melkegna and landowners had been driven out and the Derg had regained control, the students had few guarantees to offer compared to the regime (Lefort 1981, 163). They had ideas, but they did not have the resources the state did. This, together with their young age, which upset the hierarchies who exercised authority, meant that the zemach lost credibility. Finally, the Derg armed the farmers’ associations whose members it had won over to its side in order to eliminate all forms of opposition. The young Wolaita from the EPRP then tried to set up an armed movement, but it was a resounding failure. Paolos Sorsa was in charge of organising it: “From organising the awraja party committee I shifted to the military side. And I had military organisation in Wolaita Kindo, in Bolosso Sore, two sites. The two guerrilla fighting units failed and we lost so many youngsters, and we didn’t carry out any operation of any sort.” 30
44After the depletion of the zemecha and the Derg’s propaganda, repression completed the process of separating the peasants from the students and their rallying behind the regime, whether they wanted to or not:
Especially in Offa wereda, in Boloso Sore wereda we had very large and wide contacts with the peasantry. You see, all armaments or munitions for the guerrilla was transported by peasants and by the transportation means of the peasantry. So, the Wolaita peasants were very supportive [of] the EPRP. Because of the Derg’s massacres and oppression, finally they betrayed or they couldn’t resist the fascistic aggression. So except that, the Wolaita peasantry were very supportive [of] EPRP .31
2.5 The Red Terror
45The years from 1976 to 1978 saw bloody clashes between the military government and its civilian collaborators on the one hand, and the students and teachers organised within the EPRP on the other. The split, which was already well under way in the summer of 1975 during the zemecha, only grew worse. Disillusioned students deserted en masse. At the end of 1975, of the 60,000 who had set out a year earlier, only 18,000 remained at their posts. Many returned to the city to swell the ranks of the EPRP. Despite their defections, they left behind them rural areas that had been liberated from the former landlords, and peasant associations that had been organised. They had done their job (Donham 1999, 34). What now remained to be done was to establish a civilian government.
46The plans to move students away from the capital in order to silence the opposition had failed. They returned to Addis Ababa more determined than ever as a result of their encounters with the misery of the countryside and united by their shared experience. Launched in the days following Haile Selassie’s deposition, the campaign for the establishment of a civilian government, which had never truly stopped, was forcefully reactivated at the end of the zemecha. As a result, in early September 1976, the Derg denounced the EPRP for counter-revolutionary activities, imprisoned hundreds of people and carried out executions (Bahru 2008b, 437). By the end of the month, the EPRP had launched its campaign of targeted assassinations of members of the Meison who were participating in the Derg government (Balsvik 2007, 79). In October, the Derg announced that the life of a revolutionary was worth a thousand “anti-people” lives (Bahru 2008b, 437), heralding the mass killings that culminated in May 1977, which impacted the EPRP as well as the Meison. In 1977 and 1978, the columns of the government newspaper Addis Zemen increased the number of articles calling for “anti-revolutionary” and “anti-people” anarchists to be tracked down and eliminated. For two years, teachers, students and secondary—and even primary—school pupils were hunted down, murdered and tortured horribly. The figures vary between 10,000 and 150,000 deaths, depending on the sources (Bahru 2008b, 441). These are the recollections of Tsehai Zerihun, who was not an activist but a young student from Wolaita who had recently arrived in Addis Ababa at the height of the Red Terror:
I completed grade 12 and I left for Addis Ababa. At that moment, it was very hard to me to exist in Addis because it was Red Terror. I tried to join Addis Ababa University. But Addis Ababa University was […] every time under a hard campaign by the military. The teachers were taken, they were killed in front of the schools. The students were taken from their bed at night, and we hear that they were killed.
So, I left Addis Ababa University and I joined Commercial College, because I was afraid for my life. It was a free execution moment. Even, I almost died […]. One day, I was going from Commercial College to the hostel I was living in […]. Two people came in a car and they stopped the car. They ask me to show them my ID card.
I said: “I don’t have ID card, I am new to this place, to Addis.”
“From where are you?” they said.
“I am from Sidamo province.”
“Ok, what’s your name?” I told them my name.
“Ok, sorry we were going to kill you because you look like someone we are looking for from a photograph, but you are lucky.”
I was afraid from that day to go on foot on the road in Addis, because they gave them free chance of killing anybody whom they suspect, or whom they think that he is EPRP, or somebody anarchist, against the government. Later on, I was in the hostel, when I was trying to study I cannot study, at night, because I hear bullet shots and everything. When I went in the morning, I saw peoples’ bodies… I see the blood… That makes all fear with all that I passed, especially in 1977. That moment was a very harsh moment, to me especially, to my existence even, to study, to live my day to day life was always… with the suspicion. I may go out in the morning but I don’t know if I may go back to my home. When we go to the school also, in the class sometimes we missed friends. That means that they were taken in their area. They don’t come back beqa! [finished!] We were in the class around 40 before, and around February we became around 20 in Commercial College. And the teachers too. Whom we see in November, we don’t see them in February. Nobody knows, they were taken or killed. […]
So, it was a very suffering time. So many intellectuals were killed, I know. So many youngsters even. If they make a mistake, they could put them in a jail, give them lesson and they could [bring] them back into the society. Age of 15, age of 10, age of 12 were all in the jail. Taking a child age of 10… what do you think? “Because he was distributing papers in the society,” they say. And even age of 10 were in the jail and tortured. Later on, I just want to leave from Addis but… I want to go back to Wolaita but Wolaita also was not good conditions. I heard that in Wolaita, the children, the youngsters were taken, even they were thrown in the Omo River, into the water to be eaten by crocodiles. Also in Abela… to the lions, wildlife place, they cut their tongue and hands and feet and throw them for the wild lions. Even my batch in Wolaita, grade 11, with me, zemecha students, most of them were killed. So, I didn’t go back to Wolaita. Finally in 1978 the conditions became a bit cooler, because they finished almost all the youngsters and the intellectuals group, the doctors, the teachers and so on.32
47Tsehai Zerihun was terrified by what she was experiencing in Addis Ababa and could not return home to Wolaita, where repression was also rampant. As early as December 1976, the official government daily newspaper Addis Zemen had launched the first call for the creation of revolutionary defence committees in two neighbouring provinces of Wolaita, Hadiya and Kambatta (Bahru 2008, 438). These committees have remained famous for the role they played in the Red Terror. In the Sidamo region of Wolaita province, 4,000 rifles were distributed to 61,000 militiamen (Lefort 1981, 282). And the testimony of Tsehai Zerihun shows that being armed with a rifle was not necessary for massacres. Father Gino, a Capuchin missionary responsible for the educational activities of his congregation in Wolaita since 1970, also testifies to this:
“So imprisonment, killing… very bad. Here, I still remember what happened to one of my students, a girl. […] When somebody wants to insult somebody here, they say in Wolaitigna “bita, bita” that means “eat the earth, eat the earth.” What they use to do to those who were accused to be EPRP? I saw my girl, my student, it was during the rainy season with the mud and everything, she was lying in the mud and she had to eat this mud, and all the other students they gathered and they can spit on her, they can kick her… so there were this kind of… there was no freedom at all, no freedom at all. Today you go, and you couldn’t live in peace, because you suspect that always somebody may accuse you. […] There was mass graves, even here, which I went… because after this revolution, some people talked… and we went to take out the mass grave where nineteen students, nineteen youngsters were buried alive. So many people disappeared.”33
48Father Gino’s testimony reveals that students beat up one of their classmates who had been accused of being from the EPRP. Like Tsehai Zerihun, he highlights another essential aspect of the Red Terror: the violence inside schools themselves as soon as they reopened in 1977. While the vast majority of EPRP members came from the school community, and while the EPRP was by far the party with the largest number of supporters, some students and teachers were also defenders of the Derg. Schools were the scene of political conflicts between the EPRP and the Meison (Kiflu 1998, 189). They were also a privileged place for hunting down opponents of the Derg. In 1977 and 1978, self-denunciation meetings were organised: pupils were rounded up and “suspects” were called on to come forward to deny that they had betrayed the revolution and affirm their support for the Derg. Those who refused were taken away (Kiflu 1998, 191).
49Several thousand young graduates left the country. Those who did not and who survived were severely affected psychologically, and sometimes physically disabled. This is how Demissie Tsigge remembers the situation:
“Almost all the survivors of the first massacres fled to Europe or the United States. […] We who had stayed behind seemed to be alive but we were the living dead, hopeless, on our knees, crushed by the boot of the Derg. […] Five years after the fall of the Emperor, after I was released from prison, it seemed to me that there was nothing left of my life. All my friends were dead or abroad, and our organisations had dissolved.” (Demissie 2004, 340)
50Paolos Sorsa, one of the founders of the Wolaita branch of the EPRP, testifies to a strong feeling of failure and bitterness, but also identification with the revolution:
“The Derg […] highly oppressed the youth and the generation from the 1960s, the modern political thinkers, […] educated in foreign countries, educated in the country. It was a very strong generation. […] And I am one of them, I remained from that generation. First, I told you that I have been in prison for 10 years during Derg. And so the Ethiopian Revolution was my revolution. […] The main Ethiopian revolution, the first social transformation happened in the country. The first and the worst massacre happened in the history of the country […]. It is mainly heart and part of my history, and it is written with blood. When one mention[s] about that part of this history, I don’t know what sort of feeling I feel, I can’t tell you. It is very bitter.”34
51In August 1977, once the EPRP had been annihilated and its members were either dead or in prison or exile, the Derg turned against the Meison, whose members suffered the same fate.
Conclusion
52The four years during which the Derg regime stabilised its position and major reforms were implemented were extremely intense. Thanks to land reform and the zemecha, relations between the centre and the periphery reached a previously unknown depth. First of all, by destroying the intermediary class of melkegna and landowners, the state strengthened its grip, but it also broke a lock that had closed the doors of the national space to the peasants of the south. Then, by bringing the revolution to the countryside, the state and the zemach involved the peasants in a movement that spread across the whole country. The opportunities for creating a national imagination increased. The encounter between the school community in Addis Ababa, the small provincial towns and the peasant world represented an unprecedented decompartmentalisation. Never before had schools and farmers shared their daily lives in such a way, and never before had they had as much political room for manoeuvre as they did during the first months of the zemecha. Although its impact on the political and social representations of the zemach is relatively well known, the effect of this experience on those from the peasant world deserves the greatest attention.
53For the students, the zemecha was a moment of intense politicisation, due to both the confrontation with the misery of the countryside and the widespread dissemination of the Marxist political culture that had been maturing at Addis Ababa University and abroad since the early 1960s. For pupils in provincial secondary schools, the politicisation that had begun before the revolution experienced an unprecedented acceleration. Finally, the zemecha constituted a massive extension of the educational phenomenon, one that laid the foundations for future policies. As students and teachers emerged from the Red Terror divided by grudges, broken by violence and subjected to the Derg, the regime, which had finally stabilised its power, was in a position to launch its policy of educating the masses in the service of “Ethiopian socialism.”
Notes de bas de page
1 Paolos Sorsa, interview, December 2010.
2 Tsehai Zerihun, interview, January 2011.
3Wanna Dea, interview, December 2010.
4 Yemesrach Alula, interview, January 2010.
5 Tsehai Zerihun, interview, January 2011.
6 Wanna Dea, interview, December 2010.
7 Yaluse Mita, interview, November 2009.
8 Tsehai Zerihun, interview, January 2011.
9 Yaluse Mita (teacher), interview, November 2009.
10 Tsehai Zerihun, interview, January 2011.
11 For example: MOEFA, Home Economics for Grade 9, Book One (1974 [1969]), 15–21.
12 Yaluse Mita, interview, November 2009.
13 Ibid.
14 MOEFA, Curriculum Policies and Standards. Teacher Training Institutes (1965), 41–45; MOEFA, Elementary School Curriculum Years I-VI (1970 [1963 EC]), see part 1, chapter 4.
15 Kassech Mulugeta, interview, December 2009; Yemesrach Alula, interview, January 2010.
16 Yaluse Mita, interview, November 2009.
17 Wanna Dea, interview, December 2010.
18 Paolos Sorsa, interview, December 2010.
19 Abraham Worku, interview, January 2011.
20 Paolos Sorsa, interview, December 2010.
21Wanna Dea, interview, December 2010.
22 Abraham Worku, interview, January 2011.
23 Wanna Dea, interview, December 2010.
24 Abraham Worku, interview, January 2011.
25 Yaluse Mita, interview, November 2009.
26 Tsehai Zerihun, interview, janvier 2011.
27 Kassech Mulugeta, interview, December 2009; Yemesrach Alula, interview, January 2010.
28 Wanna Dea, interview, December 2010.
29 Abraham Worku, interview, January 2011.
30 Paolos Sorsa, interview, December 2010.
31 Ibid.
32 Tsehai Zerihun, interview, January 2011.
33 Abba Gino (Capuchin missionary), interview, Soddo, 12 December 2009.
34 Paolos Sorsa, interview, 14 December 2010.

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