Interlude 2
School and the State in 1991: Identities Reconciled?
p. 317-324
Texte intégral
1The famine of 1984–85 represented a break in the Derg’s government, and ushered in a new period for it. The second decade of the 1980s was marked by severe economic, political and military convulsions that “overtook” the school movement. The famine, forced displacement and villagisation that followed, the regime’s intransigence towards Eritrean independence, which led to a constant intensification of the war, and the armed struggle led in the north by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) had a profound effect on the population. In this context, education was no longer as much of a priority for the government as it had been a few years earlier. Moreover, famine, war and major state projects had cumulative effects that had a powerful impact on the population’s living conditions, on its relationship with the state, and on the social dynamics of schooling. Because schools were so sensitive to their environments, daily school life was also particularly affected. What became of the movement of society towards schooling that had begun in the early 1980s?
2A comparison between our analysis of school dynamics and that of the upheavals that took place from 1984 on will enable us to question the connections between the appropriation of school, the relationship with the state and the degree of sedimentation of the national imagination in Wolaita at the time of the fall of the Derg.
Dropouts: Famine, war and education (1984–91)
3When Dessalegn Rahmato conducted his survey in 1984 in four cantons in Kaffa, Gojjam, Wellega and Wolaita, he noticed that the population’s enthusiasm for organisational activities was beginning to wane. In the aftermath of the land reform, the rural population had shown great interest in the establishment of farmers’ associations and collective work, and had actively participated in them. Eight years later, this participation had become less than lukewarm (Dessalegn 1984, 92). Promises were slow to be kept, and doubts about whether they would be fulfilled in the future grew. Over the previous decade, both the urban and rural populations had been bombarded with speeches on progress through education and collectivisation: during the land reform, during the literacy campaign, in mass associations, in schools, in the media and on walls decorated with slogans. Contrary to what the government claimed about the peasants’ gains, their incomes had fallen and their situation had become more fragile (Planel 2008, 176–77). In short, in 1984, the actual situation was far from living up to the hopes that had been raised and the discourse that had been disseminated by the regime’s propaganda.
4At the very moment when Dessalegn Rahmato was noticing a certain disenchantment among the peasantry and while the regime was celebrating the tenth anniversary of the revolution with great pomp, a drought broke out that was to cause the greatest famine experienced by Ethiopia in the 20th century. In 1984 and 1985, between 500,000 and a million people died (Dessalegn 2007, 292). Teacher Germa Bekele recalls that in Wolaita, the high mortality rate among humans and livestock was aggravated by a cholera epidemic. Under these conditions, most students left school to try to survive, while the better-off went to the city to flee the shortages and disease. For three months, the school was used as a hospital for cholera patients, and when it reopened, only a few children whose parents had salaries turned up.1 The famine precipitated the launch of the villagisation project that had been planned since the late 1970s (Clapham 1988, 175). This was the flagship project of the rural transformation programme, and consisted in grouping farmers who had hitherto been living in scattered settlements together in planned villages. The aim was to simplify access to infrastructure such as health centres, schools and mills, to facilitate access to water and roads and to collectivise agriculture. A 1985 UNESCO report illustrates how this project sought to establish restructured and self-sufficient communities after the ravages of the famine.2 Farmers had to leave their homes, often against their will, to settle in the new villages they themselves had built. By 1989, 14 million peasants (40% of the rural population) had been “villagised,” but the project was carried out in haste, without adequate preparation, and it does not seem that similar past experiences, such as that of Tanzania, were taken into account. At an agricultural level, the project was a failure: the farmers found themselves far from their fields, the inhabitants did not have enough room to grow vegetables around their houses, and there was a lack of pasture. Animal mortality increased due to contagious diseases, and the water supply, schools and clinics were delayed (Tadesse 2002, 117, 123–25). In a context in which the population had been forced to comply with a large project without seeing the compensation they had been promised, the political constraints seemed to be more burdensome and the government more alienated.
5Generally speaking, in the second half of the 1980s, state policies lost the support of those who had supported land reform and the school policy a few years earlier. As Germa Bekele testifies with regard to the Wolaita: “The Derg took, it couldn’t give, it was painful.”3 Similarly, in the Menz area in the north, Helen Pankhurst collected a proverb in the second half of the 1980s that expressed the idea that the aid provided by the Derg was drowned out by the costs it imposed: “The state has a good side and a cruel side; cruel side has become too hard for us” (ምንግስት ባንድ ፊት ደግ ባንድ ፊት ክፉ ነው ክፉነቱ በዛብን እንጂ; Pankhurst 1990, 78). Education was affected by this situation. Exhausted by famine and state policies that constantly solicited their participation in cash, kind or labour, communities were less and less able to provide the required schooling effort. Community participation in the management of schools became an additional constraint on the family economy. Schools were among the Derg’s multiple tax and labour levies. An extreme example of the way rural areas were used without restraint can be seen in the fact that between 1985 and 1987, farmers in Wolaita had to pay a drought tax, even though they themselves had suffered the consequences of famine (Planel 2008, 177).
6Finally, the intensification of the civil war between the state and the guerrillas in the north, which was waged jointly by the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front,4 definitively confirmed the split between the population and the Derg. In addition to the deprivation caused by the depletion of resources for the war effort, the brutality with which young people were used as a breeding ground for soldiers led to an irremediable aversion to the regime. Teacher Yaluse Mita remembers:
It was war, so it was a time of pain, a time of tears. Some families, at an age when children were still dependent… many people went to Eritrea, […] where the battlefield was. Under the Derg, the most frightening thing was the war. Many young people disappeared… many young people were taken away, loaded on to trucks. Those who were loaded on to trucks and sent from south to north numbered in the thousands. This was the most horrible period in Ethiopia. As a result, everyone hated the Derg. […] For other things, for development, for education, for girls’ education, the situation was good. […] Once, at the end… the pupils who were at school… in the last moments… it was at the time of the feast… when the Feast of the Cross is celebrated in Wolaita… the pupils who were at school… they were waiting for them to come out… when they came out, they caught them. They came to the houses and took many young people. They came to the houses at night, they took them, it was horrible. After that it was enough, the Wolaita refused the Derg.5
7When conscription was no longer sufficient, the methods used to “recruit” became particularly forceful. Young people were taken from their beds at night, when their presence was guaranteed and their capacity for resistance diminished. Yaluse Mita also testifies that in Wolaita, schools were targeted. In the north of the country, in Lalibela, a small town a few kilometres from the front, teachers were encouraged to carry out forced conscription directly in schools. Some lined up students and selected the strongest ones to be conscripted. The youngest were 13 or 14 years old.6 Teacher Mantagosh Eshete estimates that a quarter of teachers actually did this.7 This did not happen in Wolaita, however;8 instead, students were picked up after school.
8As a result, young people chose to flee. Former student Habtamu Lemma recalls “hiding for two days to avoid going to war, [because] they would come at night to pick up recruits from the houses.”9 Zerihun Anebo says others fled for longer and were hunted down.
When the war became serious, they prepared and they selected people for the front. The children were not volunteers, the parents were not volunteers to go to the war front […]. Because of this, they wanted to escape, they even changed their living place. […] They left their parents and the place they were living and they went somewhere else. The military living there […] suspected them, they arrested them […]. When I was teaching, only girls were attending the classroom, no boys, no men, that was very very very… that makes […] feeling, and we felt much. All were chased. […] Even these girls learning in classrooms, there were… In their black clothes… which is a sign of what? Sorrow! Educationally, the impact at that time was that. We were not learning, that created hate upon the government by the people. Communities disliked it.10
9This excerpt from an interview bears witness to stalking practices that demonstrate a regime that used its population without restraint, as a mere material resource.11 The sacrifices asked of young people in school songs was not simply rhetoric used to instil a sense of common belonging and a desire to work together: it was a reality. The only means available to boys was to desert their school benches and, for some of them, to flee their homes. Only girls dressed in mourning clothes showed up for class. Bearing in mind that the Derg forbade families of missing opponents from mourning, this gesture can be interpreted as a way for girls to show their disapproval.
10In view of this violence, what remained of the reforms and school policy implemented by the Derg? A posteriori, the testimonies give a picture of a two-faced hydra, with the balance sometimes tipping towards progress and sometimes towards the unbearable, depending on the interlocutors, or even during the same interview. The point of view expressed by the peasant Mana Madibo, quoted previously on the subject of the literacy campaign, is worth recalling. Despite the loss of his son, who died at the front, he says that he appreciates the Derg because of the lasting nature of the reforms which, in his view, finally freed those who had been oppressed. By educating and liberating the peasants, the Derg made a break with the past that opened up a new era.12 Teacher Zerihun Anebo leans towards criticism: while he agrees that the Derg made beneficial changes, he argues that it should have done things differently: “Actually, in all aspects, academic, economic, social, and political, there was change. But the bad implementation made them collapse. With no negotiation, with no discussion, with no base on agreement.”13
11Unlike Mana Madibo, Zerihun Anebo considers that the progress cannot compensate for the means that were employed. Like most of the teachers we interviewed, he agrees with the substance but criticises the form. Authoritarian practices and violence ruined a project that had been seen as being positive. This is also the opinion of Yaluse Mita: “The Derg came by two paths, working for development, opening roads, stimulating education. […] But even though the Derg did a lot, its objectives were based on war.”14
The appropriated school?
12In this particular historical context, how can school education, the national imagination, perceptions of “progress” and the relationship to the state be explained? Can a distinction be made between the appropriation of school on the one hand, and the conflictful relationship to the state on the other? This implies knowing whether in Wolaita, the spread of a sense of belonging to Ethiopia driven by land reform, the literacy campaign and the progress in schooling was eroded by the rejection of the Derg’s violence.
13At first glance, education seems to fall on the “positive” side of the scales. Peasants and teachers alike believe that liberation from serfdom and education went hand in hand, and they all inseparably link education and emancipation. In their view, this emancipation cannot be separated from integration into the national political community. Through education, the state sought to promote the marginalised in the nation, to provide opportunities for the greatest number and to work for collective progress. In short, the actors dissociate the government’s authoritarian practices from its educational policy. The idea of a beneficial education is put forward independently from the structural obstacles (such as the lack of opportunities for graduates or the deterioration of the economy) and cyclical disasters (such as famine and war), which, whether provoked by the state or aggravated by it, did not allow schools to fulfil their promise. However, not everything about schooling was viewed as positive. It was not spared from the arbitrary and violent practices of power the population experienced outside its walls. At the end of the 1980s, there was a wide gap between the content of the textbooks and songs praising the revolution and promising a bright future on the one hand, and the school experience, which was that of a model dictatorship, on the other. As the decade progressed, school became a dangerous place that was best to keep away from. More than ever, schools were in a state of tension between emancipation and oppression. Families were not mistaken: they sent children to school as never before, but even in the early 1980s, they stayed away from its internal workings. School as an institution was a closed space governed by its own laws, a place of power that was impossible to discuss, let alone challenge. In this sense, local society did not appropriate the school.
14After the famine, however, schools were gradually repopulated, and while boys were kept away from classes at the height of forced recruitment, the underlying trend towards schooling continued, beyond the aversion to the regime. In the early 1980s, taking literacy classes and sending children to school had been accepted, for better or for worse, because the regime enjoyed popular support for a time. A decade later, however, the Derg was rejected, but the social dynamics of schooling that had accompanied its education policy had lasting effects. In this sense, schooling had been appropriated this time. It was the school of society, not just the school of power, and it had begun to take root. Schooling was appropriated because of its promise of individual and collective advancement within the Ethiopian nation. By the end of the 1980s, despite the Derg’s extractive policies, “Ethiopia” was no longer just seen as the predatory power it had been under Haile Selassie’s regime, but as a political space and resource that was perceived to be accessible, which had been far from the case before the revolution.
15It was not the particular education system of the Derg—“education for the construction of socialism”—that worked, but the school form in general that made advances in society. Actors took the knowledge and ways of being in schools inculcated outside their walls. Whereas until the end of Haile Selassie’s regime it was normal not to have attended school, the situation had been reversed by the fall of the Derg. Mass literacy had entrenched the idea that one had to be able to read and write, and that one had to go to school. It was no longer considered normal to reserve mastery of the written word to a body of specialists. Being illiterate was now a sign of ignorance and an inability to be a complete political being. On the basis of the Derg, is it possible to speak of a situation in which everyone, whether or not they have been to school, recognises, accepts and actively consents to the fact that going to school is the yardstick for measuring political ability and legitimate membership of the nation? It seems that it is. Marginalisation of the illiterate increases all the more as the school culture advances, as society becomes, to use Ivan Illich’s expression, a “schooled society,” a political community in which it seems to be self-evident that only school really educates (Illich 1971).
16However, just as practices of “literacy delegation” (Fraenkel & Mbodj 2010, 20) exist, there are also practices of “delegation of school culture.” For example, whereas a peasant from Lasta asked me, “Why do you come to me, I who am only a donkey?” implying that his illiteracy and distance from a school culture did not make him a valid interlocutor for a researcher, Mana Madibo from Wolaita explained that as long as his group has enough “educated” people, the entire group is promoted within the nation. There are therefore collective and collaborative understandings of educational capital and the dignity it provides to the group.
17This also calls for a re-evaluation of the supposed “alienation” of the products of an imported school system if one wants to think about the relations between the “educated” and the illiterate, in all their different types and transformations. The products of the Ethiopian school system were not only people who believed themselves to be the depositories of progress, and wanted to guide the ignorant masses in an authoritarian manner; the “infallible demigods” mentioned by Tekeste Negash (Tekeste 1990, 54); and the “uprooted” in a state of acute psychological crisis, potential dictators, described by Messay Kebede (Messay 2008). The Ethiopian philosopher studied a section of the student elite in the capital: the same elite that radicalised the Ethiopian student movement in the 1960s and 1970s (Messay 2003). We have shown previously that even in the 1970s, not all products of the school system shared these same characteristics. They were also minor local government officials or village teachers on the periphery, who were involved in the daily lives of their fellow citizens, and who could bring their language and writing skills, and knowledge of the codes governing the nationwide political arena, to the community. They had been a rare sight in rural areas before the revolution, but they became a familiar presence as a result of the Derg’s mass education policy.
18In short, the seven years between the Red Terror and 1985 were decisive. The years between 1985–91 slowed the school movement down, but did not stop it: the distance between the regime and the population increased, but schooling had become a matter of course. The step back from schools because of famine and forced recruitment was merely temporary. The idea that school was to be used by the vast majority and not just a small group of specialists in the written word had spread throughout society, which had not been the case before the early 1980s. Despite disaffection with the Derg, the war and the unfulfilled promises of development, there remained the idea of justice between the nationalities that made up the nation and, in Wolaita, the feeling of being Ethiopian. Wolaita was already incorporated in the national space through taxation and forced submission to the central government, but under the Derg, the idea of nationhood made its way into the local imagination. It was no longer only urban dwellers who could think of themselves as part of the national space, and the role of education was a central factor of this identification process.
Notes de bas de page
1 Germa Bekele, interview, December 2010.
2 Unesco, Ethiopia, Education and Training Projects for Self-Reliance (1985).
3 Germa Bekele, interview, December 2010.
4 The former now leads Eritrea and the latter dominates the EPRDF, which has ruled Ethiopia since the fall of the Derg.
5 Yaluse Mita, interview, November 2009.
6 Solomon Maereg, interview, February 2007; Allebachew Fantew (pupil under the Derg, teacher), interview, Lalibela, 14 February 2007.
7 Mantagosh Eshete, interview, Lalibela, 16 February 2008.
8 Zerihun Anebo, interview, December 2010.
9 Habtamu Lemma, interview, December 2009.
10 Zerihun Anebo, interview, December 2010.
11 In his film Teza (The Dew), which was released in 2008, Ethiopian director Haile Gerima depicted members of a farmers’ association shooting on sight at teenagers fleeing forced conscription.
12 Mana Madibo, interview, December 2010.
13 Zerihun Anebo, interview, December 2010.
14 Yaluse Mita, interview, November 2009.

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