General Conclusion
p. 325-331
Texte intégral
1This history of education in Ethiopia’s Wolaita province has attempted to hold together the official purposes of government education as they were defined by the state and its international supporters; the social dynamics of schooling; the knowledge and conduct to be inculcated and the way in which they were communicated; and finally, the effects of education on students and society. We have looked at the changes in the school system in terms of their ties to the transformations in social structures and means of exercising power. Finally, we have approached the question of schools on the basis of the position of schools at the confluence of national and local spaces, as a meeting point between the state and local society. These approaches have been brought together from the perspective of a history of the integration of a peripheral region into the nation as a consequence of the ways in which the population adapted to school. The forms of social appropriation of a state structure responsible for education reveal the different ways in which individuals and groups think and feel in the nation. The outcome is not a homogenous, linear history, but a series of intertwined processes.
2The integration of the Wolaita into Ethiopia began with its conquest in 1894 in the form of political control and taxation. Despite the central government’s dreams of a unified empire, the question of cultural assimilation did not become an issue in the first third of the 20th century. The process began in 1941 with the government schools, but until the revolution in 1974 the government school system was a purely urban phenomenon. These schools were located in the small towns that were the administrative centres of the Wolaita weredas. It was not the central government but the Protestantism brought in by the missionaries from the Sudan Interior Mission that was the driving force behind schooling in rural areas from the late 1950s. The 1940s and 1950s saw a massive conversion of the Wolaita countryside. The local churches rapidly became independent, and the Protestant schools that had initially been established in the countryside for religious ends served as a springboard for rural young people to attend government schools. This led to important transformations in the sociology of schooling. In the 1940s and 1950s, most pupils attending school were the children of notables: they were the offspring of settlers from the north or of Wolaita with connections to the government. From the 1960s, young people from rural areas who had converted to Protestantism began to arrive in urban government schools from rural Protestant schools in increasing numbers. On the other hand, while the sociology changed in terms of social backgrounds, schooling remained an almost exclusively male phenomenon, and girls did not go to school in significant numbers until after the revolution.
3The period of the Derg was one of unprecedented progress in education in the countryside. The literacy campaign created an unprecedented form of contact between the state and farming communities, and the network of schools intensified beyond the towns and cities. The Derg’s educational advances in the countryside took two directions: a takeover of the Protestant church buildings and the construction of new schools through community participation, through a mixture of voluntary cooperation, encouragement and coercion. In the 1980s, school education became a part of everyday life in the countryside. Although not all children went to school, it became a commonplace phenomenon, and lost the image of strangeness it still retained in the 1960s.
Young Protestant Wolaita: the conditional nation
4School dynamics were driven in part by state education policies. Some pupils were enrolled at school, willingly or unwillingly, as a result of various incentives. In the 1940s, the “pupil police” tried to persuade young people to go to school, before Bogale Wallelu and Wanna Wagesho went round to people’s homes to convince parents. Others were coerced into school, like Abraham Worku, who began his education at a basic education centre set up by Governor Germame Neway. Officials knocked on his door one day in 1958 to tell his parents that from then on Abraham would spend several hours a day learning to read, write and count, much to the chagrin of his family, who deplored the daily absence of the young man who was in charge of the family’s herd. Other families and students came to schooling by observing the government’s educational policies, and seizing them as an opportunity. Between the two poles of compliance and coercion there was a whole spectrum of different attitudes. The literacy campaign is one good example of this. It gave rise to various forms of state practice, from incitement and coercion, and to a wide range of social attitudes towards education: observance or disagreement, enthusiasm or reluctance and conviction or ambivalence, and to reversals along the way.
5Later, school dynamics developed out of strategies for adapting to the transformations that affected the organisation of power and the way it was exercised. An expansion of bureaucratisation gradually led to schools becoming the route to positions of responsibility. The groups that held power in Wolaita were the first to send their children to school. As early as 1941, they were aware of the fact that if they wanted to maintain their position, they would have to take over this new institution. It was with this in mind that they opposed the education of peasant children so that they could reserve schools for their own children for the purposes of social reproduction. On the other side of the distribution of power, schooling was a tactic for escaping marginalisation by making a place for oneself in the nation through social ascension, which was represented by access to a salaried job. At school, rural people learned the codes and skills that legitimised membership of the political community. Here, the construction of the network of rural Protestant primary schools reveals a dynamic that is relatively independent of government policy. These schools developed outside state structures: they were an endogenous social dynamic, a resource for people who wanted a school education despite the lack of government schools. It was a roundabout route. From the end of the 1950s, the political dimension that had been expressed since the time of the earliest conversions to Protestantism in the 1930s began to be articulated through schooling. All of it involved a strategy of psychological, identity, political and material reconstruction within Ethiopia. The objective of these marginalised rural inhabitants was to find a place without bending completely to the mould imposed by the conquerors by exploiting an alternative religion to the official Christianity. The fact remains, however, that the movement of rural Protestant youth into schools in the 1960s was a clear sign of their desire for integration. It is of no small significance that the three heroes of the Wolaita “pantheon of dignity,” Bogale Wallelu, Germame Neway and Wolde-Samaet Gebre-Wold, were all great educators who worked in the name of integration. These figures, of whom Wolaita who were educated between the 1940s and the 1960s always speak with a mixture of pride, esteem and affection, wanted to make Wolaita Ethiopian.
6The changes in the school culture had a major impact on pupils’ experience and the formation of their identities. The problem of adaptation to the culture did not arise in the case of urban, Amharic-speaking and Tewahedo Church followers’ children, but the same was not true of rural pupils, for whom school undoubtedly made it possible to cross the border between marginalisation and belonging to the nation, but also raised new obstacles. School assimilated and discriminated, levelled and ranked, standardised and distinguished. It provided the codes and skills necessary to develop within the national space, but it was also in itself the world of the “other”, especially under Haile Selassie’s regime. School was a social space in which acquisition of the criteria for integration into the nation (through an Amharic name, the Amharic language and, if possible, the Tewahedo Christian religion) was achieved by debasing one’s own identity. This was a less bitter experience for the generation of Wolaita students who attended school in the 1940s and 1950s than it was for those who went to school in the 1960s. The former were few in number and came from the city or its immediate surroundings, their fathers worked for the government and their families, most of whom had converted to the official religion of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church; they were already partially assimilated. The latter arrived from the countryside in their thousands, their fathers did not work for an administration and they were Protestant, but they still wanted to be fully Ethiopian.
7In fact, while the state imposed strictly-defined criteria of nationhood in its schools, the Wolaita youth who went to school in the 1960s did so on their own terms. They wanted to enter the nation as they wanted to, and not necessarily as the central government dictated. A study of school dynamics reveals a link among the various identifications. Sabine Panel has shown how the “two dynamics of spatial identification (individuality of nationalities and Ethiopian unification) are not exclusive and act in concert to build territories” (Planel 2003, 44). Wolaita and Ethiopian identifications achieved the same thing to build feelings of belonging. In many respects, the way in which the Derg redefined the criteria of belonging to the nation by declaring that nationalities were equal within a political community united by class solidarity was in line with the Wolaita’s expectations. The school culture, which remained assimilative, also became less discriminatory. School was still the world of the other, but it was a world that was more easily appropriated. Under the Derg, pedagogical relationships and discipline were stricter, and even extremely violent, but cultural discrimination diminished. Imaginations and identities were shaped in this web of tensions.
Girls, education and the nation
8The arrival of rural youth in government schools in the 1960s marked the first renewal of the sociology of the students in Wolaita. The second renewal took place from the late 1970s, with the arrival of girls. Under Haile Selassie’s regime, the state had made little effort to enrol girls in school, and it was not until 1974 that the first girls took the Grade 12 examination, although there were only four of them out of 350 students, and they were all teachers’ daughters. Their fathers sent them to school—sometimes against their mothers’ wishes—without any particular type of encouragement from the government. This schooling of girls was relatively independent of the state’s education policy, and these few girls entered a school space that was difficult to conquer. They were very much in the minority, accused of not conforming to the social norms of femininity, suspected of having loose morals, subjected to sexual pressure, intellectually discredited by some teachers and unrepresented in school textbooks: girls’ school experiences were built out of adversity.
9If they moved towards “women’s jobs,” it was not so much because the other paths were closed to them as it was because they themselves wished to. Adolescent girls at school wanted to develop skills that they saw as being specific to women, as their own qualities. They saw secretarial work, nursing and teaching as opportunities, not as forced careers. These were ways in which they could increase their space of freedom. One of their objectives was to gain their independence through a salaried job so that they would be able to have a balanced relationship with their future husband. This first generation of girls who attended school under Haile Selassie found themselves caught up in specific power relations that guided their concerns. Because they were from Amhara or assimilated Wolaita families, they were faced with patriarchal domination much more than with cultural discrimination. As a result, they were less concerned with the promotion of Wolaita than the advancement of girls and women in local society, and thus in the nation. Since the late 1970s, this generation of women graduates has worked hard for the education of girls and women.
10It was under the Derg that the state really began to take an interest in girls’ education. Armed with the discourse of dual oppression of Ethiopian women, feudal and patriarchal, the new regime declared that they would be promoted in the nation, and that it wanted to end discrimination in access to employment and positions of power. If this was to be achieved, women needed to be provided with educational capital. While power remained in the hands of men, the Derg encouraged the education of girls and women. Women were more involved in the literacy campaign than men were and in the 1980s girls also gradually occupied school benches. Although they received far more encouragement from the regime’s rhetoric to attend classes, their school experience was no easier than that of their elders had been. Prejudices around their supposedly lesser intellectual abilities still persisted. Girls and women barely figured in textbooks, or else they were presented in a stereotypical manner. Gender violence also increased in schools. Girls were more numerous and more anonymous, and they came from less privileged social backgrounds than their elders, who were the daughters of notables. Therefore, they were more vulnerable. In spite of these forms of violence, girls and women began to move into a social space that had until then been almost exclusively reserved for boys and men.
11Fifty years of school education have contributed to continuous transformations in social structures, sometimes in conjunction with the general transformations taking place at the national level, and sometimes by upsetting the relationships with local authorities.
Language and the written word: the battleground of the fight for legitimacy
12School education was the space where the Amharic language and the written word, both of which were at the heart of serious power issues, were acquired. For the state, language and the written word were two key tools for unifying the nation. The network of schools was where written production was distributed on a national scale, and at an unprecedented level. However, while Haile Selassie’s regime was hostile to any expression of a culture other than that of the north, the Derg, in line with its “equality of nationalities” policies, adopted a more open stance, including teaching in local languages during the literacy campaign. However, the position of Amharic strengthened during this period because the population took advantage of government education to take up the national language. The Wolaita had developed an aversion to Amharic—“the language that punishes you” and “makes you pay taxes”—since the time of the conquest. Contact with Amharic was part of a relationship of domination: with the tax collector, with the lord, and in official situations marked by feelings of dispossession, submission and humiliation. The same was true of writing. The conquerors had conquered with their weapons, but then ruled with their pens. Here again, contact with writing represented a drain on resources, or judicial acts or administrative documents that often brought bad news. At the end of the 1940s, young Wolaita who were attending school were accused by peasants of wanting to become tax collectors in the future. In the late 1950s, Abeba Fola’s father sent his son to school, telling him that their teachers dominated them because they could write. In their peripheries, empires provoke feelings of repulsion and attraction, but the two phenomena are not always clearly discernible. They are also extremes between which a multitude of positions emerge. In Wolaita, this tension manifested itself in Amharic and writing. They were objects of aversion and mistrust, but mastering them was tantamount to appropriating the instruments of domination in order to make a place for oneself in the nation. The school was at the heart of power issues because it was the place where these two tools were acquired. From the year the government school first opened, the ruling classes of Wolaita wanted to retain a monopoly over it. Thirty years later, in 1971, the children of the great melkegna and landowners, who were descended from settlers from the north, insulted their Wolaita classmates, telling them that they did not belong at school because they were born to serve. On both sides of the frontier that separated the world of the dominant from that of the dominated, everyone was aware of the political stakes of schooling.
Margins redefine the nation?
13With the advancing of a school culture and the capital it provided, the margins helped redefine the nation. Even in the case of authoritarian systems, movements take place behind the scenes. Gradually, and especially under the Derg, people from southern Ethiopia who had gone to school moved into different levels of government, or worked as teachers, in hospitals, in commerce and so on. They pushed for a redefinition of the political community simply by their presence, by their more complex way of viewing the nation and acting within it. Wolaita is an example of a drive from below. This bottom-up movement can be observed in schools from the 1960s onwards, and it accelerated under the Derg, when graduates entered the world of work in large numbers and took up positions of power. This was a different political dynamic, one that is less well known than the student movement and the armed struggles on the margins, which have been studied far more extensively.
14The Derg did not adopt the notion of equality of nationalities simply because it had been permeated by Stalin’s theory of nationalities that had been brought in by the student movement: it took note of a social reality that was certainly not found in Wolaita alone—that of millions of Ethiopians who aspired to a different definition of Ethiopia. The list drawn up by Donald Donham, which we cited in the introduction, therefore needs to be completed. To the “peasants, landlords and slaves created in the wake of Menilek’s expansion in the south” who “helped to make twentieth-century Ethiopia” (Donham 2002, 3) must be added the multitude of graduates. Since the time the first government schools were founded in the south in the 1940s, people gradually emerged, members of marginalised groups or women, who contributed, often silently, to redefining the Ethiopian nation.

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