ሌሎቹ በየአካባቢያቸው ለአገራቸው ሲታገሉ እኛ እዚህም በወላይታ አካባቢ ለምንድን ነው የማንታገለው? ሌባው ዘራፊው ቀማኛው ለምን ይበድላል? አባቶቻችን ለምን ይበደላሉ? ለምን ይጨቆናሉ? በሚል ወጣቱ ተነሳሳ።

Why is it that while others were fighting for their countries, we weren't doing the same in Wolaita? Why do thieves, looters, and robbers mistreat us? Why do they mistreat our fathers? Why do they oppress? These questions stirred the youth, prompting them to rise up.<fnref n="37" />

Instilling obedience to authority and loyalty to the regime were among the very first aims of school socialisation; however, students were also constantly reminded of their responsibilities as future leaders of the nation. School taught them that they had to be faithful servants of a just power: the country was ruled by law and not by force, and civil servants had to be honest and loyal, and devoted to the emperor, the country and society. The reality of Wolaita seemed to them to be totally contrary to these precepts. Power was exercised through force and arbitrariness, the local notables were accomplices of the thieves, the corruption of judges was so commonplace that they did not even bother to hide it and civil servants only served their own interests. In a word, the representatives of power betrayed their offices. Saol Akamo insists that the “campaign to eradicate thieves” “was not aimed at overthrowing the government but the false people in power.”<fnref n="38" /> It was to cleanse the administration of its corrupt, arbitrary and oppressive practices; to restore what should have been. In this sense, the revolt was not just a reaction to a situation that had become unbearable: it could be rationally legitimised by the education received at school. The pupils were inspired by the idea of an honest, fair and caring administration: the one the school showed them as an example, the one Germame Neway had tried to set up in Wolaita, the one that the students of Addis Ababa defended, the one they wanted for the future of their region and their country. In this respect, it seems that the movement should not have taken the violent turn it did. According to one of the actors in the movement, Wanna Dea, what was a “good idea turned into other crimes.” The leaders, who wanted to impose “moderate punishments,” were overwhelmed by events.<fnref n="39" />

Stressing that the campaign was not conceived as an act of disloyalty to the regime is essential to being able to understand it. The pupils of 1970 still nourished the faint hope that central power and national space might be a resource against local practices of power. They were inclined to believe that the emperor would take their side once he became aware of his subordinates' illegal activities, so to be judged as criminals was a source of great disappointment. They received harsh sentences, while the “thieves” were not disturbed.

<footnote n="37">³⁷Saol Akamo, interview, November 2010.</footnote>

<footnote n="38">³⁸Ibid.</footnote>

<footnote n="39">³⁹Wanna Dea, interview, December 2010.</footnote>
The regime, if not the emperor, had just proved that it showed solidarity for illegal practices. While some doubts might have remained, the trial proved once and for all that the Addis Ababa regime and the local aristocracy were one and the same.

Militant activities continued under the leadership of the students' associa-
tion. During the election of *dagna* (judges and village representatives responsi-
ble for collecting taxes) in 1972, the association succeeded in bringing together
enough people to campaign in all Wolaita. The aim was to encourage farmers
to choose their representatives freely by resisting pressure from the *melkegna*
and landowners only to elect people from their own clientele group. The
campaign was a success in many parts of the province. The two-year period
between 1972 and 1973 before the revolution was devoted to actions aimed
at mobilising the population. School was closed several times due to strikes
organised by the students. A demonstration was held in Areka, a Wolaita town
on the road to Addis Ababa, in May 1973. Joined by the townspeople, students,
teachers and a few peasants who were parents of pupils, they demonstrated in
front of the office of the governor of the *wereda* with slogans such as: "Land
to the tiller," "Incompetent administrators out" and "Bread for the hungry"
(Demeke 1985, 48).

4. Wolaita students, the nation and the revolution

In a book published in 2008, the philosopher Messay Kebede takes stock of the factors that led to the political radicalisation of Ethiopian students. He argues that it was not Ethiopia's political and economic conditions that resulted in the infusion of revolutionary ideas, but the prior adoption of Marxism-Leninism, which led to an alteration in how problems were perceived (Messay 2008, 15).

According to Messay Kebede, the students came from privileged back-
grounds. Because they were not directly faced with economic problems, they
were not socially predisposed to adopt revolutionary ideas. If students were
ready to embrace Marxism-Leninism, it was because they were in a state of
“psychological disorientation.” The fault lay with the imported school system
and its Western values, which would eventually lead students to reject their
country and heritage and choose a total break with the past. This analysis may
not be totally inaccurate, but it is far too partial, and Messay Kebede (too) draws
radical conclusions, to say the least. Why not rather think of the process in
terms of a system in which social realities and political theory feed into each
other to lead to political dispositions, rather than choosing between the chicken
and the egg? Is it not possible to come from an affluent background while also
being disgusted by the black misery ravaging one’s country, and to opt for a
radical transformation without being “psychologically disoriented”?

The pupils in Wolaita were exposed to the imported school system but their
radical criticism of Haile Selassie's regime and the socioeconomic realities of
their region was not the result of mental disorders caused by a state of cultural alienation. They were critical before they knew what Marxism-Leninism was because they were facing political oppression, cultural discrimination and economic problems. Their analysis was based on their own experiences. Moreover, to assume that an imported system necessarily leads to alienation ignores the complexity of the processes of reappropriation of school education. Pupils knew that some of the knowledge taught to them was imported; they were not passive recipients. Although they are attracted by distant societies and cultures, social actors use their capacity for reinterpretation. Finally, pupils are subject to multiple socialisations, at school, in their family and in their community, and school socialisation is not all-powerful. The political dispositions of the Wolaita pupils were the result of their immersion in these different socialising universes. Competing, and even contradictory, socialisations did not necessarily lead to identity crises and psychological disorders. Although this may happen, actors also know how to mobilise diverse embedded patterns of thought and action, depending on the situations in which they find themselves (Lahire 2011, 392). Ultimately, the case of the Wolaita pupils raises serious questions about analysis based on alienation, and invites a careful examination of the processes of appropriation at work in school education in the context of an imported system.

What was the level at which the Wolaita pupils who entered the struggle conceived their fight? Did they fight nationally against Haile Selassie's regime or locally against the system of domination implemented by the settlers, the Wolaita government employees and agents sent by the state? Measuring their testimonies against the "question of nationalities"—even though they had not yet formulated it in these terms—provides some elements of the answer, and allows us to look at the reality of their sense of belonging to the Ethiopian nation at the time. The "question of nationalities," which has been a major issue since the establishment of federalism from 1991 onwards, has its origins in the student movement at the end of the 1960s. This movement was the scene of the emergence of a discourse that combined a class struggle and a struggle for equality of nationalities, not without sometimes virulent debate. The problem is a complex one, and it gave rise to long-lasting and sometimes very violent divisions, the effects of which are still being felt today (Bahru 2007). It is true to say that class and nationality partly overlapped to form the structure of domination in southern Ethiopia, and the 1971 brawl between Amhara and Wolaita students at Soddo Secondary School was part of this dual relationship of domination. The "campaign to eradicate thieves" that had taken place a year earlier was more complex, as the people who were attacked by the students were part of a system of extortion that combined the shared interests of settlers and members of rural Wolaita society.
Because of the importance this issue has had since the 1990s, it is not easy to draw conclusions about the views of pupils in the 1970s on the basis of oral interviews conducted today. As a methodological precaution, the witnesses were not directed towards the question of social classes or nationalities. The aim was not to smooth out a complex reality or to caricature their concepts, but simply to establish the spectrum across which they unfolded. Abebe Fola, for example, says that when he was a secondary school pupil in the early 1970s, the problem he shared with his classmates was not the imperial regime but the “Amhara of Soddo.” He and his friends were not very much influenced by the students from the Ethiopian University Service who took advantage of their teaching year to politicise the pupils of Wolaita: “These teachers, not all but some serious politicians, were agitating us. [...] Not many of us accepted their agitation. Why? It was secondary for us. Our serious problem was with the Amhara of Soddo town.”<fnref n="40" /> According to Abebe Fola, the activist teachers from Addis Ababa were not paying attention—or were not paying enough attention—to the issue of nationality. In turn, the attention he paid to the political system the student movement described as “feudal,” which located the struggle in the entire national space while also recognising specificities in the south due to the cultural domination by the north, was secondary. His concept of domination dissociates local and national spaces.

For his part, Zebdewos Chama frequently interprets the struggle of the Wolaita students as being directed against the “Amhara.” For him, the central issue at the time was “to be freed [...] from the bondage of Amhara.” But he immediately adds: “When I say ‘Amhara,’ this means ‘Menilek’s Amhara.’ [...] Not all the Amhara people...”<fnref n="41" /> He therefore refers specifically to the system of domination set up in Wolaita—and by extension in the south—following the conquest by the Ethiopian army in 1894. Zebdewos Chama uses the formulations “Haile Selassie regime” and “Amhara regime” interchangeably. Although his dissociation of spaces appears to be less clear-cut than Abebe Fola’s, he seems to favour, through his past opposition to the imperial regime, the question of the oppression exercised by the north over the south. Ultimately, Abebe Fola and Zebdewos Chama situate social injustices within a perspective of the oppression of nationalities. Do they believe this today, in the context of federalism and the current government’s emphasis on “nationality rights,” or did they already believe it in the 1960s and 1970s? It seems that the latter version is correct: apparently they felt more marginalised as Wolaita than they did as peasant children. They consistently and emotionally emphasise the humiliations and daily struggle involved in living in a social world—that of the school and the city—in which their identity was denigrated.

<footnote n="40">⁴⁰Abebe Fola, interview, November 2009.</footnote>

<footnote n="41">⁴¹Zebdewos Chama, interview, November 2010.</footnote>
Others, on the contrary, seem to view the “nationality issue” as secondary, or
as not even a part of their struggle. Saol Akamo says that he committed himself
to the “campaign to eradicate thieves” in order to put an end to the oppressive
situation in which the peasants lived, which was considered unbearable. He
speaks of an oppressive and corrupt administration without blaming the
“Amhara,” a term he never uses. He also says that he wanted to fight “as others
did elsewhere,” and so does not individualise Wolaita as a place of oppressive
power practices. For their part, Paolos Sorsa and Wanna Dea also do not
utter the word “Amhara” at any time. They do not place the Amhara and the
Wolaita in opposition to each other, but rather young people and the regime,
the *melkegna* and the landlords. They do not seem to believe it is significant
whether one or the other was Amhara or Wolaita. The vocabulary they use is
one of social classes. For them, the lot of the Wolaita peasants was the same as
that of all peasants in Ethiopia. They fought against a feudal power that was
exercised on a national scale. The fact that they were the most heavily engaged
in the student movement is certainly not insignificant, however. They were,
therefore, members of a movement whose goal of overthrowing the regime
suggested the entire country as a field of action. While the student movement
was divided on the issue of nationality and social classes, it is the latter that
seems to have had the greatest influence on the Wolaita student activists of
the 1970s. It provided an opportunity to oppose oppressive practices at a local
level by projecting the goal of social transformation to the whole country.
Thinking about and acting for a different future at a national level meant
locating oneself in the time of the nation. As was the case with the faithful gen-
eration of the 1940s and 1950s, the national space was conceived as a resource
against local forms of domination. This time, however, it was not a political
space that was merely to be integrated into: the aim was to transform it.

Conclusion

The generation that was educated in the 1940s and 1950s was generally loyal
to the regime. The extensive opportunities for social mobility and the patriotic
climate of regained independence invited adherence to school propaganda based
on nationalism and a personality cult—the atmosphere was one of trust in the
school, and the regime and Haile Selassie. National integration and assimilation
were also encouraged. In contrast, the generation educated over the following
two decades was anti-establishment. Nationally, the administration and the
economy were no longer able to absorb all the graduates. In Wolaita, the number
of students increased significantly, particularly as a result of the increasing
enrolment of young people from rural areas, at a time when opportunities
were becoming scarcer. This revealed the limitations of the emperor's political
project, whose autocracy proved to be an end in itself despite the tireless
preaching about progress in the school space. In the 1960s, the discrepancy
between the assimilationist and progressive discourse of the state on the one
hand, and the misery of the peasant world and the oppressive practices of the
local administration on the other, was revealed in all its violence.

There can be no question that the political actions involved only a minority
of pupils and teachers—about a hundred during the “campaign to eradicate
thieves” out of more than 1,500 pupils in the town of Soddo—but it was
a powerful minority: a hundred or so people in contact with the national
student movement through the school network and linked to the surrounding
countryside by family ties represented a political force in a town of 10,000 in-
habitants. This was just an incubation phase, however, and a more intense
politicisation process was to take place in the early years of the revolution,
during the struggle against the establishment of the Derg military regime
between 1974 and 1978.
<figure><img src="image_26.png" /></figure>
Interlude 1

Schools and the Nation

in the Mid-1970s: Negotiated Identities

In the 1940s and 1950s, schooling in Wolaita was a uniquely urban phenomenon that mainly involved the children of political elites from the north and children of Wolaita who were co-opted and assimilated by the authorities. From the end of the 1950s, the idea that school education might be an instrument of integration through assimilation and social uplift began to make its way, very modestly, into rural areas, although the feeling of mistrust towards the dominant culture of the north did not disappear. One section of the population of Wolaita viewed the national space as a resource for emancipating themselves from the relations of domination that governed local society. The administration remained the main provider of employment for graduates. Social mobility worked well in the years of reconstruction and centralisation between 1941 and the early 1960s, but once the administration had been built and autocracy achieved, bottlenecks emerged. A timid demand for education arose in the Wolaita countryside just as the system's capacity to absorb graduates was shrinking.

At the same time, from the beginning of the 1960s, tensions arose in Soddo as more and more rural children arrived in schools. These rural young people were seen as a threat by the dominant minority, who lived off the exploitation of peasants. The school system's objective of assimilation ran up against the local organisation of power. In addition, these pupils did not only come from economically exploited, politically dominated and culturally marginalised rural areas: the overwhelming majority came from Wolaita families who had converted to Protestantism. They had their first schooling in the education centres that had been temporarily set up by Governor Germame Neway in 1958–59 or in the Protestant schools that dotted the countryside from the late 1950s onwards.

In people's memories of rural Wolaita, Germame Neway embodied the defence of the oppressed against an arbitrary power. As for Protestantism, it had been appropriated by the Wolaita as a source of identity and moral regeneration in the face of the power that was oppressing them. The pupils from the Protestant countryside were determined to make themselves a place in the nation without, however, fully complying with the criteria of belonging
imposed by the central government. They were willing to take an Amharic name and speak Amharic, but abandoning Protestantism to join the national Tewahedo Church would have cost too much. Thanks to their schooling, they had the ambition of becoming Ethiopians while also remaining Wolaita, of entering the national space without totally losing their identity and of taking their place in the nation, even if it meant having to force the door open. For the central government and Wolaita's urban society "orthodox" Christianity was a pillar of national identity. It was just a short step to come to doubt the patriotism of those who refused to adopt the national religion, who were pouring into government schools in large numbers from rural Protestant schools that were difficult for the government to control.

While students from rural areas can be seen to have been a privileged minority compared to the overwhelming majority, who remained apart from the movement towards schooling, their experience of school was not without violence. Teaching content and practices reminded them constantly that they were moving into the world of the “other”, a world in which they were not particularly welcome. Sarcasm and hostility from both teachers and students from the dominant class were often the response to their desire to move up the social ladder. Schools, which were supposed to encourage them, also put obstacles in their way. Nevertheless, the school system succeeded in creating an esprit de corps among the pupils, so that it was possible to speak of graduates as a social group in their own right. This was the result of the limited number of pupils who attended school, as well as the pedagogical arrangements in schools, which had specific political socialisation objectives. The students learned that they were to be the leaders of the nation, that their efforts were to be devoted to serving king and country for the common good, with the whole process being labelled under the category of “progress.” This discourse burdened them with heavy responsibilities, and this socialisation had the opposite effect for Haile Selassie’s regime: to its advantage in the 1940s and 1950s, and to its disadvantage in the two decades that followed.

Between 1941 and 1974, the discourses and forms of political socialisation at work in schools remained unchanged. The emperor was still the man who had saved Ethiopia from Italian colonisation, the father who watered the country with his benefits, the enlightened guide who embodied the future. Students of the 1940s and 1950s wanted to serve their country by being loyal to the regime. Nationally, the two decades following the liberation from Italian occupation were a period of intense patriotism and a belief in a future of progress. Pupils in Wolaita were particularly exposed to this atmosphere, which strongly permeated the school space. The pupils of the 1960s and 1970s, like their elders, wanted to serve their country, but the context was now very different. The patriotic fervour of the 1950s and 1960s had faded, and nationalist pride in being the only uncolonised country in Africa gave way in the early 1960s to
a bitter sense of being one of the poorest countries on a now largely liberated continent. This was blamed on the inertia of the regime. In Wolaita, the regime did not seem ready to reform a power system, an economic structure and forms of cultural discrimination that kept the vast majority marginalised. The rhetoric of progress to which students were constantly exposed had not been followed up. The regime had not kept its promises, and the pupils were no longer able to believe in Haile Selassie.

However, they had absorbed the belief that they had to lead and serve the nation in the name of progress. Some were therefore inclined to reformulate the school discourse in terms of the discrepancies between it and the social realities of their region. This requirement presented itself to them at the same time as students in Addis Ababa, with whom they were in contact, were adopting the Marxist ideas that were circulating in university campuses internationally. As adapted to the Ethiopian situation, these ideas gave rise to demands expressed in the slogans "Land to the tiller" and "Education for all". While these slogans may not appear very original at first glance, they could not fail to be invested with precise content by the students of Wolaita, and in 1970, school propaganda about the emperor and progress seemed to be a pallid notion in the face of students and pupils who had rubbed shoulders with Marxism, and who were convinced that they had to guide the nation.
<figure><img src="image_27.png" /></figure>
Education under the Derg:
Emancipation and Encadrement
(1978–1991)
<figure><img src="image_28.png" /></figure>
In April 1976, the new government promulgated the programme of the National Democratic Revolution, which set out the broad directions of the new national policy. The Derg declared that “scientific socialism” had been officially adopted, and committed the nation to the construction of a “socialist Ethiopia.” This political project implied a new way of thinking about the nation, its future and consequently its education system. Together with the disappearance of the aristocracy, the Derg announced the emancipation of those who had been oppressed in the past: peasants, marginalised populations in the south and women. These objectives required mass education with the objective of building a new society. The new education policy was developed with the participation of East German pedagogues, who replaced North American expatriates in the wake of the changes in alliances brought about by the revolution.

The feudal system was considered responsible for the fact that Ethiopia was one of the most “backward” countries in the world.<fnref n="1" /> This was why the programme of the National Democratic Revolution announced that the objectives of the revolution were: “To completely abolish feudalism, imperialism and bureaucratic capitalism from Ethiopia and, with the united effort of all anti-feudal and anti-imperialist forces, build a new Ethiopia and lay a strong foundation for the transition to socialism.”<fnref n="2" /> Although the term seems strange, “bureaucratic capitalism” referred to the alliance of the Ethiopian “feudal class” and US imperialism as the particular system used for the oppression of Ethiopians under Haile Selassie’s regime.<fnref n="3" /> Breaking away from “backwardness” meant fighting those who had made this system work. The notion of the “class enemy” (የመደብ ጠላት) then appeared in official rhetoric. The nation was redefined on an egalitarian basis, and would be cemented by class consciousness, and united in the construction of the new society. The programme of the National Democratic Revolution announced the promotion of nationalities that had been oppressed in the past.<fnref n="4" /> It was, the “monarchy of divine right” that had divided Ethiopians along national, regional, religious, linguistic and sectarian lines.<fnref n="5" /> The Derg

<footnote n="1">¹MOI, *Ethiopia in Revolution* (1977), 6.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">²PMGE, *Programme of the National Democratic Revolution of Ethiopia* (20 April 1976), 1.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³MOI, *Ethiopia in Revolution* (1977), 20–21.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴PMGE, *Programme of the National Democratic Revolution of Ethiopia* (1976), 5.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵MOI, *Ethiopia in Revolution* (1977), 20.</footnote>
proclaimed the abolition of the cultural domination of the Christian North over the Muslim and “pagan” south, and in so doing, the new regime proposed a form of secular nationalism that would be free from the religious, social and cultural discrimination of the past (Clapham 1988, 195). But any idea of self-determination was excluded. The definition of common enemies and the equality of nationalities was intended to create a nationwide sense of class solidarity that transcended particular identities. Finally, under the overthrown regime, Ethiopian women had been subjected to the dual oppression of class and gender.<fnref n="6" /> But the programme of the National Democratic Revolution declared that this would no longer be the case in socialist Ethiopia: “There will not be any sort of discrimination among [...] sexes. No citizen will be accorded special privilege in his or her political, economic and social undertaking on the basis of [...] sex.”<fnref n="7" /> The Derg announced that women’s liberation was an integral component of national policies. The three categories to be mobilised in the service of the egalitarian redefinition of the nation were ranked in descending order of importance: class, nationality and gender. Only in a united Ethiopia cemented by class consciousness could nationalities and then women achieve emancipation.

The school system, which had hitherto been oriented towards a capitalist industrial society, was to be pointed in the direction of socialist countries. More generally, the official adoption of “scientific socialism” meant a change in international alliances. Between 1976 and 1989, six work plans were established between the Ethiopian ministries of Education, Culture and Health and their East German counterparts. The Ethiopian government was interested in educational cooperation with East Germany because its school system was considered one of the best among the socialist models. For its part, the GDR sought to orient the Ethiopian school system towards its own model through the design of educational policies and curricula, and the training of administrative and teaching staff (Haile-Gabriel 2006, 74–76). The school system of Haile Selassie’s regime was accused of having been aimed exclusively at creating a loyal administration in order to ensure that the same class remained in power. The limited spread of school education was the result of a deliberate choice by the monarchy, [which] had kept the population in ignorance in order to better be able to oppress it.<fnref n="8" /> The National Democratic Revolution, on the contrary, announced that “There will be an educational programme that will provide free education, step by step, to the broad masses. Such a programme will aim at intensifying the struggle against feudalism,

<footnote n="6">⁶Ibid., 39.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷PMGE, *Programme of the National Democratic Revolution of Ethiopia* (1976), 6.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸MOE, *Education in Socialist Ethiopia...* (1984), i.</footnote>
imperialism and bureaucratic capitalism. All necessary measures to eliminate illiteracy will be undertaken.”<fnref n="9" />

The eradication of illiteracy was a priority because it was understood that illiteracy, poverty and marginalisation overlapped. A literate population was the first step towards a general education, which would ensure the mobilisation of everyone for the common good, a prerequisite for a collective escape from poverty. Under Haile Selassie, the school system had provided an elitist education, based on the argument that a minority of enlightened people would guide the nation towards progress. The Derg announced a general basic education for development from below. In 1980, the Ministry of Education specified the three general objectives of the new school policy in a document titled *General Objectives for Ethiopian Education: education for scientific consciousness, production and a socialist consciousness*.<fnref n="10" /> While the National Democratic Revolution's programme included major educational principles that were common to all socialist regimes, the *General Objectives for Ethiopian Education* are strongly reminiscent of the pedagogical discourses of the GDR. Like its East German counterpart, Ethiopian pedagogy envisaged the formation of a complete personality, a “new man” who would build a “new society” through a polytechnic education linking theory and practice.<fnref n="11" /> Building a socialist society implied an integrated education that was concerned with the political awareness and the technical, scientific and intellectual skills of individuals, while also paying special attention to ethics and moral qualities.

In the 1980s, the Ministry of Education also mobilised the concept of the “learning society,” which had been in vogue in international institutions such as UNESCO since the 1970s. In the preface to the booklet *Education in Socialist Ethiopia: Origins, Reorientation, Strategy for Future Development*, the Minister of Education, Bililign Mandefro, explained: “We believe that education in Ethiopia has now been set on a course which will result in the creation of a LEARNING SOCIETY. Through the generations to come, that learning society will transform Ethiopia.”<fnref n="12" /> Based on a recognition that contemporary societies were undergoing permanent change and that education must be adapted to this situation, the notion of a “learning society” emphasised education for all throughout a person’s life, which must extend beyond schools to children and adults alike. Its first theorisations were developed by liberal education researchers in the late 1960s (Jarvis 2000). Their aim was to adapt the circulation of knowledge to transformations in the market and the capitalist economy, and to enable people to live in a world of increasingly rapid change.

<footnote n="9">⁹MOE, *Basic Information on Education in Ethiopia* (1977), 3–4.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰MOE, *General Objectives for Ethiopian Education* (1980).</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹MOE, *Education in Socialist Ethiopia...* (1984), 15.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹²Ibid.</footnote>
In the concept of the “learning society,” Ethiopian school decision-makers did not mean an education that was adapted to the market, but rather a society in which teaching and learning would be integrated into daily activities, in which communities would be the actors of their education within a dynamic of social transformation.

In order to achieve this educational project, the Derg implemented an ambitious school policy that extended to non-formal and formal education alike. Before that, however, the strengthening of its power went through an extremely violent and striking revolutionary moment (Chapter 6). The regime launched a national literacy campaign, which lasted from 1979 until the fall of the regime in 1991, with the aim of totally eradicating illiteracy (Chapter 7). This campaign was carried out in conjunction with a major extension of schooling to rural areas (Chapter 8). Lesson content was modified to correspond to the new political project, and transmitted the fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism and advocated planning, collectivisation and industrialisation on the Soviet model (Chapter 9). Power relations within the school space were transformed. Discrimination based on cultural criteria diminished, while the violence of the pedagogical relationship intensified sharply alongside the Derg's violent practice of power (Chapter 10).
Chapter 6

# The School Environment and The Revolution: From Political and Educational Mobilisation to the Red Terror (1974–1978)

The 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

After 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.

While 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*

It 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.

There 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).

On 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*

Events 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*

The 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.
For 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.<fnref n="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*

Holding 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

<footnote n="1">¹Paolos Sorsa, interview, December 2010.</footnote>
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.

On 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

Inspired 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
<figure><img src="image_29.png" /></figure>

Participants of the "Zemecha" program at a Rally before leaving for the countryside to educate and organize the oppressed peasantry.

<caption>Figure 11. Departure for the zemecha</caption>

actors were profoundly impacted by this moment, and their experience of it merits examination.

Although 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.<fnref n="2" />

For 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.<fnref n="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.<fnref n="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.<fnref n="5" />

The 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*

In 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

<footnote n="2">²Tsehai Zerihun, interview, January 2011.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³Wanna Dea, interview, December 2010.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴Yemesrach Alula, interview, January 2010.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵Tsehai Zerihun, interview, January 2011.</footnote>
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.<fnref n="6" />

Literacy 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
zemecha girls had to make sure that women sent "the children they gave birth to
school. The Derg sent us to teach this."<fnref n="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)

The 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

<footnote n="6">⁶Wanna Dea, interview, December 2010.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷Yaluse Mita, interview, November 2009.</footnote>
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.

Education 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.<fnref n="8" />

Tsehai 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.<fnref n="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.<fnref n="10" />

The 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.<fnref n="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.

<footnote n="8">⁸Tsehai Zerihun, interview, January 2011.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹Yaluse Mita (teacher), interview, November 2009.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰Tsehai Zerihun, interview, January 2011.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹For example: MOEFA, *Home Economics for Grade 9, Book One* (1974 [1969]), 15–21.</footnote>
The 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.<fnref n="12" />

As 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.

Along 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.<fnref n="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

<footnote n="12">¹²Yaluse Mita, interview, November 2009.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">¹³Ibid.</footnote>
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.<fnref n="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).

The 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*

The 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,<fnref n="15" /> and that the “basic

<footnote n="14">¹⁴MOEFA, *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.</footnote>

<footnote n="15">¹⁵Kassech Mulugeta, interview, December 2009; Yemesrach Alula, interview, January 2010.</footnote>
development” was changing the face of the countryside.<fnref n="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*

The 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.

Events 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.

The 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

<footnote n="16">¹⁶Yaluse Mita, interview, November 2009.</footnote>
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.

The lack of precise directives from the government initially led to differ-
ences of interpretation concerning the political reorganisation of the coun-
tryside. 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."<fnref n="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

<footnote n="17">¹⁷Wanna Dea, interview, December 2010.</footnote>
between the Derg's desire for leadership and the *zemach's* dream of a rural
democracy.

Radicalisation 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.<fnref n="18" />

The 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."<fnref n="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"<fnref n="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.<fnref n="21" /> Specific

<footnote n="18">¹⁸Paolos Sorsa, interview, December 2010.</footnote>

<footnote n="19">¹⁹Abraham Worku, interview, January 2011.</footnote>

<footnote n="20">²⁰Paolos Sorsa, interview, December 2010.</footnote>

<footnote n="21">²¹Wanna Dea, interview, December 2010.</footnote>
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.<fnref n="22" />

Students 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."<fnref n="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.'"<fnref n="24" />

The 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.

<footnote n="22">²² Abraham Worku, interview, January 2011.</footnote>

<footnote n="23">²³ Wanna Dea, interview, December 2010.</footnote>

<footnote n="24">²⁴ Abraham Worku, interview, January 2011.</footnote>
2.4. Farmers, the zemach and the Derg

But 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).

A 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.

There 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.

Yaluse Mita remembers very good relations with the peasants:

በእድገት በሕብረት የትምህርት ዘመቻ ወቅት ወደ እርሶ 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.<fnref n="25" />

Tsehai 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.<fnref n="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.<fnref n="27" />

<footnote n="25">²⁵Yaluse Mita, interview, November 2009.</footnote>

<footnote n="26">²⁶Tsehai Zerihun, interview, January 2011.</footnote>

<footnote n="27">²⁷Kassech Mulugeta, interview, December 2009; Yemesrach Alula, interview, January 2010.</footnote>
The 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.”<fnref n="28" />

For 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).

Relations 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

<footnote n="28">²⁸Wanna Dea, interview, December 2010.</footnote>
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.’”<fnref n="29" />

Oral 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.”<fnref n="30" />

After 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.<fnref n="31" />

<footnote n="29">²⁹Abraham Worku, interview, January 2011.</footnote>

<footnote n="30">³⁰Paolos Sorsa, interview, December 2010.</footnote>

<footnote n="31">³¹Ibid.</footnote>
## 2.5. The Red Terror

The 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.

The 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.<fnref n="32" />

Tsehai 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

<footnote n="32">³²Tsehai Zerihun, interview, January 2011.</footnote>
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."<fnref n="33" />

Father 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).

Several 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

<footnote n="33">³³ Abba Gino (Capuchin missionary), interview, Soddo, 12 December 2009.</footnote>
nothing left of my life. All my friends were dead or abroad, and our organisations
had dissolved. (Demissie 2004, 340)

Paolos 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."<fnref n="34" />

In 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

The 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.

For the students, the *zemecha* was a moment of intense politicisation, due to
both the confrontation with the misery of the countryside and the widespread

<footnote n="34">³⁴Paolos Sorsa, interview, 14 December 2010.</footnote>
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.”
Chapter 7

# The Literacy Campaign: A Matrix for the New Society? (1979–1985)

In order to give birth to a “learning society” aimed at nurturing scientific awareness, encouraging socialist attitudes and increasing production, the Derg implemented a national campaign in 1979 with the objective of completely eradicating illiteracy by 1987. It was a flagship action of the regime, and was envisaged to be the primary impetus that would set the population on the road to a widespread and sustainable education that would transform society. This chapter will show how this campaign was conceived as a powerful vector of mobilisation and offer an update on the educational, social and political dynamics it generated. By analysing the ways in which a mass project decided from above was engaged in by the population, it will be possible for us to understand how the various actors—peasant communities, women and members of marginalised nationalities—wanted to live within the national political community.

The literacy campaign began in 1979 and lasted until the fall of the Derg in 1991. This chapter focuses on the years between 1979 and 1985, a short period of relative calm when the regime became institutionalised in the countryside. 1985 was marked by a great famine, which was followed by forced population displacements and the villagisation policy. The second half of the 1980s also saw an intensification of the war against Eritrea. The period between 1985 and 1991 was one of increased pressure on the population, and will be discussed in Chapter 10.

## 1. Eradicating illiteracy: the method

To implement its campaign, the regime drew on the literacy experiments that had been carried out on a smaller scale since the 1960s.

### 1.1. *Building on past literacy experiences*

In the 1960s, the Ethiopian government, UNESCO, UNDP and the Lutheran Church carried out functional literacy projects, the aim being to equip their target populations with the appropriate knowledge and skills to increase productivity and serve development. A first proclamation on literacy issued by Emperor Haile Selassie in 1955 called on adults to work towards literacy on their own initiative using their personal means and locally-available
educational resources.<fnref n="1" /> The government did not announce any action on its part. The first significant step was taken in 1961 with the establishment of the “National Literacy Campaign,”<fnref n="2" /> a misleading name, as it was an institution and not a campaign. The emperor was the head of the organising committee, the crown prince was its president, and the patriarch and prime minister were honorary members, “to show the importance that the government and the people of Ethiopia [accorded] to such an organisation.”<fnref n="3" /> In 1966, a Department of Adult Education was established within the Ministry of Education.<fnref n="4" /> By the summer of 1962, 13,280 people had attended literacy classes. This number rose to 27,000 in 1964, and then fell back to 7,500 in 1969, before the project collapsed (Gudeta 1982, 206).

The most important work done on literacy before the revolution was the Yemesrach Dems Literacy Campaign (YDLC), which was implemented between 1962 and 1975.<fnref n="5" /> It was initiated by the Mekane Yesus Evangelical Church, an Ethiopian affiliate of the Lutheran World Federation. Although the church was established in the southwest of the country, especially in Wellega, the campaign was carried out in 12 of the 14 provinces of the empire, with a focus on remote rural areas. In the northern regions with an “orthodox” Christian majority, schools were established in Muslim villages so as not to compete with the official Tewahedo Church (Sjörström & Sjörström 1983, 69–71). The YDLC had evangelistic aims coupled with a functional literacy project. Amharic, arithmetic and the Bible were taught, with the addition of courses on agriculture, nutrition and health (Sjörström & Sjörström 1973, 17). By 1973, it had reached 375,000 people, half of whom were members of the Ethiopian evangelical churches. From 1975, the YDLC literacy centres were gradually transferred to the newly-established farmers’ associations (Sjörström & Sjörström 1983, 11–14). The teachers, Ethiopians with limited training who accomplished a great deal with very limited means, then joined the Derg literacy campaign as instructors and inspectors (Sjörström & Sjörström 1983, 184).

The third initiative was the Adult Literacy and Vocational Training Project, which was implemented between 1968 and 1974. It was part of the Experimental World Literacy Programme (EWLP) that was conducted and funded by UNESCO and the UNDP in 11 countries between 1967 and 1973. In Ethiopia, four zones were selected: Wolaita, Arsi, Kaffa and Methara

<footnote n="1">¹MOE, *Every Ethiopian Will Know How to Read and Write and Forever* (1981), 10.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">²MOI, *Ethiopia Today: Education* (1973), 23.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³MOE, *Every Ethiopian Will Know How to Read and Write and Forever* (1981), 11.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴MOI, *Ethiopia Today: Education* (1973), 23.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵“Yemesrach Dems” means “The Voice of Good News” in Amharic.</footnote>
Ribbon.<fnref n="6" /> The planning and management of the project was the responsibility of the Ethiopian Ministry of Education, in partnership with the Ministry of Agriculture, Trade and Industry. UNESCO was responsible for the financial assistance provided by the UNDP.<fnref n="7" /> Its objective was to test the functional literacy method that had been officially adopted by UNESCO in 1965 at the Tehran Conference. Kaffa, Wolaita and Arsi were selected on the basis of their estimated potential for “rural development.”<fnref n="8" /> In Methara Ribbon, which is in the industrialised zone southeast of Addis Ababa, literacy was linked to technical education and the safety standards to be applied in factories.<fnref n="9" />

The adult literacy and vocational training established in Wolaita was integrated into the Wolaita Agricultural Development Unit (WADU), which started in 1970, funded two thirds by the World Bank and one third by the government. It aimed to enhance food security through the introduction of chemical fertilisers, better seeds and pesticides, the development of credit for farmers and the creation of cooperatives (Dassalegn 2007, 30). Reading, writing and basic arithmetic were taught using appropriate vocabulary and applications for agriculture, hygiene and nutrition.<fnref n="10" /> The instructors were local students from grades 6 to 12 who had received a brief training in literacy teaching.<fnref n="11" /> On the eve of the revolution in 1974, 43,440 people in the four areas selected for the project had become literate, with 13,960 in Wolaita alone.<fnref n="12" />

By 1970, across the country and across all projects, one million people had become literate. According to the Director of the Department of Adult Education, the “problem” had “only been touched on.”<fnref n="13" /> In 1974, the illiteracy rate was 93%.<fnref n="14" /> However, the country had people with experience of literacy methods, notably functional literacy for health and agriculture. Textbooks had been produced that could serve as models. Finally, the Mass Literacy Campaign that began in 1979 could count on the momentum generated three years earlier by the *zemecha*.

## 1.2. *The organisation*

First of all, the Department of Adult Education was given a new lease of life. Made up of 18 staff members in 1974, its initial work was to review past

<footnote n="6">⁶MOI, *Ethiopia Today: Education* (1973), 24.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷UNESCO, *Ethiopia. Work-Oriented Adult Literacy Pilot Project* (Paris: UNESCO, 1975), 1.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸Ibid., 2 and 5.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹Ibid., 3.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰Ibid., 4.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹Ibid., 6–7.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹²Ibid., iv.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">¹³MOE, *Every Ethiopian Will Know How to Read and Write and Forever* (1981), 11.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">¹⁴MOE, *Information Paper on the Education System in Ethiopia* (1982), 10.</footnote>
experiences and develop teaching materials.<fnref n="15" /> This is how Gudeta Mammo, Director of the Coordinating Committee of the National Literacy Campaign, describes the process of developing the literacy campaign:

> Before the actual launching of the National Literacy Campaign [...] all those who were to be involved were invited to discuss it. Top government officials in the Revolutionary National Development Campaign and Central Planning Supreme Council met to discuss ways and means of launching the campaign. Once the programme was approved, a National Seminar was conducted involving all Regional and Provincial Administrators, Peasant Association members, Production and Political Cadres, Urban Dwellers Association members and Women and Youth Associations members. The participation of officials together with the members of the different associations was to control the consolidation of the plan and facilitated the mobilization and participation of the masses. (Gudeta 1985, 108)

In May 1979, the Coordinating Committee for the National Literacy Campaign was established and then expanded to the various levels of government.<fnref n="16" /> The policy was developed and driven by the Coordinating Committee at the Ministry of Education, and then descended in stages to the peasant and urban neighbourhood associations to reach the masses. The literacy campaign was a good example of the regime's ability to carry out large-scale action in a limited timeframe through the effective articulation of the various administrative levels. The key structures for linking government and communities were the peasant associations, which were responsible for all logistics and monitoring at a local level (Dassalegn 1984, 96).

### 1.3. *Using all available means*

The effort was jointly financed by international institutions, UNICEF, UNESCO and the European Development Fund, by foreign countries such as the USSR, Japan and the GDR, by the Ethiopian government and by the population directly.<fnref n="17" /> The population was heavily involved: 65% of the financial resources obtained locally were used at a national level, while 35% were held back for local use (Gudeta 1985, 118). Implementation of the campaign would have been impossible without the wide-scale involvement of the population, however. People who were able to read and write were mobilised on a massive scale. The vast majority of the literacy teachers were students, accompanied by teachers and civil servants from the administration or the army. Candidates for selection had to be healthy, single and childless (Gudeta 1990, 5). In 1979, they numbered 241,501 and in 1980, 57,993.<fnref n="18" /> Logically, as literacy progressed,

<footnote n="15">¹⁵MOE, *Every Ethiopian...* (1981), 19</footnote>

<footnote n="16">¹⁶Ibid., 21.</footnote>

<footnote n="17">¹⁷Ibid., 43–44.</footnote>

<footnote n="18">¹⁸Ibid., 41.</footnote>
the number of enrolments decreased, as did the number of students. Service was compulsory, and all pupils who had passed the Grade 12 final examination had to teach for at least four months. It was a prerequisite for further study and employment. Demeke Melesse, an instructor in 1989, recalls that he received 60 *ber* per month—a relatively symbolic sum considering that the salary of a primary school teacher at that time was 400 *ber* per month—and a uniform, and was housed and fed by the peasants.<fnref n="19" /> In turn, in order to make the best use of available resources, literate farmers gradually became instructors in their own communities. These local literacy instructors were sometimes temporarily assisted by young Grade 12 graduates sent by the Ministry of Education (Pankhurst 1990, 66).

"Schools, town association centres, factory workshops, commercial premises, military camps, prisons, private homes, offices, churches and mosques, youth centres, state farms and meeting rooms" became literacy centres for a few hours a day (Gudeta 1982, 208). In rural areas where these buildings were not available, thatched earthen buildings in the style of peasant dwellings were put up by the villagers, or literacy classes were held in the shade of trees. The basic school materials consisted of a blackboard, an alphabet poster and sometimes beginners' books. The reading books were produced in Addis Ababa and transported by truck to the last place accessible by road before being brought to the villages by mule by farmers (Gudeta 1985, 120). Lack of paper and pens was a major problem in rural areas at the beginning of the campaign, but small village traders quickly acquired them before they were distributed by consumer cooperatives.<fnref n="20" />

1.4. *Rhythm and timing*

The established objective was the total eradication of illiteracy by 1982 in urban areas and by 1987 in rural areas.<fnref n="21" /> The campaign was organised as a series of “stages,” at a rate of two per year. The main session began at the end of the school year, when students, young graduates and teachers were available. Literacy teaching was provided for four to five months, for three hours a day, five days a week (McNab 1990, 69). Specific targets were set for each stage to spread literacy from the cities to the countryside, and from one stage to the next. The first two stages, from June to October 1979 and October 1979 to June 1980, respectively, were “a concerted attack in urban and surrounding areas.” In the third stage, from May to October 1980, action was extended to rural areas selected by the provincial coordinating committees. The aim of the fourth stage, from November 1980 to April 1981, was the final eradication

<footnote n="19">¹⁹Demeke Melesse (teacher), interview, Lalibela, 20 February 2008.</footnote>

<footnote n="20">²⁰MOE, *Every Ethiopian Will Know How to Read and Write and Forever* (1981), 39.</footnote>

<footnote n="21">²¹MOE, *Information Paper on the Education System in Ethiopia* (1982), 9.</footnote>
of illiteracy in urban areas and an extension to other rural areas. From these fully literate “safe bases,” the stages would be launched towards “the vast rural areas,” until illiteracy had been totally eliminated.<fnref n="22" /> For the military regime, this was a “campaign,” a progressive conquest of the territories of illiteracy.

## 2. Teaching: knowledge and languages

The knowledge that was disseminated and the languages that were used were a reflection of the Derg's development policy and its redefinition of the nation.

### 2.1. Knowledge: organising communities along socialist lines and improving living conditions

The basic literacy teaching materials consisted of a syllabary, a reading book, an arithmetic book and a political education book (McNab 1990, 75). Other textbooks were produced specifically to be used by new readers as part of a post-literacy scheme. The aim was to ensure that the skills acquired were maintained, and that they would be directed towards functional knowledge that could be used directly to improve material living conditions and transform community organisation. The themes of the textbooks were health, hygiene, childcare, agriculture and political education. By 1982, the Coordinating Committee of the National Literacy Campaign had built 4,300 “community reading rooms” and produced 50 titles to be used by newly-literate people.<fnref n="23" /> Two examples of textbooks, one on the role and functioning of cooperatives and the other on health, child care, hygiene and milking, show the knowledge that was disseminated and how it was presented.<fnref n="24" />

The first textbook *Worker Cooperatives* had openly political objectives. As the authors stated in the introduction:

> መጽሐፉ በሶሻሊስት ኢትዮጽያ የሚቋቋሙትን የኅብረት ሥራ ማኅበራት ዓይነቶች ይገልጻል ። [...] የሰፊው ሠርቶ አደር ሕዝብ ኑሮ መሻሻል ለሚደረገው ጥረት ከፍተኛ አስተዋጽኦ እንደሚያበረክቱ ለማሣየት ነው። [...] ዝግጅቱም ለጎልማሶች እንደሚስማማ በቃላል ቃላት ፣ በአጫጭር አረፍተ ነገሮችና አንቀጽች ለማቅረብ ጥረት ተደርጓል።

This book offers explanations regarding the cooperatives established in socialist Ethiopia. It aims to highlight the efforts they undertake and their significant contributions to enhancing the lives of the working masses. To ensure its accessibility for adults, an endeavour has been made to use simple words, short sentences, and paragraphs in its organization.<fnref n="25" />

<footnote n="22">²²MOE, *Every Ethiopian...* (1981), 23–24.</footnote>

<footnote n="23">²³MOE, *Information Paper on the Education System in Ethiopia* (1982), 10–11.</footnote>

<footnote n="24">²⁴MOE, የኅብረት ሥራ ማኅበር ትምህርት ትምህርት ፣ ሁለተኛ መጽሐፍ (*Worker Cooperatives, book 2*) (1979); MOE, ሙያ ነክ ምንባብ ምንባብ ፣ ፫ (*Book of Reading on Skills, Book 3*) (1983).</footnote>

<footnote n="25">²⁵MOE, የኅብረት ሥራ ማኅበር ትምህርት ትምህርት ፣ ሁለተኛ መጽሐፍ (*Worker Cooperatives, Book 2*) (1979), introduction.</footnote>
The manual presented four types of cooperatives: service cooperatives, producer cooperatives, savings and credit cooperatives, and housing cooperatives. It went on to explain how they operated, their usefulness and their objectives in terms of production and spreading socialist ideas and practices, technology and development: their “multiple contributions to the construction of the new society” (ለአዲስ ሕብረተሰብ ግንባታ የሚያበረክቱት አስተዋጽኦ).<fnref n="26" /> They lay at the heart of the workings of a society based on solidarity, in which the population’s economic, political and social rights would finally be guaranteed. Their advantages in terms of development were then highlighted. An organisation of production based on cooperatives would allow better transmission and use of “modern technology” than a system based on the private ownership of production resources; along the road to development, socialism was a “superior form” to capitalism. In the space of just 30 pages, therefore, the manual offered some basic notions of Marxism-Leninism and some explanations of the functioning and rationale of a collectivised society.

In the introduction to the book on health, hygiene and agriculture, the authors explained that:

> መጽሐፉ ለአዲስ አንባቢያን ችሎታ ተስማሚ እንደሚሆን ታስቦ ቀለል ባለ አቀራረብ ሥዐላዊ መግለጫዎች ታክለውበት ተዘጋጅቷል። ስለሆነም ጎልማሶች መጽሐፉን አንብበው ያገኙትን ዕውቀት ለኑሮአቸው መሻሻል እንደሚጠቀሙበት እምነታችን ነው።

Recognizing the need for this book to align with the skills of new readers, it has been meticulously crafted with clear and engaging illustrations. We are confident that adults, while reading this book, will discover valuable knowledge to enhance their lives.<fnref n="27" />

The book depicted a familiar world from the first glance. Many of the didactic illustrations depicted Ethiopian peasants in their local environment. There was no comparison between the peasant world and a distant “modernity” that was viewed as superior. Women’s and men’s activities were presented separately, even though they were combined in the same book. The illustrations on childcare and hygiene in the domestic sphere featured women, while those on agriculture featured men.

The book was divided into five sections. The first focused on the most common contagious diseases that affected children, such as whooping cough, tonsillitis and smallpox. Symptoms were described in such a way that they could be detected by everyone, and the existence or lack of a vaccine was specified in each case. Vaccinations for children were the subject of the second chapter, and readers were strongly encouraged to visit health centres. All the

<footnote n="26">²⁶Ibid., 12.</footnote>

<footnote n="27">²⁷MOE, ሙያ ነክ ምንባብ ምንባብ ፣ ፫ (Book of Reading on Skills, Book 3) (1983), introduction.</footnote>
illustrations depicted a woman and her child at a doctor’s clinic. This was
an attempt to familiarise readers with medical institutions in a rural society
where there was little or no medical care. The third section was titled *Let’s be
careful disease doesn’t spread* (በሸታ እንዳይዛመት እንጠንቀቅ). It dealt with bodily
hygiene and diet, and how diseases spread through breathing and mucous
membranes. Several pages were dedicated to “pests”: rodents such as mice
and rats, and insects such as flies, fleas and mosquitoes. The fourth chapter
presented techniques for managing waste and human excretion. Simple and
inexpensive building techniques were suggested using materials that were
directly available in the countryside, such as wood, earth and stones. The
text was illustrated with plans showing the dimensions to be used when
building latrines, a hole for burning domestic waste and a sink system to filter
wastewater using layers of stones of different sizes. This section presented a
series of practices aimed at family and community maintenance of the living
environment without the costly collective infrastructures the state would not
be able to provide. On the other hand, the previous incentives to accustom
people to visit medical facilities implied that infrastructure would be available
close to each village community, which was far from being the case, but
they were part of the long-term project to establish one. The fifth chapter,
on milking methods and clean milk, is a good example of what government
educators and planners meant by “technology transfer.” It presented methods
that required relatively large amounts of equipment compared to the scarce
resources available to the majority of farming families: a room entirely devoted
to milking, several buckets and other metal containers requiring the use of
chemical disinfectant and a weighing scale. The weighing scale had to be
used for the rational monitoring of production. One illustration shows a
peasant dressed in a shirt, trousers and boots—a “modern” peasant–, instead
of the cotton cloth and sandals worn by the peasants on the previous pages,
communicating the status of his production on paper. Of course, the peasants
already knew the amount of milk their animals were producing from their
specially adapted containers, but this chapter called for a type of monitoring
that was viewed as rational in contrast to customary farming practices. It
implied the use of the written word for long-term evaluation and its inclusion
in the daily routine of productive practices. This raises the question of how the
majority of farmers might obtain the equipment illustrated. Here again, it was
a question of anticipating the future planned by the authorities. The authors
probably thought that this work would be carried out within the framework
of cooperatives, or that cooperatives would be able to provide this equipment
to farmers in the future.
## 2.2. *The languages of nationalities*

As well as promoting grassroots development based on everyday practices and socialist cooperatives, the literacy campaign was the principal place for implementing the policy of promoting nationalities through the choice of teaching in languages other than Amharic. Vernacular languages were written down specifically for the purposes of teaching literacy. From the early stages in 1979 and 1980, materials were printed in five languages: Amharic, Oromo, Somali, Tigrigna and Wolaita. In 1981 it was the turn of Gedeo, Hadiya, Kambatta, Kunama, and Tigre.<fnref n="28" /> The total number was later increased to 15, thereby including the languages spoken by 95% of the total population (Bahru 2008a, 88). The language policy represented a decisive break with the past exclusive recognition of Amharic. The intention of the literacy campaign was to “promote the revival of the cultures of different nationalities in all their diversity and, as far as possible, to teach illiterate people in their mother tongue” (Gudeta 1982, 207). From a pedagogical point of view, this statement echoed the arguments that UNESCO had been proposing since the 1950s: that a person who is literate in his or her mother tongue is more likely to assimilate the knowledge that is being transmitted.<fnref n="29" /> From a political perspective, the choice of a national or local language was a matter of nation-building. The aim was to combat the marginalisation of minority groups and build national unity at the same time. For UNESCO, the concern for minority cultures and state interest in unity were both considered legitimate. One of the key challenges of the literacy campaigns was to respect and encourage minority cultures while also providing new readers with the means to break out of their marginalisation. This involved the promotion of vernacular languages and the dissemination of a national or international lingua franca at the same time. The Derg's language policy was a part of these debates. Educationists in the Ministry of Education believed that literacy and the transmission of an ideology that accompanied it would be more effective in the mother tongue. They claimed that they wanted to end the cultural oppression of the southern nationalities while at the same time being viscerally committed to the creation of a unified nation. From this dual perspective, the development of local languages *and* Amharic as vehicles of education was a major concern.

Ethiopia has a rich linguistic context. Estimates vary, but it is possible to make the claim that there are at least 70 languages in the country. They include Amharic, Oromo and Tigrigna, which at the time of the campaign were the mother tongues of 31%, 27% and 14% of the population, respectively. Numerically, they dominate the other languages; next on the list is Wolaita, which is the mother tongue of 3.6% of the country's population, followed

<footnote n="28">²⁸MOE, *Every Ethiopian...* (1981), 29.</footnote>

<footnote n="29">²⁹UNESCO, *The Use of Vernacular Languages in Education* (Paris, 1953).</footnote>
closely by Sidamo (3.4%) (MacNab 1990, 68). The work of compiling and editing the languages was carried out by the Institute of Language Studies before the Institute for the Study of Ethiopian Nationalities (ISEN) took over after its creation in 1983. As early as 1976, the *zemecha* had provided an opportunity to catalogue languages and begin the development of written forms. By 1978, the institute employed 21 linguists working in three teams devoted to the compilation of lexicons, literature and linguistics, respectively. In the first instance, the literature team had to bring together two sets of texts: those in the languages of the ancient written tradition, mainly Geez, Amharic and Tigrigna, and those of the missionaries written in the languages of the peoples of the south whom they had attempted to evangelise. The second team had to collect and study stories, proverbs and tales, and write reports on the socioeconomic and philosophical ideas they conveyed. The third team had to conduct phonological studies before writing, conduct comparative studies and enrich the vocabulary of the various languages to embrace science, technology and Marxist concepts (Bender 1985, 274–76). Everything was to be transcribed into the Geez syllabary in order to facilitate the transition from the mother tongue to the national language, Amharic, the dissemination of which remained an essential objective for unification purposes.

ISEN worked in collaboration with Addis Ababa University and employed academics from a variety of disciplines, including law, political science, sociology, history and economics. It accumulated a significant amount of information on the different nationalities. Its very existence marked a significant change from the previous regime. In this sense, it is testimony to the fact that the recognition of nationalities was not mere rhetoric. Of course, its intended function was to be unifying. The institute was supposed to contribute to “resolving minor contradictions between nationalities” by eliminating “chauvinism” (Clapham 1988, 200). In a way, it reflected in Marxist-Leninist terms the position of the authors of the article titled “Aims and Objectives of Ethiopian Education” in the *Journal of Ethiopian Education* published on the eve of the revolution in 1974. Instead of a uniformity based on the imposition of the language and identity of the Christian North, these academics and senior officials from the Ministry of Education argued that cultural diversity could be a strength rather than a weakness, and that education should combine a mixture of cultures into a rich national culture (Girma, Abraham & Abba Samuel 1974, 9). It seems that this was also the vision of the cultural committees that were created in the regions following the revolution. This, at least, is the position defended by Abraham Babanto, the chairman of the Wolaita Cultural Committee, in his history of Wolaita published in 1979. In his introduction, he states that he wrote his book to promote the history of his region with the aim
of unity, equality and exchange with the other nationalities of the country,
from a nationalist perspective.<fnref n="30" />

3. Mobilising the masses

The government made significant efforts to fill the literacy centres. Although
it was encouraged by a small urban intelligentsia, social demand from the
peasant world was virtually non-existent. The use of the written word in the
countryside was limited to specific acts relating to religion or communication
with the administration. The population also practised "delegated writing":
they were able to use men of the church to access religious written culture,
and used public writers to produce legal documents.<fnref n="31" /> The written word was
not integrated into daily practices in any way. This being the case, attending
literacy classes was far from an obvious step. Zerihun Anebo, a Wolaita teacher
who was an instructor in the neighbouring Kaffa region, recalls that at first,
literacy seemed strange to the peasants.<fnref n="32" /> It was an odd kind of education
that produced nothing that would satisfy one's basic needs, and hours of
sitting down were required to learn to master a practice that was not a
part of daily activities. Were the few people who knew how to read and
write, the "professionals" of the written word, not enough to provide what
was needed? Under conditions where scepticism needed to be overcome, the
regime combined incitement, persuasion and coercion.

The Derg was sure of its direction, and placed literacy at the heart of
its plan for social transformation. It was one of the most iconic aspects
of its general policy. Its extremely ambitious educational project had been
widely announced, and considerable efforts had been made to organise and
implement it: literacy had to be achieved quickly, whatever the cost. Since
peasants “did not know the usefulness of education,” the regime opted first
for pedagogy.

3.1. *Explaining*

The mass media, gathering places such as markets, social events such as
weddings and funeral ceremonies and, of course, popular associations were
used to explain and convince.<fnref n="33" /> Mobilising the population for the literacy
campaign was an important task of local cadres, and they received short
training courses for this purpose.<fnref n="34" /> Regional and provincial officials also took

<footnote n="30">³⁰ Abraham Babanto, ጥንታዊት እና እና ዘመናዊት ዎላይታ (The Ancient Wolaita and Contemporary Wolaita) (1979), 7–10.</footnote>

<footnote n="31">³¹Anjulo Agago, interview, December 2010. On delegated writing, see Gérard (2002).</footnote>

<footnote n="32">³²Zerihun Anebo (teacher), interview, Soddo, 5 December 2010.</footnote>

<footnote n="33">³³MOE, *Every Ethiopian...* (1981), 25.</footnote>

<footnote n="34">³⁴Zerihun Anebo (teacher), interview, Soddo, 5 December 2010.</footnote>
part in the efforts to convince people. More rarely, visiting senior officials
made sure to speak out on the subject. The gatherings organised by the *kebele*
and farmers' associations were times for exchanging opinions, both between
officials and participants and among the participants themselves. According to
a senior official of the Ministry of Education, Gudeta Mammo, the debates that
took place at such gatherings, which enabled the masses themselves to practice
the art of persuasion, often had a greater impact on the participants than
months of effort by educators (Gudeta 1990, 111). However, other less biased
and more frequent witness accounts paint a different picture. Researcher
Dessalegn Rahmato found that the exchanges were very uneven and could
sometimes turn into a “hammering,” especially if someone important was
there (Dessalegn 1984, 93). Nevertheless, it is very likely that real exchanges
did take place, especially in the countryside, during meetings held when
important people were not present, and only peasants had gathered. But the
farmers’ associations were conveyor belts between central government and
local communities, not institutions aimed at encouraging proposals from local
communities. Free discussions or not, in the end it was the policy that had been
decided upon that had to be implemented.

3.2. *Staging: departure and award ceremonies*

A second means of mobilisation was through the ritualisation of milestones.
The departure of the instructors was an occasion for large public ceremonies.
Twice a year, at the beginning of each "stage," thousands of people gathered in
the streets of Addis Ababa and other major cities to celebrate the instructors'
departure. These mass gatherings were covered by the national media. The
size of the ceremony had to be commensurate with the action being celebrated,
and the population was therefore able to assess the extent to which the literacy
campaign was a national priority. The speeches were once again designed to
convince, the music to create an atmosphere of jubilation and the slogans to
stimulate a sense of communion. These ceremonies were not unlike departures
for war: families and friends were there to say goodbye to their loved ones, who
were leaving for the "rural adventure" to fight illiteracy, in a clearly patriotic
atmosphere. Like all mass ceremonies of a political ilk, they were addressed
to both reason and emotion, to encourage determination, enthusiasm and
fervour. The young people who were leaving could feel that they had the
support of the entire nation in the accomplishment of a historic mission. The
instructors' interest in their task was essential to the quality of their work: the
success of the campaign depended to a large extent on their attitude. It was
therefore of the utmost importance to create a collective momentum, to instil
in everyone a feeling that they were participating in a common project and to
develop a spirit of solidarity between the instructors and their future students.
The instructors' departure rituals were matched by the welcome ceremonies in the places they had been assigned to. On their arrival, the “heroes of the literacy campaign” were greeted by an assembled crowd, regional government officials and the leaders of popular associations.

On their arrival, these heroes of the literacy campaign are expected by a crowd that in addition to many local residents includes personalities from various organisations, such as the president of the peasant associations, the president of the youth associations, the president of the women's associations and the president of the teachers' council. Officials, community elders and the presidents of the various associations give welcoming speeches, after which one of the teachers' representatives, preferably a woman, as this serves as an example and encouragement for rural women, takes the floor in turn to try to explain the objectives of the campaign. The launch of a literacy campaign in a designated area is a landmark and spectacular event. It is announced through the national media, such as radio and television, and the press. It takes place on the same day throughout the country. (Gudeta 1990, 6–7)

Here again, the ceremony had a stimulating, explanatory and demonstrative function. First of all, it reminded the instructors of their responsibility. Secondly, experiencing the material hardships of rural life for several months was not without its inconveniences for young people from the towns. The aim of the welcome was to create an engaging atmosphere in order to motivate them to work with enthusiasm. Once again, the ceremony provided an opportunity to explain the aims of the campaign and to praise the benefits of education (we will return to the question of specific incentives for women later on). Finally, gathering in large numbers in the presence of important personalities was intended to show that the literacy campaign was taken seriously by the institutions, and the local population was encouraged to do the same. The simultaneous nationwide coverage of these local events accompanied by the occasional presence of the media signified the national dimension of what was happening in their locality to those present.

A third ritual took place when certificates and prizes were awarded on International Literacy Day, 8 September (Gudeta 1985, 116). By holding these ceremonies at the same time in different official places and institutions, the government was once again showing that they needed to be given the appropriate amount of attention. The chosen date placed the ritual in an international perspective. In the tradition of school prize-giving ceremonies, these public ceremonies were an opportunity to encourage by example and to motivate by emulation. Last but not least, their symbolic significance should be appreciated: they ritualised the entry into the world of the literate. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu, anthropologist Marc Abélès emphasised that consecration rites show how “societies classify, distinguish, differentiate between categories
of individuals in relation to the objective oppositions, the relations of domi-
nation and subordination that in fact exist between men” and women. The
ritual is performative: it is “the symbolic *coup de force* by which a group fixes
and freezes divisions and hierarchies” (Abélès 1990, 242–43). The award of
a literacy certificate might be interpreted as the crossing of the border that
separated the literate from the illiterate. Given the representations attached to
these two categories, access to the world of the literate symbolised entry into
a new life. In concrete terms, since writing and the exercise of power were
indissolubly linked, the award of the certificate signified promotion into the
group of people who had the ability to administer and command.

3.3. *Theatre and songs*

Culture was also mobilised to exert continuous action on the population. This
aspect is still vividly remembered by witnesses, who recall many songs and
travelling plays to support intense proselytising in favour of education.<fnref n="35" /> Some
of these plays were produced locally by members of popular associations or
school theatre clubs. Others were national, such as the piece titled የጨለማ
ት (Journey into Darkness), which was broadcast on radio and television and
performed by travelling theatre groups in local languages in rural areas.<fnref n="36" />
This form of popular culture reached a very wide audience. The plays usually
featured an illiterate person and a literate person in order to compare the
harmful effects of illiteracy with the benefits of education, or to recount the
dramatic misadventures of an illiterate person. One famous story featured an
illiterate man who travels to the city to see a doctor for his sick daughter.
After asking him for the symptoms of her illness, the doctor gives him some
medicine. Before returning to his village, the illiterate man decides to buy
rat poison to get rid of the rodents infesting his house. Seeing that he has
medicine in his hand, the salesman asks him if he can read. When he answers
“no,” the salesman warns him not to confuse the two boxes. He then finds a
solution to help him: one box is green, and the other is blue. The two men
practice together—“blue, medicine; green, rat poison”—for enough time to
give the scene comic effect. On the way to his village, to make sure he does not
forget, the man rehearses. But then, by repeating and repeating, he reverses
the colours. The comic effect disappears and the spectators worry about the
predictable end: back home, he involuntarily kills his daughter by giving her
the rat poison instead of the medicine. The moral of the story is that if he had
known how to read, his daughter would not have died through his fault.<fnref n="37" />

<footnote n="35">³⁵ Abraham Worku, interview, January 2011.</footnote>

<footnote n="36">³⁶ Asela Gujubo (recorded discussion with Abraham Worku, 2 January 2011, Gesuba).</footnote>

<footnote n="37">³⁷ This story is reported and commented on by Solomon Maereg, who was a pupil under the Derg (interview, Lalibela, 7 February 2007).</footnote>
The aim of these plays was to show that knowing how to read can improve one's daily life (reading is desirable) and prevent disasters (reading is necessary). It is highly likely that by overstating the point in this way, by proposing a stereotypical vision, the Ethiopian authorities were seeking to draw attention to it for educational purposes. Nevertheless, the pieces conveyed weighty value judgments. The spectator might laugh at the illiterate man, feel sorry for him, or deplore or condemn his behaviour. He was sometimes ridiculous, sometimes the victim, sometimes the "villain" of the story. This poor peasant who killed his daughter out of ignorance was to be pitied, but also blamed: his ignorance caused a death. Voluntarily or inadvertently, illiterate people were always to blame in one way or another. The objective of provoking awareness through shock led to these characters being portrayed in a truncated manner, defined by their defects, and resulted in considerable symbolic violence towards illiterate people. At the beginning of the campaign, less than 10% of the Ethiopian population was literate, with an even lower percentage in the countryside. The overwhelming majority of the spectators were illiterate. The image that was conveyed claimed to speak about them, and imposed an identity on them whose attributes it is doubtful they could accept.

However, the way the pieces were presented also helped provoke discussion. It provided basic elements for reflection that invited nuances, additional elements and debate. The drama format is very popular in Ethiopia, and is commonly used to illustrate social events. The audience played an active role, commenting on and discussing what they had seen, which was one of the objectives of this popular art form. The return from the market was an important collective moment—people walked in groups and discussed the news they have learned. There is no doubt that the pieces they saw animated their conversations, were commented on and interpreted, and were related to those who had not seen them. The impact of these plays cannot be measured quantitatively, but it is an indisputable fact that they made a powerful impression. The population still remembers them 30 years later: today, everyone over forty can tell a story about a play he or she remembers. They have become a part of popular culture.

Songs expressed the joy of learning. The star singer Tsehaye Yohannes had a hit in the early 1980s called ማንበብና መፃፍ (Reading and Writing). The song was broadcast extensively on radio and television, and also circulated in the countryside. In the TV clip, the singer holds a letter in his hand and complains that he cannot read it. A literacy class is being taught in the background. The verses—a lament—are interspersed with a chorus sung by the pupils of the literacy class that expresses their joy at learning. Finally, the singer, a tearful, powerless illiterate, comes across a passerby, who reads his letter to him before pointing towards the literacy class. They exchange a few words. The spectator
understands that the passerby has told the illiterate man that he can learn to read if he wants to, thanks to the literacy centres. The illiterate man's face lights up, and the passerby accompanies him to the class, where the instructor welcomes him with open arms and the other pupils step aside to make room for him.<fnref n="38" /> The clip shows the ease with which it was possible to learn, and the opportunity represented by the literacy centres. For the hero, entering the world of the pupils is a joyful event, and the learning universe is supportive. Just as the teacher and the other pupils welcome the illiterate character with kindness, the world of readers must not be intimidating; it is hospitable and warm.

### 3.4. *Control and coercion*

The new regime was not content just to change people's attitudes towards education through explanation, example and persuasion. The Derg stated that it wished to free people from illiteracy and “sometimes it forced them to learn.”<fnref n="39" /> The government used various methods of control, pressure and coercion. For illiterate people, enrolment in courses was compulsory. The first method of control was the certificate of enrolment issued by the local administration. It was also possible to register in the workplace, where lessons were given in the evenings. In theory, the certificate could be requested by the administration at any time (Gudeta 1985, 116). During the early years of the campaign, agents sent by neighbourhood and farmers' associations visited the homes of people who were not attending classes to check why they were absent or simply to collect them.<fnref n="40" /> What powers did the local administration have to force people to come to school? In a 1984 field study, Susan Hoben noted tough measures to attract students, indicating that not all participants learned of their own accord (Hoben 1994, 634). Various punitive measures were employed, including monetary or labour penalties, threats of imprisonment and, more rarely, a few days of actual imprisonment.<fnref n="41" /> Another method used was blackmail over the distribution of land. With the agrarian reform, land management had been entrusted to peasant associations. In the context of subsistence farming, which in many ways meant that families were constantly having to deal with shortages, this gave the administration considerable leverage. A farmer who was absent too often risked seeing the amount of land allocated to him or her each year drastically reduced.

<footnote n="38">³⁸The clip is available on the internet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xi9UQrNiDY; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQjxZ8ZgYOo (http://www.ethiotube.net/video/23254/Oldies-Tsehaye-Yohannes-Mambeb-Ena-Metsaf)</footnote>

<footnote n="39">³⁹Demissie Minamo (teacher), interview, Soddo, 5 December 2010.</footnote>

<footnote n="40">⁴⁰Anjulo Agago, interview, December 2010; Assefa Wolde-Giorgis (public writer, miller, merchant), interview, Lalibela, 7 February 2007.</footnote>

<footnote n="41">⁴¹Yemesrach Alula, interview, January 2010.</footnote>
Although imprisonment and land confiscation, which were particularly severe punishments, seem to have been little used in the literacy campaign, financial penalties and compulsory labour were common practice.

Coercive practices need to be understood in several different ways. One argument is to explain coercion as part of the Derg's general authoritarian practices. The campaign was decided from above and was not a response to popular demand, other than that of an urban intelligentsia. Large-scale mobilisation had to be driven, and a mass movement had to be created. The stakes were extremely high for the regime: since literacy was seen as a prerequisite and matrix of progress—the raison d'être of the revolution and the principal argument for legitimising power—the future of the country depended on it. To put it more prosaically, the literacy campaign was a key tool for capturing the peasant world. The state's progress in rural areas took its materiality from the peasant associations, and the literacy campaign had to achieve ideological integration. Finally, it was possible to justify these authoritarian practices through the figure of the illiterate man and woman, who lived in a vicious circle of ignorance and misery, lacked political consciousness and had trouble perceiving the benefits of education and understanding what was in their interest. It was therefore legitimate and necessary for others to force them to learn, for their own benefit.

**4. Educational dynamics: the masses arrive on the scene**

What was the position of rural people vis-à-vis the literacy campaign? What were their perceptions, practices and modes of appropriation of this national policy? Rather than focusing on their supposed ability or inability to “understand” the benefits of education (which would mean taking the politically-useful construction of the “illiterate” for granted), it is more profitable to look at their disposition to adhere to the literacy project. In the first place, these dispositions formed a part of the general relationship of the peasant population with the new regime. Secondly, they can be understood through the peasants' relationship with the political, religious and cultural manifestations of the written word. More specifically, they depended on what the campaign made possible, on what could be expected of it, on whether or not the knowledge taught was deemed appropriate and on what it could be used for. Finally, the question of how much room for manoeuvre the population enjoyed must be mentioned. Were they able to refuse, and if so, what means did they have at their disposal to avoid it?

**4.1. Attitudes towards education at the heart of political and social transformations**

The attitude of the peasants towards the new political power depended first of all on their appreciation of the economic and social transformations that had
taken place. During the first four years of the revolution, the regime was able to aggregate peasants through the land reform. This is the general context within which Mana Madibo, a Wolaita peasant from Gesuba, includes education. For him it was part of a comprehensive policy that was perceived as emancipatory and egalitarian: "The Derg succeeded in leading us to political power as equal citizens, and then to equal access to resources, the nationalisation of land, the right to vote and to be elected. With this, every household received education in a very widespread way."<fnref n="42" /> For Mana Madibo, education was to be included within a set of reforms that were seen as leading to the overall promotion of the peasantry: economic, with access to land; political, with the right to vote in peasant associations; and cultural, with access to education. As a member of a marginalised nationality and an exploited class, he was sensitive to the egalitarian discourses of the new regime. He interprets the Derg's education policy as a confirmation and future guarantee of economic and political reforms. Anjulo Agago, a peasant from Dubbo, explains that education was not accepted as such but because the population appreciated the regime: "The literacy campaign was imposed by force, some liked going to school and some disliked it. But the government at the time was seen as an ally or supporter of poor peasants. So in the beginning, everything the cadres said was considered to be a blessing."<fnref n="43" /> While pointing out that the taste for studying was not unanimous, Anjulo Agago confirms that the perception of the education policy was understood within the context of a positive attitude towards the Derg's general policy. The land reform gave rise to a feeling of confidence in the regime. In spite of the use of coercion on a population with mixed views on education, the feeling of trust created a bridge between the peasant communities and the literacy centres. Mana Madibo goes further:

> The Derg is very highly regarded, and is remembered for mass education. My first eldest son died on the northern front<fnref n="44" /> after dropping out of secondary education. But I am not sorry because the Derg freed the tenant farmers and provided access to resources for the peasants. Poor farmers felt equal and that they were citizens, and they abandoned share-cropping and submission to the lords. So no matter what sacrifice we made, I appreciate the Derg for mass education, for mass liberation.<fnref n="45" />

This statement is particularly evocative. First of all, by contrasting personal tragedy with collective progress, Mana Madibo states that he still appreciates the Derg. He testifies to a sense of political dignity won by the peasants, to

<footnote n="42">⁴²Mana Madibo, interview, December 2010.</footnote>

<footnote n="43">⁴³Anjulo Agago, interview, December 2010.</footnote>

<footnote n="44">⁴⁴In the second half of the 1980s, as the war against the Eritrean independence movement intensified, young people were a pool for soldiers, and they paid a heavy price for the regime's stubbornness.</footnote>

<footnote n="45">⁴⁵Mana Madibo, interview, December 2010.</footnote>
a collective liberation within which he places education. If he categorises the terms “mass liberation” and “mass education” as part of the same movement, it is because in his opinion, “the merit of education is to bring equality and self-confidence.” On several occasions and at different points in the interview, referring to the period before the Derg, he explains: “We were illiterate, so we bowed down.” In spite of the terrible years that followed, which were marked by the 1984 famine, the policy of forced villagisation, the intensification of the civil war on the northern front and the increasingly heavy material and human cost, the peasants Mana Madibo and Anjulo Agago believe that the policies of 1974–84 were finally achieved. They transformed the living conditions of the countryside and the status of its inhabitants. They were groundbreaking in that in the collective memory, they separated a “before” of oppression and misery from an “after” of liberation, despite the hardships of life under the Derg.

In spite of the farmers’ feelings of goodwill towards the Derg in those early years, learning to read and write was not to everyone’s liking. In the face of an obligation to be literate, resisters used avoidance tactics: “In the beginning, people who did not like it found excuses not to go to the literacy centre. They would say ‘I’m sick’ or even hide. ‘He’s not there, he’s gone to the market.’”<fnref n="46" /> The campaign’s national director Gudeta Mammo was aware of this avoidance phenomenon. As he wrote in a 1985 article: “Some people may waste time by explaining that they learn at the *kebele* centre or at their workplace, without going to any centre” (Gudeta 1985, 115). But this was not possible in rural areas where there was only one literacy centre. There, one had to go to the classes, willingly or unwillingly.<fnref n="47" /> Support for the regime and coercion cannot explain everything, however. Some seized the opportunity offered by education as such: “Some people managed to write and read. [...] Those who continued with perseverance went to [formal] school, completed their education and are now employed by the government in administrative jobs....”<fnref n="48" /> Some, seeing the doors that mastery of the written word could open, decided to take advantage of the opportunities for social advancement offered by literacy.

## 4.2. Women engage with the literacy centres

For different reasons, women engaged with the literacy centres more than men. In the name of its policy to promote women, the Derg wanted to give them equal access to education. Enrolment rates for girls in schools under the Haile Selassie regime were extremely low. The Derg wanted to

<footnote n="46">⁴⁶Anjulo Agago, interview, December 2010.</footnote>

<footnote n="47">⁴⁷Assefa Wolde-Giorgis, interview, February 2007.</footnote>

<footnote n="48">⁴⁸Anjulo Agago, interview, December 2010.</footnote>
encourage women to go to the centres so that they could become literate, but also so that families would gradually acquire the habit of sending their daughters to school. The woman teacher Yaluse Mita recalls that the Derg sent female teachers to the countryside, insisting that they should teach women in particular.<fnref n="49" /> She also testifies that women were enthusiastically involved as early as the *zamecha*. Tsehai Zerihun, who was also a young *zemach*, says the same.<fnref n="50" /> Later on, women joined the literacy campaign in greater numbers than men. During the first phase, 70 percent of students were women and girls (Sjörström & Sjörström 1983, 40). This is highly significant if one bears in mind the fact that just four years earlier, rural women and girls were being kept away from schools. At the very end of the campaign, in 1990, anthropologist Helen Pankhurst found that women made up the majority of students attending the literacy centre in the village of Gera (Pankhurst 1990, 66). How can this engagement by women with the literacy campaign be explained? Women were no less busy with daily chores than men were. Perhaps the fact that they were already in the village due to the important role of domestic work in their daily activities made it easier for them to attend classes. However, women were also responsible for fetching water and carrying wood for domestic use, activities that kept them away from the village for several hours, and exhausting tasks that also left them with little energy for studying.

The reasons why women attended more frequently must be sought some-
where other than in greater availability. First of all, they seem to have seized
the opportunity to acquire knowledge that would prove useful in their every-
day activities. In 1984, the anthropologist Tsehai Berhane Selassie noted that
the literacy programme had enabled women to communicate more widely
and to be approached by the Revolutionary Ethiopia Women's Association
(REWA), which also provided education on nutrition, family planning, moth-
erhood and basic hygiene, which were lessons adapted to daily life (Tsehai
1984, 18). It has often been pointed out that women's associations were sub-
ordinate to the farmers' associations and at a national level to COPWE, of
which they were appendices (Clapham 1988, 138). That said, they were also
places where women came together. They could exchange ideas and express
themselves in public, something that was reserved for men in mixed spaces.
In rural Ethiopia, women rarely met at all, let alone in a group (Poluha
2002, 71). Literacy classes and women's associations were spaces where they
could spend time outside the home, and they opened the door to more extensive
sociability. They also provided opportunities for women farmers to spend time
with the few women graduates who lived near them. This brought them into
contact with a different model of femininity, which may have attracted them.

<footnote n="49">⁴⁹Yaluse Mita, interview, November 2009. See Chapter 6.</footnote>

<footnote n="50">⁵⁰Tsehai Zerihun, interview, January 2011.</footnote>
Tsehai Zerihun, who was involved in literacy training and the organisation of women's cooperatives in the Wolaita countryside during the zemecha, recalls that the women farmers talked to her, a young graduate from the city, a great deal about their condition. She testifies to a palpable sense of injustice based on an acute awareness of the inequity of gender relations. Tsehai Zerihun, and other women graduates with her, reinforced these feelings, and showed that one could be a woman and still be freer and more independent, albeit within the constraints of a patriarchal society.<fnref n="51" />

It is therefore possible to conclude that women seized the opportunity offered by the literacy classes to expand their space of freedom. More generally, did they not see the new structures created by the Derg—literacy classes, women’s associations and cooperatives—as an opportunity for emancipation through a greater inclusion in collective social activities? Moreover, Tsehai Berhane Selassie recalls that women’s associations were involved in political awareness-raising (Tsehai 1984, 18). It would therefore be interesting to stop looking at the phenomenon from above and discover what was actually going on inside these non-mixed spaces. Although the new political structures undoubtedly became increasingly restrictive, to the point where they led to a sense of dislike in the second half of the 1980s, this does not mean that women did not invest them with their own aspirations for a time. Did they not see these changes as beneficial to them? Although men remained at the helm of the political apparatus, did the large number of women attending literacy centres not show that women had begun to move?

**5. What does reading and writing mean?**

How did farming communities appropriate the written word? What use did they make of it? Rather than understanding it “as a technology that has the same effect everywhere,” it is better to “grasp the way in which writing is always taken in particular cultural contexts and power relations, forbidding any generalisation about its effects, whether cognitive or social” (Fraenkel & Mbodj 2010, 13). It is therefore necessary first of all to look at the history of writing practices in Wolaita and the particular power relations in which writing was embedded.

By 1984, the nationwide illiteracy rate had fallen from 90% to 50% compared to 1974. Since the beginning of the campaign, 12 million people out of a total population of about 30 million had received their literacy certificate (Hoben 1994, 633–34). In view of the high failure rates in the final literacy examination reported in the official documents—two thirds in the first phase and one third in the third phase —it does not seem that the certificates

<footnote n="51">⁵¹Ibid.</footnote>
were distributed in order to boost statistics.<fnref n="52" /> Indeed, it must have been
very tempting to sacrifice quality for quantity in the programme (Clapham
1988, 152). Nonetheless, the literacy campaign is rightly considered by several
authors to be the regime's most impressive achievement (Balsvik 2007, 96),
and Ethiopia was awarded the Literacy Prize by UNESCO as early as 1980.<fnref n="53" />
Nevertheless, the figures that appear in the 1994 national census suggest
that the impact of the campaign should be played down. In the capital city
of Wolaita, 73% of men and 61% of women were declared literate; in the
surrounding countryside, the rates were 46% and 23% respectively. In the
mountainous *wereda* of Kindo Koysha, the figures were 56% and 39% in the
city of Bele, and 24% and 6% in rural areas.<fnref n="54" /> These are much lower than
those announced by the Derg at the end of the 1990s. However, while the Derg
may have been tempted to exaggerate the results, the EPRDF, which replaced
it, may have been tempted to minimise them—EPRDF liked to claim that
its own educational work started out from a catastrophic situation. Beyond
these possible liberties taken with the statistics, this draws attention to the
phenomenon of the loss of literacy skills, which has been particularly strong in
rural areas due to the lack of a favourable literary environment for practising
reading and writing. Anjulo Agago is one of those who have, as he puts it,
forgotten: “I was one of those who read and wrote but with time I forgot,
I moved backwards.”<fnref n="55" />

In the Wolaita countryside, the written word was intimately linked to
Protestantism on the one hand, and to communications with the authorities
and the production of legal documents on the other. The biblical texts in
Wolaita and Amharic owned by the Protestant churches made up the entirety
of literary resources in the countryside. In 1950, missionary Trimingham
counted between 150 and 200 Christian communities, each gathered around a
church with one or two gospels written in vernacular (Trimingham 1950, 34).
Brian Fargher, who worked from the SIM archives, provides a higher figure;
he reports that 900 copies of the Gospel of St John translated into vernacular
were distributed in Wolaita in the 1940s (Fargher 1996, 169). While it is
difficult to know the exact number of texts in circulation on the eve of
the revolution, Tibebe Eshete recalls that Bibles translated into Amharic
circulated abundantly from the 1960s because of their low price (Tibebe
2009, 375).

<footnote n="52">⁵²MOE, *Every Ethiopian...* (1981), 10.</footnote>

<footnote n="53">⁵³Ibid., iii.</footnote>

<footnote n="54">⁵⁴CSA, *The Population and Housing Census of Ethiopia, Results from the southern Nations, Nationalities' and Peoples' Regional State. Statistical Report on Education and Economic Activity* (1995), 74.</footnote>

<footnote n="55">⁵⁵Anjulo Agago, interview, December 2010.</footnote>
Although each Christian community had texts, contact with the written
religious culture was, as mentioned above, by delegation. In Wolaita, tens of
thousands of the faithful had access to the Bible through the mediation of a few
hundred local church leaders. Rural communities also used delegation in the
administrative field. The tiny minority of literate people in the countryside
were all occasional public writers who were called upon to produce legal
documents, but the need for these documents was too irregular for the written
word to be included as a part of daily life. Finally, domestic writing practices
were non-existent. In short, the written word had a real role in the Wolaita
countryside, but it was not considered necessary for everyone to be able to
read and write. A few community members—writing “professionals”—were
enough to ensure that the largest numbers of people had access to written
culture through delegation, this “collective and collaborative understanding
of literacy” (Fraenkel & Mbodj 2010, 20). Anjulo Agago does not seem to be
saddened by having “backed down,” by “forgetting” how to read and write.
For him, the literacy campaign led to an advance in writing that still persists,
despite the losses: “From four villages, if we were lucky, we would find one
person who could write a legal document. We had to go a long way to find
someone who knew how to read. Now it is available.”<fnref n="56" /> Three years after
the end of the literacy campaign in 1994, the literacy rate in Dubbo, where
Anjulo Agago lives, must have been close to that of the rural areas of Soddo
canton, which was 40% (due to the proximity of the well-school-educated town
of Areka).<fnref n="57" /> Compared with the rates in 1974, when less than 1% of the rural
population knew how to read and write, literacy had made great progress. In
the rural context, almost one in two people in the countryside could write—a
significant proportion. Thus, the quotation above should be understood within
the logic of the delegation of writing applied by peasants. Delegating writing
has been radically simplified since the literacy campaign. It has not “eradicated
the scourge of illiteracy,” but it has entrenched the presence of the written word
in the countryside. In a context in which the written word was the attribute
of power, the literacy campaign reduced the vulnerability of peasants vis-à-vis
the administration. Having an official document written by a member of the
community, by a neighbour, rather than by an unknown public writer does not
have the same meaning in terms of power relations. Whether or not everyone
knows how to read and write, the advance of the written word has led to a
*collective* empowerment of peasant communities. In individual terms, those
who claim they have “forgotten” also say that they still know how to write
their names. Being able to sign one’s name is crucial in all Ethiopia’s rural areas.
According to Abeje Mammo, who was a teenager in a village in Lasta, in the

<footnote n="56">⁵⁶Ibid.</footnote>

<footnote n="57">⁵⁷CSA, *The Population and Housing Census of Ethiopia...* (1995), 74.</footnote>
north, during the campaign: "It was very interesting for the farmers. Before, to sign, they were afraid to point their finger... it is better to write, it is very important."<fnref n="58" /> The peasants thought it degrading to sign with a fingerprint (Pankhurst 1990, 64). For Baye Maereg, a farmer in Lasta, signing is the most important thing the literacy campaign brought him.<fnref n="59" /> The Wolaita peasant Mana Madibo says the same. If signing is so important, it is because it is an act of communication with power and gives a measure of dignity to a relationship of domination. No longer signing with a fingerprint also means being able to understand what one is signing and therefore to feel politically less vulnerable.

The second consequence of the literacy campaign is that it brought education to the villages in a sustainable way. For the first time, no family was left out. Teacher Girma Bekele's recollections testify to the visibility of the campaign, to its inclusion in the rural landscape: "The Derg arrived and decreed basic education. [...] They recited: 'hä hu hi, lä lu li, mä mu mi, rä ru ri' that's it! All of them! In every place, in the whole *wereda*! In the other *wereda* it was the same."<fnref n="60" /> This educational activity was added to other activities to give a rhythm to the life of the communities. It helped make school-type education a part of the life of the population. For some, this was a first step towards further education. Only a small minority of adults attended the training centres organised as part of the post-literacy process. Most of those who wished to continue studying went to school, where evening classes were introduced for newly literate adults (McNab 1990, 70). The literacy campaign was then used as a gateway to formal education in a context of social advancement.

> When basic education came, at that time, I was in grade 8. It was the Derg who brought it, by imposing it, they taught the peasants by force. [...] Some of those who received basic education by being forced have good positions. There are some who work in the administration for the region, the zone, the canton, there are some who work in many places. There are also some in the Education Office. And they worked during the Derg. It was the Derg that opened people's eyes. After the arrival of the Derg, people made progress. Schools were established everywhere. The Derg also made people equal. It was the Derg that opened the door to freedom between people. First of all, it made people equal, it made the weak and the strong become the same."<fnref n="61" />

This witness believes that through its educational actions, the Derg "opened the eyes" of the population to education as a means of social promotion and

<footnote n="58">⁵⁸ Abeje Mamo (employee of the NGO Plan International), interview, Lalibela, 14 February 2008.</footnote>

<footnote n="59">⁵⁹ Baye Maereg, interview, February 2008.</footnote>

<footnote n="60">⁶⁰ Germa Bekele, interview, December 2010.</footnote>

<footnote n="61">⁶¹ Arjo Anjulo (university graduate), interview, Dubbo, 10 December 2010.</footnote>
collective progress. Like Mana Madibo, he believes that it was well worth using
force.

**5.1. Vernacular or Amharic?**

With the written word, the literacy campaign led to an unprecedented advance
in Amharic. It was necessary to wash away the injustices of the past oppression
of nationalities *and* to continue the national unification work of the previous
regime, to promote local languages *and* to spread the national language. In
1985, the linguist Lionel Bender wrote that the military regime had continued
the policy of promoting Amharic (Bender 1985, 277). On the contrary,
according to the Wolaita teacher and school headmaster Zebdewos Chama:
> “All books were prepared in the Wolaita language, there were no Amharic
> at all in the literacy campaign.”<fnref n="62" /> On the other hand, Susan Hoben points
> out that in the later years of the campaign, there were increasing demands
> to learn in Amharic, and textbooks in other languages were being sent back to
> Addis Ababa (Hoben 1994, 637). These contradictions reflect a complex and
> ambiguous phenomenon provoked by both technical and political issues.

Firstly, putting languages into a written form implied a process of codifica-
tion and standardisation that posed serious problems because of the dialectal
differences among vernacular languages (McNab 1990, 75). While linguists
at the Language Academy in Addis Ababa were working to put the dialects
in order to develop teaching materials, students in the provinces who were
learning with the same materials no longer recognised their language. In
addition, some languages contained sounds that were foreign to the Amharic
alphabet. This meant that adaptations had to be made that were not always
obvious to readers. For example, it was reported that local instructors, who
were literate in Amharic but in contact with their mother tongue in its written
form for the first time, had difficulty reading textbooks (Hoben 1994, 635).
Second, learning in vernacular was too limited for those who wished to con-
tinue their education or simply use their reading skills. Proficiency in Amharic
was essential for entry into formal schools, where instruction was always in
the national language. Apart from a few rare translations of religious texts,
the only books that existed in local languages were the booklets and reading
manuals produced by the Ministry of Education for the literacy campaign.
The possibilities offered by literature in Amharic were far wider. One of the
aims of literacy was to provide access to texts on national issues. However,
apart from one magazine in Oromo and another in Tigrigna, newspapers and
magazines were all written in Amharic (Sherr 1989, 438). In short, to emerge

<footnote n="62">⁶²Zebdewos Chama, interview, November 2010.</footnote>
from marginalisation into the national space on a full footing meant knowing
Amharic.

Finally, as elsewhere, knowledge of the national language was part of the relationship with power and the nation. No one could be a fully-fledged citizen without speaking Amharic. The language of power remains a language of oppression for as long as it has not been mastered. Amharic was the language used for dealing with the administration, which was a key literacy issue for both the government and the people (Clapham 1988, 153). The government wanted to provide literacy in vernacular languages, but local governments always worked in Amharic. It was also local governments that provided employment opportunities, and thus upward social mobility, for newly-literate people. In addition to these factors driving people towards Amharic, there was also a question of identity: southern nationalities had less reason to reject Amharic if their own language was no longer devalued. Why not become part of a nation that no longer despises us? In short, the relationship to the languages of instruction was played out in an overlapping of affiliations—local and national, Wolaita and Ethiopian—which could be complementary or in opposition, depending on the context.

In southwestern Ethiopia, this language policy raised another issue, which would later prove to be fraught with consequences: that of competition among peripheral societies for their place within the national space.

## 5.2. *Language issues on the periphery: Gamo intellectuals against literacy in the Wolaita language*

Wolaita is an Omotic language, a characteristic it shares with the neighbouring languages spoken by the Gamo, Goffa and Dawro. But it was the language with the largest number of speakers among the minority languages. Many Gamo, Goffa and Dawro spoke it. For all these reasons, the Derg decided that the Wolaita language would be used to teach literacy to all the populations who spoke Omotic languages.

Gebre-Mikael Kuke was an important player in the literacy campaign in Wolaita. Known as the host of the literacy programme on radio, he was author and editor of the Wolaita language textbooks used during the campaign. He recalls that a meeting was held at the Ministry of Culture in Addis Ababa in 1984 on the design of a future Amharic-Wolaita dictionary. The Gamo intellectuals in attendance made the point that the dictionary should not only be in Wolaita, as it was to serve as a basis for textbooks for Gamo, Goffa and Dawro people too. They proposed the creation of a new language, a compound of the four Omotic languages that they suggested to name WoGaGoDa. The Wolaita refused, claiming that it was not a “historical” or “cultural” language. The Ministry of Education sided with them and ordered the textbooks to be prepared in Wolaita. A year later, Gebre-Mikael Kuke went to Gamo to
present the new literacy textbooks in Wolaita and train the instructors. They raised the same issue again, saying that they wanted the WoGaGoDa and that they would not teach in a language called Wolaita because they were not Wolaita. Gebre-Mikael Kuke reported the discussion to the Ministry of Education and to the Ministry of Culture. In 1986, a meeting was held at the Curriculum Department to decide on the matter. The order was once again given to teach the whole region in the Wolaita language.<fnref n="63" />

These debates took place in the context of the historical hegemony of the Wolaita in the region and heralded an identity competition among the peripheries for better representation in the Ethiopian space. The language of instruction was seen as a means of visibility, and therefore of recognition, in the national cultural field. It was the place of the first mobilisation of identity to establish a political existence in the nation as a group. The WoGaGoDa question was to resurface in 1999–2000 (Data 2000; Vaughan 2006; Guidi 2012).

## Conclusion

The issue is not whether the literacy campaign “kept its promises”—of development, emancipation, spreading socialist consciousness and so on—but to try to grasp the multiple social dynamics that converged around it. Motivated by a resolutely voluntarist policy, the government made considerable efforts to design it and mobilise the population. On the other hand, the people’s movement towards literacy centres, between coercion and voluntary action, makes it possible to detect an appropriation process that is the outcome of a varied repertoire of motivations. First, the years between 1979 and 1985 saw the rural population trying to adapt to the new regime by engaging with the transformations it was driving. Rural communities viewed literacy as part of a policy for their benefit. Second, the advance of the written word has reduced vulnerability to the administration, which exercised its power through it: it has contributed, in a small but real way, to transforming the relationship with political power. Third, literacy has been the subject of strategies for social uplift enabled by the growth of the administrative apparatus out to the local fabric of the countryside. As the state moves forward, it controls and represses, but at the same time it can become less alien by being engaged with increasing numbers of local community members. For their part, rural women, who had always been excluded from the exercise of political power, took advantage of the literacy campaign not only to acquire knowledge that was directly useful to their daily lives but also to broaden their scope for autonomy. Did this movement of the Wolaita countryside alongside the advance of the state take place in the context of the emergence—albeit a timid one—of a new

<footnote n="63">⁶³Gebre-Mikael Kuke, interview, November 2010.</footnote>
national imagination? There was a clear desire for integration within peasant
communities. The literacy campaign was seen as a gesture of promotion within
the national space. While land reform represented an emancipation of the
peasants as a class, the recognition of vernacular languages promised an end—
at least in theory—to the symbolic violence exercised by the north over the
south; it constituted promotion as a nationality. The literacy campaign was
conceived as a medium-term mass action, combined with an extension of the
primary school network as a long-term strategy.
Chapter 8

The Movement Towards Schools:
Between Coercion and Social Demand
(1978–85)

From stabilisation of the regime to the famine in the mid-1980s, the period between 1978 and 1985 saw an unprecedented convergence between rural Wolaita society and the state. This was unheard of, in the sense that previous relations between the administration and the peasant communities in southern Ethiopia could be summed up as extraction and repression. The reasons behind this convergence are a hard-to-disentangle web of voluntary movements, incitement and coercion, some aspects of which we revealed in the previous chapter. A look at formal education, especially primary schools in rural areas, will now allow us to drive our analysis forward. In 1985, a senior official of the Ministry of Education, Gudeta Mammo told UNESCO:

> In Socialist Ethiopia, universal primary education has not yet been achieved. So once the literacy programme is over in a village, the people in the area are encouraged to keep the centre as a primary school, until the government finally agrees to build a school. (Gudeta 1985, 119)

The literacy campaign was a first step towards widespread formal education under the responsibility of the farming communities, in partnership with the government. It was seen by the state as a first step in the construction of a symbiotic cultural and ideological link between the state and its citizens—an aspect of social control that went alongside supervision and repression—that formal education was intended to perpetuate. The various strands of educational policy were conceived on the basis of distinct, well-defined time-frames as parts of the same policy of mobilising the masses through education. The *zemecha* (1975–76) had been a major short-term point of contact aimed at responding to the political acceleration of the revolutionary years. The objectives of the national literacy campaign were medium-term. Formal education structures would ensure the permanence of the state’s educational actions in the countryside.

This chapter seeks to understand how the people of Wolaita positioned themselves vis-à-vis the formal education policy driven by the regime, and the ways in which they engaged with it. This means looking at the increase in the
school network, the management and administration of the schools and the
driving forces at work in school dynamics.

1. Increasing the school network: a state move to conquer rural areas?

In 1974, in addition to the low enrolment rate, there was also an unequal geographical distribution of educational facilities. Nationwide, 50% of primary school students were in towns, where only 11% of the population lived.<fnref n="1" /> In a document published in 1977, the Ministry of Education announced the following objectives:

a) to promote universal primary education within the shortest period of time commensurate with available resources and with the need to satisfy demands from other aspects of education; b) to reduce inequalities in access to second level education and eventually to eliminate these discrepancies, in particular, redressing the imbalance between rural and urban areas. (Ayelew 2000, 45)

In 1982, the proposals put forward in preparation for the 1984–94 ten-year plan provided that universal primary education would be achieved up to Grade 6 by 1992, along with the eradication of illiteracy, which remained the priority.<fnref n="2" /> The Ministry of Education’s aim was to establish one primary school for every three peasant associations (each association covered 800 hectares and had about 600 inhabitants), one school up to Grade 9 per *wereda* and one school up to grade 12 per province. Nationally, the number of primary schools more than doubled from 2,754 to 6,600 between 1974 and 1983. During the same period, the number of secondary schools increased from 113 to 194.<fnref n="3" /> In 1972–73, 588,868 pupils or 13.5% of the 7–12 age group, were enrolled in primary schools nationwide (Teshome 1979, 170), and by 1989 this figure had risen to 3,926,700, or 35% of the 7–16 age group (Tekeste 2006, 19). This expansion reduced inequalities between urban and rural areas, as the government’s efforts were focused particularly on small towns and the countryside. In 1983, 40% of primary school enrolments were in urban areas, compared with 50% in 1973 (Legesse 1984, 334). In short, the first ten years of the Derg saw an unprecedented increase in school networks throughout the country, especially in the countryside. In Wolaita, the increase in the number of schools was greater than that observed nationwide. Between 1974 and 1983, the number of primary schools tripled from 36 to 108, and many of the older schools that had been operating up to Grade 4 now expanded to include Grade 8.<fnref n="4" />

<footnote n="1">¹MOEFA, *Report on Educational Development in Ethiopia: 1973–74 and 1974–75* (prepared for the 35th session of the International Conference on Education, Geneva), 2.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">²MOE, *Information Paper on the Education System in Ethiopia* (1982), 6.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³PMGE, *Ten-Year Perspective Plan, 1984/85-1993/94* (1984), 136.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴WZEO, የትምህርት ተቋማት ዝርዝር ፣ መቹ እንደተሠሩ የሚገልጽ መረጃ (List of establishment of schools, clarifications on their date of construction, 2010).</footnote>
The primary schools in the *wereda* towns Areka, Boditi and Bedessa became secondary schools. With the school in Soddo, the total number of secondary schools in Wolaita thus increased to four.

**1.1. *Building schools***

However, the post-revolutionary period did not see a significant increase in the share of the national budget devoted to education (Tekeste 2006, 19). As with the literacy campaign, the population was called upon to contribute. The ten-year plan published in 1984 stated as follows:

> The institutionalisation, on the basis of democratic centralism, of the active partic-
> ipation of the broad masses on matters pertaining to the provision, administration
> and management of general education has been the most important achievement
> during the last ten years.<fnref n="5" />

Participation by communities was seen as a democratic step towards involving them, making them actors and giving them a sense of ownership of and responsibility for their own schools. Before the revolution, the education tax had been a weight on peasant families, while it was the urban population who were the beneficiaries of education.<fnref n="6" /> The aim was to redress this injustice by making schools not only available to communities, but also their property. Finally, the school system under Haile Selassie's regime was considered unsuitable because it was too centralised. Cooperation between the government and communities would allow decentralisation to better adapt education to local conditions. This unprecedented collaboration began with a mobilisation of village communities to build schools for themselves. The frequent emphasis on "democratic centralism" implied, in theory, that the administration should centralise the aspirations of the "grassroots" before formulating its policies. In reality, the collaboration methods were decided at the top, as teacher Zerihun Anebo reminds us:

> There were contributions, but that contribution could not take place voluntarily. It was decided by certain individuals who were highly authorised. And there was no discussion regarding school fees, constructions, academic purpose. And they bring the decision to the community to involve it in working contribution when they are building a school. [...] The communities lacked money. Due to this situation, they cannot bring money as they were ordered. So they changed money into work.<fnref n="7" />

The regime viewed this as an inevitable constraint on the growth of the school system. The degree of community voluntary participation is hard

<footnote n="5">⁵PMGE, *Ten-Year Perspective Plan, 1984/85-1993/94* (1984), 136.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶MOE, *Information Paper on the Education System in Ethiopia* (1982), 3.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷Zerihun Anebo, interview, December 2010.</footnote>
to measure. Girma Bekele, who was at the same time a teacher, a school headmaster and a member of a peasants’ association, recalls that at the beginning of the regime, farmers “worked voluntarily for development and schools.” As he recalls, the school in Bedessa, of which he was the headmaster, was expanded to provide grades 7 and 8 following a request from the population. His task was to be an organiser and an intermediary between the governor of the region and the community. The governor came to visit the school and ordered new classrooms to be built as a condition for his consent. Girma Bekele arranged for each household to contribute a small amount of money.<fnref n="8" /> He does not say whether the construction work was carried out with contribution of labour from the villagers. However, when listing the expenses, he only mentions the cost of materials and not the wages of any masons. It is therefore likely that it was the villagers who put up the buildings, and a Ministry of Education document published in 1982 stated that almost all primary school construction was carried out by local communities. In this way, it was possible to build up to 500 new schools a year nationwide, instead of the 200 built before the revolution.

## 1.2. *The stranglehold over Kale Hiwot's structures*

In Wolaita, the progress of the government school network was based on the phased confiscation of the structures belonging to the Protestant *Kale Hiwot* Church. Proclamation number 54 of 1975 on the nationalisation of private schools specified that missionary schools were outside its scope, and Proclamation number 103 of 1976 on the “Administration and Control of Schools by the People” said the same thing. However, it said nothing about Ethiopian religious schools such as those of *Kale Hiwot*, which had become independent from SIM in the 1960s. But as Talemos Mana recalls: “The Derg came to power and the missionary schools were handed over to the government. All the church schools were closed.”<fnref n="9" /> When Talemos Mana speaks of “missionary” schools, he is referring not only to those that were actually run by the missionaries but also to the hundreds of primary schools that were organised, financed and operated by local Protestant churches. In terms of closures, these were requisitions. From the very beginning of the literacy campaign, as Girma Bekele recalls, Protestant churches were transformed into places of study: “The Derg arrived and decreed a basic education. Basic education was decreed and all the churches were closed. Every place of prayer became a school.”<fnref n="10" /> This was part of the general policy of the literacy campaign: these religious buildings could be used as

<footnote n="8">⁸Germa Bekele, interview, December 2010.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹Talemos Mana, interview, November 2010.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰Germa Bekele, interview, December 2010.</footnote>
classrooms just like any other building, especially as they were widespread and the communities were organised around their churches. They were perfectly appropriate places for placing education at the heart of communities. Then, as the literacy centres became primary schools, the temporary use of these buildings became permanent.

Initially, the *Kale Hiwot* Church faithful supported the revolution. They believed that the reforms were more in line with the word of the Bible than the policies of the overthrown regime had been (Eide 2000, 169). In order to become institutionalised in the countryside, the new regime was able to rely on the large numbers of Protestant settlements as well as the support of the faithful: many of the early leaders of peasant associations were Protestant (Donham 1999, 151–76). Relations began to deteriorate in 1979–80, when young followers refused to chant slogans like: “we must destroy our enemies,” “religion is the opium of the people” and “God is dead.” In response, the government imprisoned hundreds of *Kale Hiwot* members in Gamo-Goffa and Kambatta. The situation was no better in Wolaita, where the congregation decided to hold their annual Bible study conference in 1983 despite being refused permission by the authorities. It was attended by 10,000 people. On the third day of the conference, the police arrested the ministers, some of whom remained in prison for over a year. The most severe actions were taken in 1984–85, however, when the government closed more than half the local churches (1,700 out of 2,791) without giving a reason. This move affected all 748 churches in Wolaita, and all the SIM's property was confiscated (Eide 2000, 169–70).

In order to be able to understand these measures, one must look at the Derg's general policy towards religions, which was based on political rather than religious considerations. Despite professing to be atheist, the Derg pursued different policies towards the religions practised in Ethiopia. As a member of *Qalä Haywät* recalls: “Selassie Church in Addis Ababa celebrated *Temqat* every year and the government participated in the programme. But for us, *Kale Hiwot* or *Mekane Yesus*, they closed it.”<fnref n="11" /> “Selassie” (Trinity) is one of the main churches in Addis Ababa where national ceremonies organised by the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church are held. Why this ambivalent attitude of the Derg towards religions? Although the Derg was quick to proclaim the equality of religions and freedom of worship, its attitude towards the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, Islam and Protestant churches was far from identical.

On 10 August 1974, it separated the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church from the state, causing it to lose its status as the official church, and thus its

<footnote n="11">¹¹Abebe Fola, interview, December 2009.</footnote>