The book under review is an exemplary work of self-examination by a current Professor of Philosophy who was a participant in the Ethiopian student movement, at a formative moment. Messay Kebede draws from this existential fountain and examines his subject by blending scholarly discipline with a lived life. The result is a book that provokes, fascinates, educates and informs the lay reader as well as the seasoned scholar.

Messay Kebede successfully presents the Ethiopian student movements, whose leaders either have passed away, or are part of the current Ethiopian regime, as a paradigmatic example of a failed student revolution.

His mission is to explain the notion of cultural dislocation and how that notion applies to the Ethiopian student movement. 

His thesis is eloquently summarized in the following paragraph:

In order to demonstrate the link between cultural dislocation and radicalization, the book analyzes the multifarious impact of Western education on Ethiopian youth. It shows how the internalization of Eurocentric concepts and its dissolving effect on traditional values and references produced a characteristic cultural crisis that fed on a rejectionist state of mind. It draws the infatuation with Marxism-Leninism from the nugatory attitude, thereby exhibiting the concrete correspondence existing between the needs arising from the cultural crisis and the precepts of revolutionary doctrine. Going beyond a purely exogenous explanation, the analysis inquires into the Ethiopian legacy and establishes the existence of a messianic trend that responded favorably to Marxist Utopianism. In other words, in light of internalization of Eurocentrism that caused deep fractures, the inquiry harnesses the emergence of radicalism to the therapeutic, but alas illusory, promises of Marxism-Leninism (p, 6)

This thesis is then rigorously examined in nine chapters. Chapter one provides a historical account of the radicalism of Ethiopian student leaders and followers; the internalization of Western normatively is presented in chapter two; the role of this normatively in Emperor Haile Sellassie�s educational policy is explored in chapter three; the fall out of up rootedness and Globalism is further enforced in chapter four; imitativeness of Eurocentrism as the normatively is critically analyzed in chapter five; Ethiopian Messianism is the subject of chapter six; chapter seven carries further Messianism as an instance of religion and Social Utopianism in chapter eight; chapter nine looks at the Sublimation of Desertion, and finally chapter nine  critically engages the conventional argument that the Ethiopian student movement is a response to the material conditions of the Ethiopian poor.

Messay dismisses the views that student revolutionaries were motivated by their sympathy for the poor, that students thought that liberal reforms were simply inadequate. For Messay, the pivot to the understanding of the psyche of the student elites is imbedded in the cultural domain, that scholars have long ignored. His task is to penetrate this dimension by the use of cultural hegemonic ideology, which students fully internalized. (8-37). By cultural conditions, Messay understands, the corrosive effect mediated by the normativity of the West, most particularly, the liberal education that the Emperor uncritically introduced to Ethiopia , and its diffusion among the educated elites, who manned the Ethiopian bureaucracy.  Emperor Haile Selassie�s vision of modernity was the displacement of traditional education by modern liberal education.

The normativity of the West was essentially embodied in the imported educational policies, which were forced on Ethiopian educators and policy makers.  It is these projects that Eurocericim used to colonize culturally Ethiopia , which was at first spared of physical colonization, the fate of the other Africans, who were subjected to the colonial project for seventy-five years.

The traditional education, that produced Zara Yacob , Ethiopia �s modernist philosopher, was wrongly replaced by Western education, which sealed Ethiopia �s future, as the victim of the Eurocentric project of cultural colonization. Messsay analyzes this practice with a penetrating awareness in three interrelated chapters (3.4, and 5).

Furthermore, Messay argues that it is precisely homegrown religious sentiments, which made it possible for Ethiopian revolutionary students to be infatuated with Marxism-Leninism, which itself had utopian projections mediated by the Messiah, which the student readily translated into the myth of the messianic leader of the Marxist-Leninist political party. The Marxist-Leninist Party becomes the Messiah, which would lead the dormant Ethiopian masses, to which Ethiopian revolutionary leaders will bring consciousness from the outside.

Ethiopianism, the new slogan of the students, was intended to diffuse Ethnicity; Ethiopianism, in concert with workerism, was to replace ethnicity anchored on peasantrism. Serious debates among the revolutionaries were fought on the terrain of Nationalism and Ethnicism.

Messay puts it thus:

The history of the Ethiopian student movement shows that a great number of students dragged their feet in endorsing the Leninist solution to Ethiopia �s inequality. Aware of the danger of the Leninist idea of self-determination, some students proposed� Ethiopianism as a renovated nationalism� it defined Ethiopia as the integrated unity of free and equal citizens. (P, 176)

This book has shown us Ethiopians that we have our history, perhaps even our own institutions, with which we can handle Ethiopian matters by Ethiopian instruments. This possibility was blocked by the importation of western normativity, and that Ethiopian modernity must be dug out of the Ethiopian past, and rejuvenated by the mantles of critical reason.

If this project can be realized only my looking backwards instead of forward, then Ethiopian modernity is the task of the Ethiopian past and not Ethiopia �s future as the representation of Western normativity.

Now that Messay has diagnosed the Ethiopian condition most compellingly, I look forward to his prognoses, through a debate with Tecola Hagos, who recently challenged Messay to take on Constitutional monarchy as a new possibility of leadership for contemporary Ethiopia .

Teodros Kiros, PhD

January 23, 2009