"Land to the tiller! Education for all!": constellating the Ethiopian Student Movement and the Black Radical Tradition

Abstract

The 1960s Ethiopian Student Movement (ESM), a moment where the youth’s radical fervor and commitment to a socialist Ethiopia was a harbinger of the end of empire, is a significant moment in the trajectory of Ethiopian political history worth intervening and reconstituting as part of the Black Radical Tradition (BRT). Ethiopia’s presumed history of remaining uncolonized in the face of European domination has created a “picturesque medievalism of kings and queens” while masking the “overwhelming reality of the misery” of the Ethiopian people.1 And despite the sustenance of this misleading image, scholars have attempted to establish Ethiopia’s albeit differing coloniality and the emergent decolonial politic embraced by Ethiopian students and activists in the mid-century against Haile Selassie II’s feudalist and imperialist empire. This study aims to intervene here and contribute to the scholarship regarding the ESM to show how the Ethiopian students’ ideological posture on the socioeconomic and national questions of Ethiopia was a manifestation of the phenomenon that is the BRT. Resituating the ESM within this inherited tradition establishes Ethiopia’s radical past, more accurately, as part of the transnational Black revolt uninterested in reformation, but rather socialist world-building—a moment in Ethiopian history overlooked, simplified and relentlessly critiqued. 1 Ethiopian Students Union in North America, “Repression in Ethiopia,” Africa Research Group 5, (1971): 1.