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Bahru Zewde. 2014. The Quest for Socialist Utopia: The Ethiopian Student Movement c. 1960- 1974. Melton, Suffolk, UK: James Currey. 299 pp.
This book digs into the core of the intellectual and political developments in Ethiopia, one of the largest, oldest, and most reputed states in Africa. The author, Bahru Zewde, is a respected Ethiopian professor of history who has lived close to what he narrates for more than forty years. In an impeccable scholarly exposition one senses an emotional drive to analyze the passing of historical events that can explain the constitutional order of Ethiopia that became a reality in 1994. How did Ethiopia, as the only state in Africa to do so, become a federal republic based on ethnically defined states? The answer is buried in the development of the Ethiopian student movement that made a decisive and fateful intervention in the political direction of the country, from the process that overthrew the government of Emperor Haile Sellassie to the formation of the two regimes that followed, in 1974 and in 1991. The book sees this within the context of both an international perspective of student movements as well as encompassing the thinking of earlier pioneers of change in Ethiopia.
Many studies have been dedicated to the Ethiopian student movement. They are all dealt with and the author uses as his sources everything that is related to his object of study: Ethiopian newspapers, university reports, and police and intelligence material as well as the wide range of student publications and pamphlets at home and abroad and, in addition, oral narratives.
The crucial circumstances from which the historical drama emerges were the Emperor's dedication to the development of education and the opening up of college and university education, starting in 1952. The idea of academic freedom and the initial encouragement on the part of the university...