Haile Selassie, Western Education, and Political Revolution in Ethiopia

Haile Selassie, Western Education, and Political Revolution in Ethiopia. By Paulos Milkias. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. $89.95 paper.

Paulos Milkias is an Ethiopian writing about revolutionary change that engulfed his country beginning in the 1960s, which resulted in the overthrow of legendary emperor Haile Selassie, and then a singularly brutal military dictatorship lasting until 1991. The book includes observations about the period of the Mengistu dictatorship and important information and insights from Ethiopia's earlier history. But, principally, it centers upon the period of the 1960s and 1970s when students and teachers played important roles in heralding and mobilizing revolutionary change, a period when western education that Haile Selassie championed played an important role in the undoing of his regime and a long history of feudal Ethiopian imperialism.

Haile Selassie, Western Education, and Political Revolution adds a great deal of important information about this tumultuous period from the perspective of the education sector about which too little has been written. While others...