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Messay Kebede. Radicalism and Cultural Dislocation in Ethiopia, 1960-1974. Rochester, NY: Rochester University Press, 2008. xi, 235 pp.
Radicalism and Cultural Dislocation in Ethiopia is the result of Messay Kebede's quest to understand the modernization process promoted by Haile Selassie since the sixties, and more specifically its failure which, apparently, led to its overthrow and to the 1974 Revolution.
Multiple factors help to explain the Ethiopian radicalization process in the decade and a half prior to the revolution, the shift of the regime being its culmination. Usually, the structural ones have been underscored, pointing to a question of degree rather than of form to make clear why, suddenly, Haile Selassie's reign broke up in the middle of the seventies. Following this point of view, the events appear as something natural or even logical in the Ethiopian historical process: having reached a decisive point, the economic and political problems became unbearable for the society; reform was not an option, the autocratic regime had to come to an end.
Nevertheless, in contrast with this explanation, Messay Kebede comes back or rescues the fundamental question from which the historical analyses may start afresh, namely: why" Transmitting, in a certain way but not explicitly, a kind of braudelian notion of history (maybe the fruit of his personal experience in Ethiopia and of his knowledge of the French Academy), Kebede offers a critical account of the 1960-1974 period. Analyzing the modernization process promoted by Haile Selassie in the education system and its social consequences, the author looks for new answers to an old issue.
Even if the revolution in the seventies is not something new, it can be understood from a renewed point of view. From this perspective, the question is not any more how the 1974 break-up was possible, as why the radicalization which allowed...