Amsale Alemu

Third World Historical articulates a research agenda for a project suggestively housed as a special section in the pages of CSSAAME (42.2).The editor’s community webpage on Borderlines features experimental writings that enact the project’s attention to questions of form. Here, the intention is to engage in a collaborative project that is its own form of archive building, a portal that speaks to the wider themes of the Third World Historical. The essays in Borderlines highlight the visceral and the relational as distinct from abstract concepts of revolution as complete breaks. The words in these pieces are never failure, or defeat but stories of complicity, compromise, and fragmentation. By emphasizing relationality, movement, and complicity we aim to think concretely about moving between a world overwhelmed by structural forces that preclude action and an imagined world filled with boundless agents detached from history, an equally self-defeating proposition.

Forty years after the event, Hailu Ayele recalled being arrested in Addis Ababa on suspicion of political libel. When he arrived at the police station, two colonels began their interrogation: “They started by handing me a piece of blank paper and instructing me to write ‘imperialism’ on it.” (P.40-41)

“Is that the way you write ‘I’?” [the colonel] asked me.

“I write it any way I want to,” I replied. (P.21)

The issue, Hailu Ayele understood, was an article written by Ethiopian students in the United States, which had traveled to Addis Ababa, been transcribed by hand by students in the capital, and reproduced by mimeograph for widespread distribution. The police were attempting to incriminate him as a conspirator, on the basis of his handwriting. Their reasoning: if Hailu’s “I” matched that of the document, he must have been directly involved in its proliferation.

Hailu Ayele remembered the article being titled “U.S. Imperialism in Ethiopia,” and its being published around 1968, but did not remember the author. Out of self-protection, the students who reproduced the article in Addis Ababa had slightly sanitized passages that were especially critical of Emperor Haile Selassie during the transcription process. For this, and for not being the original authors—or presumed capable of writing an article that made significant use of U.S. materials—they were exonerated. In fact, Haile recalled counter-intelligence police treating him and two other suspected students to lunch at Castelli Restaurant, after which they were informed of their release from police custody and bribed to join the civil service. (P.40-41)

I cannot definitively say to what document “U.S. Imperialism in Ethiopia” refers. Written around 1968 and citing U.S. government documents and newspapers, it could be “American Economic Penetration in Ethiopia: A Survey,” a paper presented at the Ethiopian Student Association in North America’s (ESANA) fifteenth congress in 1967, held in Bloomington, Indiana, (published in “Proceedings and Resolutions”). It could also be “Repression in Ethiopia,” a document making similar arguments about Ethiopia being “an imperialist agent” of the U.S. via economic saturation and military occupation, which was published as a stand-alone pamphlet in 1971 but printed in The Black Panther newspaper in 1970 and prepared by ESANA as early as June 1969. Or else it could be a working copy (or a published version, if Hailu Ayele’s memory was a couple of years off) of the special issue of Challenge, “Imperialism in Ethiopia,” from January 1971, which included articles on historical and ongoing U.S. imperialism in Ethiopia by Wondwossen Hailu and the New York chapter of the Ethiopian Students Union in North America (ESUNA). The original “U.S. Imperialism in Ethiopia” remains an ambiguous document; and the version that was rewritten, edited, and redistributed by members of the University Students Union of Addis Ababa (USUAA) was actually destroyed. (P.40-41)

Such archival ambiguity is endemic to histories of revolutionary thought and action. In the Institute of Ethiopian Studies at Addis Ababa University, many materials pertaining to the 1974 revolution that deposed Haile Selassie and ended imperial rule in Ethiopia are housed in the “Clandestine Literature Collection.” Given state censorship, the perceived libelous nature of insurrectionary political thought, and the necessity for revolutionary students to organize themselves covertly, the archive that scaffolds this history of Ethiopian political thought is presumed “clandestine” because of its gaps, inconsistencies, and often unclear authorial attributions. However, in my pursuit of a sociopolitical history of Ethiopian revolutionary student activists located in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s, I have been thinking through the idea of the clandestine a bit differently.

“Clandestine” is not only what is secret, but the gravitational pull of the secret itself. A critical history of revolution thrives in archival ambiguity precisely because it is not mainly concerned with recovering absences and presenting a narrative void of contingency. Instead, recognizing that “how the dust settles is not exactly predetermined,” in Elleni Zeleke’s words, it approaches the clandestine as the drawing-near of people to potent ideas. I am less interested in the seduction of uncovering the hidden than in tracing concentrated attention around concepts just beyond reach, nearly unknowable. In effect, any revolutionary imaginary, though it may plan for the post-revolution, employs rupture as tactic and theory of historical narrative. For Ethiopian student activists, imperialism was in many senses a clandestine concept of the problem of revolution.

The history of Ethiopian student revolutionary thought from the late 1950s through the 1970s tends to speak of two major turning points. The first is represented by the 1965 “Land to the Tiller” demonstrations, with the singling out of “feudalism” as an intractable condition of imperial rule, such that no revolutionary program would thereafter be complete without prioritizing peasant conditions and land reform. The second was the turn of the student movement to Marxism-Leninism, which is located generally in the late 1960s, though a threshold radicalizing moment was the 1969 assassination of USUAA President Tilahun Gizaw by state authorities and the ensuing imprisonment and exile of several student leaders.[1] Rarely do we discuss a third turning point, around 1967, when the Ethiopian student movement began to conceive itself as anti-imperialist.[2]

Anti-imperialism was not an obvious theoretical choice for Ethiopian students organizing against a monarch who was a global symbol of Black African independence. To make their argument, Ethiopian students uniquely adapted ideas of semi-, para-, and neo-coloniality.[3] They argued that the United States exerted neo-imperial control of Ethiopia through land and economy, culture and education, and geopolitics and the military.[4] As ESANA claimed in an announcement of its fourteenth congress, “the analysis of Ethiopia’s present geo-political position and political economy does not simply rip off the mystique of traditional Ethiopian independence, but also unmasks the real mastery of many a so-called independent state of the underdeveloped world.”

As Hailu Ayele himself recalled, the word “imperialism” had been secretly discussed among students in Addis Ababa before first being published in the resolutions of the National Union of Ethiopian University Students’ (NUEUS) sixth congress in 1967. (P.40-41) “U.S. Imperialism in Ethiopia” would not have been the first text to venture the idea of Ethiopia’s imperial relationship to the United States, but its access to U.S. materials, as well as the authority it could assume as a dispatch from the “metropole,” so conceived, would have been impactful.

Ethiopian students in the United States, for their part, were not theorizing U.S. imperialism alone. Some of the earliest student writing by Hagos Gabre Yesus and Dessalegn Rahmato arguing for a connection between feudal monarchy and capitalist imperialism took place parallel to an argument among Black American activists regarding their own proximity to colonization vis-à-vis the United States.[5] ESANA invited Stokely Carmichael to its fourteenth congress; Carmichael accepted but was unable to attend due to his imprisonment in the wake of the 1966 Atlanta uprising.[6] In fact, at its fifteenth congress, the same student conference where “U.S. Imperialism in Ethiopia” likely originated, ESANA passed a resolution on “The Rebellion of the Black People in the U.S.,” positing that Black Americans were to prove a vanguard of American liberation and an eventual example for other anti-imperialist movements beyond its borders.

Ironically, one reason Ethiopian counter-intelligence police were certain that Haile Ayele could not have authored “U.S. Imperialism in Ethiopia” was because of the document’s access to U.S. sources. The fact that the article could seemingly have only been written abroad was precisely the argument of a revolutionary movement beginning to promote an anti-imperialist platform. When students in Addis Ababa edited the article to evade government reprisal, they were not “less radical” than their foreign counterparts, but were enacting a (neo-)imperial geography mapped by the content of its message. The very circulation of the document would open immanent critique of Ethiopian independence under monarchical rule.

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[1] This is well accounted for in Bahru Zewde’s seminal work, The Quest for Socialist Utopia: The Ethiopian Student Movement, c. 1960–1974 (Oxford: James Currey, 2014).

[2] Elleni Centime Zeleke’s Ethiopia in Theory is one of the first works to treat neocolonialism in the Ethiopian Student Movement at length, especially in the discussion of Dessalegn Rahmato’s 1967 review of Kwame Nkrumah’s Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (1966) on pages 105–7.

[3]Wondwossen Hailu wrote in his essay on the history of American imperialism in Ethiopia: “The case of Ethiopia is one of the earliest instances of neocolonialism as a means of economic and political control by United States imperialism” (“Imperialism in Ethiopia,” 1971). His statement begged the question: what was neocolonialism before the era of African independence?

[4] Ethiopia is our closest friend in Africa,” Henry Kissinger disclosed in a classified briefing to President Nixon on 6 July 1969: Richard M. Nixon National Security Files, 1969–74, Meetings with Foreign Leaders, Folder: 103974-003-0383, NAACP Vault.

[5] “For us, as for many peoples of the Afro-Asian world, Black Power is no mere slogan. It hits the very core of our problems so long neglected and obscured by the ideology of liberalism” (Ethiopian Students in North America, “World Situation,” Cambridge, 1966, 2395/03/1.8, Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Addis Ababa University).

[6] Julia Polk to Mr. Hagos G. Yesus, Letter, August 1966, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Papers, 1959–72, Folder: 252253-002-1183, NAACP Vault; “Carmichael Arrested on Riot Charges in Raid on Snick Office: Bond Is Set at $11,000; Hearing Will Be Today,” The Atlanta Constitution, 9 September 1966.

Amsele (Amy) Alemu is assistant professor in the Department of History at Scripps College. She received her PhD from the Department of African-American Studies at Harvard University in 2021. Her interests include Black transnationalism, the history of political thought, and integrative approaches to African and African-American Studies.