The Rise of Ethiopian
Nihilism and the Plight of Addis Ababa University
A significant
debate is going on in Ethiopia about the problems and the future of Addis Ababa
University. An echo of this debate is found in the weekly Addis Tribune: in
successive articles, several readers have expressed their serious concern about
the future of Addis Ababa University, and by extension, of higher education in
Ethiopia. So far-reaching are these concerns that they vary from the perception
of a crisis which has reached “an unmanageable proportion” to the diagnosis of
a “final fate” or the choice “to close the university.” As to the reasons for
the deteriorating condition, the lack of financial incentive and the
suppression of democratic governance are cited as leading causes. The patent
symptoms of the crisis being the exodus of professors and the general apathy of the academic staff, the
diagnosis seems accurate enough. Moreover, it designates the Ethiopian
government as the main culprit, obvious as it is that neither the improvement
of the financial condition nor the establishment of democratic atmosphere is
beyond the reach of the present government. The general suspicion is that the
appalling condition of the university may be the result of a deliberate policy
of strangulation.
My
purpose is not to add my voice to the general outcry against governmental
indifference or malevolence. Instead, I prefer to share my reflections on the
deeper cause of the mistreatment of the university by successive regimes as
well as by its own products, namely, the Ethiopian educated elite.
To tell the
truth, although the majority of the students and academic staff have so far
firmly defended a nationalist commitment, the university as an institution has
never succeeded in defining and assuming a national role. Its failure reflected
the inability of Ethiopian ruling elites and educated circles to make sense of
modern education. In many ways, modern education in Ethiopia has been and still
is the learning of self-hatred and destruction. We Ethiopians made the fundamental
mistake of overlooking the long-term effects of an education based on the
unilinear and Eurocentric conception of social change on our own self-
perception, as a society and a nation.
If anything,
such a conception taught us to systematically measure our history and cultures
against the values and achievements of the West. The result was the learning of
self-depreciation, soon followed by the revolutionary rage against a legacy
held responsible for our “backwardness.” In thus demolishing our very fabric by
looking up to the West, we lost the historical initiative in favor of the
Western engine by which we were literally towed. To be educated meant for us
learning how backward our society and tradition are and how mercilessly we must
tear them down to enter the mainstream of modern nations. It meant imitating
the Western model so that modernization amounted less to mobilizing our own
creativity than to copying an external model. From producers that we were
supposed to become we stooped to the level of mere consumers of modernity. This
explains why the adoption of the appearances of modernity and the impatience to
change define us better than the eagerness to understand how machines work and
how peoples get organized to use machines.
Modernity
versus tradition: such is the key concept of our modern education. Our total
and uncritical surrender to this dichotomy is easily explained by our history,
in particular by the fact that we escaped colonization. Because other African countries had gone
through the ordeal of alienation and domination by a sustained and direct
colonial rule, their scholars, at least a few of them, understood the need to
recapture their freedom by recentering their identity and history. For them,
the extraction from the unilinear conception of history--by which the West
assumed the vanguard position while the rest of humanity turned into a passive
follower--appeared as the sine qua non of restoring the initiative to African
peoples. Such thinkers as Cheikh Anta Diop and Leopold S. Senghor, to name but
the most famous, advocated a return to the source. To make sense of Africa,
they argued, no other way exists than to construct an autonomous theory of
African history and personality. To accomplish anything, one must begin by
regaining the feeling of worth.
The
case of Ethiopian intellectuals predating the Italian invasion put aside, no
contemporary Ethiopian scholar has expressed a concern similar to Negritude or
Afrocentrism. On the contrary, the conflict between tradition and modernity
became the main leitmotiv of Ethiopian intellectual life, further engraving
self-hatred and infantile destruction. The apex of nihilism was reached when
within a few years the great majority of Ethiopian students and educated elite
turned into fanatic Marxist- Leninist or Maoist followers. Since I was myself a
typical representative of the general drift, the forces which backed my
mutation into a revolutionary zealot are still vivid in my mind. We became
Marxist because the dichotomy between tradition and modernity that we had
uncritically absorbed led us to believe that unless the foundations of our
society were turned upside down, no remedy was to be found to the plight and
misery of Ethiopian peoples. It was a consistent, logical dictate of self-hatred:
even before we made any serious attempt to reform things, we had to be
persuaded that the country was so hopeless that nothing less than a deeply
uprooting shakeup was necessary. Put otherwise, we espoused Marxism, not
because we believed that it was appropriate, still less because having tried
reformist methods, we were convincingly rebuffed. No, we became Marxist because
the theory gave to our hatred its ultimate expression through the permission to
devastate Ethiopia. For those who doubt the presence of a destructive urge, I
ask them to explain why the revolution was no sooner launched than it plunged
into a senseless blood bath in which victims and killers became indistinguishable.
Given
that the university and its direct and indirect products were the active
instrument as well as the ideological spearhead of the revolution, it is fair to
say that its present plight is the result of the destructive forces that it has
itself nurtured and launched. Faithful to its ideology, the Derg was the first
to marginalize the university, all the more willingly as the very composition
of its leadership had a persistent grudge against the arrogance of the educated
elite. Once the umbilical cord uniting the bulk of the army to the traditional
elite was cut by the insidious work of young educated officers, power went to
those who most ardently hated the social hierarchy. The more destructive these people
became, the higher their assurance of being born Marxist in default of being
intellectuals soared. Can we fail to understand that what propelled them toward
the pinnacle of Ethiopian power and gave them justification was the self-
hatred that gripped the country?
The story
continues: others became guerrillas, following their grasp that an even greater
destruction can be obtained if the class conflict is supplanted by ethnic
animosity. What makes us listen to the sirens of ethnicity is still the same paradigm
of modernity culminating in the description of a deficient society in need of a
thorough upheaval. Unsurprisingly, the first victim of the ethnic ethos were
Eritreans whose greater exposure to Western influence through a direct colonial
rule easily talked them into the idea that they were more “civilized” than the
Ethiopian ruling elite. Make no mistake: the ethnic ethos, which undermines
Ethiopian unity, is simply a deepening of the revolutionary drift of the 60s
and 70s.
Far be it from
me to suggest that imperial Ethiopia was perfectly fine. Formidable obstacles,
mostly due to the demission and inappropriateness of the imperial system, were
standing in the way to change. But the course that the revolution took was
neither called for nor inevitable. In no way, however, does this deviation
invalidate the leadership role claimed by the educated elite and the
university. The one thing that the Ethiopian peoples expected more than
anything else was the leadership of those of their sons who were fortunate enough
to glean modern education. But let us hasten to add that, in their eyes, young Ethiopians
were sent to Western countries and to the Europeanized sectors of Addis Ababa
as spies with the mission to steal and bring home the secret of Western power.
Little did they expect that their own spies would turn into mercenaries intent
on ravaging their life.
Allow me to
recount a memorable circumstance of my own introduction to modern education. It
refers to the first day when schools open after the long break of the rainy
season. We were then a bunch of kids from a remote neighborhood walking through
the streets of Addis Ababa early in the morning to get to our school: the Lycee
Guebre Mariam. While boys and girls were thus filling the streets, women and
all kinds of other peoples could be seen getting out of their home to greet us
with loud and cheerful ililitas. Because I was very young, I was hardly in a
position to understand the deep meaning of this spontaneous display of popular
support except to say that people were happy to see us go to school as obedient
children. It is later on that I was able to decipher the meaning of the
ililita: it clearly defined modern education as an assignment, a mission given
to the few to return with the secret of machines. It did not imply the
demolition of the order, beliefs, and customs of the society. It was rather a
mission to salvage by empowering the Ethiopian legacy with the knowledge of
machines.
Had AAU and
higher education in general stuck to the task of appropriating the secret of
machines, they would have set the course of a proper national role. True, the
introduction of machines into the fabric of society was bound to entail
far-going social and cultural changes. Even so, these changes did not need to
depart from the direction of enhancing Ethiopia’s commitments and originality.
The transition from consumer to producer of technology depends on the
association of individual rewards with the promotion of social and national
goals. When studies suggest that better payments coupled with democratic
governance can significantly reduce the present exodus of professors from the
universities, the proposal admits that the number one priority is the recognition
of the university, that is, the definition of its national role in conjunction
with the appropriate institutional framework. Unless the function is first
defined, neither the issue of institutional arrangement nor the satisfaction of
material rewards can be properly addressed. You can never retain people, still
less expect them to become active and creators, without making room for their
input. There is always a higher bidder, especially when poverty does not allow
you compete, not to mention the fact that you will consider those who stay in
the country either as worthless scholars who are unable to sell themselves
elsewhere or as candidates waiting for an offer to come. In both cases, you
poison your relationships with the university. But provide them with a national
role, and you make these scholars think, not only in terms of better life and
income, but also in terms of their contribution. In thus appealing to their
sense of being somebody, you get a better chance to retain them even if you pay
them less.
Taking Ethiopia as Subject
The great
question, then, is this: Have we today a better idea about the role of the
university than before? My own answer tilts toward skepticism. So long as higher
education in Ethiopia remains externally oriented, it will never be able to define
its proper national function. It will persist in the so far followed path of producing
alienated and revengeful elites who would have for the university nothing but
grudge and suspicion in default of knowing what to do with it. This brings us
back to our point of departure, to the imperative need to rescue modern
education from its alienating impact, to forcefully domesticate its spirit by
grounding it on Ethiopian history and culture. Only thus will it cease to be the
learning of hatred and destruction in favor of taking root, whose outcome should
be the release of creativity.
Let me recount
another episode of my life, this time while I was professor of philosophy at
Addis Ababa University. As after years of confusion and wanderings I became
progressively convinced of the need to give education a national direction, it
dawned on me that the best way of initiating the process is by teaching
university courses in Amharic or any other Ethiopian language for that matter.
Seeing the already advanced stage of the translation of Marxist concepts and
ideas into Amharic, I thought that an experiment in Amharic to one selected
class of the freshman philosophy course for one semester would be in order. I
prepared handouts and after a long administrative battle, I began the
experiment under the supervision of a departmental committee elected for the
purpose. I still vividly remember the general outcry and hostility that my experiment
generated. With the exceptions of few people, the prevailing attitude was to
reject the experiment.
I do not want to
go into the detail of that story. Suffice it to say that the general hostility
was for me further evidence of the alienation of the educated elite. While I
understood that many members of the academic staff resented the experiment
because of their hostility to Marxist-Leninist philosophy, in particular
because it meant an endorsement of the ideology of the Derg, I could also see
that there was more than mere refusal of a philosophical position. There was a
deep resistance to the very idea of a university course being given in Amharic.
Yet it was generally admitted that most students, especially those who came
from rural areas, had insufficient knowledge of English. What is more, the use
of Amharic language is not a side issue in the modernization process. The
original national script of Amharic represents a smashing refutation of the
stigma that colonialism attached to the absence of script in Black Africa. I
cannot think of a higher and more compelling determination to modernize
Ethiopia than to begin with a rupture, the very one resulting from the proud
use of a written native language as a medium of university education and research.
Nothing could
better show the lack of national orientation of the whole system of higher
education than the choice of the English language when so much was at stake. It
made knowledge into a fortress guarded by the English language to which only
few had access. For this elitist stand, knowledge was no longer what was stolen
from the West and then spread among the people in the language they know.
Worse, its aim was not so much the empowerment of the local community as its satellization. In thus betraying its assigned
role of messenger of Ethiopian peoples, modern education had become the
advanced citadel of the corrosive effect of Westernization.
Allow me to
illustrate my position by a concrete example. It can be argued that it is in
the best interest of Ethiopia to drop celebrating the New Year in September by
simply adopting the Western calendar. The eccentricity of the calendar isolates
Ethiopians from the developed world, just as it unduly complicates their
communication and exchanges with the rest of the world. Yet the whole question
is to know whether it makes sense for Ethiopians to celebrate the New Year in
January. I note that, in addition to corresponding to a tangible weather
change, the Ethiopian New Year occurs in a context of transformations
signifying transition, rebirth, and joy. The rainy season when life becomes
muddy, gray, and unsuitable is over; here comes the time of harvest, of the
shining sun and rebirth of flowers, the time of new hope and joy. The only
impact that the adoption of the Western calendar will have is a further loss of
Ethiopian identity, a further surrender of its will to posit and live in a
world liable to consecrate its autonomy.
The example
carries a powerful meaning. It shows that introducing Amharic in higher
education is not a misguided attempt to express a foreign and superior knowledge
in an inappropriate local idiom. It is an attempt to recenter knowledge, to nationalize
it, to make it serve a local community by inversing its tendency to turn local
life into a periphery of another center. In a word, it is to take possession of
knowledge. Language is to knowledge what the soil is to the cultivator: the
recipient and nurture of the seed. And as long as governments and educated
circles resent the full integration of higher education into the Ethiopian
reality, the choice of a native language as a medium of learning and developing
knowledge will remain a taboo.
What is one to
conclude from this? That it is of no avail to press for a policy change while
we still run away from the fundamental question. We must first face and solve
this great question: Why is the system of higher education persistently
producing people who play havoc with the country? Answering to this question
means critically examining the form as well as the content of what now passes
for higher education. It will easily be found that the question is equal to
finally critically evaluating the impact of Western education on the Ethiopian
youth.
Let there be no
misunderstanding. I am not at all suggesting that we should turn our back on
what is Western. Such an attitude would be foolish and self-defeating. Much of
Western education is based on solid scientific discoveries and rational
thinking, which are universal, and hence usable. Nor am I calling for the
adoption of a confrontational attitude toward Western countries. Anything other
than the sober spirit of normal business relationships would only reveal our
immaturity. Still, we must not forget that the rational content of Western
education is inserted into a conception of history and a vision of the world
describing the West as a center surrounded by peripheral peoples and cultures.
Unless we extract the rational content from this Eurocentric vision, what we
borrow from the West will only deepen our marginality. As stated earlier,
learning will amount to self-effacement, itself leading to sadomasochistic
yearnings.
Imperative,
therefore, is the involvement of all those Ethiopian scholars who have at heart
the bright future of Ethiopia in a serious reflection taking Ethiopia as
subject rather than as destined to be modeled on an external icon. Without this
primary work of defining Ethiopia by investing her with an autonomous personality
and course of existence, the complaint about the mistreatment of the university
remains inconsistent and vain. After years of reflection and research, I
recently published a book, Survival and Modernization, Ethiopia’s Enigmatic
Present: A Philosophical Discourse, in which I attempt to recenter Ethiopia by
inserting its history and experience of modernization into an autonomous
historical mission derived from its myths and existential unfolding. I observe
that other Ethiopian scholars are also engaged in the same work of reconnecting
Ethiopia with her own self. One can only hope for the sustained expansion of
this promising self-critical and self-repossession trend whose result must be
the incorporation of what we borrow into an enhancing image of our own self.
This is to say that our complaint concerning the university makes sense only if
we know that what we are losing had indeed the projected virtues. If higher
education in Ethiopia remains the learning of self-contempt, then there is
nothing to complain about. Not only are
we not losing anything, but we should also add that private universities with a
full-fledged foreign curriculum would better achieve the goal of self- denial.