From the Ethiopian Student Movement

FORWARD! Newsletter of WWFES, Feb 1977

Before 1974, the worldwide Ethiopian Student movement was home to a vital and extremely political community of young people. Especially in Europe and North America, Ethiopian students debated, and ultimately planned, revolution in their homeland. Exposed to the ideas of Marxism-Leninism, then wildly popular on college campuses, especially in its “New Communist Movement” or Maoist, form, the publications of this movement took on the language of the revolution in earnest. Both EPRP and Meison — as well as figures like Senay Likke — seem to have come out of this movement. When the revolution began, many of these students went home, where they became the leaders of living revolutionary movements. Those who remained behind transformed their organizations into support vehicles for the revolution: The majority of these student groups after 1974 clearly lined up behind EPRP. Here are a number of the publications of these groups.

The “Handbook on Elementary Notes on Revolution and Organization” came out in 1972, published by the Ethiopian Student Union in North America (ESUNA). It's a manual for clandestine revolutionary organizing, then under the rule of Haile Selassie but soon to be put to good use under the military regime.

The World Wide Federation of Ethiopian Students (WWFES) was quick to support the EPRP, and quick to warn of the impending violence against young Ethiopian revolutionaries by the Derg. This small pamphlet was produced in 1976.

Forward! was the mostly English-language journal of WWFES. It featured lots of news of events in Ethiopia, and sharply-worded Marxist-Leninist analysis of what was happening.

While WWFES was not formally a youth organization of EPRP, it clearly aligned itself with EPRP, witness the ad box on the back cover of this issue of Forward!. Actually at some point chapters of WWFES like ESUNA developed differences of political line with EPRP, especially over divisive but crucial questions like Eritrea and the nature of the Soviet Union.

ESUNA's own publication was Combat, published in out of Madison, Wisconsin. ESUNA was definitely a battleground for various US Marxist-Leninist tendencies. The climax of the revolution, 1976-1977, was a period of foment after Mao Zedong's death and a leadership coup in China brought about the end of the Cultural Revolution and a strong realignment of Chinese policy toward world revolution. The unsettled ideology of this period in what would eventually divide into Maoist, Hoxhaist and Dengist factions of the world left movement was quite evident.

Another issue of Combat. This one is full of statements of support to the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Army of EPRP.

Other publications of this student movement included Zena, Struggle and Challenge. I don't know what the publications of Ethiopian students in Europe were, organized as ESUE. Research update: I'm adding two important works about the role of the Ethiopian student movement in the revolution to my reading list.