Nega Ayele, Martyr of the Revolution

Class and Revolution in Ethiopia, by John Markakis & Nega Ayele

I am re-reading John Markakis and Nega Ayele’s definitive work Class and Revolution in Ethiopia for the first time since the 1980s. It’s an important book, and while dated, contains a lot of really useful analysis and information, untainted by the questionable analyses of certain Marxist intellectuals (deeply revisionist in my opinion), who were eager to rationalize the Ethiopian military as a legitimate force for socialist revolution. It was published in the US by Red Sea Press in 1986, though I believe a European edition appeared in 1978. It covers the period up to about the end of 1977; and it seems to still be in print.

I wanted to pay tribute to a haunting fact about this book: its coauthors were friends who met in academia. Both were scholars but Nega was also a partisan of the revolution, excited and involved in the history that was rushing up around him. They began working on the book in 1975, but Nega Ayele himself did not live to finish it. A member of the EPRP, he was murdered by a “Red Terror” death squad in March of 1977.

Co-author Markakis penned a touching intro to the book about his friend. It concludes with this passage:

“Nega himself disappeared in September 1976, when the battle against the military dictatorship was joined in earnest. His name was entered on the regime's wanted list; in effect an automatic death sentence. He managed to avoid capture for several months. On 19 March 1977, Nega and two of his comrades were caught inside a factory at the town of Akaki, near Addis Ababa, and were murdered on the spot. Three days later, the newspapers announced that he had been killed while trying to run away. In fact, Nega's leg muscles had been wasted by a debilitating disease, and he could walk only with difficulty.” (p. 14)

Hiwot Teffera recounts meeting Nega while he was underground, in her extraordinary memoir, Tower in the Sky:

“That day I went to my cousin Elsa's around six-thirty in the evening. Days before the assessa [Derg campaign against the EPRP], I went there to spend the night and saw a man sitting on the couch in the living room. I instinctively knew he was a Party member. I made friends with him easily and since that day, I sat and talked with him whenever I went there. I became his window to the outside world. At times, people came, took him in a car, and brought him back. He had an infirmity of his legs and I often wondered how he could survive the horrible conditions with his physical infirmity. I wondered if the man was still at my cousin's. He was not. My cousin sadly told me that he had been killed trying to leave town before the assessa. I learned that his name was Nega Ayele....”

Kiflu Tadesse has a more detailed account of Nega's death in volume 2 of The Generation. By way of context, though the Derg and the EPRP had already been exchanging blows, this was only a few weeks after the February 1977 incident in which Mengistu consolidated his mastery of the Derg by having several of his associates executed, blaming conciliation toward the EPRP. A systematic campaign of annihilation was then begun:

“In March 1977, while getting ready to withstand the search and destroy campaign, the EPRP lost four of its invaluable leading members: Yohannes Berhane, a member of the CC and one of the leading members of the Democracia editorial board; Melaku Marcos, a veteran activist and leading intellectual...a CC member without portfolio; Nega Ayele, an economist an a lecturer at the University of Addis Abeba and a member of the EPRP political department; Dr. William Hastings Morton, a British lecturer at the Addis Abeba and a member of the EPRP....

Arrangements were made [to escape Addis] and Dr. Morton came into the picture to provide means of transportation and to give the group a plausible disguise. On a Saturday morning, on the day that the campaign was expected to begin, the [four and another EPRP member named AY] left for the south via the Akaki Road...In order to avoid the checkpoint at Akaki, Yohannes Berhane, AY and Melaku Marcos stepped out of the vehicle just before the city limits. As they walked through an alley, past a factory gate in the Kaliti area...they encountered Abyot Tebeka [Derg-organized “defense guards”] members from one of the factories. They tried to run away, but they were chased by the Abyot Tebeka members and a mob of workers that was just going out on a break. Yohannes and Melaku were killed on the spot... Nega and Dr. Morton, who drove past the checkpoint peacefully were waiting for the others when they heard the gunshots, and sensing danger, cancelled the plan to drive to Langano. As they returned to Addis Abeba, members of the Abyot Tebeka opened fire and killed both of them. Neither the regime nor the Abyot Tebeka members knew that they had eliminated some of the most valuable members of the EPRP.” (p.196)

Since Dr. Morton was a British citizen, this incident actually made world headlines. I've attached the AP dispatch at left. Entitled “Espionage Claimed by Ethiopians,” it repeats the official Derg line that the four killed, including Dr. Morton, were counterrevolutionary spies, caught red-handed in an espionage mission. The news article obliquely refers to the beginning of the mass campaign of terror against the EPRP, then underway in earnest.

Back in the late 1970s when I first learned of Nega Ayele, I was profoundly moved by the idea of a leftist revolutionary who was murdered by a supposedly leftist government while writing an early chronicle of an unfolding revolution. He came to symbolize the generation of young revolutionaries who has haunted me for decades, inspiring me to begin this study of the revolution in earnest.

I was unfortunately not able to locate a photo of Nega Ayele to accompany this blog post. He's somebody we should never forget.



(updated May 28, 2016)

Symbolic Confusion, continued

Marx, Engels, Lenin, Siad

Expanding on my previous post, more conflicting imagery:

Wall painting of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Somali president Siad Barre, from formerly socialist Somalia, apparently photographed in Mogadishu in 1991. Socialist Somalia and Socialist Ethiopia fought a short but brutal war, 1977-1978, as the US and USSR abruptly switched clients.

Marx, Engels, Lenin as Trinity

Painting of Marx, Engels and Lenin done in traditional Ethiopian style, source of this photo suggests it was done this way to mimic Ethiopian paintings of the Christian Holy Trinity.

Marx and Engels in Amharic translation.

Ethiopia-printed version of Marx and Engels. Source suggests this is Capital, I'm thinking "The Communist Manifesto" is more likely. Lifegoal: visit the International Institute of Social History collection in Amsterdam. From the same source, a Derg/Workers Party magazine features the familiar silhouettes on a flag:

Stamps from the Derg regime commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, picturing Lenin, issued in 1977.

Symbolic Confusion - Lenin’s Legacy

Pro-Derg rally in Meskel Square, probably 1984

 “It is still incredible to me that the RRC’s [Relief & Rehabilitation Commission, an Ethiopian government agency] most difficult task was convincing our own leaders of the very existence of a widespread famine that was now swallowing up the entire nation. But their sights were set solely on upcoming anniversary celebration. Throughout the country, red flags and pictures of Mengistu, Marx and Lenin were being distributed.... The usual slogans were posted everywhere: ‘The oppressed masses will be victorious!’ ‘Marxism-Leninism is our guideline!’.... Preparations for the celebration were in full swing, including the phony elections for the newly-formed Marxist-Leninist Party.... Hundreds of North Koreans were in Addis decorating the city. They had been invited during Mengistu’s recent visit to North Korea, where he had been impressed by the colorful ceremonies and meticulously planned parades. Money was poured into new buildings, highways, conference halls, and a huge statue of Lenin in the center of Addis. There was no mention of famine anywhere except in my office.” —Dawit Wolde Giorgis, former RRC head, writing in 1989 about 1984, in Red Tears: War, Famine and Revolution in Ethiopia (pp.134-135)

Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mengistu? Workers Party Conference, 1980s

“What is now happening to Marx’s theory has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the theories of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes fighting for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonise them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the ‘consolation’ of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarising it.”—V.I. Lenin, State and Revolution, quoted in “Down with all Revisionist Distortions Against the Ethiopian Revolution, in the pro-EPRP journal Forward, published by the World-Wide Federation of Ethiopian Students, February 1977.

Pro-Derg rally, probably May Day 1977. Civilian left contingent with portraits of Stalin, Lenin, Marx

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was of course the Russian revolutionary who successfully led the Russian October Revolution of 1917. After decades of revolutionary organizing, his wing of the Russian socialist movement emerged triumphant after years of repression and setbacks. His Bolsheviks had rejected the social-patriotism that virtually destroyed the socialist movement during the first World War, and fought their way to dominance after the February Revolution overthrew the Russian emperor or Tsar. When the Bolsheviks emerged triumphant after October at the head of the world's first socialist country, a world communist movement grew like wildfire around the strategical, tactical and philosophical expansion of Marxism that Lenin used to lead the oppressed and working peoples of Russia to victory. Lenin died in 1924, only a few years after the triumph of October, and it's from that moment that Marxism-Leninism appears as the professed ideology of communists around the globe. It is also from that moment that the seeds of future revisionisms sprout.

Huge poster of Lenin overlooks
pro-Derg rally, 1970s

It's too complicated to address here in detail, but numerous rifts and divisions appeared in the communist movement over the coming decades. Lenin’s Communist Party successor Stalin, confronted by a hostile world and to the need to transform the new Soviet Union into a self-reliant power that could resist counterrevolution and imperialism, lead the communist movement for a while, often subjecting the movement to turns necessitated by the foreign policy needs of Russia. Trotsky's defection in the late 1920s spawned a whole new wing of the movement, and Mao’s innovative road to revolution in China in the 1930s and 1940s ultimately led to another wing.

By the time of the Ethiopian revolution in 1974, competing streams of communist thought all claimed the mantle of Marxism-Leninism, and most pointed back to the same inspirational volumes of Lenin’s oeuvre, printed in competing editions in Moscow, Beijing and clandestine printshops around the world. But it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that not everyone who calls herself a communist actually means the same thing, and here is the challenging thing about revisionism: people with diametrically opposed politics pretend to use the same words and images to justify their actions. 

“Marxism-Leninism eventually became the new reigning orthodoxy both inside the USSR and its allied communist parties. However, it was no longer a vibrant theory of revolution, but a state religion, a dogma and infallible science used to justify the requirements of whatever the policy the leadership needed it to. Soviet Marxism-Leninism was deterministic, mechanical and economistic.” — Doug Enaa Greene writing on the history of revisionism in ‘The Final Aim Is Nothing’ in Links, International Journal of Socialist Renewal

Mengistu's office in Addis Ababa,
occupied by TPLF fighters in 1991

It then becomes a question of subjectivity to interpret who is actually applying — or synthesizing — Lenin’s ideas to make a revolution, and who is using them as a justification for something else altogether.

When an army led by the Tigrai People's Liberation Front entered Addis Ababa 25 years ago this month and overthrew the Derg's fifteen-year rule, they marched into Mengistu's palace office to reveal a wall of Leninist mementos and communist souvenirs. Clearly Mengistu professed a love of Lenin. But Mengistu had also been engaged in a war of annihilation with others who similarly professed a love of Lenin and an adherence to his ideas.


“Combating every brand of opportunism — be it revisionism or dogmatism, ‘is a question of extraordinary, indeed of primary, importance’ to all Marxist-Leninists engaged in the struggle for true democracy and socialism. After enumerating the many episodes in the long history of arduous struggle waged by the Ethiopian people against internal and external enemies, namely feudalism and western imperialism led by US, ABYOT (vol. 2 no. 7) reminds its readers of the emergence of a fresh enemy in the arena of the Ethiopian democratic revolution, the Soviet hegemonists and their cohorts from Cuba and East Europe.

Feature on Lenin in the pro-EPRP
publication Goh (Dawn), 1975

‘The EPRP did not start to to fight the Moscow counter-revolutionaries only at the time they took the side of fascism and stood against the Ethiopian revolution. When the EPRP was founded it declared that revisionism constitutes a very grave danger and is the main one to the international communist movement. Consequently, the EPRP consistently fought against revisionism both inside and outside the party....’

In a number of its publications, especially in its official organ DEMOCRACIA, the EPRP has been widely teaching the masses the danger posed by the Soviet bureaucrats to the Ethiopian revolution... The supply of arms, ‘experts,’ interrogators, etc. and the diplomatic support the USSR is giving to the crumbling fascist state cannot be isolated from the nature of today’s ‘Soviet’ state. ABYOT describes the ‘Soviet’ Union as a ‘country where democracy has been stifled. It is a country where a clique of bureaucrats rule with iron hands in the name of the working class. It is a country where the working class has no say either in the running of the government or the industries. It is a country where the people are muzzled, where genuine Marxists are hounded....”—from ‘Soviet Hegemonism Exposed,’ in the pro-EPRP journal Forward, WWFES January 1978

Lenin quoted in the pages of EPRP's Abyot, February 1978

By all accounts, the idea of Marxism-Leninism was introduced to the the military Derg by civilian leftists who came from the same largely student-based revolutionary milieu as the EPRP.

Lenin’s ideas were brought to Mengistu first by the likes of Haile Fida and Sennay Likke. Mengistu and his fellows were largely career military officers, isolated from the ideas spreading in the student movement. Indeed while many Ethiopian revolutionaries spent their formative years radicalizing at American universities, Mengistu spent a period in training in the 1960s at US military bases in the American south. Only after “Socialist Ethiopia” was already established, did Derg cadre begin interacting with the Soviet Union, many being sent for education and training in the USSR and Eastern Europe. By 1977, U.S. imperialism had pulled back its support of Ethiopia, and the Ethiopian government needed a strong ally, which it found in the Soviet bloc. It is, of course, left to the observer to decide who best manifested Lenin’s ideas in the course of the Ethiopian revolution.

Soviet propaganda: “Young Ethiopians study the
Russian language, the language of Lenin.”

“It cannot be too strongly maintained that... that the Social-Democrat’s [how communists referred to themselves at that time] ideal should not be the trade union secretary, but the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects; who is able to generalise all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation; who is able to take advantage of every event, however small, in order to set forth before all his socialist convictions and his democratic demands, in order to clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat.” —V.I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done, 1902

A few weeks ago I posted the story of the EPRP’s role in driving the CIA out of the Ethiopian labor movement. Here's a coda to that story that I think suggests something fundamental about the revisionist attitude toward working people, far different than Lenin's.

This account was written by Valentin Korovikov, Pravda's Africa correspondent, in 1979:

“The bankrupt Confederation of Ethiopian Labour Unions had to be replaced by a new Trade Union Association. The law emphasized that in their political and production activities the unions should be guided by socialist principles and by the overall programme for the country's progressive development.... The new labour legislation showed that the military government was taking practical steps to secure the interests of the working people and to improve their life, even though the underdeveloped Ethiopian economy offered few chances for this. The proclamation of workers’ rights helped to expose the demagogy of the ultra-left and anarchist groups that had sought to depict the Dergue as the anti-democratic dictatorship of a military junta.”—Ethiopia: Years of Revolution, p.51

And so the workers’ struggle was reduced to a law that promoted production, banned strikes, and replaced independent working class organization in favor of a top-down state-allied association.

Toward the end of his life, relatively young but in ill health, Lenin was well aware of the challenges to come: the existential challenge of the Soviet Union to survive, and the challenge of keeping the revolutionary flame burning not only in the world movement but inside of Russia itself. In one of his last essays, Lenin worries about the tendencies to entropy and bureaucratization:

“We have been bustling for five years trying to improve our state apparatus, but it has been mere bustle, which has proved useless in these five years, of even futile, or even harmful. This bustle created the impression that we were doing something, but in effect it was only clogging up our institutions and our brains. It is high time things were changed....

25 years ago: Addis Ababa's Lenin statue toppled
in the aftermath of the TPLF victory. Ironically the core
of the TPLF also described themselves as ‘Marxist-Leninists’

In all spheres of social, economic and political relationships we are ‘frightfully’ revolutionary. But as regards precedence, the observance of the forms and rites of office management, our ‘revolutionariness’ often gives way to the mustiest routine. On more than one occasion, we have witnessed the very interesting phenomenon of a great leap forward in social life being accompanied by amazing timidity whenever the slightest changes are proposed.

This is natural, for the boldest steps forward were taken in a field which was long reserved for theoretical study, which was promoted mainly, and even almost exclusively, in theory..... I think that this has happened in all really great revolutions, for really great revolutions grow out of the contradictions between the old, between what is directed towards developing the old, and the very abstract striving for the new, which must be so new as not to contain the tiniest particle of the old....

The general feature of our present life is the following: we have destroyed capitalist industry and have done our best to raze to the ground the medieval institutions and landed proprietorship, and thus created a small and very small peasantry, which is following the lead of the proletariat because it believes in the results of its revolutionary work. It is not easy for us, however, to keep going until the socialist revolution is victorious in more developed countries merely with the aid of this confidence, because economic necessity, especially under NEP, keeps the productivity of labour of the small and very small peasants at an extremely low....” — from Better Fewer, But Better, 1923

This essay, and the whole thing is worth reading, shows Lenin deeply aware of what was happening inside the Soviet government, and with the hindsight of history we can see that everything he talks about in fact came to worsen, not improve. It's not hard to see how the Soviet view of Leninism evolved into something different than the fiery struggles of working and oppressed people for their own emancipation in which it developed, into a kind of roadmap for following a correct institutional model of state control and development. Certainly the cultural revolution in China, winding down by the time of the Ethiopian revolution, represented an attempt to confront this same tendency, harnessing another interpretation of Marxism-Leninism to inspire ongoing revolutionary will and mass democratic participation. Judging by today's China, revisionism won that round as well.

But the ultimate tragedy of revisionism is that it seems to cast its spell mostly only on its own true believers, and the result is a poisoned well. How, now, to present Lenin's bold, insightful and — I believe — actually still relevant and correct, ideas in the context of an Ethiopia where Lenin became the face of oppression?

Workers Party CC member and RRC head Dawit Wolde Giorgis visited a refugee shelter in the town of Korem during the 1984 famine:

“There were a few who still had the strength to shout at us in anger and despair, ‘Why are you coming to see us? We've had so many visitors, why doesn't Mengistu come to see us?’ As if to mock them, even here [in the famine-struck region] the streets were decorated for the upcoming celebration. Heroic posters of Marx and Lenin frowned down upon them in the streets and even inside the shelters. Some, having nothing further to fear from the authorities, were bold enough to point a bony arm at the red flags and shout, ‘That cloth should be covering our bodies, not hanging in the streets! This isn't our wedding, it's our funeral...it's not a time to celebrate it's a time for grief.... Where is the bread? Where is the bread?” —Dawit Wolde Giorgis, op cit, p. 140

The legacy of the Derg's “Leninism”

Quick Review: Tim Bascom

Running To The Fire:
An American Missionary Comes of Age in Revolutionary Ethiopia
by Tim Bascom
University of Iowa Press/Sightline Books, 232 pp. paperback, 2015

I expected this book to be a Christian tract about communists torturing Christians in revolutionary Ethiopia, and I’m pleased to report that this is much less that kind of propaganda tract and much more a fairly engaging growing-up story. The author is sixteen years old when his veteran missionary parents take him with them to Addis Ababa in early 1977 en route to a posting in rural southern Ethiopia where his physician father will combine spiritual evangelism with needed medical care.

Writing as an adult, it turns out that Bascom has spent quite a lot of time pondering not only the influential six months he spent in Ethiopia but the meaning and ramifications of revolution, Marxism, and indeed missionary Christianity itself. As a teenager he's pretty much hanging out with other MKs (“missionary kids”), going to school, growing up from shooting at birds with a slingshot to holding hands with a girl, and trying to make sense of what he's seeing around him, which includes random dead bodies deposited by the Red Terror, the frequent background noise of automatic gunfire, frightening kebele checkpoints, and an alien world and culture he's eager to experience. He comes across quite likeable, and raises plenty of existential points about the missionary tradition he grew up in, leaving the book free of missionary certainty and consequently highly readable. I think his attempt to understand — and deliver a verdict on — Marxism, especially Marxism’s view of religion, is well intentioned but unfortunately shallow and off-target, but that's pretty understandable given the contempt shown to Marxist theory in the modern United States.

For the purposes of my study, I found some of Bascom’s anecdotes fascinating:

 “When we passed a burnt-out hulk of a car,  [my friend Dan] said, ‘That's from before Christmas break. Some guerrilla dudes raided an army post and got a bunch of weapons, but they got trapped here.’ ‘It was totally gross,’ Dave added from my other side. ‘You could see bodies for a week.’ ‘Check out the bullet holes,’ Dan said. Then he frowned in a cockeyed way....Dan looked to the driver of the bus, a twenty-five-year-old Ethiopian who seemed a favorite with all the teens. ‘Hey, Yared...what do you think about the burned out car? Were those guys from the EDU?’ The driver, a slender guy with rippling forearms and a receding hairline, shook his head. ‘EPRP,’ he shouted.... I asked, ‘So what's the EPRP?’ ‘The Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Party,’ Dave explained. ‘They're the student radicals who started the whole thing. They say they want democracy, but they're more communist than Mengistu.’” (pp. 54–55)

He paints a pretty vivid picture of what it was like to experience Ethiopia as an expat kid, but the problem of course is that as a protected young foreigner, his exposure to the realities being lived by Ethiopians, at least as long as he remained in Addis Ababa, is largely watched through a fence or a window. 1977 was a crucial year, but to young Bascom the details are all so much nighttime gunfire. I wished for more of these kind of anecdotes and visual descriptions.

He eventually spends some of his time with his parents in their remote rural mission station, where it's clear that his family's protestantism is as out of kilter with the time and place as their foreignness. They have plenty of connections with a repressed evangelical community (Ethiopian Christianity being largely of an Orthodox variety), and the threat of legal repression seems ever present. Eventually, growing anti-Americanism and government resentment at missionary privilege and property forces Bascom’s family, and the rest of the missionary community, to evacuate Ethiopia in the latter part of 1977, and Bascom is left haunted by a few months of transformative experiences.

I didn't think this book was a crucial read for my research, but it was a fast read and I enjoyed it much more than I expected. Bascom is thoughtful, and his narrative largely avoids self-righteousness or, worse, American colonial/missionary resentment, and his self-questioning of his own coming of age means that this is accessible to readers who don't share his family's vintage 1977 missionary zeal.

Quick Review: Makonnen Araya

Negotiating A Lion’s Share of Freedom:
Adventures of an Idealist Caught up in Ethiopian Civil War
A Memoir
By Makonnen Araya
Self-published paperback; 2010; 248pp.

This was a quick, entertaining, though not particularly uplifting read. It's the memoir of the author's time as a member of the Ethiopian Peoples' Revolutionary Army, the guerrilla wing of the EPRP, in rural northern Ethiopia 1977–1979.

It's quite a tale of hardship and determination that really undercuts romantic notions of what it's like to be a guerrilla. As I just read in volume two of Kiflu Tadesse's The Generation, the EPRA was set up to be a long-term project of armed struggle as the EPRP was gradually eliminated by the military government from Ethiopia's cities. Young students, workers, and even lawyers like author Makonnen Araya, targeted for assassination by the military for being “anarchists,” sought refuge in the hardscrabble liberated areas of several northern provinces. Unfortunately, the EPRA found itself in conflict not only with the military government and its peasant militias, but competing guerrilla groups like the TPLF and EDU; while it did provide refuge for militants fleeing the cities, it didn't seem to morph into a serious military threat to the Derg. Although the EPRP leadership had hoped to make a strategic turn to rural guerrilla war, Makonnen here admits that while the EPRA met with some sympathy at first, it was never able to follow up its plans and promises with enough military power to make a viable difference for Ethiopian peasants unhappy with the Derg.

The story recounted is mostly not one of military confrontation but of survival and a somewhat futile attempt to win over the peasant population to leftist ideals which seemed abstract to the bitterly poor peasants among whom the EPRA operated. His main enemies turn out to be lice, hunger, cheap rubber shoes, and unrelenting weather. But Makonnen relates in great detail his attempt to negotiate escape from Addis Ababa through clandestine channels, his dangerous journey to the EPRA's Tigray base, and then his guerrilla training in an EPRA camp. He recounts two years spent with the guerrillas in the bush, largely living off the land and trying to keep away from government forces. Eventually Makonnen resigns his post and joins the flood of Ethiopian refugees in the borderlands, escaping Ethiopia for Khartoum in the Sudan, where he navigates UN relief, vindictive veterans of the rival, anti-communist EDU militia, and local law enforcement before winning relocation to the US.

It's a really interesting, if sobering, read. Although self-published it is readily available on Amazon.