Quick Review: Makonen Getu

The Undreamt: An Ethiopian Transformation
by Makonen Getu
Christian Transformation Resource Center (Philippines), 2004
188pp., paperback

This short but engaging memoir is another by a survivor of the Red Terror period, a member of that generation which went from studying at university to making revolution. What makes this memoir particularly interesting is that the author, Makonen Getu, today a development engineer with worldwide Christian NGOs, was in his youth a president of the Union of Ethiopian Students in Europe, and if I'm reading correctly, for a time a member of Meison's Central Committee during the period it went underground at the height of the “Red Terror.” Makonen's memoir is thus the first English-language account I've discovered from a Meison, rather than an EPRP, point of view.

Makonen tells the story of growing up in hardscrabble rural Wollo province. He becomes adept at herding his family's cattle as a small child. Eventually he is lucky enough to be sent to a school to which he must walk two hours each morning. Schooling awakens ambition in young Makonen, and dedicating himself to his studies he eventually finds himself attending university in Sweden at the height of the Ethiopian student movement in the early 1970s. Sweden seems to be the base of the Meison (the All-Ethiopian Socialist Movement) wing of the student movement, and Makonen is radicalized along with his peers, soon studying Marxism-Leninism along with his professional studies. His youthful poverty means he has a clear picture of the injustice and inequality of pre-revolution Ethiopia and he is highly motivated. He joins ESUE, and eventually becomes its president.

But Makonen does not return to live in Ethiopia until late 1977, after Meison breaks with the Derg and returns to the underground. The Derg's death squads are quickly effective in unearthing much of Meison's leadership, and so Meison asks Makonen to return home to help rebuild the underground apparatus and formulate new strategies for guerrilla resistance and the longterm survival of his organization. The central portion of his memoir, entitled “My Communist Years,” is therefore the most relevant to our studies here.

Makonen arrives home with a bag of books on guerrilla warfare, and makes contact with the underground. He doesn't describe the underground Meison in very much detail, nor does he get into many of the political and ideological details which framed the position in which Meison found itself in late 1977, but his account is still a fascinating read. He spends time dodging former acquaintances, watching friends get arrested or disappear, and using his PhD studies as a cover for his covert organizing. Eventually he seems to realize that Meison is losing its battle against its former allies in the Derg, and he manages to escape the country, flying out of Addis Ababa in 1978 on the same day Fidel Castro was arriving for revolution anniversary celebrations.

Makonen returns to Europe, makes contact with Meison in Paris and Stockholm, but in the process of returning to his studies, converts to pentacostal Christianity and leaves the revolution behind for the world of Christian relief and development agencies.

Makonen comes across as a genuinely decent person. While he abandons his Marxism-Leninism, he continues a dedication to social justice and quality of human life. While the more evangelical portions of the book may distract the historical reader, they're brief, and Makonen doesn't waste time with vitriolic anti-communist denunciations. For a member of Meison, he also doesn't spend much time attacking EPRP. He describes being roughed up in Europe once by members of the opposing student faction, but he doesn't get into the bloodletting between EPRP and Meison after the latter ingratiated itself into the lower levels of the Derg's state apparatus. This might be somewhat self-serving, but it is of course ironic that Meison succumbed to the same state violence it had once fostered.

It's really a shame that there is so little English-language literature from the Meison side of the intra-revolutionary conflict. Andargetchew Assegid has written a history of Meison but it is untranslated from Amharinya. Negede Gobeze's memoir is similarly untranslated. I know there is a document called “Meison's Self-Criticism,” but I have yet to discover whether this is available in translation. And Meison founder Haile Fida's prison testimony before his execution is also available, but again only in the original Amharinya manuscript.

One of the more interesting things I got out of this memoir were some hints that the ideological positioning of the Ethiopian left is more complicated than many observers would have it. EPRP is often called Maoist, and while its diaspora supporters inhabited the Maoist milieu, the label seems inaccurate and superficial. Makonen calls himself and Meison Maoist more than once, reminding us that after Mao's death (1976), the halting of the cultural revolution in China, the coup by Deng Xiaoping's faction, and worsening relations between China and the Soviet Union, that ideological silos were in a moment of flux. Perhaps English-translations of Meison materials will surface shedding more light on its political subleties.

The Undreamt is a worthwhile and quick read. Its descriptions of the author's rural childhood and in the dangerous terrain of the revolutionary underground are vivid and engaging.



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