Quick Review: Marina and David Ottaway

ETHIOPIA, Empire In Revolution
By Marina and David Ottaway, Africana Publishing Company/Holmes & Meier, hardcover 1978, 250pp.

I had the pleasure of reading a recent essay by Professor John Markakis entitled “The Revolution and the Scholars,” in the 2016 issue of Northeast African Studies journal. In the essay Markakis, co-author of the landmark Class and Revolution in Ethiopia, surveys from today’s decades-later vantage point some of the volumes written during the Derg period which have become standard reference works on the revolution. These include René Lefort’s Ethiopia, An Heretical Revolution; Halliday and Molyneux's The Ethiopian Revolution, and Marina and David Ottaway’s Ethiopia, Empire in Revolution, among others. I am pleased to report that Markakis’s judgment of the Ottaways’ book can be quoted to neatly summarize my own view of the Ottaways’ work:

“Having failed to to draw the political implications of class and ethnic contradictions, the Ottaways are unable to account for the popular upheaval that irrupted in 1974. Instead, they go to some lengths to discount the contribution of the social groups involved in it.” (NEAS 16:1, p. 92)

The Ottaways were based in Addis Ababa during the early years of the revolution. She was an academic, he a journalist, both presenting leftish views in the fashion of the post-Vietnam era. Though they describe having to ship their primary resources, research notes and draft writings out of the country just ahead of being expelled from Ethiopia in mid-1977 during the Red Terror, their book seems to have become an edifice of pro-Derg Western leftist apologia writing. The book is quite full of detailed information, including some garnered from behind the scenes via interviews and the period of massive public debate in the first two years of the revolution. It reproduces a number of Derg proclamations in full as appendices, and as such is certainly a valuable historical record.

The book was written in mid-1977, after Mengistu’s seizure of power in February 1977, but before his decisive elimination of potential counter-leadership within the Derg in the Fall of the same year. But the fact that this book is a dated or incomplete picture of the revolution is not really the problem with it.

The Ottaways wind up legitimizing the Derg’s claim to the mantle of socialism by sneering at the social forces outside the military.

“The EPRP [Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Party] conceived of revolution in terms of a mass movement from the bottom up. No such movement ever existed in Ethiopia, however, and the EPRP implicitly recognized this historical fact in drafting its plans for a people's government. Its proposed alliance of workers, peasants, progressive intellectuals, and progressive elements of the petty bourgeoisie was to be implemented through direct interest-group representation.” (p. 119)

And yet, it is this “non-existent” movement that actually manifested the 1974 revolution and the massive political turmoil of the following two years. They note that the EPRP proclaimed itself in 1975, while casting doubts that the EPRP’s claim to existence as a pre-party tendency in the period before 1975 was in any way significant. In fact my research leads me to see how the revolutionaries that revealed themselves in 1975 on both sides of the pro/anti military divide had been carefully preparing for the possibility of revolution for years, in fact in ways remarkably similar to the Russian revolutionaries before 1917.

Elsewhere the Ottaways seem fixated on the small size of the Ethiopian working class, and take a sneering attitude toward the Ethiopian labor movement as it attempted to find its voice and exercise its power in the aftermath of February 1974. They seem disdainful of Ethiopian working class activists, suggesting that they should have just lined up behind the provisional military government.

“The position of the CELU [Confederation of Ethiopian Labour Unions] during this transitional period was obviously confused. Despite its lack of a coherent vision, the confederation assumed it would continue as an autonomous organization, and even enjoy the protection of the government against management. But since the government had now become the largest employer in the country, CELU's hopes were quite naive.”  (p. 107)

While the Ottaways attempt to document the conflict between the Ethiopian civilian left and the Derg and its leftist allies, they completely wave away the principles behind that conflict.

“...The inability of like-minded politicians to compromise or cooperate remained a constant impediment to the revolution. It gave rise to the civilian left's bitter hatred for the military left; it spawned some half-dozen splinter leftist civilian groups with practically identical ideological platforms....This attitude caused the...[EPRP] to reject all cooperation with the military even though there was little difference between its program and that of the Derg.” (p. 101)

Somehow the Ottaways fail to understand that the EPRP’s demand for a people’s provisional government free of the military was one of two centrally defining factors not only to their program but to their growing base of support. (The other was the EPRP’s approach to the national question). It wasn't just a “little difference” and it wasn't just banal infighting: these were thought-out matters of principle about the nature of the revolution itself. Again and again throughout the course of the period when leadership of the revolution was under contention, it was this difference of mass democracy versus military control that virtually defined the dynamic of the period. Perhaps now, long after the defeat of all the players of the 1970s, it’s possible to see how the untried path charted by the EPRP offered more than the unfolding of history actually delivered.

Without getting into an extended discussion of the EPRP's ideological foundation in Marxism-Leninism or compassing its exact location in the ideological debates on the left, it is often presumed by observers that intense struggle within the left is a matter of mindless, self-defeating infighting. But any student of actual revolutionary leaders like Lenin and Mao — neither of whom could be accused of being wedded to comfy armchairs by a perverse love of internecine conflict — quickly comes to the conclusion that revolutionary struggle is marked by fierce competition between contending lines of politics and leadership just as much as it is marked by the combat in the streets between opposing class or societal forces. So the Ottaways’ insistence that the differences between EPRP and Meison were trivial, or that CELU was just naive and stubborn reflects something important about the Ottaways’ views about the issues themselves.

The Ottaways recognize that at the time of their writing, things are unsettled. But in this volume and its follow-up, 1981’s Afrocommunism, they express a surprisingly willingness to give the Derg the benefit of the doubt. The cheerleaders of the Derg among the world left, chiefly those in the orbit of the Soviet bloc, would build on the Ottaways’ arguments.

Ethiopia, Empire in Revolution is out of print but seems to be readily available.