Research Update; Faces of History

Dr. Nigist Adane, date unknown

The central premise of the book I'm working on is that the Ethiopian revolution may have ultimately been hijacked by the military and become the story of a military regime, but it didn't start out that way. It was actually a much more complicated story than most histories acknowledge. I'm trying in part to humanize the generation of leftists who, while they were ultimately defeated, shared a dream of a liberated, socialist, and democratic Ethiopia.

I've been fascinated by many of the individuals who lost their lives during the revolution and during the period of military consolidation. It's one thing to read about the loss of nameless thousands, it's another to learn the details of the individual lives lost. Somehow finding photographs of the people one reads about adds a whole other dimension to understanding that history is not just dry words in books but the story of multi-dimensional real human beings meeting real-world challenges and suffering real-world loss. Photos humanize even the people who made terrible mistakes.

The photo above is a picture of one such tragic figure. Dr. Nigist Adane was a pediatrician educated in the Soviet Union, not uncommon for radical Ethiopian students under Haile Selassie. Initially in the orbit of the EPRP, she and her husband shifted and became leaders of the All Ethiopian Socialist Movement or Meison, a group which wound up supporting the military and shares responsibility for the military's bloody vendetta against the EPRP wing of the civilian left. She was active in building the women's movement during the revolutionary period ca. 1975-1976. In mid-1977 her group broke with the military regime and went underground, becoming targets of the same repression they had helped instigate. She was captured with most of the other leadership of the group. The story goes that these high-level leftist prisoners were strangled during a graduation ceremony of security forces cadets. She was killed in 1978. She is just one of the figures who as characters in my book, even small players, have drawn me into the human story of the Ethiopian revolution.

My book project is proceeding nicely. I'm following leads on additional research details and still attempting to acquire original materials. I'm still in need of various translation help. But my writing is really coming together; I'm approximately 2/3 done with a first draft. Finishing a first draft will only be a kind of new beginning: there will be an editing process I expect to be painstaking and frustrating; there are details and sources to add and probably some to delete. I will want to make sure the narrative is understandable, compelling, comprehensive and enjoyable. And I will need to make sure the overall political and historical content is accurate and what I want to communicate. I will soon be approaching a carefully chosen list of book publishers.  

Thank you for visiting my research blog and taking an interest in my project.