This book attempts to assess the impacts of Haile Selassie's educational policy on Ethiopia's educated elite. This inquiry was inspired by the fact that the educated Ethiopian elite has played a negative role during and since the overthrow of Haile Selassie's regime. The further political and economic stagnation is also tied to the policies adopted by the educated elites. The author questions whether the reliance on the Westerns curriculums and teaching methods brought to the spread of the Marxist ideas in Ethiopia. Another question is about abandoning native Ethiopian educational legacy in education during the period in question.

In a multi-disciplinary approach, this seminal work examines, among others, the role of western education, impact of being instructed in English, the invention and imposition of a new WoGaGoDa language in the South, and the national educational strategic plans. With scholarly rigor, eminent Ethiopian scholars offer to enlighten readers on the role of education over the last 100 years. I recommend this book to anyone interested to feed their intellectual-soul on education, development, and politics in Ethiopia.--Worku Negash, Ph.D., Vice President, Mission College, Santa Clara, California [Review via publisher's website]

A provocative investigation into the root causes of the Ethiopian political upheavals in the second half of the twentieth century. During the 1960s and early 1970s, a majority of Ethiopian students and intellectuals adopted a Marxist-Leninist ideology with fanatic fervor. The leading force in an uprising against the imperial regime of Emperor Haile Selassie, they played a decisive role in the rise of a Leninist military regime. In this original study, Messay Kebede examines the sociopolitical and cultural factors that contributed to the radicalization of the educated elite in Ethiopia, and how this phenomenon contributed to the country's uninterrupted political crises and economic setbacks since the Revolution of 1974. Offering a unique, insider's perspective garnered from his direct participation in thestudent movement, the author emphasizes the role of the Western education system in the progressive radicalization of students and assesses the impact of Western education on traditional cultures. The most comprehensive study of the role of students in modern Ethiopian political history to date, Radicalism and Cultural Dislocation in Ethiopia, 1960-1974 opens the door for discussion and debate on the issue of African modernization and the effects ofcultural colonization. Messay Kebede is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Dayton and is author of Survival and Modernization -- Ethiopia's Enigmatic Present: A Philosophical Discourse [1999].

Why did reasonable demands of Ethiopian masses for change lead not only to the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie, but also to a radical revolution that caused civil wars, economic decline, secession, and ethnic politics, all in the name of socialist equality and freedom? The answer of the book is that elite conflicts over scarce resources promoted mutually exclusive struggles for power, and so mobilized ideologies suitable for zero sum politics, of which radical revolutions are typical expressions.

This 1988 text traces the continuities between revolutionary Ethiopia and the development of a centralised Ethiopian state since the nineteenth century.