1947–
Historian of modern Ethiopia
Against the loose figure of 120 Derg members, he wrote that in actual fact their number was less than 110, that senior officers were deliberately excluded, and that no new members were ever admitted.
Historian and author of modern Ethiopian history, and emeritus professor at Addis Ababa University. He studied history at Haile Selassie I University and African history at the University of London, and served as Head of the History Department and Director of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies. He wrote the standard synthetic text on modern Ethiopia, 1855 to 1991, and was a founding member of the Forum for Social Studies.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1947Born in Addis Ababa
- 1970BA in history with distinction, Haile Selassie I University
- 1976PhD in African history, University of London
- 1991Published A History of Modern Ethiopia 1855–1991
- 1998–2004Chair, Forum for Social Studies board
Related historical events
Reconstructing the Student Movement and the 'National Question'
Zewde's research turned less on the Derg itself than on the movement that produced it. At the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin in 2010-2011 he pursued a project titled "A History of the Ethiopian Student Movement, 1960-1974." He treated that movement as passing through successive stages of self-awareness, reformism and revolutionary commitment, and argued that the overthrow of one of the world's oldest monarchies, the subsequent and ultimately disastrous policy of socialist construction, and the current experiment in ethnic federalism can all be traced back to it. His complaint was that most assessments of the post-1974 situation were not informed by an understanding of this backdrop.
His method drew heavily on oral history. Alongside the secondary literature and the contemporary publications of student unions inside and outside Ethiopia, he organized a four-day collective exercise in recollection by some two dozen former student leaders and activists, and had the reflections transcribed and edited into a large corpus of primary data. That material addresses the innocuous beginnings of student activism, the radicalization of the movement in the early 1960s, the genesis and course of the "national question," and the evolution of student groupings into leftist political organizations.
Two issues framed his account. The land reform campaign launched in 1965 under the slogan "Land to the Tiller" demanded an end to tenancy, particularly in the southern half of the country, and was resolved by the 1975 rural land proclamation. The "national question" was first articulated in 1969 at the 17th Congress of the Ethiopian Students Union in North America, and was resolved in 1971 at the 11th Congress of the Ethiopian Students Union in Europe and the 19th ESUNA Congress in the form of recognizing the right of nations to self-determination up to and including secession. Zewde noted that this stand was adopted by all the leftist parties that emerged from the student movement and has since been enshrined in the 1994 Constitution of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. This work on the movement's origins belonged with his correction of the received figure for Derg membership to a common attempt to reconstruct the revolution's beginnings from documents and testimony.