Elleni Centime Zeleke’s new book is a profound, cross-disciplinary meditation on the nature and reverberations of a revolution – and on what it means to be human. She shows how a certain way of doing politics, and of understanding the world, stultified Ethiopian political discourse. She analyses almost all the major fissures in Ethiopia’s recent history: nationalism, positivism, developmentalism, industrialism, modernism, authoritarianism, and stagist Marxism. Her book invents a social science methodology – Tizita, traces the biographies of famous Ethiopian student activists, and gives fresh life to historical materialist social theory.
The first chapter of Ethiopia in theory introduces Zeleke’s novel method of Tizita, Amharic for ‘nostalgia’ or ‘memory’. To create this method, she braids together – among other threads of thought – Dagmawi Wubshet’s meditation on the word as embodying three valences (2009, 629–632); Raymond Williams’s notion of ‘structures of feeling’; and an experience endemic to the lives of exiles who compulsively harken to the foregone, the left-behind, to the debris of dislocation. Children of migrants will see themselves in Zeleke’s recollection of her family’s ‘longing for an absent memory’ – their ‘plea to make contemporaneous that which belonged to another country’, which ‘felt like nothing less than an invitation to occult practices: the adults were collectively talking to ghosts’ (all quoted from p. 21). She draws from the novel How to read the air by Dinaw Mengestu (2010), who, like Zeleke, came to the West at a young age. Part literary theory, part psychoanalysis, and part necromancy, Tizita is a tantalising corrective to a dogged, outward-looking positivist empiricism, a way of knowing that, in Zeleke’s view, plagues Ethiopian studies. Tizita is ‘a theory of embodied knowledge’ that Zeleke effectively uses to critique the history of the social sciences in Ethiopia (201).
In so doing, Zeleke enters the minds of her nostalgic forbears and extracts the underwhelming marrow of positivism, which a philosopher has defined as ‘a stance which prizes science for its ability to both produce reliable knowledge and contribute crucially to human flourishing’ (Cohen 1999). In her words, Zeleke ‘historicizes methods of knowledge production in Ethiopia’ (15). ‘I don’t have Tizita’, Zeleke says (23). Instead, she is the captive of her elders’ stories, in which ‘the past is always strategically constructed as a usable memory for those with power to control the manner in which stories are told’ (23). She meditates on the past through critical engagement with publications in the journal Challenge, which, along with journals like Tatek (‘get armed’) and Combat, was a key arena where the Ethiopian student revolutionaries debated their ideas. She also analyses their recent policy prescriptions, uttered decades after their early interventions in Ethiopian politics. By following them across decades, Zeleke uncovers the ‘link between the history of social sciences and the history of social policy development … in Ethiopia’ (10).
This claim is irresistible to ivory tower types. To have a discursive answer to the question ‘where did we go wrong?’ is to empower the academic. Zeleke argues that the ‘linkage’ between contemporary debates and ‘the claims of the 1960s and 1970s’ holds the key to overcoming the ‘overly fractious nature’ of Ethiopian politics today (150). The linkage, in short, is positivist empiricism. Ethiopia in theory spends very little space substantiating the claim that contemporary Ethiopian politics is ‘overly fractious’ (150). Instead, Zeleke describes the upstream dogmatisms in theory and praxis that feed our current malaise.
One such dogmatism is the notion of ‘civil society’ as used in contemporary policy talk. Following the career of this concept in Ethiopian policy discourse, Zeleke uncovers a transition from the days of the Ethiopian revolution, when the state and popular revolutionary forces were seen as the central sources of political-economic transformation, to contemporary times, when this thing called ‘civil society’ is thought to be a primary source of political-economic transformation. In Ethiopia today, ‘Civil society qua civil society is seen as a catalyst for change, able to bring about the development of larger democratic processes and to quicken the drive for equity, and as having the capacity to engender innovative approaches to the rallying of public opinion’ (155). In one of the book’s profoundest insights, Zeleke shows how this neutral-seeming concept reproduces the vanguardism and empty conceptualism that underpinned Challenge articles. In her reading, the term ‘civil society’ actually refers to ‘donor-dependent NGOs engaged in development and service delivery’ (156). The disconnect between civil society organisations and the material reality of ordinary life as lived by most people in Ethiopia mirrors the disconnect between the revolutionary era’s central planning and day-to-day life, which Zeleke tells us ‘took revenge on the theoretical attempt to coerce it into empty formulations’ (143).
Zeleke’s keen assessment of the relationship between thought and practice is free of comfortable and reassuring conceptual formulations. In her final chapter, Zeleke highlights and overcomes the subject–object thread that runs through the work of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and other lights of neo-Marxist theory. She breaks from this mould, but without doing what Jürgen Habermas (1984) and Axel Honneth (1996) did and abandoning the Frankfurt School’s historical materialist legacy. The core of Zeleke’s thought is well crystallised here:
what it means to be human is to be given a self through historical relations with other human and non-human species. To transform social structures is to change those constitutive relations, and vice-versa. At the same time, to freeze human knowledge through subject-object identity is to freeze the very relationality that gives us human possibility. (188–189)
Having thus staked her position, Zeleke executes a rich exegesis of Karl Marx’s Economic and philosophic manuscripts (1959 [1932]), Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of enlightenment (2002 [1947]), and Michael Neocosmos’s Thinking freedom in Africa (2016). She manages, in the book’s final 60 pages, to strip positivist empiricism, Eurocentrism, and the notion that societies exist at different ‘stages’ of development from the theoretical architecture of neo-Marxism. What results is an original immanent critique of neo-Marxist and postcolonial theory.
In the short term, Ethiopia in theory’s most controversial contribution may very well be its intellectual biographies of key figures of the Ethiopian student movement. Zeleke follows Berhanu Nega and Andreas Eshete, among others, from their heady, oppositional role as student contributors to Challenge, to their contemporary ingratiation in upper echelons of Ethiopia’s power hierarchy. The story Zeleke tells is not merely one of chastened idealism, or of an ideological pendulum that has swung from left to right during the lives of revolutionaries. Rather, Zeleke tells a deeper story about the political subjectivity that certain strands and practices of social science engendered in Ethiopia’s student revolutionaries, who today participate in the country’s politics as policy wonks.
Ethiopia in theory prises open Ethiopian history for new and fruitful directions of research. Those of us with a special interest in religion may leave the book intrigued, but wanting more. Zeleke’s effort to unearth ‘the historical dynamics at play between knowledge production and social practice in revolutionary Ethiopia’ promises new insights for the role of religion in the Ethiopian polity (15). Indeed, during the very period that Zeleke covers, tens of thousands of Muslim Ethiopians demonstrated and demanded some form of redress. Surely, some sort of knowledge production was involved in this social practice. Zeleke asks whether Ethiopian studies and Ethiopianist social sciences reproduce the ‘anti-colonial and anti-black’ substrate of state sovereignty in Africanist thinking; perhaps Islamophobia has similarly undergirded Ethiopian nationalism (231). Although Zeleke gives some due to the role of Christianity in early Ethiopian nation-building (43–44), her book focuses largely on secular concerns, perhaps reproducing the tendency of critical theory to ‘eschew … all metaphysical thinking’ (199). This leaves it to future scholarship to bring Tizita to bear on religious dimensions of social reproduction in Ethiopia.
This is a difficult book. It is ‘difficult’ in the Frankfurt School sense of the term: highly theoretical heavy lifting that sits atop a heap of Marxist classics. Without some knowledge of György Lukács, Adorno, Horkeimer, and the writings of the early Marx, the book’s final 60 pages will leave the lay reader confused, perhaps despairing. But maybe Zeleke – like Kierkegaard and other elliptical writers – wishes to make her readers work for her insights. Her sentences verge on the gnostic, the kabbalistic; they are chiselled into the already arcane raw material of postcolonial and neo-Marxist theory. And, like most critical theorists, she avoids utopian prescriptions, choosing instead to show where theory and praxis have stumbled and fallen. She has learned the lessons of dystopia. But she does not resort to a numbed quietism. With wit and literary grace, Zeleke is a prodigious talent reshaping multiple fields. This work reads like a classic in the word’s Bloomian sense, a work with a ‘strangeness’ that bends its field to its methods and patterns of thought and expression. Ethiopia in theory is a work of genre-defining originality.