Bahru Zewde. The Quest for Socialist Utopia: The Ethiopian Student Movement, c. 1960–1974.

Abstract

The late Ali A. Mazrui went to Haile Selassie I University in 1973 to give a talk to the university community. Witnessing firsthand the students' blunt criticism of Haile Selassie's regime, he said that these were the most radical students on the African continent. Five years later he wrote: “[I]n the late 1960s it was already clear that Ethiopian students were becoming the most radicalized in the whole [African] continent” (Higher Education, 7, no. 1 [1978], p. 126). Bahru Zewde's book, The Quest for Socialist Utopia: The Ethiopian Student Movement, c. 1960–1974, provides a rich, nuanced history, analysis, and interpretation of this most radical student movement in Africa in the twentieth century. It is a remarkably well-crafted book; elegant, readable, engrossing, and comprehensive. Other than Randi Rønning Balsvik's book, Haile Selassie's Students: The Intellectual and Social Background to Revolution, 1952–1977 (1977), which Bahru cites extensively, no other book has dealt with the topic with such depth and candor as Bahru's recent monograph.