Abstract
This paper analyzes Amharic poems written in the 1950s and 1960s during annual College Day competitions held by students of the then Haile Selassie I University in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The contemporary global and local socio-political situations are given as background to help understand the context in which the poems were written. The poems have been grouped into two categories, as poems of disillusionment and poems of protest. While disillusionment poems revealed the awareness of the university students as regards the problems that prevailed in the country, the protest poems adamantly shouted that the regime had to be up-rooted. The paper recommends that the contributions of these poems to the socio-political changes that took place in Ethiopia in 1974 have to be studied and be given their proper place. Key words: Poems, Haile Selassie I University, students, disillusionment, protest.
Highlights
Poetry is a major literary genre which has been in use by man for a long period of time serving different purposes
In the 1960s, Haile Selassie I University in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia was experiencing severe turbulence because of the radical ideas that developed among the students
Different factors such as the introduction of modern education contributed to the awareness that the university students started to formulate about their country
Summary
Poetry is a major literary genre which has been in use by man for a long period of time serving different purposes. In Ethiopia, a similar situation had occurred in the 1960s when Ethiopian university students started to use poetry as a means to disseminate and propagate their ideas against the political system of the Haile Selassie regime that ruled the country from 1930 – 1974. A few years later, after the establishment of University College of Addis Ababa, which later became Haile Selassie I University in 1951, the poems that were written by the students started to show the socio-political situations in the country and the need for change, similar to the overall ideals of the Ethiopian student movement at that time. All the Amharic poems analyzed in this paper were winners in the competitions on College Days
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