The Ethiopian Exception: Resisting the Irresistible (Part 3)

We trace the 1960 palace coup, the rise of a critical elite, and the famine that shattered Haile Selassie’s story of gradual reform. The fall of the emperor and the Derg’s ascent reveal how Ethiopian exceptionalism became both a source of pride and a barrier to change.

Chapters

• 0:04 Palace Hostages and a Coup
• 0:36 Haile Selassie Learns Abroad
• 1:01 Mengistu Neway’s Reformist Rationale
• 1:46 Propaganda, Students, and Reform
• 2:21 Exceptionalism Under Fire
• 3:24 Show Framing: Blueprint of Nations
• 5:50 From 1941 Return to a New World
• 7:17 Ghana’s Independence Redefines “African”
• 9:04 Pan-African Pivot and Its Costs
• 10:39 Educating a Critical Elite
• 12:20 Classroom Contradictions Erupt
• 13:30 The 1960 Coup Exposes Fault Lines
• 15:12 Selassie’s Pattern: Suppress, Then Tinker
• 16:04 Famine Shatters the Myth
• 18:18 The Documentary That Broke the Spell
• 20:33 Strikes, The Derg, and the Fall
• 22:00 Revolution Meets Old Psychology
• 23:24 The Life Cycle of a National Myth
• 25:02 From Asset to Liability
• 26:22 The Unfinished Argument
• 26:43 Teaser: Gandhi’s Salt March

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:04

Inside the Gwyneth Leo Palace, a group of cabinet ministers and important officials have just arrived for what they believe was an emergency meeting. It is December 13, 1960, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Something is wrong. The Imperial Guard soldiers surrounding them aren't protecting them. They're holding them hostage. Outside the palace windows, more Imperial Guard units are taking control of key points across the capital. And 6,000 miles away in Brazil. Emperor Haley Selassie, the Lion of Judah, elect of God, King of Kings, is just learning that his throne is being taken from him. The man leading this coup is Brigadier General Mengistu Nue, commander of the Kebur Sagvana, the Imperial Bodyguard itself. This isn't a foreign invasion or a communist conspiracy. This is the emperor's own modernized, western trained military turning against him. Mengistu had studied in the United States, understood modern political theory, and had come to believe that Ethiopia's ancient monarchy had become the obstacle to the very modernization it claimed to represent. His brother Germain, a provincial governor who had spent years trying to build roads and schools only to be blocked by feudal landlords, helped plan the timing. They waited until the emperor was literally on the other side of the world before making their move. For three days, the outcome remains uncertain. Radio Addis Ababa broadcast proclamations in the name of the crown prince Aspha Wozhen, declaring a new progressive government. Students from the university marched through the streets with banners proclaiming equality, brotherhood, and freedom. The conspirators issue an 11-point reform program addressing all the grievances that Haley Selassie's gradual modernization had failed to resolve. But here's what makes this moment so extraordinary. The Emperor who had survived Italian invasion, World War, and international abandonment now faces a challenge that strikes at the heart of everything he represents. His own people, the product of his own educational reforms, the officers he sent to Western military academies, young intellectuals he took with modernized Ethiopia, have concluded that Ethiopian exceptionalism has become Ethiopian backwardness, that the crown and the cross that symbolize independence have become symbols of stagnation. Psychological DNA of Adwa will be tested like never before. Will this prove strong enough to preserve traditional authority? Or will the same forces that are reshaping Africa and the developing world finally overcome Ethiopian resistance to fundamental change? This is the story of how the country that had always defined itself through its difference from other African societies would finally confront the question that Menelik and Haley Selassie had spent decades avoiding. Whether exceptionalism was strength or weakness in a world where being different increasingly meant being left behind. This is part three of the Ethiopian exception, resisting the irresistible. You know how they say you can't understand someone until you walk a mile in their shoes? Well, I'd argue you can't understand a nation until you've walked through its history. Not just to highlight Rio or the sanitized version you find in textbooks. I mean really getting into its DNA. Those defining moments that shaped everything that came after. Those moments where paths were chosen, where decisions were made in palaces and backrooms and city streets that changed the course of millions of lives. I'm your host, Paul, and this is Double Helix, Blueprint of Nations, where we unravel the genetic code of countries through their most transformative moments. Think of it like ancestry testing, but for entire nations. We dig deep into the historical DNA, finding those crucial moments that made countries who they are today. The Emperor who returned to Addis Ababa in May of 1941 could reasonably claim that his approach had been proven correct by the events. Ethiopian independence had been restored through Ethiopian resistance rather than foreign imposition. But the world that Ethiopia rejoined in 1941 was fundamentally different from the one it had left in 1936. World War II had accelerated processes of decolonization, social transformation, and ideological competition that would challenge every assumption about sovereignty, development, and political legitimacy that had guided Ethiopian policy for the previous half-century. Most importantly, Ethiopia was no longer unique as an independent African state. Across the continent, liberation movements were challenging European colonial rule using arguments that sounded remarkably similar to those that Ethiopia had been making since Adwa. That Africans had the right to govern themselves, that traditional sovereignty deserved international respect, that military resistance to foreign domination was morally justified. We're in Black Star Square, watching Money and Kruma become the first president of independent government. It is March 6, 1957, in Ecco. Among the dignitaries in the review in Stand is Emperor Haley Silesi, no longer the only independent African head of state, one leader among many in what is rapidly becoming a continental movement for African liberation. For 60 years, Ethiopian leaders had derived legitimacy from their uniqueness. They were the Africans who had never been conquered. The society that had maintained its independence when others had failed. The exception that proved European theories about African incapacity wrong. But now that exceptionalism was being challenged by different models of African achievement. Ghana hadn't maintained independence through centuries of resistance. It had won independence through organized political struggle against colonial rule. Today, Nkrumah declares in his independence speech, from now on, there is a new Africa in the world. The new Africa is ready to fight his own battles and show that after all, the black man is capable of managing his own affairs. It's a statement that implicitly challenges everything Ethiopian exceptionalism has stood for. If Africans in general were capable of managing their own affairs, then Ethiopian claims to special status based on having done so longer became less impressive. If the new Africa was defined by successful anti-colonial struggle, then Ethiopians who had never experienced colonialism might actually be less authentically African than those who had overthrown it. Haile Selassie understood this challenge better than most of his advisors. Throughout the 1950s and 60s, he would attempt to reposition Ethiopia from exceptional African survivor to leader of African liberation, hosting the headquarters of the Organization of African Unity in Addis Ababa, supporting independence movements through the continent, and presenting Ethiopian independence as a foundation rather than an alternative to Pan-African solidarity. But this repositioning required Ethiopia to modernize not just its economy and administration, but its entire political culture. And that modernization would expose contradictions that monarchical rule and gradual reform could no longer contain. The generations of Ethiopians who came of age in the 1950s and 60s had grown up with fundamentally different expectations than their parents. They had been educated in schools that Haley Selassie had established to create a modern Ethiopian elite. They had studied abroad in universities in Europe and in America that exposed them to democratic ideologies and socialist theory. They had witnessed decolonization movements across Africa and Asia that suggested alternatives to monarchical authority. Most dangerously for the existing order, they had been taught to be proud of Ethiopian exceptionalism while simultaneously being educated in ways that made that exceptionalism seem increasingly anachronistic. In a crowded lecture hall, 20-year-old Erhan Misquell listens to a visiting professor from the University of California explain the Marxist theory on historical materialism. The professor, invited as part of Haley Selassie's modernization efforts, argues that all societies progress through inevitable stages of development. Feudalism gives way to capitalism, which gives way to socialism, which eventually produces communist society. Professor, this story is correct. What you're saying is that Ethiopia's feudal monarchy is a historical anachronism that must be overthrown for our society to advance. Are we supposed to take notes on this theory and then go home and serve an emperor who represents everything that modern political science says is obsolete? The professor, clearly uncomfortable with the implications of his own lecture, deflects. Well, every society must find its own path to development. Ethiopia's unique history may require unique approaches. They've been raised in stories of Adua and taught to be proud of Ethiopian independence. But they've also been educated to understand that independence without social justice, economic development, and political participation is just privilege for traditional elites maintained at the expense of popular welfare. So Ethiopian exceptionalism, behind it persists, means that we're exceptionally backwards, that we get to maintain feudal oppression longer than other societies because we were never colonized? It's a question that comes to the heart of the contradiction that has always existed within Ethiopian modernization efforts. How do you educate people who think critically and then expect them not to think critically about the system that educated them? How do you embrace modern political theories and then claim that those theories don't apply to your own society? How do you prepare young people for leadership in a modern world while maintaining political structures that those young people increasingly see as illegitimate? The answer, increasingly, was that you couldn't. The very success of Haley Selassie's educational modernization was creating the intellectual framework for challenging the political system that had made the modernization possible. The 1962 attempt, led by Mengistu Nouwei, was crushed after three days of fighting. But it revealed fault lines within Ethiopian society that went far deeper than political disagreement. The rebels weren't foreigners or communists, they were products of the emperor's own modernization efforts. Officers who had been trained in Western military academies, students who had studied democratic theory, professionals who had been exposed to alternative models of governance. Their proclamations during the brief period when they control parts of Addis Ababa read like a point-by-point indictment of everything that Ethiopian exceptionalism had become. Ethiopia is among the least developed countries in the world. While other African nations search forward, remain chained to a feudal backwardness. While our emperor travels the world speaking of African liberation, our own people remain oppressed by the same system that once resisted European colonialism. The coup failed because it lacked popular support and because the imperial military remained largely loyal. But it succeeded and demonstrated that Ethiopian exceptionalism was increasingly being seen as Ethiopian backwardness by the very people who were supposed to be his beneficiaries. Hailey Selassie's response was characteristics of his entire approach to political challenges. Suppress the immediate threat while making limited reforms designed to address underlying grievances without fundamentally altering the system. He purged his loyal officers but promoted military modernization. He censored revolutionary publications but expanded educational opportunities. He maintained absolute authority while creating new institutions that appeared to share power without actually doing so. It was the same balancing act he had been performing since the 1920s. By the 1960s, the contradictions it was meant to manage had become too large for any individual ruler to contain. Entire villages have been abandoned as people search for food that doesn't exist. Children are dying of starvation while government officials in Addis Ababa continue to export grain to earn foreign currency. Among the victims is an old woman named Almaz Teferi, whose husband fought at Adwa in 1896, and whose son served in resistance against Italian occupation. She sits beside the road leading south towards the capital, too weak to continue walking, watching her grandchildren die of hunger while government vehicles pass without stopping. My husband used to tell me, she whispers to a relief worker, that Ethiopians fought at Adwa so that our children would never be slaves to foreign powers. What difference does it make if you're free from foreign slavery, but your own government lets you starve to death? This is a question that exposes the fundamental hollowness of Ethiopian exceptionalism as it had evolved by the 1970s. What good was independence if the independence couldn't protect ordinary Ethiopians from preventable death? What was the value of ancient sovereignty if that sovereignty served only to preserve the privileges of traditional elites, while the majority of the population remained trapped in poverty that was increasingly difficult to distinguish from the colonial exploitation that Ethiopia had supposedly escaped? The famine also revealed something more immediate and politically dangerous. The extent to which the imperial government had become disconnected from the realities of Ethiopian life. While hundreds of thousands of people were dying in the northern provinces, Ailey Selassie was hosting lavish state dinners in Addis Ababa, traveling internationally to represent African interests at the United Nations, and maintaining the facade of enlightened African leadership for foreign audiences who knew nothing about the conditions in rural Ethiopia. But the facade was about to crumble in the most damaging way possible. In October of 1973, the British journalist Jonathan Dimbleby aired a documentary called the Unknown Famine.

SPEAKER_00: 18:39

In Ethiopia, people were dying. This is a queue for food. These people are Ethiopian peasants. Once they had cattle, land and houses, but they sold them all to buy food. Now they have only their rags. They're destitute. There are perhaps 1,000 people in this queue. In the province of Wallo, where they live, 700,000 people are in the same state. In Ethiopia as a whole, nearly two million people are suffering. In Wallo, there are 23 food distribution centers like this, feeding more than a quarter of a million starving people. There has not been enough food. In the last six months in Wallo alone, at least 50,000, and possibly more than 100,000 people have died from the famine.

SPEAKER_01: 19:31

That documentary showed the world images that the Ethiopian government had tried to suppress. Mass starvation in a country whose emperor claimed to be the leader of African development. Children died of hunger while government officials exported food for profit. Ancient ceremonies celebrating imperial authority while people starved in provinces just a few hundred miles from the capital. The country that had always prided itself on independence and dignity was revealed as a society where independence served mainly to protect elite privilege, while the majority suffered conditions that were arguably worse than those in the many colonial territories. More damaging still, the famine exposed a lie at the heart of Haley Selassie's modernization efforts. For fifty years, he had argued that gradual reform under monarchical authority was superior to revolutionary transformation because it would avoid the social disruption that rapid change inevitably produces. But the 1973-74 famine demonstrated that gradual reform produced social disruption anyway. Throughout 1974, strikes and protests spread across Ethiopia as teachers, workers, and students demanded not just famine relief, but fundamental political change. The military, increasingly uncomfortable with its role in protecting a system that seemed incapable of governing effectively, began to fragment along generational and ideological lines. On September 12, 1974, a group of junior officers calling themselves the coordinating committee of the armed forces, police and territorial army, later known simply as the Derg, announced that Emperor Haley Selassie had been deposed and that a provisional military government would assume power until new political arrangements could be established. The Lion of Judah, elect of God, King of Kings, was driven from his palace in the back of a Volkswagen beetle. But the revolution that overthrew Haley Selassie didn't resolve the fundamental contradiction that had defined Ethiopian politics since Adwa. Just transfer that contradiction to a new set of rulers who would prove even less capable of managing it effectively. The Dirk promised to modernize Ethiopia through socialist revolution rather than monarchical reform. They would eliminate feudal backwardness through collective agriculture, replace traditional authority with revolutionary discipline, and integrate Ethiopia into the progressive global community rather than maintain its splendid isolation. But they face the same basic challenges that had defeated Haley Selassie. How do you transform a society that has always defined itself through its difference from others? How do you modernize a culture whose entire identity is built on the idea that it doesn't need to change because it's always been superior to its neighbors? The psychological DNA of Ethiopian exceptionalism, was born at Adwa and refined through decades of monarchical rule, would prove remarkably resistant to revolutionary transformation. Dadurg would discover that overthrowing an emperor was much easier than overthrowing the attitudes and expectations that had made imperial rule possible for so long. Their attempts to resolve this contradiction through violence rather than gradual reform would produce consequences even more devastating than the famine that had triggered the revolution. What we witness across these three episodes is the life cycle of a particular kind of national mythology. How military victory creates psychological confidence. How that confidence enables successful resistance to external pressure. But also how it can become a barrier to internal transformation when external circumstances change. The Ethiopia that defeated Italy at Adwa in 1896 was a society that had successfully adapted traditional institutions to meet modern challenges. The Ethiopia that resisted Italian conquest in the 1930s was a society that had learned to balance ancient identity with international engagement. The Ethiopia that collapsed into revolution in 1974 was a society that had become trapped by its own success, unable to change because change seemed to threaten everything that had made survival possible. Ethiopian exceptionalism wasn't wrong when it claimed that Ethiopia was different from other African societies. Ethiopia was different. It had maintained independence when others had been colonized, preserved traditional authority when others had been disrupted by foreign rule, and maintained cultural continuity when others had been transformed by external pressure. But by the 1970s, those differences had become liabilities rather than assets. In a world where legitimacy increasingly depended on popular participation rather than traditional authority, Ethiopia's differences made it harder rather than easier to address the challenges facing all developing societies. The psychological DNA that had been forged at Adwa, the confidence that came from proving European armies could be defeated, the pride that came from having never been conquered, the certainty that Ethiopian ways were superior to foreign alternatives, had become a cage that trapped successive generations of Ethiopian leaders in approaches that no longer worked, that couldn't be abandoned without seeming to betray to everything that Ethiopian independence had meant. The story of Ethiopian exceptionalism doesn't have a neat conclusion because it's still being written. Every generation of Ethiopian leaders faces the same fundamental challenge that confronted Menelik and Haley Selassie how to preserve what is valuable about Ethiopian difference while adapting to change in circumstances that make some forms of difference unsustainable. What we can say is that victory at Adwa created something unprecedented in African history, not just military success against European colonialism, but a model of African sovereignty that influenced independence movements across the continent and continues to influence African politics today. Next time, on double helix, we'll witness twenty-four days in 1930 that transformed civil disobedience into a weapon of liberation. We'll follow Mahatma Gandhi as he calculates whether a 240-mile walk to the sea can defeat an empire. Watch British colonial administrators realize they're facing something they have no legal framework to counter. Explore how symbolic resistance created India's template for moral diplomacy still shapes Indian foreign policy today. From the spinning wheel to the salt works at Bandy, we'll see how one frail lawyer turned breaking a tax law into breaking the psychological foundations of imperial rule. Until then, thank you for listening. We will see you soon.