When the World Calls

by Stanley Meisler

  The first contingent of almost three hundred Volunteers arrived in Ethiopia in September 1962. The importance of the program was underscored by the appointment of its director, the thirty-six-year-old civil- rights activist Harris Wofford. Wofford was already well known as the campaign worker who had come up with the idea that presidential candidate John F. Kennedy phone Coretta King when her husband, Martin Luther King Jr., was jailed in Georgia. Wofford was also one of the pioneers who had helped Shriver set up the Peace Corps, and he had joined the White House staff as special assistant to President Kennedy on civil rights. The Peace Corps looked on his dispatch to Ethiopia as a grand coup.

  The Volunteers regarded Wofford as an inspiring visionary. In his view, “Every Peace Corps Volunteer—like Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court—became a 20th-century revolutionary example in Ethiopia for they were pluralist, secular and full of can-do American enthusiasm.”

  In an early achievement, Wofford persuaded the Ethiopian government to create a Peace Corps of its own. Under the scheme, every Ethiopian university student was obliged to take a year off and teach in an Ethiopian secondary school alongside the American Peace Corps teachers. Many students, from elite families, did not know the countryside outside Addis Ababa. “They were shocked by the bureaucracy and poverty and misery and became radicalized,” says Wofford.

  The emperor, who wanted to modernize his country without altering his traditional authoritarian rule, welcomed the Volunteers with a reception at his Jubilee Palace. Later, whenever his Rolls Royce passed a Volunteer in the streets of Addis Ababa, he would nod at the American. The Volunteers were easy to spot because they only bowed to the emperor—unlike his subjects, they did not fall to their hands and knees when he passed by. By prearrangement at Christmastime, a group of fifty Volunteers assembled below the windows of the palace and sang carols. He invited them in, served champagne and Ethiopian tej, a honey wine, and, seated on his throne, received each one for a few moments of Christmas greeting.

  The Peace Corps kept growing in Ethiopia and began to display all the flaws of an oversized program. By 1965, a year after Wofford returned to Washington, the number of Volunteers had almost doubled to 550. More than 450 were teaching in the secondary schools, more than 30 at the university. The Volunteers made up more than a third of all secondary school teachers in Ethiopia, and more than half of all secondary school teachers with a university degree. “While it is not always good to be dependent on so many Americans,” said Tegegne Yeteshawork, the editor of the government newspaper, the Ethiopia Herald, “Ethiopia cannot help itself. The Peace Corps is indispensable to us. By 1970, we may need 4,000 Volunteers.”

  Yet the size was already making it difficult for the Volunteers to break away from each other and experience Ethiopian life fully. The clusters were enormous. Addis Ababa alone had 159 Volunteers, more than any other city in the world. In fact, the contingent in Addis Ababa alone numbered more than the full Peace Corps program in twelve other countries in Africa. Throughout Ethiopia, many Volunteers enjoyed a varied social life, playing poker, riding horses, seeing movies, playing tennis, watching television, drinking beer, and vacationing—almost always with other Volunteers.

  Despite the problem of the large clusters, many Volunteers maintained an intensive relationship with their schools and their pupils. Ethiopia did not have the isolated school compounds and dormitories of the boarding schools in the former British colonies. Pupils came to town, often from far-off villages, and fended for themselves while attending secondary school in town. Many Volunteers allowed pupils to live in their houses in exchange for household chores. Others were hired by the Volunteers as Amharic teachers. The Volunteers handed out books to the young Ethiopians and, in many cases, paid for them to continue their schooling.

  Unlike Ghanian schools, the Ethiopian secondary schools did not have comfortable bungalows for their teachers. The Volunteers lived in functional, nondescript houses in town, and many pupils, whether they lived with the Volunteers or not, hung around.

  The Ethiopian children had to learn in English, a foreign language. Although English was one of their subjects of study, they felt ill at ease with the language. In their desperation, they memorized great chunks of subject matter to parrot back on examinations. Volunteers tried hard to break down this rote learning. They admonished their young Ethiopians to think for themselves, to find solutions though their own ingenuity, to analyze subject matter instead of memorizing it.

  The Volunteers, sometimes through demonstration, also taught their pupils to question authority. That, of course, was one side of the admonition to think for themselves. The pupils would also see the Volunteers challenge Ethiopian headmasters to expand the curriculum, or speed up the mimeographing of examinations, or stop beating pupils. This example would not be lost on the Ethiopian university students teaching in the secondary schools as well.

  All those ideas that came naturally from American teaching—think for yourself, question what you are told—were subversive ideas in a country where one man, elected by God, possessed the authority to make all decisions. Americans imparted these ideas without even realizing it. Some Volunteers went further, expanding the curriculum to include Western ideas that they knew (or should have known) challenged the emperor, his court of whisperers, and his feudal world.

  “At Shimeles Habte School in Addis,” Richard Lipez, a member of the first contingent of Volunteers, recalled recently, “I taught a unit in ninth-grade English on the techniques and uses of propaganda. I never mentioned the emperor, of course, or maybe Ethiopia at all, but these kids were soon up to their eyebrows in Orwell. And they could put two and two together.

  “I also led an after-school seminar, for those top students who wanted to participate, on Great Books and Documents. I can’t remember all the literature we read and discussed; availability was one of the factors in choosing what to take on. But I do remember Alan Paton’s Too Late the Phalarope and—God, what was I thinking?—the American Declaration of Independence . . . .

  “The students I had,” Lipez went on, “were hungry for ideas and for the kind of societal change that would give them more opportunities to get ahead. Maybe the most radical idea we promoted, consciously or unconsciously, was that merit was what mattered, not tribe or family or class. I wonder if Haile Selassie knew what he was doing when he invited us in.”

  In 1969, students began to strike and demonstrate against their government. At first, their demands focused on the woeful weakness of the Ethiopian school system. Almost 80 percent of the pupils who entered sixth grade dropped out of school before the twelfth grade. Those who made it through high school found an economy too frail to provide enough jobs for them. Only a handful were admitted to the university in Addis Ababa.

  Their demands grew more universal as the strikes continued. “Land for the tiller”—a demand for land reform—became a familiar student battle cry. They also demanded parliamentary democracy, freedom of speech, and an end to corruption and nepotism. The students continually drew up lists of demands. But as one militant university student acknowledged, “If the government gives in to our fifteen demands, we will have thirty more. Our real aim is the overthrow of his majesty’s government.”

  The students also wanted Ethiopia to rid itself of the foreign forces that propped up the emperor. These were mainly American and, in the school system, mainly Peace Corps. As one Volunteer teacher put it, “We are liked as Peace Corps, admired as teachers, but we are Americans.”

  The strikes would usually begin at the university, spread to the high schools in Addis Ababa, and then reach the schools in the countryside. Communication was eased by the program—first proposed by the Peace Corps—that put university students into the secondary schools for a year of teaching.

  The government of Haile Selassie dealt with the strikes mainly by suppressing them. The emperor and his cronies convinced themselv
es that foreign communists had subverted the minds of the students. Two Soviet journalists and three Czech diplomats were expelled from Ethiopia in March 1969. Suppression worked, but only as a temporary palliative. The student demonstrations would subside, but then, after a few weeks, they would burst forth again.

  In late December, Tilahan Gizaw, the president of the university student union, was shot and killed while walking near campus. Students carried the body to campus and staged a demonstration against the government. Five trucks arrived, crammed with soldiers of the emperor’s imperial guard. Officers of the guard demanded that the students relinquish the body. When the students refused, the guardsmen fixed bayonets and marched forward, determined to clear the campus grounds of students. At least twenty students, but probably more, died in the melee.

  Joseph Murphy, a thirty-six-year-old former professor of political science at Brandeis University, was then director of the Peace Corps in Ethiopia. For months, he had tried to persuade senior U.S. officials to understand the significance of the student strikes.

  Ethiopia allowed very few channels for open dissent. Political parties did not exist. Labor unions were weak, practically ornamental. Newspaper editors and reporters either wrote their articles as directed or tried to anticipate what would please the emperor and his court. But students at the university had the privilege of a student organization, a student newspaper, and a tradition among their American teachers that encouraged dissent. Their complaints often echoed the complaints of the silent in Ethiopia.

  But Murphy failed to persuade U.S. officials of the significance of the student demonstrations and the need for the emperor to modernize his corrupt and inert feudal government quickly. Like the emperor’s bureaucrats, U.S. officials tended to look on the student demonstrations as isolated bursts of youthful exuberance. They believed that the emperor, a stalwart anti-communist ally during the Cold War, would eventually control the restless students.

  A month after the killing of the students at the university, Murphy resigned as Peace Corps director in Ethiopia. In a letter that soon circulated among the Volunteers, he wrote he could no longer work in a dictatorship “which cannot establish a social order with better answers to its problems than shooting and beating young people.” “The recent incidents at the university and other places throughout the empire,” he went on, “have pretty well convinced me that we do no service in teaching Ethiopian youngsters how to ask questions about their physical and social world when they live in a society in which the answers to those questions are bayonets and clubs.” Murphy would return to academic life, most notably as chancellor of the colleges of the City University of New York.

  Perhaps the resignation should have been treated by U.S. officials as a signal that the time had come for the U.S. government to exert pressure on the emperor to give up his absolute power in favor of a democratic constitutional monarchy. But that was too much to expect at a time when the minds of U.S. policymakers were clouded by the priorities of the Cold War and the need to keep the Kagnew military base. Shoring up the emperor seemed like the best insurance for maintaining the base. Most U.S. officials treated Murphy’s resignation as a minor personnel change brought on by rowdy, undisciplined students.

  The waves of student strikes intensified, and Peace Corps Volunteers often found themselves the object of student anger and resentment. The Volunteers may have helped carry western enlightenment to young Ethiopians, but, far more important to many students, the Volunteers were the most visible manifestation of U.S. support for the despised emperor.

  In the town of Harar, in eastern Ethiopia, once the fabled home of the nineteenth-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud, the secondary school was in continual turmoil. “Teachers were often shouted out of class,” Volunteer Eleanor Shumway wrote in a report. “Peace Corps Volunteer teachers got particular abuse about our cultural imperialism, involvement in Vietnam, and the students’ certainty that we were CIA agents intent on making Ethiopia a second Vietnam.” On two occasions, the pupils threw rocks at the Volunteers.

  “We feel our continued presence here,” Shumway said, “is a hindrance to the political development of Ethiopia. This is an internal problem and the Ethiopians are constantly demonstrating to us they want to solve their own problems without our interference.” Ten of the thirteen Volunteers in Harar resigned.

  In the historic northern town of Adowa, where Ethiopian soldiers had halted the march of Italian colonialism in 1896, forty eleventh-grade pupils set upon Volunteer teachers Craig Johnson and Dick Obermanns one afternoon. The young Ethiopians were angry that one of them had been disciplined in class, but the encounter soon turned into one of anti-American fury.

  The students pummeled the Americans with sticks, stones, and their fists, leaving them bruised and bleeding. “While we remain in Ethiopia,” Johnson wrote in a report, “we will only remain conspicuous targets for the very real frustrations young Ethiopians feel about their political and economic systems. No matter how good a job we feel we are doing as individuals, our experience has made it clear that we are first and foremost symbols of an oppressive American presence which nationalist-minded young Ethiopians deeply resent.” Four of the five Volunteer teachers in Adowa resigned after this incident.

  In all, by early 1970, 70 of the 235 Volunteer teachers in Ethiopia had resigned. Teaching had become halting and exasperating throughout the country. For long stretches, university classes had no more than 25 percent attendance, the high schools of Addis Ababa were shut down, and teaching in most schools outside the capital had become a farce. The Peace Corps announced that it would reduce the numbers of Volunteer teachers to 100 in 1971. The numbers dwindled even more after that.

  Haile Selassie and his security forces were unable to contain the relentless movement of the students. The government even tried trucking university students into the countryside and herding them into concentration camps. But, when released, the students returned to demonstrations and strikes. Other Ethiopians started marching with students throughout the country. The government’s woes were exacerbated by a famine that the emperor refused to acknowledge. Photos of him feeding meat to his dogs while Ethiopians starved added fury to a growing national resentment. The government’s stability quivered as the army continued to fail to squelch the insurgency of Eritrean nationalists in the north.

  The revolution reached a climax in 1974. A mutiny by junior officers and noncommissioned officers led to a military takeover of the government. The soldiers put Haile Selassie under house arrest in his palace and ruled through a military committee known in Amharic as the Derg. The eighty-two-year-old emperor, close to senility, dismissed his government and issued whatever decrees the soldiers demanded.

  At first, it did not seem as if the soldiers had seized control of the revolution from the students. The two groups were very close. Most of the noncommissioned officers were recent secondary school graduates who had joined the army because they could not find any other job. Many of the junior officers were graduates of the non-elitist Holetta Military School, which admitted poor youngsters after a year or two of secondary school. The students served as the intellectual guides of the soldiers.

  The students, in fact, were more radical than the revolutionary soldiers, at least in the beginning. The students wanted a complete end to the reign of the emperor and all the regime’s trappings. Yet the Derg continued to issue its decrees “in the name of the Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah.”

  Western education and the English language opened channels to far more subjects than English literature, Enlightenment philosophy, and U.S. history. Students could delve into Marxism and Leninism as well. This was especially attractive during a Cold War when young Ethiopians looked on the United States as an enemy. Although many students still advocated parliamentary democracy for Ethiopia, others organized two communist-style political parties.

  Major Mengistu Haile Mariam soon emerged as
the strongman of the revolution, taking the post of vice chairman and then chairman of the Derg. He was thirty-six years old in 1974—too old to have studied with any Peace Corps Volunteer teacher before entering the Holetta Military School. Although the cause of the emperor’s death is still a mystery, one theory holds that Mengistu ordered his personal physician to smother Haile Selassie to death in 1975 with an ether-doused pillow. By 1977, Mengistu was the ruthless ruler of Ethiopia, and the Peace Corps withdrew the last of its Volunteers.

  Mengistu’s reign, which lasted fourteen years, was one of the bloodiest in Africa. Not only did he kill hundreds who had once worked for the emperor, but he also wiped out one of the student communist parties because it advocated civilian rather than military rule. Yet he declared himself a communist and allied Ethiopia with the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba. Heeding the student cry of “land to the tiller,” he launched a grandiose land reform scheme, but it lacked planning and failed badly. To make matters worse, he continued the emperor’s disastrous war to prevent the secession of Eritrea.

  The rise of Mengistu and the length of his military rule has led many outsiders to attribute the fall of the emperor to the rebellion in his army. But as Paulos Milkias, a professor of political science at Concordia University in Montreal and a former Ethiopian student leader, put it in a recent book, “Careful analysis shows that Haile Selassie was not overthrown by the military . . . . Rather, the crucial and decisive deathblow that crushed the Haile Selassie regime emanated from the methodical forays of the students and teachers who were the products of the modern school system.” Volunteer teachers played a role—perhaps a significant role—in this. But once the program closed down, there is no evidence that the Peace Corps tried to analyze the impact of the Volunteers on the revolutionaries who brought down the emperor. The cruelty of the aftermath was too horrible to attract that kind of research. Peace Corps officials were pleased to be free from the turmoil of Ethiopia and kept their attention on their other programs.