Educating the Nation in Ethiopia: State, Society and Identity in Wolaita (1941-1991)

In analysing the educational dynamics of the Wolaita region in Ethiopia, this book traces the history of the nation-state from the perspective of its margins, between 1941 and 1991. From Haile Selassie's divine right monarchy to the Derg's Marxist-Leninist military regime, it looks at the ways in which the inhabitants of a region incorporated at the end of the nineteenth century reacted to their dominated position within the national structure by negotiating with schooling - its successive ideologies, its knowledge, its languages of instruction, and its practices of power - in order to take their place in the national political community. By focusing on everyday feelings of belonging and ordinary nationalism as manifested in school dynamics, this book bears witness to the way in which nations are constructed and reshaped in the interaction and tensions between various social groups and the state. The ways in which the Ethiopian governments appropriated the North American and then Soviet schooling models offer a special insight into Ethiopia's changing positions vis-a-vis the outside world in the context of the Cold War as well as the forms of translation at work right down to the local level. Featuring a wide range of actors - women and men, urban graduates and peasants, national and local civil servants, North American Peace Corps workers and East German advisers, Catholic and Protestant missionaries - this book will appeal to a much wider audience than Ethiopia specialists alone.