Sub-Saharan Africa
organization and the methods employed were formida-
ble, and the impasse created forced colonial troops to
fire on the protesters, killing about 50 women and
wounding several others. Between late December 1929
and early January 1930, the Commission of Inquiry set
up by the British government to investigate the imme-
diate and remote causes of the uprising collected evi-
dence and recommended collective punishment for the
communities involved.
The first three chapters focus on the pre-and early-
colonial Igbo world, British attempts to understand and
pacify Igbo society, and how the pseudoscientific the-
ories of the nineteenth century informed British atti-
tudes and led to the creation of particularly negative
stereotypes about the Igbo. The Igbo world the authors
show was already in transition before British colonial-
ism. The transformative and significant impact of the
Atlantic slave trade, the post-abolition economy that
focused on commodity trade, and the collaborative he-
gemony that came in the wake of missionary and co-
lonial contact were major impetuses for change. These
developments took place within an indigenous cultural
milieu defined by a world view and spirituality that was
gendered and communal as well as interdependent. Yet
the British perceived the Igbo social and political struc-
tures as chaotic, disorderly, and uncivilized, which
stemmed from their inability to understand Igbo indig-
enous politics. This perception of the Igbo was impor-
tant in how the British embarked upon their civilizing
mission in the region. Evidently, the British drew upon
the prevailing race theories in setting boundaries of ra-
cial, sexual, and gender difference. Such ideas were also
influenced by the psychological frame of mind of the
men who carried out the war against the women of East-
ern Nigeria in 1929.
Chapters 4 and 5 focus on the tradition of social
movements beginning with the 1925 Nwaobiala, or
Dance Movement, and the 1929 Women’s War. The
rest of the book focuses on British reactions to the 1929
revolts. The 1929 uprising was an expression of the ten-
sions that had been brewing since the introduction of
colonial administration in the region. The discontent
surrounding the women’s movement falls into three
main categories. First, the government was caught in a
problematic situation emanating from the unpopular
Native Revenue Ordinance, which introduced direct
taxation in southeastern Nigeria. The perception that
the tax could be extended to women provided the po-
litical opportunity and impetus for their collective ac-
tion. Furthermore, the discontent began to extend to
another major issue of relevance to rural peoples in
Eastern Nigeria—the declining prices of their major ex-
port produce—palm oil and kernels, and increasing in-
flation that pushed the price of imported goods beyond
the reach of the local population. In the late 1920s, the
entire world economy was in turmoil due to the Great
Depression. The period of the depression was by no
means the first time rural farmers experienced eco-
nomic hardship, but it was clearly the worst.
Another source of discontent was the powerful dis-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
375
trust for government found in Eastern Nigeria in 1929
and the laissez-faire attitude of colonial authority. As
the authors reveal, the British were out of touch. The
protesters called attention to the widespread corrup-
tion that existed in the native administration and par-
alleled the rise of the new political elite with the emer-
gence of moral decay and the widespread exploitation
of the local population. Their petitions and testimonies
gave voice to what many described as humiliation at the
hands of native court members and warrant chiefs.
There was indeed a growing nostalgia for the pre-co-
lonial political and economic order. Women capitalized
on past transgressions by the government, especially
the warrant chiefs, to articulate and popularize their
protest.
The British persistently sought to minimize the ac-
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tions of women involved in the 1929 revolt. By denying
agency to these women, the British authorities revealed
their own prejudice against the Igbo, and Igbo women
in particular, as well as the Eurocentric and Victorian
gender ideology that colored much of their understand-
ing of Igbo society.
The authors do a great job contextualizing the place
of the Women’s War in the history of Eastern Nigeria.
They convincingly illustrate that the conditions that
gave rise to the uprising lay in earlier times and that the
form of collective organization and militancy expressed
during the uprising had its roots in long-established
forms of consciousness among women.
CHIMA J. KORIEH
Marquette University
BAHRU ZEWDE. The Quest for Socialist Utopia: The Ethi-
opian Student Movement, c. 1960–1974. (Eastern Af-
rica.) Oxford: James Currey, 2014. Pp. xvi, 299. $90.00.
The late Ali A. Mazrui went to Haile Selassie I Uni-
versity in 1973 to give a talk to the university commu-
nity. 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 his-
tory, 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 can-
dor as Bahru’s recent monograph.
The Quest for Socialist Utopia has eight chapters and
an introduction. The introduction provides a review of
the literature on student movements in general, and the
Ethiopian student movement (hereafter ESM) in par-
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376 Reviews of Books
ticular. Chapter 1 deals with “youth in revolt.” It is a
global survey of student movements, with 1968 as its
nadir. The remaining chapters focus on the ESM, both
at home and abroad.
Bahru declares his methodology as one informed by
Leopold von Ranke’s dictum that the historian’s task is
to tell about the past “the way it exactly happened” (p.
9). He adds, “The primary task of historians is to record
what happened, as it happened, not to justify or con-
demn it” (pp. 264 –265). In this age of postmodernism,
postcolonialism, and other “posts,” it may sound ar-
chaic to talk about the detached objectivity of the his-
torian. “What actually happened” is itself contested.
Ranke himself restricted history to Western Europe,
denying it to the rest of the world, including China. For
Bahru, good historical writing is writing rich in docu-
mentation. Many of the writings he critiques in this
work are charged with one common fault: lack of doc-
umentary evidence. Documents help us know “what ac-
tually happened.”
Bahru identifies three factors for the rise, growth,
and radicalization of the ESM: national, continental,
and global. The national factor that awoke students to
politics was the 1960 abortive coup against Haile Selass-
ie’s regime. The continental factor was that of African
scholarship students who joined Haile Selassie I Uni-
versity. Their radical nationalist ideas had a powerful
impact on Ethiopian students. The global factors were
the radicalisms of the 1960s: Vietnam, Cuba, China, the
civil rights movement in the U.S., etc. Bahru provides
a masterful analysis of these diverse sources in all their
complexities, specificities, and overarching unities.
Bahru’s approach to the history of the ESM is bold
and refreshing. One hardly finds writing on the ESM by
Ethiopians that is not marred by two intractable prob-
lems: partisanship and hyperbole. Decades after the
ESM and the political parties that grew out of it have
passed into history, one searches in vain to find an “ob-
jective,” dispassionate, sober, and critical analysis of
the movement. This is what makes Bahru’s book stand
out. Bahru is the first Ethiopian scholar/historian to
write the history of the ESM by looking at all sides of
the debates, without praising one and condemning the
other. He filtered his account through a massive array
of primary sources, including student and government
publications, interviews, and archives. He also con-
sulted an extensive list of secondary sources.
Two themes are prominent in Bahru’s narration of
the ESM. First, how a small group of students dedicated
to Marxist ideology succeeded in galvanizing a gener-
ation of student activism aimed at a socialist regener-
ation of Ethiopia. And second, how the overwhelming
majority of the activists and participants of the ESM
came from groups identified with “historic Ethiopia,”
Amhara and Tigray, as well as Eritrea. That Amhara
students played a critical role in delegitimizing and un-
dermining the hegemony of their ethnic namesake is a
profound lesson one learns from the radical politics of
the ESM. Walelign Mekonnen was the quintessential
representation of such Amhara student radicalism.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
While some charge Walelign with national nihilism ad-
vocating the disintegration of Ethiopia, Bahru offers us
a different reading of Walelign: a passionate university
student who may have had a wrong solution but for the
right ideal, the freedom and equality of all Ethiopians.
The radicalism of the ESM expressed itself in the lan-
guage of Marxism. It was heavier on Lenin than Marx,
Stalin than Lenin, Mao than Stalin. Yet, the two Marx-
ist icons for whom students sang songs are not found in
the above list: Ho Chi Minh and “Che” Guevara. ESM
activists also read Franz Fanon and New Left Marxism.
Bahru identifies two legacies of the ESM: the “fram-
ing of the national question and . . . organizational cul-
ture” (p. 280). The “national question” was what Haile
Selassie’s government “dreaded most” (p. 267). The
dread was to continue to plague the Darg years, too.
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Bahru shows in detail the debates and acrimonies on
the “national question.” Accepting “the right of na-
tions/nationalities to self-determination, including and
up to secession” became the hallmark of a true revo-
lutionary (p. 209). Article 39.1 of the current Ethiopian
Constitution grants the right to secession, showing its
origins in the Marxism of the ESM. The only other com-
petitor to the national question in ESM politics was the
land question. ESM radicalism began with the slogan,
“Land to the tiller!” (p. 101).
Bahru closes his book by reflecting on the activists of
the ESM: “They had no hidden agenda. They were
driven by what has driven youth everywhere and
throughout the ages—the quest for social justice and
equitable development” (p. 280). We may only add that
such “quest” need not necessarily be “utopian.”
With Pioneers of Change in Ethiopia: The Reformist
Intellectuals of the Early Twentieth Century (2002), his
edited volume, Documenting the Ethiopian Student
Movement: An Exercise in Oral History (2010), and The
Quest for Socialist Utopia, Bahru Zewde establishes
himself as the foremost intellectual historian of modern
Ethiopia.
TESHALE TIBEBU
Temple University
ROBERT ROSS. The Borders of Race in Colonial South
Africa: The Kat River Settlement, 1829–1856. (African
Studies, no. 128.) New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2014. Pp. xvii, 340. $99.00.
Robert Ross is a preeminent historian of South Africa
and this book is the latest distinguished addition to an
already impressive corpus. It tells the story of the Kat
River Settlement on the eastern frontier of the Cape
Colony from its founding in 1829 to its disintegration in
the early 1850s.
The Kat River Settlement was the brainchild of Sir
Andreas Stockenström, one of the most impressive co-
lonial officials of the early nineteenth century. It was
designed to provide a homeland for the Khoekhoe peo-
ple, known in the nineteenth century as Hottentots,
who were scattered across the Eastern Cape, but mainly
concentrated around the mission stations that dotted
FEBRUARY 2015