Elleni Zeleke and indigenous knowledge production

Elleni Centime Zeleke was an Ethiopian scholar whose book, Ethiopia in Theory, challenged us to reconsider how we think about knowledge production using the Ethiopian student movement as an example 

At the beginning of July 2024, African academia lost one of its brightest scholars in recent decades, Elleni Centime Zeleke. She was an Assistant Professor of African Studies at Columbia University in the United States. Zeleke’s interests included the politics of the Horn of Africa, critical theory, the Frankfurt School, African political thought, and the history of capitalism. She was particularly known for her seminal book Ethiopia in Theory (2020), which stood out due to her comprehensive approach to the student movement in the country, distinguishing her work from notable previous studies on the same issue by Randi Balsvik (1985) and Bahru Zewde (2014). 

Zeleke employed Marxism as the closest method to frame the ideas of student movement leaders, using what she termed knowledge production, to a distinct understanding of historical materialism, different from that of the revolutionaries themselves. This “Ethiopian” interpretation of Marxism diverged from the Ethiopian elite’s tendency from the late 19th century to adopt Western forms of knowledge, including Marxism itself, in their attempts to understand their society’s backwardness or reactionary nature. Issues raised by the Ethiopian student movement since the 1960s, such as land ownership, nationalities, and the meaning of democracy, remain relevant in Ethiopia, both during the recent civil war in Tigray and today. Zeleke’s ability to employ interdisciplinary sciences with equal skill in data collection, analysis, and presentation was exceptional, making her one of the most impactful scholars of her day.  

Reading Ethiopia in Theory 

Zeleke’s seminal book, Ethiopia in Theory, cannot be separated from her overall output. As a specialist in the history of social and political thought, her research focused on African political thought and the Marxism of the Third World. The book is closely related to Zeleke’s extensive contributions through various research and academic platforms. For example, she published an important study on Addis Ababa (2020), which explored the ways in which ideas espoused by the country’s elite were re-inscribed onto a city. Every new regime littered the city with new symbols and monuments to stamp their authority on the capital.  

Zeleke also dedicated one of her articles to critiquing the Ethiopian elite and the complexities of their development since the late 19th century, while showing some sympathy for some of its members. This was reflected sporadically throughout the book, especially in the third chapter. 

In 2016, Zeleke presented a rigorous study on the concepts of social sciences and their becoming neutral in mediating social conflict, linking them to the Ethiopian student movements of the 1960s and 1970s. This study, which involved diverse materials such as publications, journalistic articles, and academic monitoring of Ethiopia’s 2005 federal elections, deeply discussed the implications of these elections (including various party perspectives on pressing Ethiopian issues like land privatisation, capital control, and ethnic self-determination), unhindered by the state’s efforts to frame the elections as a primarily technical matter. This study formed the fourth chapter of Ethiopia in Theory, indicating that it was a well-planned project spanning nearly a decade. 

Additionally, a brief overview of Zeleke’s ideas—born to Amhara parents in Gondar, the historical stronghold of the modern Ethiopian state—regarding state identity and the historical upheavals caused by successive regional and international conditions (discussed in part in the early chapters of the book), and her explicit condemnation of violence and the reactionary forces that have plagued Ethiopian society for prolonged periods, explains Zeleke’s clear inclination towards what she calls “rethinking the history of the Ethiopian revolution”. The revolutionary period in her view of Ethiopia’s history, forms the basis of a lot of issues which have afterlives in the country’s politics today. Rethinking that era then becomes an urgent task of both historical and contemporary significance.  

She connects this with the global rise of the left and the issue of “historical contiguity”. Notably, in the context of the previous observation, she describes the period from 1965 to 1969 as a phase of discontinuity from strong revolutionary activity towards a complete revolution against Emperor Haile Selassie’s rule, irrespective of the outcomes of that revolution and its subsequent hijacking by an ideologically unqualified military organisation. 

Ethiopia in Theory: A project of indigenising knowledge production  

Zeleke’s unique work, Ethiopia in Theory, merits her description of it as a project; it uniquely and seamlessly combines three main approaches—philosophical, historical, and anthropological—supported by field studies and an organic understanding of the Ethiopian student movement’s origins within the global history of similar movements since the 1960s. 

The book is divided into two parts. The first part, titled Knowledge Production and Social Change in Revolutionary Ethiopia, comprises chapters 1-5. The second part, titled Theory as Memory: The Problem of Social Sciences in Africa, represents an extensive study focused on developing a theory of African knowledge production based on the Ethiopian student movement. This part employs Marxist critical theory and the Frankfurt School, juxtaposing them with empiricism and objectivity. Zeleke consciously and clearly surpasses the dominance of ideology over research, aiming to understand the determinants of the student movement through the intellectual tools established by the movement itself, as mentioned in the book’s introduction. 

The first part addresses knowledge production and social change in Ethiopia through five coherent chapters, beginning with a chapter on seeking an alternative methodology for researching the Ethiopian revolution. This chapter blends her personal experiences, as she left Ethiopia at a young age in the late 1970s, grew up in Canada, Guyana, and Barbados, and continued moving between various capitals, including Addis Ababa. The second chapter rethinks the history of the Ethiopian revolution within Zeleke’s main concerns with Marxist critical theory. It escapes the European archival reading of Ethiopian history in the 20th century by integrating her abbreviated readings of documents from the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, royal family annals, and church-held land records (mostly written in Ge’ez or Amharic). She avoids reliance on the Ethiopian state’s narrative and resorts to unofficial sources that restore balance to how the story of Ethiopia’s history is told, especially concerning historically marginalised peoples since the late 19th century. 

The third chapter delves into the literature of the Ethiopian student movement and its place in social sciences, especially in the decade 1964-1974, as a primary source for addressing the history of this movement within Zeleke’s larger project aimed at Africanizing knowledge production, particularly in the Ethiopian context. Zeleke provided a very smart reading of the student movement’s growth, based on several of its publications, such as the Challenge, and analysed their content. The fourth chapter, as previously mentioned, is derived from Zeleke’s earlier work. The fifth and final chapter of the first part, titled Negative Revolution: Life after the 2005 Elections, explores the aftermath of the 05’ elections and how tensions between civil society and the Ethiopia state over plans to expand Addis Ababa and the protests it triggered were used by the OPDO elite to move themselves into the centre of power, and lay down a urban-based top-down neoliberal model for development under Abiy Ahmed.  

Theory as autobiography  

Zeleke’s efforts are part of ongoing attempts in Africa to dismantle the link between African history and the dominant European-western perception of this history. Among these efforts is the pioneering work of Ethiopian professor Teshale Tibebu on Hegel and the Third World, in which he dedicates a section to the dialectic of nature and spirit.  

In the second part of her book, Zeleke presents a lengthy single chapter (about 60 pages, making it the longest chapter in the book) on her vision of linking theory to local contexts, titled The Problem of Social Sciences in Africa. She attempts to trace the roots of this “problem,” rethink stages of transitional capitalism, and discuss the idea of “knowledge production” in Africa as a foundation for its development. Zeleke also aims to establish a “theory of human development,” after a thorough discussion of the ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Hegel. From her conclusions, it can be summarised that “human life is a historical life that leads to the critique of knowledge,” emphasising the necessity for a society to critique its history and not accept it as a given in order to enhance its capacity for change. 

Thus, it can be said that Zeleke’s effort to Africanise knowledge production is fundamentally based on scientific tools and methodologies, and most importantly, on historical experiences documented through diverse means—not merely abstract ideas. She attempts to apply this approach in her presentation of the “Ethiopian revolution,” with the student movement at its core. Her challenge to African, Ethiopian and global readers however isn’t just an argument about the importance of localised knowledge production. This method encourages us to ask what lessons Ethiopia, and perhaps Africa more broadly can offer us in thinking about social change and global developments in world history.