What do African revolutions look like? Do they have any distinctive features? Has the continent had any globally significant revolutions? These questions were prompted by the symposium at the University of Miami marking fifty years since the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie in Ethiopia in September 1974. Those events most definitely did seem to constitute a veritable moment of revolutionary rupture, recognized at the time by both local actors and outside observers (Kebede 2008, Thomson 1975). There might be some debate about the duration of the revolution itself, of course: when it started and how long it went on. After all, revolutions are never singular events. Ethiopian army officers moved in stages against the aging emperor in the course of 1974, a little tremulously at first, partly because of their uncertainty about how the wider populace would receive such maneuvers. They did so against a backdrop of heightening socioeconomic discontent and political protest which had been in the gestation a long time. But the first shots were fired across the bows of l‘ancien regime quite a few years before, in December 1960, when a contingent of radicalized and idealistic soldiers had attempted to overthrow Haile Selassie’s government while he was abroad. It was crushed within a matter of hours. Yet—as in tsarist Russia in 1905—the survival of the regime didn’t mean an end to the underlying challenges. The eventual ouster of Haile Selassie was only the beginning of the revolution—best understood here as a process rather than an event—for the advent of the Provisional Military Administrative Committee (PMAC, or Derg, Amharic for “committee”) involved the far-reaching and violent transformation of Ethiopian state, society and economy deep into the 1980s, and the country’s geopolitical repositioning in a Cold War context, leading to significant Soviet military aid (Halliday and Molyneaux 1981; Tiruneh 1993; Schwab 1985). This particular revolution, however, soon converged with another—or, perhaps more accurately, a series of regional revolutions on the part of Tigrayans, Eritreans, Oromo, and Amhara, who ultimately combined to remake Ethiopia (and independent Eritrea) in new ways (James et al., 2002; Tareke 2009). Perhaps, it might be argued that these were simply different stages in a prolonged period of revolutionary tumult, with which Ethiopians are in fact still living....
