Best Books on Ethiopia Under the Derg and the Cold War

## Africa's Forgotten Cold War When people think about Cold War proxy conflicts, they think of Vietnam, Korea, Angola, Cuba. Ethiopia rarely comes up. Yet the events in that country between 1974 and 1991 were as dramatic and deadly as almost anything that happened during the Cold War, and they reshaped an entire region. In 1974, a military committee called the Derg overthrew Emperor Haile Selassie, one of the twentieth century's most iconic figures, and began a revolution that would kill hundreds of thousands of people. The Soviet Union and Cuba backed the new regime with weapons, advisors, and troops. The United States, which had been Ethiopia's Cold War patron under Selassie, switched sides and began supporting Somalia. The result was a series of catastrophes: a brutal counter-insurgency in Eritrea, the Red Terror campaign against political opponents, a catastrophic famine in 1984 that killed a million people, and the Ogaden War with Soviet-backed Ethiopia against American-backed Somalia. The ideological alignments were bewildering, the human cost enormous. The books below are the best accounts of this period. ## The Emperor Who Was Overthrown Ryszard Kapuscinski's **The Emperor** is not a history of the Derg. It is an account of the court of Haile Selassie in his final years, assembled from interviews with former courtiers who witnessed the decline and fall of imperial Ethiopia. Kapuscinski was a Polish journalist who reported from Africa for decades, and his prose is unlike that of any conventional historian. The book works as a kind of collective memory. Former palace officials, servants, and functionaries speak in fragmentary testimonies about the rituals of the imperial court, the paranoia and sycophancy that surrounded Selassie, the ceremonial cushion bearer who followed the emperor to soften his footsteps, the man whose job was to wipe the mouths of the dogs the emperor favored in audience. It sounds like satire, but Kapuscinski insists on the factual basis of what his sources told him. What The Emperor captures is the atmosphere of a system so rigid, so built around the fiction of imperial infallibility, that it could not respond to the famine developing in the north in 1973 and 1974. The government actively concealed the famine from the emperor and the outside world. When footage of starving Ethiopians was interspersed with footage of imperial banquets and broadcast by the BBC, it helped trigger the coup that ended three thousand years of Ethiopian imperial tradition. ## The Historical Framework Bahru Zewde's **A History of Modern Ethiopia** provides the scholarly context that Kapuscinski's impressionistic journalism cannot offer. Zewde is Ethiopia's most distinguished historian, a professor at Addis Ababa University who lived through much of what he describes, and his book covers the period from the 1855 unification under Emperor Tewodros through the end of the Derg in 1991. Zewde is particularly good on the structural conditions that made the 1974 revolution possible. The imperial land tenure system concentrated ownership in the hands of a small elite, impoverishing the rural majority. The educated urban class that Selassie's modernization had created became the regime's most dangerous critics. The military, poorly paid and poorly treated, accumulated grievances that the 1973 drought and famine finally brought to a head. His account of the Derg period is measured and devastating. He traces how the Derg, initially a collective leadership of military officers, was taken over by Mengistu Haile Mariam through a series of purges and murders of his colleagues. The Red Terror of 1977-1978, in which the regime killed tens of thousands of suspected opponents, many of them students and young urban professionals, gets careful treatment. So does the decision to collectivize agriculture in the 1980s, which combined with drought to produce the 1984 famine. ## The Cold War Dimensions Paul Henze's **Layers of Time: A History of Ethiopia** brings a different perspective. Henze was a CIA officer who served in Ethiopia and later became a scholar of the country, and his book covers Ethiopian history from antiquity to the fall of the Derg. The Cold War chapters reflect his insider knowledge of American policy and its consequences. What Henze makes clear is how badly American policy failed in the Horn of Africa. The United States backed Selassie as a Cold War ally, then scrambled to adjust when the Derg emerged. The decision to support Somalia against the Soviet-backed Ethiopia was motivated by simple Cold War logic (the enemy of our enemy), but Somalia's government under Siad Barre was no more democratic or humane than the Derg, and the Ogaden War it launched in 1977 was a disaster that Somalia never recovered from. Henze also covers the Cuban and Soviet involvement in Ethiopia with detail that is hard to find elsewhere. Cuban troops played a decisive role in turning the Ogaden War in Ethiopia's favor in 1978, fighting alongside Ethiopian forces against the Somali army. This was a significant military commitment by Havana, and it shaped the trajectory of the entire Horn of Africa for the following decade. ## The Legacy The Derg fell in 1991, replaced by the Tigray People's Liberation Front and eventually by the current government of Abiy Ahmed. But the wounds of the Derg period are not healed. The land question that drove the 1974 revolution was never fully resolved. The Eritrean conflict, which the Derg fought so brutally, ended with Eritrean independence in 1993 and a catastrophic border war between 1998 and 2000. The ethnic tensions that the Derg's centralization aggravated remain live political forces. Ethiopia's Cold War history is not a closed chapter. It is an active inheritance. ## Further Reading Explore more Cold War titles at [/category/cold-war](/category/cold-war).