Ethiopia’s Intellectual Crisis Begins With a Culture of Conformity

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A rejoinder to Mengistu Weldemariam and Girma Berhanu

A child asks why the family does something nobody can explain. The room goes quiet, and an adult says, “balage,” an Amharic word meaning “ill-mannered.” The child learns in a second that some questions cost more than they are worth. Years later, in a staff meeting, a party cell or a ministry corridor, that child watches a decision go wrong and says nothing.

Two recent essays circle this silence from different directions. In an 11 October article in Capital, Mengistu Weldemariam describes an intellectual life hollowed out by political fear, apathy and what he calls, following Frank Furedi, philistinism. He argues that a proud tradition, from Zera Yacob to the 1960s student movement, was interrupted by repression.

In a 14 October article in Ethiopian Tribune, Professor Girma Berhanu asks why a country that has suffered so much from war keeps failing to learn from it. He answers that elites fail to anticipate the consequences of their choices in a politics where losing feels like annihilation and compromise looks like weakness.

Both describe real problems: a public life short of independent voices, and a politics that cannot learn from its own failures. I want to ask what comes before them. Before we ask where the intellectuals went, or why our collective judgment so often falls short, should we ask whether Ethiopian society has cultivated the conditions in which independent thought can emerge, flourish and contribute to the common good?

By intellectuals, I do not mean simply educated people, professors or holders of advanced degrees. A country can be full of educated people and still be starved of intellectual engagement. Mengistu emphasizes the courage to challenge power. I would add the willingness to question what one’s own society takes for granted, including beliefs no government imposes.

I also do not claim that culture is destiny. Girma rightly warns against treating culture as an immutable explanation for national tragedy, and I agree: habits of deference are learned, so they can be unlearned. My claim is narrower. In many Ethiopian settings, the way knowledge is passed on leans heavily on imitation, and too little on innovation.

Imitation is not bad, and every society depends on it. But a society that rewards imitation while penalizing innovation risks losing its capacity to renew itself, along with the space in which independent thinkers can emerge. That, I suggest, is the question beneath both essays: not only why intellectuals are silent or leaders fail to learn, but what kind of society produces them.

Imitation and Innovation

A society reproduces itself through socialization. Through parents, teachers, religious institutions and workplaces, we learn not only what to think but how to think, and which questions are safe to ask.

Imitation preserves accumulated knowledge and values, giving a society continuity and identity. Innovation lets each generation examine, revise and improve that inheritance. Imitation without innovation hardens into repetition; innovation without imitation has nothing to build on.

I use “conformity” for what happens when the balance fails: imitation enforced as a duty, without the freedom to question what is being imitated.

In many Ethiopian settings, I observe that the balance tilts towards conformity. From early childhood, we are taught to listen to those in authority and to treat questioning as a sign of disrespect. Restraint is sometimes wise, but when it becomes a general virtue and questioning a source of trouble, restraint begins to blur into intellectual submission.

Children are praised for compliance, students rewarded for echoing their teachers, employees rewarded for accommodating their superiors, and members of political parties elevated for applauding their leaders and penalized for criticizing them.

Ethiopia is far too varied for one description to fit everywhere. Yet these practices are widespread enough to teach a common lesson: imitation and the uncritical repetition of received ideas bring rewards, while independent thought carries costs.

The consequences extend beyond the individual who learns to remain silent. When people are discouraged from questioning authority, institutions lose opportunities to recognize mistakes and consider alternatives. Leaders may receive agreement when they need honest criticism; organizations may preserve familiar practices when they need to adapt.

Education and Inquiry

Ethiopia’s education system, which should have been an engine of growth, shows this imbalance clearly. Memorization is the imitation half of learning, and it is indispensable. The difficulty is that our education system too often leaves it without its counterpart: critical inquiry.

Many Ethiopian students spend years acquiring knowledge without being adequately encouraged to interrogate it. Success often depends on reproducing lecture notes and meeting a teacher’s expectations.

This is true of both old and new schooling. In some traditional schools, students repeat prescribed texts, often in languages they do not understand, until they can reproduce them precisely. In modern classrooms, they memorize lecture notes for examinations.

Memorization has real value, but when reproduction becomes the dominant measure of achievement, students may learn to recall answers without developing the ability to question assumptions, weigh competing arguments or reach independent conclusions.

The consequences reach beyond the classroom. Education that rewards reproduction more consistently than inquiry risks producing graduates who possess knowledge but have had limited opportunities to practice independent judgment.

That matters for the development of intellectuals, and it matters for what graduates later do as civil servants, managers, officers and party members.

The imbalance takes root earlier, within the family. Young children are naturally inquisitive, and their questions sometimes expose explanations we have never examined ourselves. A child whose questions are welcomed learns that curiosity is legitimate; one who is repeatedly dismissed learns that silence is safer. When children are praised for being quiet but labeled balage for asking inconvenient questions, they may gradually suppress their curiosity.

The issue is whether children can distinguish respect for a person from unquestioning acceptance of that person’s beliefs. A parent can be respected and still be mistaken; an elder can have valuable experience without having the final word. Children who never learn this may grow into adults who know how to inherit but struggle to improve.

Political Conformity

Girma notes that political elites are not a separate class. They emerge from the wider population and carry its values, habits and experiences into office. If so, what we teach in homes and schools does not stay there.

The child praised for silence becomes the adviser who tells the minister what he wants to hear. The student rewarded for echoing the lecturer becomes the party member promoted for applause. Girma defines intelligence as the capacity to anticipate the consequences of one’s actions.

Foresight of that kind needs someone willing to say, “This will backfire.” A society that trains its members to hear that sentence as insubordination cuts its leaders off from warnings and teaches everyone around them that warnings end careers.

This does not replace Girma’s explanation. It helps explain how his mechanism operates. When every political dispute feels existential, the objector is easily cast as a traitor, and silence becomes rational. Our upbringing makes that silence automatic, and our politics makes it prudent.

The pressure no longer comes only from elders and the state. Consider a member of an ethnic or political camp, online or offline, who says that the leadership’s line is mistaken or that a favored policy will fail. The reply is rarely an argument. It is the Amharic label banda, a sellout or enemy’s tool, and often a campaign to shame the person into silence. Everyone watching learns the price.

This is Girma’s existential politics at the level of the individual: when every dispute is a fight for survival, the dissenter inside the group can look like the most dangerous enemy of all. Fear and habit reinforce each other, and the result is institutions that cannot hear their own mistakes.

Intellectual Exceptions

Mengistu points to Zera Yacob’s philosophical writings and the debates of the 1960s student movement as evidence of a tradition. Their courage deserves recognition, and in the student movement’s case, scrutiny. But their existence is not proof that society itself sustained an intellectual tradition balancing imitation with innovation. They may, instead, reveal how difficult it is to think independently in a society dominated by imitation.

The distinction is between individuals who think against the prevailing current, only to be marginalized, quietly ignored or remembered as isolated exceptions, and a society in which questioning is an ordinary, respected and institutionally supported activity. A tradition that can be interrupted by a change in political climate may never have been deeply rooted in the country’s wider social and institutional life.

The student movement offers a further caution. Rejecting an orthodoxy is not the same as questioning orthodoxy as such. Professor Messay Kebede, who took part in that movement, argues that a majority of students and intellectuals embraced Marxism-Leninism “with fanatic fervor,” and he traces this partly to the education they received. A movement may overturn the dominant order while reproducing its habits of conformity within its own ranks. That is imitation under a new banner, not necessarily intellectual innovation.

So the real test is whether our families, schools, workplaces and political spaces ever treated disagreement as a contribution rather than as insubordination. Without asking that, we risk mistaking the presence of exceptional thinkers for evidence of a society that consistently cultivates independent thought.

Culture and Repression

I do not claim that conformity alone explains Ethiopia’s political problems. Zero-sum politics, unresolved grievances, and the struggle for power among political entrepreneurs play a part. Nor does conformity alone explain the state of intellectual life, which is also shaped by poverty, underfunded universities, brain drain, and state control over academic institutions. None of these factors can be set aside.

But culture shapes how these pressures are experienced and confronted. A society unable to hear “this will fail” from its own members has one less defense against the decisions that lead there. A culture that treats questioning as insubordination makes it harder to challenge harmful practices, hold institutions accountable and correct collective mistakes. I focus on culture because it is deeply rooted, yet visible in everyday habits that individuals and institutions can begin to change.

Mengistu rightly places political fear at the center of his account, and his use of “philistinism” to describe suspicion towards intellectual work helps name one dimension of the problem. I would add that this suspicion may not have begun with the current political climate; it can find fertile ground in habits of deference learned much earlier.

Repression and obedience can reinforce each other: political power punishes dissent, while social expectations may teach people to regard dissent as disrespectful even before the state intervenes.

Mengistu holds up Ghana, whose public discourse is lively. Ghana also prizes respect for elders, as many societies do. The lesson is not that deference is harmless. It is that deference and open debate can coexist when institutions protect the person who asks the question.

So I place freedom first: without protection for dissent, no habit of questioning survives. But freedom alone is not enough. A protected space is only as useful as the habits people bring to it, and that is the work of families, schools, workplaces and religious institutions. The state can open the door. Whether anyone walks through depends on whether they have been taught that they are allowed to.

We must also distinguish silence from the absence of thought. Some scholars have withdrawn from public debate, some have emigrated, and others continue to question privately without a safe way to express their ideas openly. Their silence does not necessarily indicate intellectual passivity. It may instead reveal the lack of social and institutional space in which independent thought can be expressed, debated and put to use. A society may therefore possess intellectual resources that remain largely invisible, not because they do not exist, but because the conditions for bringing them into public life are too restrictive.

Starting Small

The important question is whether a society can examine its inherited practices, learn from experience elsewhere and adapt what it learns to its own circumstances. This requires more than access to knowledge. It requires the willingness to question established assumptions, debate alternatives and reconsider decisions when they no longer serve their purpose. Renewal depends on whether a society creates ways to turn questions into improvements.

Mengistu is right to call on policymakers to act. The state sets many of the conditions under which parents, teachers and managers operate. It cannot manufacture intellectuals, but it can help make questioning safer by protecting academic freedom, rewarding merit over loyalty and treating dissent as part of civic life. That the state can also be a source of the pressures Mengistu describes makes reform more difficult, not less necessary.

But institutions rarely move first, and individuals need not wait. A parent, teacher, lecturer, manager or religious leader needs no one’s permission to treat a question as a contribution rather than an offence. These small acts can nurture people who expect reasons, disagree without hostility and examine their own convictions as carefully as those of others.

They can also prepare citizens to use political space constructively when it opens, rather than fill it with a new orthodoxy. Without state protection, this change remains fragile; without these habits, reform may change the rules without changing behavior.

The task is not to abandon what we have inherited but to restore the balance between inheritance and improvement.

Before asking where Ethiopia’s intellectuals have gone, or why its leaders so often fail to learn, we might ask whether we have built a society with both the discipline to inherit and the freedom to improve.

That would mean a society where a child’s question is heard, where “this will fail” can be said aloud, and where independent thinkers can emerge, challenge assumptions and thrive.

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While this commentary contains the author’s opinions, Ethiopia Insight will correct factual errors.

Main photo:
Students participate in a classroom lesson at a school in Dawe Harewa, Amhara region, Ethiopia, March 2025. Source: Social media.

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