Andreas Eshete, who died last week at age seventy-nine, was one of the greatest minds of Ethiopia’s finest generation of thinkers. A child of the revolutionary movement, he was a reflective political philosopher, inspiring teacher, sensitive observer, curious inquirer, generous friend, and devoted patriot—a patriot who understood that engaged criticism was the deepest sign of patriotic devotion.
Perhaps most strikingly, Andreas combined nobility of vocation with a playful spirit and sense of humor. He was as charming as he was good. The embodiment of fifty years of the progressive movement in Ethiopia, Andreas was constantly seeking new sources of intellectual nourishment. His loss deprives us of one of the wellsprings of that spirit, at a time when the country so greatly needs it.
Andreas was a star high school student in Ethiopia, assisted by Richard Pankhurst in winning a scholarship to study at Williams College. There he found a mentor and lifelong friend, Ephraim Isaac, Ethiopia’s pioneering scholar of Semitic languages and philosophy.
Moving to Yale’s philosophy department for his PhD, Andreas completed his doctoral thesis, “The Social Structure of Freedom,” in 1970. In this, we can already read his lifelong project of reconciling the liberal and socialist traditions, a creative tension that he expressed in his philosophical focus on fraternity—the neglected element in the revolutionary triad—and its activist counterpart, solidarity. After Yale, Andreas taught at Brown University, UCLA, UC Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania, and Haverford College; he is fondly remembered by students and colleagues.
Living in the United States, Andreas embraced his new home with all its diversity and contradictions. From Williamstown and New Haven to Los Angeles and Philadelphia, he experienced both racism and a vibrant struggle for civil rights. He joined marches and voter registration programs and later spoke about how much he learned from the courage and creativity of the civil rights movement leaders. As he put it, “Although they had no economic power to talk about or political power, still they mounted this enormous movement which shook the country and shook it to the roots and it worked. It’s not the same country anymore.” It was this movement and its offspring—“the anti-war movement, the women’s movement, the gay movement”—“which make the United States an attractive society.”
In teach-ins with African American radicals such as the Black Panthers, who uncritically adored Haile Selassie, Andreas had to explain why he and his fellow Ethiopian revolutionaries were dedicated to the emperor’s overthrow. And, despite the Dergue’s horrific bloodletting, he always insisted that overthrowing autocracy and deflating the myths that legitimized feudal empire were great triumphs of the Ethiopian revolution. Deeply influenced by the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s, Andreas subordinated his own well-being to the struggle—neglecting his health and disregarding his doctor’s advice throughout his life.
Like many, Andreas overstayed his official status and—until he was a beneficiary of Ronald Reagan’s amnesty bill—danced around the margins of the immigration apparatus. He noticed that a number of Nigerians worked for the immigration services, befriended them, and discovered that they were undocumented themselves. They had decided that the safest and most strategic position was close to where the crucial decisions were being made. Characteristically, Andreas turned this observation into a broader insight—perhaps a guiding precept. He wanted to be close to where power was exercised, in the room where it happens. But he combined that proximity to power with a sense of fraternity that bound him to the humble and powerless. He sought to influence those in power, not to wield it himself.
Like a Parisian rive gauche intellectual, Andreas was invariably neatly turned out in black, cigarette in hand, ready to engage on the issue of the day with a mix of wit and insight. You can see that mix in his scholarly essays, at once beautifully written and incisively argued. He wrote on the virtues of character (courage, temperance, generosity), drawing out their connections with the value of freedom as self-mastery. And he explored fraternity as a civic ideal, connecting it both to nationalist attachments and to the value of freedom: “fraternal bonds, unlike other familial bonds,” he said, “arise from shared ends that are pursued by individuals who freely recognize their union.” Published more than forty years ago, these papers read with the same freshness and relevance that they possessed when they first appeared. They crystallize Andreas’s efforts to find a place within liberal thought, with its guiding, abstract convictions about freedom and equality, for more concrete concerns about character and communal attachment that baffled less worldly forms of liberalism.
Those who did not know him personally will find his 2009 interview with Dagmawi Woubshet particularly instructive: it is wide ranging, reflective, and profoundly humane. Among much else, Andreas there reflects on literature and philosophy as kindred spirits, both oriented to the value of all human life and to the importance of imagining new possibilities beyond circumstance and context.
In 1991, after the overthrow of the Dergue, Andreas returned to Ethiopia. He found the EPRDF leaders—notably Meles Zenawi—intellectually engaging and threw his energies into trying to help craft a democratic constitution for a “nation of nations.” Departing from the Marxist language that saw the formula as “nations, nationalities, and peoples,” Andreas envisioned the new constitution as an experiment in what he called “ethnic federalism.” When the new constitution was presented to the constituent assembly for discussion and ratification, Andreas was present in the chamber and cafeteria for every one of the thirty-five days of vigorous debate, distributing written opinion pieces by himself and internationally known constitutional lawyers on key issues. He argued with the elected members of the assembly over principles and histories and how best to square the demands of the very difficult political moment with ambitious hopes for the future of the country. Always a devoted patriot and independent-minded philosopher, Andreas provided the most cogent defense—and the fiercest critique—of the federal constitution and its principles.
In this endeavor, Andreas worked closely with another eminent returnee, the diplomat Kifle Wodajo, who chaired the Constitutional Commission. The two men developed a friendship that lasted until Ato Kifle’s untimely death in 2004, shortly after they had both addressed a gathering to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda. After the outbreak of the 1998 war with Eritrea, shocked by the summary expulsions of Eritreans—most of them Ethiopian citizens, many who had never lived in Eritrea—the two made impassioned private protests to the EPRDF leaders.
Andreas embraced controversy and understood that there was much to be learned from disagreement. But he could not tolerate charlatans—the bullshitters who, as philosopher Harry Frankfurt has argued, foul public discussion because of their indifference to the values of truth and falsity. Andreas despised lazy thinking and vacuous sloganeering. He could be quick to anger, especially at pseudo-intellectualism, and he lamented the decline in the quality of Ethiopia’s political debate.
Students at Addis Ababa University remember Andreas’s course “Theory of State and Law,” which transformed how many law students thought about fundamental questions of government, state, law, and society. His lectures were eloquent, and, across every political and social spectrum, his former students maintained a lifetime of connection and friendship with him.
Andreas’s skills as administrator never quite reached the same heights as his scholarly acumen, but he took a lead in envisioning how Addis Ababa University should adapt for the new century. He served as president for nine years, and a number of his ideas came to fruition. He left a legacy with the expansion of graduate programs, including the new Kifle Wodajo Center for Human Rights, the Center for Federal Studies, and the Institute for Peace and Security Studies and its flagship Tana Forum. He is also remembered for expanding the facilities to accommodate disabled and blind students. Ethiopia’s campaigns for the return of looted treasures such as the Axum obelisk (from Rome) and historic manuscripts and artifacts (from London) owed much to Andreas’s passion and eloquence.
Andreas was a revolutionary, but never doctrinaire. In a 2013 lecture called “What is Zemenawinet?” he credited the Ethiopian student movement as the “midwife of modernity”—but went on to single out a remarkable array of artists who “turned away from the lofty and the representational to look anew at the everyday, the ordinary, and the marginalized.”
In his scholarly writings and his everyday life, Andreas shared the artist’s eye for “a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wildflower.” He appreciated the way the virtues of character that he treasured, but were so neglected in political philosophy, were brought to life in literature. He loved Addis Ababa: the city that grew organically around the feudal villas on hilltops, with its winding, cobbled alleyways and the occasional Corbusier-inspired modernist bank or office building. This, he said, was a city whose social capital far surpassed its material development.
While the mayors of Western cities were trying to restore mixed neighborhoods and rebuild urban communities, he bemoaned the way that the 2014 Addis Ababa Master Plan demolished treasured historic areas to make way for anonymous offices and apartment blocks. He photographed old quarters before they were razed. Attending a conference of genocide scholars in Siena, Italy, to present a paper on the memorial to the victims of human rights atrocities at the site of the prison of Alem Bekagn (now the headquarters of the African Union), Andreas took time to wander around the city’s churches. He and his companions saw the relic of St. Catherine, consisting of her perfectly preserved middle finger, and made this a playful motif for the visit.
Characteristically, Andreas made fun of his own health setbacks, never allowing physical limitations to in any way diminish his passion for life, or the life of his mind. His eyes were alert to inspiration from the humdrum. Traveling by car from Lagos to Abeokuta, Nigeria, passing a roadside display of decorated coffins of the elaborate kind favored in West Africa, he asked the driver to stop. A casket he saw was adorned with the words “From dust to dust.” Andreas pointed it out and said, “I have now found what should be written on my tombstone.”
