It was 1985 when I was pulled into the Meserete Timhirt campaign for the first time. The campaign had kicked off 6 years earlier – one of the earlier mass initiatives that the Derg had embarked on in its stated quest to bring ‘Equality to the masses!’ As campaigns went, this one was largely viewed as benign – not at all like the zemecha by university students that immediately preceded it and certainly nothing like the dreaded Biherawi Wutidirina (National Military Service) afterwards which basically sent thousands of poorly trained conscripts to far off battlefields from which many never returned. Indeed, Meserete Timihirte was viewed then and still is today, as one of the few Derg successes that many can agree on.
Its basic premise was to provide as much of what was then a massively illiterate population with basic education – reading, writing and simple arithmetic. To do so, it relied on the nation’s high school seniors who were recruited to the cause by mandating that participation in the campaign was a prerequisite for university entrance, exit visas and so forth. By many accounts, Meserte Timhirt succeeded at making a sizable dent in the country’s illiteracy rates which then stood at a staggering 93%. By the time the last class under this campaign had been taught in 1989, that rate had dropped down to about 65%, having reached over 18 million students in its 10 years of operation.
Although I was a participant in the Meserete Timhirt campaign, I am afraid my experience was not as complete as it was for others. As a substitute teacher, my basic role was to fill in for absent teachers which was somehow not as common an occurrence as one might think. So I spent a lot of time in the chai bet (tea room) drinking lots of kimem chai (spiced tea) for which I developed a distinct distaste after consuming hundreds of small cups in the space of a few months. That was until the little hut that functioned as our tea room was destroyed by an errant car that happened to run into it while I was happily away on the one night I was actually called upon to teach a class.
My most vivid memory of the one classroom session I taught was of an unusually high number of students – a motley crew of elderly men and women (mostly women) accompanied by some very young kids – suddenly needing to go to the bathroom. It took me a while to realize that none of the erstwhile bathroom users were actually coming back to class. When I observed that the next student to ask the same question – a lady at least 3 times my age at that time – actually had her books tucked in her waistband, visible underneath the netela (shawl) she had thrown over them, I wised up immediately. Unsure of how to be stern with someone so much older than myself, I remember saying that the restrooms must surely be full by now and that she would have to wait until some of the previous tricksters came back (which of course they never did) or class was over.
Although the literacy aspect of this campaign may be what comes to mind first when one thinks of Meserete Timhirt, the experiences of the close to 2 million student-teachers who taught the classes is also a worthwhile topic for exploration. For most of them, this was certainly the first time they were engaged in a national effort of such magnitude and import. Despite the fact that my experience of the campaign was largely based on drinking lots of tea, I surmised that it may have left a deeper impact on other compatriots that had come before or after me.
Curiously though, anecdotal observations reveal that there were at least a significant number of student-teachers for whom the campaign was much less about what happened in the class than outside of it.
Tirsit Wolde recalls that she was originally quite apprehensive about being recruited into the campaign in only its second year (1980). Coming on the heels of the rural Zemecha (which was certainly not a popular effort), there was still uncertainty over this campaign and what it might lead to. Still at a young age, the bigger picture of being part of a national effort to try and eradicate illiteracy in the nation, was largely lost on her. And teaching the actual classes did nothing to change this perception. “We were assigned to teach classes in pairs – one instructor for language and the other one for Math. Most of the students were adult women and they did not seem very interested or motivated to learn. I questioned how much of what we taught was retained in any significant way.” In fact, one of the things that she remembers most about her participation in this campaign was that it gave her an opportunity to spend time outside of her home with a group of her peers in a much different setting than she was used to.
Turns out the social aspects of Meserete Timhirt for the instructors who served in it, were quite important to many others. By the time Dan Amare taught his first class in 1985, the campaign had more or less become a rite of passage for any high school student in Ethiopia that had the slightest inkling of going on to bigger or better things. “It gave us something to do every evening – something we looked at as hanging out with friends. Outside of the classes, we would play volleyball, card games and the like. And there was definitely some level of socialization that inevitably occurred between the young boys and girls who taught there.” Like Tirsit, he did not feel a big sense of purpose or accomplishment as part of his participation in the campaign although he recalls putting a mention of his experience there on a CV he submitted for admission into Dartmouth College a few years later.
Interestingly though, Dan believes that a resurrection of the campaign would be a great idea. “In retrospect, it was a great idea to give back to the community you grew up in and it provided a worthwhile outlet to students who wouldn’t have been doing much with their time anyway.”
For many of us, the simple power of reading and writing is probably something we take for granted given that we may have gained these skills very early on in life. But they are the difference between being able to tell which bus to get on at the fermata (station) or reading something on a poster in the neighborhood. In fact, literacy is one of the primary determinants of human capital as well as a leading indicator of development. The National Literacy Campaign (Meserete Timhirt) may not have eradicated illiteracy in Ethiopia altogether but it did make good progress towards this goal. So much so, Ethiopia won the UNESCO International Reading Association Literacy Prize in 1980 very shortly after its inception.
From a literacy rate of a miniscule 7% in 1975 to about 40% today may seem like a big jump. But the fact remains that Ethiopia still ranks in the bottom 10% of the world’s literacy rankings today. So perhaps the idea of reviving Meserte Timhirt to make even greater progress on this critical indicator of development, is one that should receive serious consideration after all.
