Negede Gobezie: The Man Who Journeyed Far
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TRIBUTE
Negede Gobezie: The Man Who Journeyed Far
Dessie, 15 October 1943 – 13 November 2026
He helped name a movement, survived its destruction, and spent half a century in exile insisting that Ethiopians settle their quarrels by talking. A tribute to the last of MEISON’s founders, and to the boy from Dessie who never stopped writing poems.
By Endex | Chief Editor, The Ethiopian Tribune
I. What a name foretells
In Kidane Wold’s great dictionary, the verb ነገደ means to set out for a distant country, to go up and down the land, to trade and barter in search of gain. The entry comes with an old proverb: የነገደ አበደ፤ ያረሰ ነገሠ. He who goes trading goes mad; he who ploughs becomes king.
It is hard to think of an Ethiopian life that fits its name more closely, or that wrestled harder with that proverb. Negede Gobezie, who died this week at 83, spent his youth arguing that the land belonged to the one who ploughs it. The movement he helped found counselled the revolution that proclaimed exactly that. And then history made him the one who went far away: to Aix, to Hamburg, to Havana and Aden, to Paris, and finally to a long exile that turned out to be the real work of his life.
II. A father’s alphabet
He was born in Dessie on 15 October 1943, the third of nine children. His father, Gobezie Taffete, was the Ministry of Education’s director for the northern provinces of Wello, Tigray and Begemder. In 1951 Gobezie proposed a national campaign against illiteracy, became its director, and moved the family to Addis Ababa. His mother, Belaynesh Ejigu, was a nurse at Zewditu Hospital, where she had met her husband, then working as a translator.
The household was a schoolroom. Gobezie asked his children to speak English at home; one of them protested that the result would be total silence. It is the first recorded example of a family wit that Negede carried all his life.
The poetry came early too. At eleven he wrote a poem welcoming Emperor Haile Selassie home from abroad, and a national newspaper printed it in 1954 without his name. Twenty years later he would help lead the ideas that ended that throne. In between, in 1963, he won first prize in the University College poetry competition with ‘Agul Bota Ameshche’, a satire about a stubborn old father facing the modern young. Few Ethiopian revolutionaries began their careers by teasing the generation gap in verse. Negede did.
At the University College he lasted three weeks in medical school before moving to economics. The authorities cancelled a planned year of study in the United States, seeing the programme as a nest of radicals. In 1964 a French government scholarship took him to Aix-en-Provence instead.
III. Aix, Hamburg and a reply to a professor
In France he learned the language, entered the law faculty, and threw himself into the Ethiopian Students’ Union in Europe. He led its French branch in 1966–67, sat on its editorial board, served as president of the whole union in 1970–71, and then led the worldwide federation of Ethiopian students until 1972. In 1968, in Hamburg, he was among the founders of the All-Ethiopia Socialist Movement, MEISON, alongside Haile Fida, Andargachew Assegid, Fikre Merid, Andreas Eshete and others. With Haile Fida he would later open a progressive bookshop near the university in Addis Ababa, putting the founding texts of Marxism into Ethiopian hands.
He paid his way partly by working in the university library at Aix and teaching African political institutions to American students. He held the classes in a café, and he paid the bill.
In December 1974 he defended his doctoral thesis in law, a comparative study of parliament and traditional society in imperial Ethiopia and Tanzania. A month earlier, many of the imperial dignitaries his thesis discussed had been executed in Addis Ababa. The chairman of the jury remarked that the candidate spoke of these men as though they were still alive. Negede answered:
“Listen, Professor, I’m presenting a thesis, not a newspaper.”
The line is funny, and it is more than funny. It shows a man who believed that analysis must not bend to the headlines of the day. That belief would be tested, terribly, within three years.
IV. The wager
He came home in February 1975. MEISON chose to give the military government what it called critical support, betting that it could steer the revolution from inside until civilians took power. Negede joined the Provisional Office for Mass Organisational Affairs (POMOA) and chaired its information and political committee. He helped set up the Yekatit 66 Political School, edited the fortnightly Abyotawit Ethiopia, and served as secretary of the Union of Ethiopian Marxist-Leninist Organisations.
He also drafted a Declaration of Democratic Rights. The Derg refused to proclaim it. That refusal was one of the quarrels that ended the alliance in August 1977. Negede was in Lausanne for the students’ union congress when MEISON told him not to come back. Within days Haile Fida and other leaders were seized outside the capital. Many were killed on the spot or later. Of MEISON’s founding leadership, Negede was almost alone in surviving.
A tribute that skipped what came next would insult the dead, and him. For a large part of his generation, above all the survivors and families of the EPRP, MEISON’s name is still an open wound. They hold that the movement gave the Derg its vocabulary and its organising machinery in exactly the years when the Red Terror was being prepared, and that some of its cadres took part in the killing. Even some former MEISON members have since called the alliance an unforgivable historical mistake. Negede never escaped that argument, and he never pretended it was closed.
What he did was keep returning to it on the record. In his 2014 book ይድረስ ከየካቲት ለግንቦት (To Ginbot, from Yekatit), he reread the analyses he had sent from exile to MEISON’s underground press and asked why Ethiopians keep repeating the same mistakes and losing what they win. In its chapters on the Red Terror he insisted on something often forgotten: the urban massacres the world remembers were matched, and exceeded, by killings of peasants in the countryside. Readers can disagree with his account. They cannot say he looked away from the question.
V. ‘Shoot on sight’
The months after the break read like a thriller. From September 1977 to April 1978 he lived in Cuba and South Yemen as a guest of their leaders, who were trying to broker talks between Mengistu and MEISON. Then he went back into Addis Ababa and spent two months inside the Cuban embassy. The international press of the time reported that he had been sentenced to death in absentia, that Mengistu was furious when he learned of the visit, and that the troops surrounding the embassy had orders to shoot him on sight. He walked out alive. Very few people in his position did.
VI. Exile as a vocation
Exile can make a man bitter. In Negede it produced a long run of organisations whose names tell the story. From the late 1970s he organised help for victims of repression in Ethiopia, work formalised in Paris in 1985 as the Solidarity Committee with Ethiopia (COSETH), which supported political prisoners and refugees. In 1990 he founded GRAPECA, a research and action group for peace in Ethiopia and the Horn. It held conferences in 1991 and 1993 on two transitions, from war to peace and from dictatorship to democracy, and in December 1993 brought a peace and reconciliation conference to Addis Ababa itself. He worked in opposition coalitions, chaired one of them in 1998, and coordinated a conference of Ethiopian political parties that same year.
He was also a working journalist. He edited New Ethiopia from Paris for nearly two decades, then Addis Digest, and in 1997 founded Radio Selam. From 1997 to 2002 he ran Radio Keste Damena. There is a quiet poetry in that last name: a man who once dealt in the reddest of politics ended his broadcasting years on a station called Rainbow. His books, from Constitution, Election and Democracy in Ethiopia (2004) to his 2014 reckoning, carried the same argument. Ethiopia’s problems have no shortcut, and only a calm national dialogue can produce a strategy the country can share.
VII. A thousand songs
Politics never filled him up. He played the krar and the harmonica. Over the decades he collected around a thousand traditional Ethiopian song lyrics: wedding songs, laments, the verses of azmaris and farmers. While the ideologies of his youth divided the country into camps, he was quietly keeping a record of the one thing all those camps had in common.
In 1978, mourning comrades whose bodies he would never be allowed to bury, he wrote ‘Bey Beiré’, a poem addressed to his own pen, urging it to tell the truth and stand firm. When he turned eighty in October 2023 he summed himself up in one sentence:
“I am twenty years old with sixty years of experience.”
VIII. The ploughman and the traveller
Back to the proverb. He who ploughs becomes king; he who trades goes mad. Negede Gobezie neither ploughed nor reigned. He went far, as his name foretold, and he did not go mad, which in his generation was its own achievement. Many of his contemporaries left only graves, and some left only silence. He left an archive in three languages, a habit of answering his critics in print, a thousand songs, and an argument he never stopped making: that Ethiopians who have killed one another over ideas must eventually sit down and talk over them.
History will go on arguing about Negede Gobezie, and it should. He would have wanted it on the record, not in the newspaper.
ነፍስ ይማር።
Biographical details are drawn from the Negede Gobezie Archives, Fidel Post’s obituary of 13 November 2026, and contemporary press reports. The Ethiopian Tribune extends its condolences to his family, comrades and friends.
