Tibebe Eshete
History
Michigan State University

I am an Ethiopian. I have served as an instructor in Asmara University, Addis Ababa University and Kotebe Teacher Training College. I have served as a freelance journalist for the Ethiopian Television while I was an undergraduate student. Between 1996-1998, I worked as a research coordinator and later training officer for World Vision International/Ethiopia. While teaching History in the various higher learning institutes in Ethiopia, I had engaged my self in researching the source of conflict between Ethiopia and Somalia, two neighboring countries in the Horn of Africa. My study focused primarily on the Ogaden, a source of intractable conflict and a a bone of contention between the two counties. I have published as a result numerous articles as an insider and a historian. I had the advantage of growing in the midst of war in the surrounding area and effectively utilizing archival documents no one had used before.

Growing up in Third World countries conscious of the poverty of the people and the lack of injustice, I was deeply involved in the radical student movement that permeated the youth of my generation. I was heavily influenced in Marxism, like most of my generation. We were young "idealists" without proper grounding of the dynamics and complexity of social change who saw all solutions in Marxism. The military came in used our idiom and vocabulary and set up dictatorship for a over a decade. The terror of the brutal regime affected all of my generation in one way or another. Hypocrisy and disillusionment led to a sense of despair and apathy. A critical moment in my life came as result of an acquaintance with someone who was a lecturer in Asmara University, who shared me his faith about God, in particular Jesus Christ. The search to know God took me into a new path, a path I follow to this day. My work in World Vision gave me an opportunity to have a first hand experience of the conditions of poverty and associated problems in the rural villages of Ethiopia. It somehow helped me to take away my academic veil and parochial thinking as a historian by objectively facing the multi-dimensional problem of my people/society.