Rise of an educated elite & the Japanizers

PROGRESSIVE INTELLECTUALS, YOUNG ETHIOPIANS, & JAPANIZERS

From the second half of the nineteenth century, mainly through European missionary schools, a smattering of young Ethiopians began receiving the rudiments of a modern education. Europe impressed these youths, even if most had never been there.they did, however, have contacts with the colonial territories bordering Ethiopia, and most studied foreign languages and other modern subjects in mission schools or in the new state schools. In the early twentieth century, these students with foreign educations often sought positions at court, and many of them refused to share the complacency of their compatriots after Ethiopia's military victory over Italy at Adwa in 1896.

Called ‘Progressive Intellectuals’, ‘Young Ethiopians’, or ‘Japanizers’, their influence peaked in the 1920s and early 1930s. Each label highlighted something different about them. The first simply expressed Ethiopia's need to reform. The other two implied Ethiopia's need to find a suitable model for that reform. European and American observers often used the term ‘Young Ethiopians’, which evoked parallels with other reforming, secular, nationalist groups such as the Young Turks and Young Egypt. The third designation highlighted the impact that Japan's Meiji transformation had had on Ethiopia's intellectuals. Japan's dramatic and rapid metamorphosis from a feudal society, like Ethiopia's, into an industrial power by the end of the nineteenth century attracted them. the Japanese victory over russia was a victory of ‘peoples of color’ over ‘white’ oppression and dramatized that non-whites could learn European skills and turn them against European colonizers.