Negede Gobeze

Negede Gobeze died in Brussels, Belgium, at the age of 83. His death was reported on 13 November 2026 by Ethiopian outlets including Borkena and Fidel Post, and tributes came from political figures including Jawar Mohammed. The cause of death was not reported.

Negede Gobeze was born on 15 October 1943 in Dessie, Wollo, the third of nine children of Gobezie Taffete, a regional education director who later led a national literacy programme, and Belaynesh Ejigu, a nurse. At 11 he had a poem welcoming Emperor Haile Selassie home from the United States published anonymously in a national newspaper. He went to General Wingate secondary school in Addis Ababa at 13 and studied economics at the University College of Addis Ababa from 1960 to 1964, winning its annual poetry prize in 1963 with the satirical poem Agul Bota Ameshche.

In 1964 a French government scholarship took him to Aix-en-Provence, where he studied law at Aix-Marseille University and gained a doctorate in law with a thesis comparing the constitutions of the Ethiopian Empire and Tanzania. He worked at the university library and taught African political institutions to American students.

In France he became active in the Ethiopian Students Union in Europe, serving as president of the Ethiopian students in France from 1966, on the union's editorial board from 1968 and as its president from 1970 to 1971. In August 1968 he was one of the founders of the All-Ethiopia Socialist Movement (MEISON), alongside Haile Fida and others.

He returned to Ethiopia in February 1975 after the revolution. MEISON gave critical support to the Derg and helped implement the 1975 Land to the Tiller reform. He founded the International Publishing House, sat on the Provisional Office for Mass Organizational Affairs, edited its paper Abyotawit Ethiopia, helped set up the Yekatit 66 political school and drafted a declaration of democratic rights the Derg refused to adopt. When MEISON broke with the regime in August 1977 he was at a student congress in Lausanne and stayed abroad as the movement's foreign representative. His record in this period was criticised by opponents of MEISON.

In exile in France he founded a solidarity committee for victims of repression in 1979 and in 1990 the Research and Action Group for Peace in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa (GRAPECA). GRAPECA held conferences on democratic transition in 1991, 1993 and 1998, including a peace and reconciliation conference in Addis Ababa in 1993, and ran the exile stations Radio Selam and Radio Keste Damena. He later chaired a union of opposition organisations and represented MEISON in opposition coalitions.

Beyond politics Negede was a poet, writing works such as Bey Beire after the deaths of his comrades in 1978. He played the krar and the harmonica and collected the lyrics of around a thousand traditional Ethiopian songs. Friends knew him for his quick wit. Marking his 80th birthday in 2023 he said he was twenty years old with sixty years of experience.

Negede was one of the last surviving founders of MEISON and of the generation of 1960s student radicals who reshaped Ethiopian politics. Admirers credit that generation with modernising Ethiopian political thought and championing land reform, while critics point to MEISON's alliance with the Derg. In exile he became known for promoting dialogue and reconciliation among Ethiopia's political forces.