Elleni Centime Zeleke joined MESAAS and the Columbia University community in 2018, after completing her Ph.D. in the history of social and political thought at York University in Toronto in 2016. Her 2019 book, Ethiopia in Theory: Knowledge Production and Social Change, 1964-2016, attracted wide admiration both for its suggestive analysis of the history and afterlife of the Ethiopian students’ movement of the 1960s and 70s, and for its examination of the uses to which social science—and knowledge more broadly—can be put in the service of both emancipation and repression.
Indeed, her scholarly expertise and commitment were indispensable when Centime stepped into the role of public intellectual during the 2020-22 Tigray War in Ethiopia; she became an important voice in debates about the conflict and never lost sight of the responsibility of the intellectual to speak truth to, and about, power in all its forms. These questions are at the heart of her second book project, “A Jewel in the Ear: The 2020 Ethiopian Civil War and The Limits of Africanist Thought,” where she put her experience facing terminal cancer alongside her analysis of the war and the accompanying transformations of society and political discourse, asking how the legacy of Black internationalism could come to be used as “apologia for war making in Ethiopia.” Reading the archives of statecraft in Ethiopia and the region, she criticized a present-day inability to think of “multiple paths towards modern state formation in Africa.” Building upon the interdisciplinary approach of Ethiopia in Theory, Centime juxtaposed trenchant political analysis with bracingly personal reflections, framed as a series of “Letters to My Father in a Time of Civil War.”
Her interest in the politics of situated, embodied knowledge and in the potentiality of culture, history, and memory—what she evocatively theorized as a “tizita method”—made Centime an important interlocutor for students and for faculty colleagues in MESAAS. Her commitments to African knowledge production and to liberatory traditions and practices in the broader Black world, as well as the Global South more broadly, are evident across her writing, as well as in the conversations she curated in the MESAAS journal Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, including “Third World Historical: Rethinking Revolution from Ethiopia to Iran” (2022), edited with her former Whitman College colleague Arash Davari. As a teacher, Centime shared her commitments with students in numerous sections of African Civilization, part of Columbia’s Core curriculum, and in seminars on her fields of interest and expertise, including African Political Thought and Histories of Capitalism.
In addition to the intellectual passions described above, MESAAS colleagues will remember Centime’s zest for life and her wonderful spirit. She was brilliant and brave, fierce and funny, and she will be missed in MESAAS, at Columbia University, and far beyond.