10 Mar 2026 Robert P Crease
Mulugeta Bekele is almost single-handedly responsible for having kept Ethiopian physics going in the 1970s and 1980s despite being imprisoned and tortured by the Ethiopian military. Robert P Crease meets an unsung hero of science
Mulugeta Bekele paid a heavy price for remaining in Ethiopia in the 1970s and 1980s. While many other academics had fled their homeland to avoid being targeted by its military rulers, Mulugeta did not. He stayed to teach physics, almost single-handedly keeping it alive in the country. But Mulugeta was arrested and brutally tortured by members of the Derg, Ethiopia’s ruling military junta. “I still have scars,” he says when we meet at his tiny, second-floor office at Addis Ababa University (AAU) in January 2026.
Gentle and softly-spoken, Mulugeta, 79, is formally retired but still active as a research physicist. In 2012 his efforts led to him being awarded the Sakharov prize by the American Physical Society (APS) “for his tireless efforts in defence of human rights and freedom of expression and education anywhere in the world, and for inspiring students, colleagues and others to do the same”.
Mulugeta was born in 1947 near Asela, a small town south of Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa. The district had only a single secondary school that depended on volunteer teachers from other countries. One was a US Peace Corps volunteer named Ronald Lee, who taught history, maths and science for two years. Mulugeta recalls Lee as a dramatic and inventive teacher, who would climb trees in physics classes to demonstrate the actions of pulleys and hold special after-school calculus classes for advanced students.
Mulugeta and other Asela students were entranced. So when he entered AAU – then called Haile Selassie 1 University – in 1965, Mulugeta declared he wanted to study both mathematics and physics. Impossible, he was informed; he could do one or the other but not both. “I told myself that if I choose mathematics I will miss physics,” Mulugeta says. “But if I do physics, I will be continually engaged with mathematics.” Physics it was.
At the end of his third year, Mulugeta’s studies appeared in doubt. The university’s only physics teacher was an American named Ennis Pilcher, who was about to return to Union College in Schenectady, New York, after spending a year in Addis on a fellowship from the Fulbright Program. Pilcher, though, managed to convince Union to support Mulugeta so he could travel to the US and study physics there for his final year.
As I talk to Mulugeta, he pulls a dusty book off his shelf. “This was given to me by Pilcher,” he says, pointing to Walter Meyerhof’s classic undergraduate textbook Elements of Nuclear Physics. Mulugeta turns to the inside of the front cover and proudly shows me the inscription: “Mulugeta Bekele, Union College. Schenectady, 1969–1970”.
When Mulugeta returned to AAU in the summer of 1970, he was awarded a BSc in physics. He then received a grant from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to attend the University of Maryland for a master’s degree. After two more years in the US, Mulugeta returned to Addis Ababa in 1973. As an accomplished researcher and teacher, he was made department chair and began to expand the physics programme at the university.
In the firing line
It was a time when political turmoil was upending Ethiopia, as well as the lives of Mulugeta and many other academics. For centuries the country had been ruled by a dynasty whose present emperor was Haile Selassie. Having come to the throne in 1930, he had tried to reform Ethiopia by bringing it into the League of Nations, drawing up a constitution, and taking measures to abolish slavery.
When fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia in May 1935, Selassie left, spending six years in exile in the UK during the Italian occupation of the country. He returned as emperor in 1941 after British and Ethiopian forces recaptured Addis Ababa. But famine, unemployment and corruption, as well as a brief unsuccessful coup attempt, undermined his rule and made him unexpectedly vulnerable.
While in Maryland, Mulugeta and other Ethiopian students in the US started supporting the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party (EPRP) – a pro-democracy group that sought to build popular momentum against the monarchy. In February 1974 Selassie was deposed by the Derg – a repressive military junta named after the word for “committee” in Amharic, the most widely spoken language in Ethiopia. Selassie was assassinated the following year.
Led by an army officer named Mengistu Haile Mariam, the Derg’s radical totalitarianism was in sharp contrast to the student-led EPRP’s efforts and its agenda included seizing property from landowners. Mulugeta’s family lost all its land, and his father was killed fighting the Derg. “Land ownership was still inequitable,” Mulugeta remarks ruefully, “only the landlords changed.”
In September 1976 the EPRP tried, unsuccessfully, to assassinate Mengistu. The following February, on becoming chairman of Derg – and therefore head of state – Mengistu began ruthlessly to crush any opposition, particularly the EPRP, in what he himself called the “Red terror” campaign of political suppression. About half a million people in Ethiopia were killed.
“It was a police state,” recalls Solomon Bililign, Mulugeta’s then graduate assistant, now a professor of atomic and molecular physics at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. “The police didn’t need any reason to arrest you. They would arrest people openly in the streets, break into homes, and left people dead in roads and parks. Many were tortured; others simply disappeared.”
Captured and tortured
Mulugeta himself was a target. In the summer of 1977, a policeman showed up at his office with an informant. Mulugeta was arrested and imprisoned for his role in helping to organize anti-Derg activities, as was Bililign. Mulugeta still recalls exactly how long he was jailed for: “Eight months and 20 days”.
After his release, Mulugeta knew it would be unsafe to stay in Addis and lived in hiding for several months. So he devised a plan to travel 500 km north to a holdout region not controlled by the Derg. However, while using a fake ID to pass through checkpoints to reach a compatriot, he was betrayed again, captured, and taken back to Addis.
Mulugeta was savagely tortured using a method that the Derg meted out on thousands of other prisoners.
En route to Addis, he managed to steal back the fake ID that he’d been using from the pocket of the policeman travelling with him. He then tore it up to shield the identity of his compatriot, and tossed the pieces into a toilet. But the policeman noticed and retrieved the pieces. Mulugeta was then savagely tortured using a method that the Derg meted out on thousands of other prisoners. His arms and legs were tied around a pole, and he was hung in the foetal position between two chairs, upside down. His feet were then beaten until he could no longer walk.
Mulugeta was sent to Maekelawi, an infamous jail in Addis, in which up to 70 prisoners could be jammed in rooms each barely four metres long and four metres wide. Inmates were tortured without warning, could not have visitors, never had trials, were denied books and paper, and at night heard screams from periodic executions. Mulugeta helped those who were beaten by tending to their wounds.
“People who knew him in prison told me that his mental strength helped all of them endure,” remembers Mesfin Tsige, an undergraduate student of Mulugeta at the time, who is now a polymer physicist at the University of Akron in Ohio. Despite the awful conditions, Mulugeta managed to continue working on physics by surreptitiously taking paper from the foil linings of cigarette packets to compose problems.
Another prisoner was Nebiy Mekonnen, a chemistry student of Mulugeta. Later a gifted artist, translator and newspaper editor, Mekonnen began translating the US writer Margaret Mitchell’s classic 1936 book Gone with the Wind into Amharic. It was the one book that the Maekelawi prisoners had in their hands, having retrieved it from the possessions of someone who had been executed.
Surreptitiously writing his translation onto the foil linings of cigarette packets, Mekonnen would read passages to fellow prisoners in the evening for what passed for entertainment. Mekonnen’s translation of Mitchell’s almost 1000-page book was recorded onto 3000 of the linings, which were then smuggled out of the prison stuffed in tobacco pouches and published years later.
Gone with the Wind might seem a strange choice to translate, but as Mulugeta reminds me: “It was the only book we had at the time”. More smuggled books did eventually arrive at the prison, but Gone with the Wind, which describes life in a war-torn country, has several passages that resonated with prisoners. One was: “In the end what will happen will be what has happened whenever a civilization breaks up. The people with brains and courage come through and the ones who haven’t are winnowed out.”
Release and recapture
In 1982, Mulugeta was moved to Kerchele, another prison. There, as at Maekelawi, inmates were forced to listen to Mengistu’s pompous speeches on radio and TV. During one Mengistu pontificated that he would turn prisons into places of education. A clever inmate, knowing that the prison wardens were also cowering in terror, proposed that Kerchele establish a school with the prisoners as teachers.
The wardens found this a great idea, not least because it let them show off their loyalty to Mengistu. The Kerchele prisoners were promptly put to work erecting a schoolhouse of half a dozen rooms out of asbestos slabs. Unlike schools in the rest of Ethiopia, the Kerchele prison school was not short of teachers, as the prisoners included a wide range of professionals, such as architects, scientists and engineers.
Students included prison guards and their families, along with numerous inmates who had been jailed for non-political reasons. Mulugeta and Bililign taught physics. “It was therapy for us,” Bililign says – and the school was soon known as one of the best in Ethiopia.
When I ask Mulugeta how he maintained his interest in physics in jail, despite being locked up for so many years, he becomes animated.
When I ask Mulugeta how he maintained his interest in physics in jail, despite being locked up for so many years, he becomes animated. “In those days, prisons were full of ideas,” he smiles. “We were university students, university teachers. We had a cause. It was exciting. Intellectually, we flourished.”
In the summer of 1985 Mulugeta was released. Many colleagues were not. “They were given release papers and as they left the building, one by one, they were strangled. I had a tenth-grade student who was one of the best; he didn’t make it. There were plenty of stories like this.” Mulugeta pauses. “Somehow we survived. But not them.”
Mulugeta returned to the university, now renamed from Haile Selassie University to Addis Ababa University, and started teaching physics full time. As the Derg was in full control no opposition was possible except in outer regions of Ethiopia. In summer 1991, after Mulugeta had taught physics for another six years, political turmoil erupted yet again.
Mengistu was overthrown that May by a political coalition representing pro-democracy groups from five of Ethiopia’s ethnic regions, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). But ethnic tensions rose and human rights violations continued. “Even though the Derg was overthrown,” Mulugeta recalls, “we knew we were entering another dark age.”
In the same year Mulugeta was put in touch with a Swedish programme seeking to build networks of scientists across countries in the southern hemisphere. Mulugeta knew a physicist from Bangalore, India, who had visited Addis twice as an examiner for his master’s programme and arranged to work with him for his PhD.
That July, Mulugeta married Malefia, who worked in the university’s registrar office, and the two left for Bangalore. As a wedding present, his student Mekonnen painted a picture of two hands coming together, each with a ring on a finger, against a black Sun in the background. “Two rings, in the time of a dark sun” Mekonnen’s caption read, “Happy marriage!” Mulugeta still has the painting.Academic assassinations are a threat to global science
Read more
Mulugeta thrived in Bangalore. Here, he was finally able to combine his two loves, physics and maths, studying statistical physics and stochastic processes and applying them to issues in non-equilibrium thermodynamics. He has worked in that field ever since. He received his PhD in 1998 from the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and returned to Addis once more to teach.
Shortly after Mulugeta’s return from Bangalore to Ethiopia in August 1998, some of his former students formed the Ethiopian Physical Society, electing him as its first president. Other students of his who had taken positions in the US created the Ethiopian Physical Society of North America (EPSNA), formally established in 2008. Bililign organized and convened its first meeting.
In 2007, Philip Taylor, a soft-condensed-matter physicist from Case Western Reserve University in the US, who had been Tsige’s PhD supervisor, heard the story of Mulugeta’s imprisonment. Astonished, he spearheaded the successful 2012 application for Mulugeta to receive the APS’s Sakharov prize, which is given every two years to physicists who have displayed “outstanding leadership and achievements of scientists in upholding human rights”.
Unsure that he would receive travel funds to attend a special award ceremony at that year’s APS March meeting in Boston, the EPSNA raised money for Mulugeta and his wife to attend. Jetlagged, worn out by the cold, and somewhat overwhelmed by the attention, Mulugeta could not be found as the ceremony began. EPSNA members tracked him down to his hotel room, where he was dressing in traditional Ethiopian clothes for the occasion – all white from head to toe, including shoes.
Under a dark Sun
In recent years, Mulugeta has continued to teach and collaborate with students and former students, publishing in a wide range of journals, as well as helping out with the Ethiopian Physical Society. But while I was in Ethiopia to talk to Mulugeta at the start of 2026, the Trump administration curtailed immigrant visas from Ethiopia and almost half of all nations in Africa supposedly in an attempt to “protect the security of the United States”. A few months before, it had imposed a $100,000 fee on work visas, all but preventing US universities from hiring non-US citizens. It killed the USAID programme that had once sent Mulugeta to the US for his master’s degree.
The Trump administration has also withdrawn the US from international scientific organizations, conventions and panels, and has gutted the most important US scientific agencies. These and other measures are destroying the networks of international physics collaborations of the kind that Mulugeta both promoted and benefited from – networks that nurture education, careers and knowledge.
“We are not yet in good hands,” Mulugeta warns me as I start to leave. “We are,” he says, “still under the dark Sun.
Register
Robert P Crease is a professor in the Department of Philosophy, Stony Brook University, US and writes the monthly Critical Point column for Physics World, robertpcrease.com, e-mail robert.crease@stonybrook.edu. His latest book is The Leak: Politics, Activists, and Loss of Trust at Brookhaven National Laboratory