Few areas of the world have presented such complex problems of appraisal for socialists as the Horn of Africa in the past three years. Many factors have contributed to this: geographical and cultural inaccessibility; war-time conditions limiting the circulation of individuals and the availability of information; opaque institutional specificities of the political scene in Addis Ababa, Mogadishu and Djibouti; the intersection of national with social conflicts, and of each with shifting international alliances. Amidst many uncertainties, however, two facts are salient and indisputable. First, and of far the greatest significance for the long-run future of the region, is the profundity of the social revolution unleashed in Ethiopia with the overthrow of the imperial dynasty in 1974—a process whose dynamic is still unfolding, yet whose final outcome remains highly unpredictable. Unlike the overwhelming majority of black African states, Ethiopia possessed an age-old feudal aristocracy, of mediaeval privilege and rapacity. The depth of the popular upheaval which finally erupted against it was commensurate with the rigidity of a traditional social hierarchy unknown anywhere else on the continent. Ethiopian politics under the Republic has, for all its military capping, owed its turbulence essentially to the explosive awakening of the rural and urban masses. The trim procedures of rule in Somalia, by contrast, are those of a country with a visibly shallow political experience.