Professor Mulugeta Bekele: Physics under Repression
Professor Mulugeta Bekele’s life reads like a quiet argument that physics can survive almost anything, even when its classrooms are turned into prison cells.
Born in 1947 near Asela, he entered science at a time when Ethiopia’s academic institutions were still fragile but full of promise. He studied physics and eventually became one of the central figures at Addis Ababa University, where his teaching shaped generations of students. Many of those students would later describe him less as a lecturer and more as a stabilizing force for Ethiopian physics itself.
That stability was tested during the turbulent years of the Derg regime. In the late 1970s, Mulugeta was arrested for his involvement in student political activity and spent years in prison. The conditions were brutal, marked by torture, isolation, and uncertainty. Yet even in confinement, he continued to think in the language of physics. In prisons like Maekelawi and Kerchele, he helped organize informal teaching and learning, turning punishment spaces into fragile classrooms where ideas still moved between people.
What makes his story unusual is not only endurance, but continuity. Physics did not leave him during imprisonment. He worked on problems in his mind, improvised materials when possible, and supported fellow prisoners academically and emotionally. Those who were with him later recalled that his presence helped others survive the psychological weight of captivity.
After his release in the mid-1980s, he returned to Addis Ababa University and resumed teaching. He later pursued doctoral studies in India, working in statistical physics and thermodynamics, and earning his PhD in 1998. His research included contributions to statistical mechanics and microscopic thermodynamic systems, continuing a scientific life that had never truly paused, only changed environment.
Back in Ethiopia, he helped rebuild academic networks. He became a founding figure in the Ethiopian Physical Society and inspired the creation of diaspora scientific communities such as the Ethiopian Physical Society of North America. These networks helped connect Ethiopian physics to global research at a time when isolation could have easily taken over.
Recognition eventually followed, including the American Physical Society’s Sakharov Prize in 2012 for his defense of education and human rights alongside scientific work.
Even today, Mulugeta Bekele continues to represent something rare in science: a career shaped not only by equations and publications, but by survival, teaching, and the belief that knowledge must remain alive even in the hardest conditions.