14/03/2026
Mulugeta Bekele: the jailed and tortured scientist who kept alive
Mulugeta Bekele paid a heavy price for remaining in 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 , almost single-handedly keeping it alive in the country. But Mulugeta was arrested and brutally tortured by members of the , 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.
https://physicsworld.com/a/mulugeta-bekele-the-jailed-and-tortured-scientist-who-kept-ethiopian-physics-alive/
