Addis Abeba — Memoirs of political imprisonment often provide a disturbing window into the cruelty of particular regimes, but W. Hundee Hurrisoo's 'A Ten Minute Mission: The Least Price for Freedom' goes deeper. In roughly 270 pages, the former Editor in Chief of Ethiopia's first Oromo newspaper chronicles not only the physical suffering that the Derg regime inflicted on him and his compatriots but also the moral and political logic that enabled and normalized such suffering.
Set during what the author calls the "dwindling" phase of the Red Terror, a period no less horrifying than its peak, Hundee's account exposes how a revolutionary state founded on promises of equality and the end of feudalism turned its violence inward against its own citizens, and most systematically against the Oromo people. The memoir shows how ordinary bureaucratic acts, a routine meeting at a ministry, or even a polite invitation to join a "short mission," became instruments of terror and part of an administrative machinery that both preceded the Red Terror and continued long after its formal end.
The irony embedded in the book's title frames the entire narrative. The phrase "A Ten Minute Mission," spoken so casually by a Derg security official as Hundee was taken from his office, was meant to reassure him that his detention would be brief. "We need your help... come with us for a short mission. You'll be back in ten minutes." These words instead became a metaphor for deception and state cruelty, as the promised ten minutes stretched into nearly twelve years of imprisonment or, as Hundee notes at the end of his memoir, "4,040 days."
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From his first moments in Derg's custody, Hundee exposes the blurred boundary between the seemingly reassuring language of authority and the reality and inevitability of violence. He achieves this through the narrative's carefully crafted pace that collapses distance in time and space, forcing the reader to feel as though each stage of arrest, interrogation, and torture is unfolding in real time. More than a retrospective account of what he was subjected to, his testimony, therefore, is a sustained examination of what occurs when a state turns truth, law, and even time itself into instruments of domination.
Multigenerational exile
W/Yohanes Hundee Hurrisoo was born in Arsi in 1944, but the roots of his family go back to Warra Jarso, Salaalee, in the present-day North Shewa Zone of the Oromia Regional State. A member of the Tulama Oromo whose confrontation with the Abyssinian kingdom began in earnest, his fourth great-grandfather, Waaree Obsaa, killed one of the invaders encamped in his village and fled to Ada'aa Bargaa. After a long and arduous battle, his grandfather, Hurriso Boruu, was pushed further south and eventually settled in Arsi, where Hundee was born. This legacy of resistance and displacement would continue to shape Hundee's own trajectory in life.
Hundee's account exposes how a revolutionary state founded on promises of equality and the end of feudalism turned its violence inward against its own citizens ..."
As a landless shepherd in Arsi, Hundee attributes his entry into elementary school to a matter of mere accident. He completed eighth grade in 1962 and went on to enroll at the Debre Birhan Teacher Training Institute. After graduating in 1966, he began his career as a teacher in Bale.
When he joined Haile Selassie I University in 1971, the campus was, in his words, "a vast sea of anti-oppression movement." From 1975 to 1976, he participated in the Derg's literacy campaign, Idgat Bahibrat, in Wollo. Equipped with a degree in history and educational administration, he joined Bariiisaa, Ethiopia's first Oromo-language newspaper, which by then had been operating for five years. Bariisaa, meaning "Dawn," symbolized an emerging cultural awakening described as "the emergence of freedom's light, marking the end of a century of slavery." That dawn, however, was swiftly extinguished when the junta took several measures to curtail its circulation and eventually confiscate it. Despite being published in the unfamiliar Sabaean alphabet, Bariisaa's daily circulation soon surpassed the more established Amharic weekly, Yezareyitu Ethiopia, prompting the Derg to confiscate and strip it of its editorial independence. In effect, it was turned into a translation service of the other government newspaper, Addis Zemen, into Oromo. This caused the paper's circulation to fall from thirty thousand copies to less than two thousand, but the newspaper did not fully disappear as they had hoped. Repeated attempts were made to either shut it down entirely or at least force it into Amharic. When censorship alone proved insufficient to achieve the desired goal, the state resorted to intimidating the newsboys that sold it, with bulk copies seized and burned publicly. Any remaining copies were redirected to non-Oromo regions such as Gondar and Eritrea, or to Derg offices where, as Hundee notes, "nobody wanted to see them, let alone read them."
While the censure of Bariiisaa was intended to contain the perceived dangers of an emerging Oromo political expression, the same logic extended to the individual, as the process of attempting to erase the organization necessitated the disappearance of Oromo figures like Hundee, whom the state regarded as a threat to its narrative, hence needing to disappear.
It is no surprise then that his arrest was almost as bureaucratic as the newspaper's censure in its casual cruelty. During a meeting at the Ministry of Information, he questioned the decision to change the broadcasting time of the Oromo language radio program, an act of professional inquiry that immediately aroused suspicion. The sarcastic, condescending response he received was an early sign that the future was not going to be kind to Hundee. And he was not wrong. When he returned to his office the following day, he found security officers waiting, one of them already sitting in his chair with an attitude that reeked of a superiority complex. Within minutes, he was shackled and led away, leaving, as he writes, "my office once and for all." The complete abruptness of this moment matures into the memoir's central tension as the everyday life of a teacher and journalist clashes with the ideological paranoia of a state where simple acts of inquiry and doing one's job were seen as no less than subversion. The nearly twelve years that followed, spent in prison without due process under what Hundee calls the Derg's "Terror Republic," marked the beginning of a new chapter in Ethiopia, one in which the social fabric of the whole country was shaken to its core until, as he later wrote, "every sense of humanity was reduced to rubble."
Machineries of torture
The opening chapters describing imprisonment in the Grand Palace and Maikalawi are among the most disturbing. The Palace, once a symbol of imperial authority, becomes what Hundee calls a "human storehouse." In Maikalawi, the central Revolutionary Investigation Organization, he is assigned to Cell Six, a sixteen-square-meter space holding forty-two men. Packed tightly together, the prisoners could only breathe one another's air, enduring suffocating heat, hunger, and humiliation.
Hundee's descriptions of torture are restrained yet devastating. His first interrogation unfolds in silence, with seven men staring at him for hours, forcing him to internalize guilt before a single blow is struck. When silence fails, violence follows. He is beaten until he sees "purple stars" and becomes almost deaf. Later, the so-called "Good military punishment" requires him to run, fall, and lift a thirty-kilogram stone a hundred times, a horrific imitation of discipline designed to destroy the body.
Similarly, in a room grotesquely called the "cake room," he encounters Ethiopia's own lexicon of cruelty. The Stalin stick, he explains, involved binding a prisoner's knees between tied hands, suspending the body upside down, and beating the soles of the feet. When his feet went numb, he writes, "they poured cold saltwater to revive the dead cells so that I would feel the pain." His tormentors sang a revolutionary song as they beat him, turning patriotism into ritualized violence. When this failed to break him, interrogator Getachew Mamo introduced the thumbscrew, which Hundee describes as a European torture device from the fifteenth century, crushing his hands until his fingers felt as though they would explode. Eight toenails were later removed, and his left sole was reduced to raw flesh, the white bone visible each time the bandages were cut away.
One of the memoir's most emblematic scenes occurs when Getachew, perhaps testing his will, offers him lunch from the Hilton Hotel. Hundee throws the food back in defiance, declaring, "A pistol is not a stick. It is not for beating. It is for shooting. You are a coward. You know only how to beat donkeys." Getachew's response is chilling in its calm certainty. "We do not waste a bullet on you. We mince you into pieces like this."
Karchallee: Place of despair, twilight of hope
Transferred to Karchallee prison in 1984, Hundee encountered marginally improved physical conditions, including more space, sunlight, and occasional visits, but the psychological violence continued. After repeated fainting, he was placed in the Patients' House, which he describes bluntly as "a death cell," a place where prisoners awaited their demise. There, he slept beside corpses, the smell of death ever-present.
While the central aim of the book is to serve as a memoir, Hundee's personal history of displacement prior to and post-prison becomes emblematic of Ethiopian state building itself."
Between 1985 and 1987, he was repeatedly misdiagnosed with tuberculosis, a process he bitterly refers to as a "TB cheese play," and was forced to purchase expensive medication himself. Even illness became an instrument of exploitation. In May 1987, a cholera outbreak swept through the prison. The government refused Red Cross intervention, and at least four hundred inmates died within four days. "The corpses were being loaded onto lorries and tractors like logs," he recalls, transforming human bodies into anonymous cargo.
The execution of his four comrades in 1986, Muhe Abdo, Gazzaahiny Kasahun, Kabbada Damisseee, and Lieutenant Yiggazuu Waaqee, deepened the atmosphere of despair. When amnesty was announced in 1989, most Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) members were excluded. Hundee's release finally came on May 23, 1991, as the Derg regime collapsed. With quiet irony, having outlived a monstrous regime, he concludes, "Thus, I completed my ten-minute mission in 4,040 days."
Significance of the book
While the central aim of the book is to serve as a memoir, Hundee's personal history of displacement prior to and post-prison becomes emblematic of Ethiopian state building itself. The southward movement of his family, first driven by Abyssinian conquest and later by successive regimes, mirrors the territorial and administrative expansion of the Ethiopian state. What is often described as consolidation appears in the memoir as a continuous process of violence that repeatedly uprooted Oromo communities and redefined belonging through coercion. In this sense, A Ten Minute Mission functions not only as the memoir of a prisoner of conscience but also as a narrative of the making of modern Ethiopia. Both processes unfold through violence. The expansion of the former Abyssinian kingdom displaced Oromos further south, including Hundee's own family, while the later modernization of state institutions culminated in his complete exile from the country. State formation, in this reading, corresponds directly to Hundee's gradual removal from political and social life, ending not in reintegration but in forced exile abroad.
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Yet the memoir is not only a record of erasure. Running throughout the text is an assertion captured in the Oromo notion of Jirra, meaning "we are here, we exist," a claim echoed today by the Qeerroo generation. Despite displacement, torture, and exile, Hundee refuses to disappear. Through his survival, and through the memory of his comrades, both those who endured and those who perished under the weight of the state's machinery, the struggle persists. The memoir shows that violence, no matter how vast or systematic, cannot erase those who stand for Dhugaa, truth in Oromo. In the end, it is not the victim but the perpetrator who withers. Hundee and his legacy endure, as does the cause for which he suffered, now carried forward by a young generation with even less tolerance for injustice.
After his release, he briefly served as an OLF representative in Ethiopia's Transitional Government and later sought political asylum in Germany, where he continued his advocacy in exile. Now, at eighty-one, he holds the status of Gadaamoojjii, an elder within the Oromo Gadaa system, and occupies a position of moral authority, advocating and writing for the freedom and peace he still longs for.
A Ten-Minute Mission is a book everyone should read to understand how the Derg regime systematically tried to suppress Oromo cultural expression and to see the ultimate price the previous generation paid for the rights, however incomplete, that the current generation enjoys today. The book is readily available on Amazon. Readers who wish to learn more about Obbo W. Hundee Hurrisoo and his sacrifices to the Oromo struggle for freedom can visit his personal website, where his media engagements and updates are posted. AS
Editor's Note: Ababiyaa Ahmed Ajmel is a master's student in Peace and Conflict Studies at Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg (OvGU), focusing on conflict and politics in the Horn of Africa. He can be reached at ababiyaa.ahmed@gmail.com / X: @ababiyaa
