Easternile gives you up to date information about happenings in Ethiopia (politics, culture, the people) and so much more.
Maaza Mengiste on the untold story of Ethiopia's women warriors during Italian occupation
Get link
Facebook
X
Pinterest
Email
Other Apps
In her new novel, The Shadow King, Maaza Mengiste draws on surprising discoveries about the role of women during Italy's 1935 invasion of Ethiopia — a conflict that many consider to be the start of the Second World War.
The story revolves around Hirut, a young Ethiopian woman who takes up arms to join the fight against Mussolini's brutal occupation. In the course of writing the book, Mengiste discovered that her own great-grandmother had been on the front lines. The novel also features a sensitive portrait of Emperor Haile Selassie, who ruled Ethiopia for more than 40 years.
Ambitious and epic in sweep, The Shadow King is an unflinching exploration of history and memory, class and gender, and the perspectives of women and girls during war. Marlon James has described it as "beautiful and devastating," while Salmon Rushdie proclaimed it "a brilliant novel, lyrically lifting history towards myth."
Born in Addis Ababa in 1971, Mengiste fled the country with her family during the Ethiopian Revolution, moving to Nigeria and Kenya before being sent alone to the United States at age seven. She now makes her home in New York.
She spoke to Eleanor Wachtel from the CBC's London studio.
These legends carried me through
"I grew up with the stories of a poorly equipped Ethiopian military confronting one of the most technologically advanced militaries in the world at that time.
"For a child, this was a story that felt epic. It was mythic. We were not supposed to win — and yet we did. I grew up imagining these heroic figures. I carried those figures with me when I moved from Ethiopia eventually to settle in the United States.
"They helped me understand what it meant to be Ethiopian, what it meant to have a history.
"These stories, the myths and the legends: my images of those soldiers, I really think, carried me through some difficult times as an immigrant and as a young girl who was black in a town that didn't understand her."
Women and warfare
"I had no idea [about my own great-grandmother's experience in the war]. I wrote this book, did my research and searched for women who were fighting in this war — without any sense of my own great-grandmother's story. When the book was almost done, I visited Ethiopia on a last-minute research trip while I was in the process of editing the book.
"My mother went with me on this trip, as she has done on several other research excursions I've made to Ethiopia. In conversation with her, I told her about a photograph I found of a woman in uniform, and how excited I was about that.
"It confirmed what I had always thought, which was that these women really existed — and she casually said, 'Well, what about your great-grandmother?'
"I had no sense that those stories also were running in my own family."
A point of pride
"The confrontation with Italy — both the first one in the late 1800s and then the one in 1935 — helped establish a narrative of Ethiopian history. It established Ethiopia as a place, a country that other Africans, other African-Americans could look toward with pride. It helped Ethiopians figure out a way to define themselves.
These were people who fought against colonizing forces, who fought against Europeans, who fought against the white men and won.- Maaza Mengiste
"[These were] people who were supposed to be conquered, and yet were not. It established a way to think about the country and the people. I grew up with some of that rhetoric, that legend, the myths. It's something that went beyond Ethiopia as well.
"It helped define a way of blackness, a way of being African, which was something that was very different from the stories of colonialism, of being enslaved. These were people who fought against colonizing forces, who fought against Europeans, who fought against the white men and won.
"That was a source of pride for people across the world — from Harlem all the way into Nigeria and Ghana."
Maaza Mengiste's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
History of aviation in Ethiopia goes back to 1929 when French made airplane, Potez 25 flown by a French pilot Andre Milet landed in the western side of Addis Ababa enrooted from Djibouti. This was 26 years after the first attempted flight by the Wright brothers and two years after the famous flight across the Atlantic by Captain Lind burg. Although Millet piloted the first aircraft which marked the history of aviation in the country, soon came with his successors with other types of airplane after one month time- in the month of September. In 1930 five sweater airplane like Farman-192 and others were purchased by the government for postal, security and government services between the towns of Dire Dawa, Djibouti, Debremarkos and Gondar. The dream that Ethiopian they would pilot the airplane was not long in coming true. In 1930 Gaston Vidal, a French Instructor, established the first pilot training School in the town of Jigjiga which produced Mishka babichief and Asfaw Ali...
America’s Department of State recently suspended $130 million worth of aid to Ethiopia because of “a lack of progress” on negotiations pertaining to the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the River Nile. According to state department officials, the decision to cut aid came as a result of a direct “ guidance ” from President Donald Trump. Estimates show that almost half of Ethiopia’s budget is linked to foreign aid. The country depends on economic assistance to support its infrastructure projects, health care and education expansion efforts, and security sector reforms. By suspending some aid, the United States has reopened the debate on whether developing countries should depend on foreign aid to realise their economic goals. The decision to suspend aid to Ethiopia comes after almost 10 years of regional and international efforts to mediate the dam dispute between Egypt and Ethiopia. Almost 60% of Ethiopians do not hav...
As it fight Covid-19 today, Ethiopia has defined a roadmap and will work to eliminate malaria in 10 years, a disease considered endemic in about three quarters of its territory. During the previous decade, we have made significant progress in controlling this preventable and curable disease, but a large percentage of the population is still at risk of infection, the State Minister of Public Health Dereje Duguma stressed in a public address. Ethiopia, he recalled, joined the global campaign to eradicate malaria and a process is currently underway to meet that goal in 12 zones and 239 'woredas' (districts) in six regional states. However, in 2020 there were delays because, due to the impact of Covid-19 and other difficulties, the eradication program was not implemented as expected, Duguma said at a ministerial meeting held in Adama, capital of Oromia State. This, he added, forces health authorities in each of the country's districts to identify as soon as possible the streng...
Comments
Post a Comment