“Once I was beloved of God, the King of Kings. I was the Conquering Lion of Judah, a descendant of King Dawit. My blood, rich and red, is kin to that other King of Kings, the most Beloved. I ruled my kingdom in honor of His. Ethiopia, the most loved of the Beloved, do you hear the drums above the clouds? Do you know that angels approach, and they come for you?”—Haile Selassie, the Lion of Judah, 1974.
Maaza Mengiste’s powerful debut novel, set in her home country of Ethiopia, brings to life the historical period from the death of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974 through the communist revolution and the subsequent resistance movement which followed shortly on its heels. The Emperor had failed to recognize and take action to mitigate a horrific famine in the remote countryside which had cost two hundred 
thousand lives. A well-publicized 1974 television documentary, showing the Ethiopian public the graphic horrors of their country’s famine for the first time, was juxtaposed against films showing the wasteful excesses of palace functions, setting the country up for revolution. Initially planned by students who wanted the government to show more accountability and to allow for change, the revolution was soon pre-empted by the strong military, which had its own agenda. Within a year, the militaristic ultra-right, known as “the Derg,” was in charge, consolidating its power while arresting many of the students who had made the revolution possible.
Mengiste’s novel takes a careful look at these times, reducing the grand scale of the disastrous famine and its political aftermath to understandable human terms by concentrating on one family and its friends and acquaintances in Addis Ababa, the capital. Hailu, a physician, and his wife, Selam, have two sons, Yonas, who is thirty-two, and Dawit, age twenty-four, a college student. Dawit inevitably becomes active in revolutionary activities which result in the overthrow of the emperor. Yonas, much less active in political affairs, is more concerned with maintaining his wife Sara and his four-year-old daughter Tizita. Their family, friends, employees, and acquaintances, seen in lively and often moving scenes, provide a multi-leveled view of the country in 1974.
The quick military and financial support for the Derg by Cuba and the Soviet Union soon leads the country’s powerful new leaders into excess, and everyone mistrusts everyone else. A “War of Annihilation” against any form of opposition is accompanied by the executions of former governmental heroes, the takeover of private enterprise, clampdowns on free speech, arrests and torture for suspected infractions, and many deaths. The government is also waging war on two fronts—Somalia and Eritrea–further depleting the country’s limited financial resources.
The author enlivens her often grim narrative by creating characters with whom the reader can identify, providing the small, realistic details which make the characters feel like people we know. The grand-scale problems of Ethiopia are examined within the smaller contexts of parent/child disagreements, sibling rivalries, romantic conflicts, jealousies, and open resentments against people who have ignored their roots in their zeal for power. As all the characters gradually become drawn into the larger political conflicts of the country, the reader is shocked by the extreme cruelty, both physical and emotional, of those who rule the country. The seemingly random attacks by the military’s “thought police” create overwhelming public fear, and the deliberate manipulation of the public’s psychology through the display of tortured bodies in the neighborhoods in which these victims have lived makes normal life impossible.
The novel is well constructed, but it is often difficult to read. The violence, which increases in intensity over the course of three hundred pages, involves false arrests, beatings, rapes, psychological warfare, agonizing tortures in an effort to extract sometimes non-existent information, and the mutilation deaths of women and children. The author’s dedication to presenting a full picture of the inhuman behavior of the country’s powerful leaders and misguided followers, however, creates unforgettable tableaux, and makes the reader yearn for change in the aftermath of the novel.
Notes: The author’s photo by Miriam Berkley appears on the author’s website: www.maazamengiste.com. An excerpt of the novel also appears on the site.
A South African blog shows many photos, such as the above, in which “Even Lions Bowed to Haile Selassie, Lion of Judah: http://criticaldawg.blat.co.za.
A BBC feature about Haile Selassie, including an interview with one of his long-time servants shows the contrasts between the country then and now: http://news.bbc.co.uk. Haile Selassie’s Wiki page is here: http://en.wikipedia.org
