Author Description

The extraordinary story of an indomitable 95-year-old woman - and of the most extraordinary century in Ethiopia's history. A new 'Wild Swans'. Born in 1916, and a child bride at eight years old, Aida Edemariam's grandmother has stood, shaking, as fascist troops searched her home for guns she knew were there; in the late 1930s and early 40s she fled both Italian and Allied bombardment. She has begged for mercy from Emperor Haile Selassie, for a husband imprisoned for treason, then, widowed, spent the 50s personally wresting from the emperor a promise to educate five of her seven living children. For thirteen years she fought through courts unused to women defending their assets. A feudal landlord herself, she felt the first tremors of the coming revolution, then, in the 70s, watched it burst into flower: night after night she listened, praying desperately, to the firing squads of the Red Terror, and endured soldiers tramping through her home. She has seen her land nationalised and her children imprisoned or exiled. She has also (in her 60s) learned to read, and been a pilgrim to Jerusalem. Aida, here records her grandmother's enthralling stories, which span the most extraordinary century in Ethiopian history - in which feudal fiefdoms run by slave-owning warlords gave way to centralised empire; centralised empire became Marxist dictatorship; Marxist dictatorship became (in name at least) democracy. This is a story with an extraordinary cast of characters, from emperors and empresses to lords and archbishops and slaves, from Marxist revolutionaries and wartime double agents to soothsayers and spirit doctors; from saints and martyrs to the Virgin Mary - but above all, her grandmother herself, who is grand and haughty and sometimes difficult but also incredibly generous and who despite everything still provides an infectious sense of mischief and joy.