The European narratives have established a firm link between masculinity and heroism, but in Afewark’s novel, it is not Wahid who saves the empire but his sister Tobbya. In what follows, Afewark weaves the unpredictable incidents of separation and reunion into the journey of the general’s son, Wahid, who attempts to rescue his father and, in due course, pay respect to those who help him along the way. After the ignominious defeat culminating in the king’s death, the only Christian general who survives the attack is sold into slavery. Set indefinitely at the beginning of the Christian era, the book opens with the incursion of pagans into a Christian land wherein the less numerous community fails to resist the invader. Tobbya responds to the religious tensions that disturbed the country following its expansion over Muslim regions initiated by Emperor Menelik’s reforms. 266), writes the author, singling out female agency among the unrest, warfare, and violence in Ethiopia’s first-ever Amharic-language novel.

‘All believed in Christ because of a woman’ (p. In 1908 when things still remain uncertain, Afewark Gebre Iyasus publishes Ləbb Wälläd Tarik (“Tobbya”), a book in which it is the female character who intervenes in the fate of the war-torn Ethiopian kingdom. The territorial expansion in Oromo lands combined with the revival of Red Sea trade routes diversify the empire, bringing an influx of people who are neither Christian nor speak Amharic. This blog post is among the winners of the Department of Comparative Literatures’s 2020-2021 Blog Award for the module 6ABA0013 ‘Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa in Global Cultural Studies’. Congratulations to Oliwia Majchrowska for winning the award!Īt the beginning of the twentieth century, the predominantly Christian and Amharic community of the Ethiopian highlands stands on the cusp of transformation.

Amharic fiction book