Notes from the Hyena’s Belly: An Ethiopian Boyhood

Description

Winner of the Governor General’s Award
A Library Journal Best Book of 2001

Part autobiography and part social history, Notes from the Hyena’s Belly offers an unforgettable portrait of Ethiopia, and of Africa, all through the 1970s and ’80s, an era of civil war, widespread famine, and mass execution. “We children lived like the donkey,” Mezlekia remembers, “careful to not wander off the beaten trail and finally end up within the hyena’s belly.” His memoir sheds light not only at the violence and disorder that beset his native country, but at the wealthy spiritual and cultural life of Ethiopia itself. All over, he portrays the careful divisions in dress, language, and culture between the Muslims and Christians of the Ethiopian landscape. Mezlekia also explores the struggle between western European interests and communist influences that caused the collapse of Ethiopia’s social and political structure―and that forced him, at age 18, to enroll in a guerrilla army. Through droughts, floods, imprisonment, and killing sprees by the hands of military juntas, Mezlekia survived, ultimately emigrating to Canada. In Notes from the Hyena’s Belly he bears witness to a time and place that few Westerners have understood.

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