My mother was born during the final few years of the last emperor of Ethiopia’s rule. By the time she was six years old, he had been overthrown by a military coup in 1974, which was motivated by a mismanaged ecological disaster that left hundreds of thousands starving and country folk leaving their homesteads to come to towns with no national relief in sight.
The Capital denied the existence of the famine and truck drivers were retelling the horrific scenes they witnessed in rural areas.
The monarch was replaced by a Marxist–Leninist government (the Derg) led by Major Mengistu Haile Mariam. Mengistu’s reign was plagued with instability: war with Somalia, insurgencies for independence in Eritrea. Tigray was rebelling against discriminatory policies from Addis, the Ethiopian capital, which introduced land reforms that disproportionately affected the region, along with a lack of development, mishandling of drought, and the suppression of language and culture. This was exacerbated by the Red Terror campaign and the aerial bombardment supported by the USSR – as Ethiopia was aligned with the communist block during the Cold War.
