‘We don’t want a James Bond adventure here,’ warns a jumpy spymaster as he grapples with an anti-state conspiracy in Oromay. Among other strands, that’s precisely what this fabled Ethiopian novel of 1983 delivers. Which is remarkable, given that Baalu Girma’s semi-autobiographical thriller of rebellion and repression, love and war, has been translated from Amharic. The ancient Semitic tongue of Ethiopia served as that nation’s official language long before English came to rule at court, and in courts.
Girma was both a journalist and a novelist, educated in the US and an editor of English-language magazines in Addis Ababa. He evidently relished the various genres adroitly mined in Oromay. They range from clandestine Le Carré-style intrigue and steamy Fleming-esque trysts to scenes from a battlefield ‘hellscape’ that nod to Hemingway and the newly minted literature of America’s Vietnam trauma. Such familiar signposts, along with an idiomatic reader-friendly translation by David DeGusta and Mesfin Felleke Yirgu, make the novel a fast, fluent and often gripping read. Yet its back-story is more lurid than its plot.
After the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974, Girma became a senior propagandist for the revolutionary Marxist-Leninist junta of the Derg and its leader Mengistu. Oromay fictionalises his actual experiences in 1981-82, when the Red Star Campaign swooped down on insurgent Eritrea to crush its ‘secessionist’ revolt not just by military might but a hearts-and-minds strategy conducted through TV, radio and print: ‘Our battlefield is the human psyche.’ Red Star soon flopped. The Eritrean rebels of the EPLF – here called the Shabia – continued to advance. In 1988, they would vanquish the Soviet-backed Ethiopian army at Afabet: a victory that Basil Davidson, the great historian of Africa, embedded in the rebel lines, deemed the most momentous Third World battle since the French rout at Dien Bien Phu.
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