Books like Ethiopia — picked by fans

I’m not a fan of novels that are paced like greased rockets, as if the author’s afraid you’ll suddenly throw the book across the room, turn on Netflix, and order a pizza. Which is a key reason I love this book. Precious Ramotswe is a “traditionally built” woman who solves crimes in a superbly witty yet unhurried fashion and with deep compassion that stops short of sentimentality.

Her heart (huge) and brain (gently incisive) work in perfect tandem in this book. The plot is simple, which will frustrate readers who prefer intricate puzzles in their crime fiction. But for me, the pleasure lies in leisurely getting to know this wise, ingenious detective and her humble neighborhood in Botswana’s capital city.

What William Dalrymple is to India, Philip Marsden is to Ethiopia. They are both inspired travel writers and scholarly historians. What I particularly loved about The Barefoot Emperor was that it actually reads like a page-turning thriller. Central to the story is the towering figure of the Emperor Tewedros, a brilliant military commander, political reformer, and charismatic leader, who was both loved and loathed by the warring factions that made up his kingdom. His rise and fall compare with anything achieved by Julius Ceasar or Genghis Khan, and Marsden captures his incredible, true-life story with bravura writing that leaps off the page. He turns a searing searchlight onto one of the most forgotten episodes in African history and captures it all with a breathtaking sense of spirit of place.        

Leader? Hero? Saint? It’s difficult to find the words to define Haregewoin Teferra, the subject of this book, but somehow I feel these still fall short. A woman living in relative comfort in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, her life is turned upside down when she is given two young children to care for whose parents died due to HIV/AIDS. In time Haregewoin becomes a mother to many more just like them. In opening her doors, Haregewoin opened her heart to hundreds of orphaned children and gave them the chance of new and happy lives. This is a book that moved me to tears. Tears of rage at the injustices in the world and tears of relief that people like Haregewoin still exist.    

Ethiopia is a treasure trove of traditional folktales and learning. Elizabeth Laird has travelled the length and breadth of the country digging them out by talking to tribal elders, community leaders, and traditional storytellers. What emerged for me was a fascinating record of an ancient culture and its wisdom that can trace its roots back to the days of the Old Testament but whose lessons still ring true to this today. I loved accompanying Elizabeth on her travels as she went in search of the stories; enjoyed meeting alongside her the storytellers she managed to track down; and most of all was charmed by the stories themselves, which are a match in wit and human insight for anything that was ever penned by Aesop or Hans Christian Andersen. 

If you haven’t discovered Tahir Shah’s work yet, then this is a great place to start. It is about a quest the writer sets himself to discover the lost Solomon’s Mines in Ethiopia after purchasing an old map in a bazaar in Jerusalem. Shah goes off the beaten track venturing to a cliff-face monastery where the monks pull visitors up on a leather rope, to the ruined castles of Gondar, and to the rock-hewn churches at Lalibela. Most striking of all are his descriptions of an illegal gold mine that he visits where the miners dig with their bare hands. The people he meets, the strange circumstances he finds himself in, and the interesting historical and geographical background he provides all contribute to a rich and compelling account.  

This short book is without doubt the best introduction to African travel (and in my opinion one of the greatest travel books ever written).

Ranging across the whole continent, Kapuscinski’s evocative writing, although not always sticking religiously to factual details, captures the essence—and the magic—of the place like nobody else can. The book, along with his other great works on Africa Another Day of Life and The Emperor, was a major influence on both why I wanted to get to know Africa and how I write about it. 

I admire the way this brilliant Polish journalist has been able to get inside the head of an ancient traveller and show us not only the incredible insights of this peripatetic predecessor, but also what travel really means. “A journey neither begins in the instant we set out, nor ends when we have reached our doorstep again. It starts much earlier and is really never over, because the film of memory continues running inside of us long after we have come to a physical standstill.” Even more important, he offers one great truth about all writing, but especially history, that there is no truth with a capital T. “The subjective factor, its deforming presence will remain impossible to strain out . . . however evolved our methods, we are never in the presence of unmediated history, but history recounted, history as it appeared to someone, as he or she believes… show more.

Ethiopian society has gone through radical changes and transformations during the last century – and which continue into an uncertain future. The medieval-style empire of Haile Selassie was toppled by a Marxist dictatorship in 1974, which in turn fell to an alliance of northern peoples who set up a federalist system in 1991, which is now showing signs of tension. This collection of sixteen essays by some of the best-known authorities in their fields, outlines the political history and economic changes. It also tells about the arrival of Pentecostal churches, the growth of militant Islam, and the adaptation of the Orthodox church to a changing world. 

Not technically a “nineteenth-century” book, this 1902 novel is the most surprising work of fiction from the period that you’ll ever read. 

Written by a Black woman from Boston who had achieved success first as an actress and then as a magazine editor, this wild fantasy reads like a cross between the film The Black Panther and a Verdi opera. It concerns a Black physician who passes for white (until he can’t), then joins an archeological expedition to discover the remains of an ancient civilization in Ethiopia. 

The plot unfolds at breakneck speed, and there are so many twists you might get whiplash. But if you slow down and focus on the details of the story you’ll find an extraordinarily complex picture of politics, spirituality, psychology, music, history, and science.

I first encountered Evelyn Waugh’s classic novel Scoop in a backpacker guesthouse in Kowloon in 1987. Some traveler had left it behind, and I read it insatiably, cover to cover, and then started again from the beginning. It was even more hilarious and bitingly satirical on the second read and is the one book I’d take along were I banished to a desert island where luggage allowance was severely restricted.

First published in 1938, Scoop delivers a timeless and elegant roasting of the profession of journalism and self-important foreign correspondents. I have to admit–up to a point–that the bumbling exploits of William Boot, the book’s reluctant protagonist, played more than a small role in my own decision to both pick up a camera and put pen to paper!