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THE MOUNTAINOUS NORTH of Ethiopia is a beautiful land long populated with farmers, priests and warriors. A rugged vastness, which had its first Christian king in the fourth century, the God-fearing people here believe the Lowlands are bedevilled by disease, strange people and savage beasts. Dotted with rock-hewn churches and lonely cliff-top monasteries, the mountain ramparts have repelled invaders for millennia.

It is here that Birhan Woldu came into this world mewling and kicking on a dried ox skin splayed across the sandy floor of a mud-walled hut known in the Tigrinya language as a sekela. It was an easy and relatively painless birth. Thankfully there were no complications for her mother, Alemetsehay, who soon cradled the wailing baby while a neighbour helped cut the umbilical cord with a sharp blade. If there had been a problem, mother and daughter would have been in the hands of the Almighty. The isolated hamlet of Lahama, with no electricity or running water, is on the high plateau of Tigray Province in Ethiopia’s remote north. A trained doctor or midwife with even rudimentary knowledge of modern medicine were at best five hours away on foot across the desolate Highlands.

Birhan’s father, Woldu Menamano, was out working his little terraced fields with his two sturdy plough oxen. As the red sun began to dip below the mountain crags, he made his way back through the lush fields of wheat, sorghum and barley, which swayed in the mountain breeze. Soon Woldu could see the rising plumes of white smoke billowing from Lahama’s cluster of dung- and wicker-walled, thatched sekelas.

Before Woldu went inside, a white-robed priest blessed the baby, sprinkling holy water on Birhan and around the sekela, its beams and thatched straw roof turned charcoal-black with woodsmoke. Woldu paused for a moment to allow his eyes to adjust from the fading sunlight to darkness. Bending down, he slowly made the sign of the Christian Cross over the baby’s forehead and whispered his own blessing. Tradition dictated he would not be able to hold his new daughter until she had been baptized, 80 days after her birth.

Woldu is a tiny man, barely 1.5 metres (5 feet) high, with a heavily lined, leathery face, a testament to a lifetime spent guiding the olive-wood plough and tending his cattle under the blazing African sun. Sipping bune, the rich Ethiopian coffee, or a home-brewed maize tella beer, he is a natural storyteller with a lyrical turn of phrase that often remains undiluted, even when translated from his native Tigrinya language. Birhan and the rest of Woldu’s extended family all listen reverently when he speaks. Today, wearing a treasured, but threadbare pale cream suit, a traditional white gabi shawl draped over his shoulders, protection against the chill of the mountain night air, Woldu’s dark eyes widen at the memory of Birhan’s birth. He already had two girls, Lemlem, aged four, and Azmera, just two.

‘I was so happy to set eyes on my beautiful little Birhan for the first time. My own childhood had been full of death, despair and suffering. I wanted my little girl to have a different life. I had passed the darkness of my early life and everything was now bright. So we called our new daughter Birhan, which means “light” in our language. Tigrayan farmers prefer boys; they are strong and can plough but I love my girls. I felt God had looked on me with fortune. I now had my own farm and a third daughter. The harvests had been good; I had honey and yoghurt for my beautiful wife and children.’

The little girl took her father’s first name ‘Woldu’ as her surname, following Ethiopian custom. There was no birth certificate, no registration. Nor could anyone in the extended family read and write to record the event. Like many in Ethiopia’s rural heartlands, Birhan does not know her birth date nor the exact year in which she was born. Woldu himself estimates that he is approximately 63. He laughs at what he sees as the Western fixation with age, saying: ‘I know when the sun rises and falls. Is that not enough? We were more worried about getting through each harvest with enough food for our children than worrying how old we were. God decides how long you have in this world.’

The best guess for Birhan’s birth year, her family say, is 1981 in the Western calendar. In January of that year former Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan became US President, just as the Cold War with the Soviet Union became more icy. In Britain, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was presiding over the yuppie age of materialism.

At some 2,300 metres (7,546 feet) above sea level, high in Tigray’s burnt-brown mountains, the often harsh life in isolated Lahama had remained largely unchanged for its subsistence farmers since the time of Christ. On a rocky and sun-baked incline above a meandering river valley, 20 or so extended families lived in sekela huts. Their thatched conical roofs made them resemble a cluster of button mushrooms from a distance. Richer families lived in hand-quarried stone hidmo farmsteads of astonishingly skilled masonry. All were scattered above the banks of a river called Mai-Shashasta, meaning ‘water splash’, which is little more than a trickle for much of the year.

Birhan remembers the seasonal rains coming and turning it into a swirling, muddy torrent as flash floods swept the rich soil from the mountains. In the early morning and late afternoon she would accompany her sisters, Lemlem and Azmera, and the village children as they trekked laughing and singing down to the river bank in knots of threes and fours. With their clay pots, jerry cans and plastic bottles they would haul back all the water needed for their families’ daily cooking and cleaning. Dangling from their necks by a thin cord given to them at baptism were lucky charms and talismans to ward off evil spirits, horrific diseases and times of hunger. ‘There was so much laughter,’ Birhan remembers. ‘Life was so carefree at times. When the harvests were good, Lahama was like a paradise.’

Yet, when the rains fail in the Highlands, a common occurrence, there is drought, and if they keep failing, famine. In this precarious land the families are purposefully large, as security against the ravages of starvation and disease.

The mountains are often shrouded with mist as the sun rises. Temperatures sometimes drop well below freezing and the howling winds make it seem even colder. Birhan remembers the whole family huddling together at night to keep warm while they slept on ox skins under blankets. Then the midday sun could be broiling and unforgiving.

The rains were good when Birhan was a baby. Irrigated fields become lush green against the surrounding burnt hills. Woldu grew carrots, sorghum, spinach, barley, wheat and the native tef grain, the main ingredient of Ethiopia’s staple dish injera bread. Another delicacy Birhan remembers the villagers loved was the prickly pear cactus fruit that grew throughout the village. Honey is also a delicacy – when the big meher rains come in mid-June, the flowers on the mountain pastures bloom in a burst of life, allowing bees to produce a distinct, sweet fluid famous throughout the country. Woldu says his hives produced some of the best honey in the village. Often served with crisp white bread as a church festival meal, it is also used to make tej, a honey wine that is the national drink of Ethiopia.

After the valley has blossomed, it is alive with bird life. Brilliant white cattle egrets bob up and down on the swirling air currents like giant butterflies above the river meadows. Carmine bee-eaters, with their brilliant green–blue head plumage and pinkish brown wings, feast on parasites while perched on the back of the cattle.

‘Lahama was our Garden of Eden,’ Birhan says, her face lighting up at the memory. ‘The fields would turn bright green after the big rains. There was a little patch of grass sheltered by acacia trees where the children of the village came together to play. We called it Maida-Tseba. It was just a small patch of meadow and a few scattered bushes but it was magical to us. It was our secret world. Although it was a beautiful valley, life was very hard for my father who would work all the daylight hours in the fields. There were no schools or doctors in Lahama then. There was no electricity, TVs or radios. We had no idea what was going on in the outside world. I’m not sure we really cared.’

Woldu would rise with the sun and work the fields with his oxen, whose sweeping horns were identical to those seen painted on the walls of the tombs of Egypt’s pharaohs. Like all rural Ethiopian men, he carried a hardwood staff called a dula. It is part weapon, walking stick and cattle prod. Most often it is used as a balance aid, laid across the shoulders with the owner’s hands curled up to clasp the wood on either side. When the light begins to go in the late afternoon, the shadows cast by men carrying them in this way make them look as if they are being crucified. Some days Woldu would load his donkeys with firewood and honey to sell at the nearest market at Kwiha. The dustbowl town, a five-hour trek across ravines and upland pastures, is a natural gathering point for the cluster of mountain villages around Lahama. It lies on the main arterial trunk road connecting Addis Ababa, with the Tigrayan capital, Mekele, and, eventually, with neighbouring Eritrea and the Red Sea.

Alemetsehay, her hair painstakingly braided in traditional cornrows, would help out with the back-breaking harvesting and planting in the fields. Amid the swirling woodsmoke inside the sekela, Alemetsehay, a pewter Christian Cross dangling from her neck, would also spend much of her time preparing family meals. A daily chore was baking the spongy, pancake-like injera on a large, black, clay plate called a mogogo over a cow dung-fuelled fire. With Birhan, Lemlem and Azmera playing at her feet, she would grind grain, roast coffee beans and brew tella beer. The barefoot village children, their heads shaved bar a single long tuft (to enable God to pluck them to heaven should they fall sick), tended the goat and cattle herds, protecting them from attacks by hyenas. Later, when she was old enough, Birhan would become a goatherd, spending long days alone with her flock on the mountainside. But at that time, Lemlem and Azmera would drag along baby Birhan to Woldu’s well-tended fields where they were charged with protecting the root crops from scavenging porcupines. ‘If you want to kill them you have to hit their feet first with sticks or stones,’ Woldu explains. ‘Their feet are their weak points.’

Ethiopia is a land where elders and grey hairs are respected and obeyed. Birhan refers to her father as ‘Ato Woldu’ – ‘Mr Woldu’ – as a mark of respect. She listens intently as he describes his family’s early years, a glass of tella beer in his hand. ‘I love him so much. I owe every thing to him,’ she says.

Devoutly Christian, Woldu tells how famine, pestilence and even plagues of locusts have dogged his six decades. The family patriarch was born in a sekela hut a six-hour walk over the mountains from Lahama in the village of Adi Hidug. The year, he thinks, was 1948. By the age of five he was orphaned – his father, Gebregergis, had perished from some undefined ‘fever’ (a description applied to most diseases in the mountains) and his mother, Aleme, died in childbirth, a still tragically common cause of death in this isolated region today. She was, Woldu says, ‘light skinned’ and so beautiful that ‘people from other villages would call in just to gaze at her’. Woldu has a sharp memory and feels obvious pride in describing his family history in the Ethiopian oral tradition.

‘We were a poor farming family. Life was very hard. Famine was not so bad then but we had plagues of locusts that made the sky go black. If the land grew infertile or there was famine we simply moved to another place where there was rain and good soil. There was plenty of space for us all then. There was no outside aid in those times. If you went hungry you died. We weren’t educated people. School was nothing but a dream to me. I can’t read or write. If you bought me a big clock and put it on the wall there I would have no idea what the time was. I just look at the sun and where it is in the sky. I only remember the time of year by the church feast days.’

Woldu was left in the care of his sisters. The family had 10 cows and many goats and Woldu was in charge of the livestock herds. He says his sisters treated him badly.

‘My sisters’ boys wouldn’t go into the fields so I did all the work. I was always hungry. I would only be given a handful of roasted barley a day to eat. I was so unhappy I cried in the fields; then I cried silent tears when I slept in our sekela.’

At the age of 12 he ran away from home to work as a cattle herder for a rich family. In return the family gave him a patch of land to farm for himself. Any profits he made, he could keep. He had no home of his own and would sleep under the stars next to the cattle.

‘I grew wheat. If I had a good crop I would lend 100kg (220lb) of the crop to those in need. When they could give it back they would give me 150kg (330lb). It was a sort of loan with interest. In the good times I would make a little money and I could buy clothes. If there were locusts I made nothing. I lived like this for many, many years during the Haile Selassie regime.’

Haile Selassie, Ethiopia’s Negus Negast or ‘King of Kings’, was said to have a divine right to rule. The Ethiopian Constitution insisted he was the 237th monarch in an unbroken line from the biblical King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Other official titles bestowed on him were ‘Elect of God’ and ‘Conquering Lion of Judah’. A tiny, seemingly mild-mannered man, Haile Selassie had ruled the nation since 1916, first as a regent, then from 1930 as Emperor. His lavish coronation seemed to confirm the biblical prophesy: ‘Kings will come out of Africa.’ Jamaicans used his name before he assumed the crown, Ras Tafari Makonnen, to found a new faith they called ‘Rastafarianism’. Haile Selassie, which means ‘power of the trinity’ in Amharic, was adopted as a living god, Jah, and marijuana as a sacrament. When the Emperor made a three-day visit to Jamaica in 1966, some people there were convinced miracles occurred, much to the bemusement of many Ethiopians. Groups of Rastafarians, encouraged by the Back to Africa movement, even migrated to Ethiopia and the town Shashemene, south of Addis Ababa, became their unofficial capital.

In his early years, Haile Selassie had made considerable efforts to modernize Ethiopia. Slavery had been abolished, schools, hospitals and roads constructed and he authorized the establishment of a parliament. But Ethiopia remained a feudal society in which the Emperor, aristocratic families and the Church owned and controlled much of the land. Birhan points out that women were second-class citizens. They were not allowed to eat their main meals until their husbands were at the table. Around three-quarters of Ethiopia’s peasant farmers were also tenants and Woldu remembers the Haile Selassie years as a time of endemic corruption to the cost of the peasants.

In the 1930s, however, Haile Selassie was hailed in the West, after his nation’s stand against Benito Mussolini, Italy’s fascist dictator. Mussolini, envious of the British and French African colonies, wanted to build an East African empire and he was desperate to avenge Italy’s crushing defeat by an Ethiopian army at the Battle of Adwa in 1896. Like most Ethiopians, Birhan is very proud of her nation’s stand against European colonialism. Italy had been humiliated at Adwa in northern Tigray when its army of 17,000 soldiers advanced into the Ethiopian Highlands but was routed by Emperor Menelik II’s forces. The victory, Birhan explains, is seared into the national consciousness. It only added to the Ethiopians’ belief that they were a special people.

In 1935 Mussolini stood before his supporters in Rome’s Piazza Venezia and bellowed: ‘We have patient for 40 years. Now we want our place in the sun.’ Half-a-million Italian troops poured into Ethiopia using aerial bombardment and banned poison mustard gas in the advance. After a seven-month campaign, Addis Ababa was captured and Haile Selassie fled into exile, choosing the genteel English city of Bath as his new home. But while Ethiopia may have been occupied by the Italians, it was never successfully colonized. The mountains protected the people, just as they had before against waves of invaders throughout history. Birhan believes this independence has contributed to Ethiopia’s evident confidence and selfesteem in the modern world.

In 1941, just five years after Mussolini’s troops had arrived, Haile Selassie slipped across the border from Sudan back into his homeland. With the help of the British-led forces already confronting the Italians, the standard of the ‘Lion of Judah’ was raised once more. The old order resumed, the Emperor took possession of his palaces and the grinding, poverty-blighted life of millions of rural peasants remained unchanged. Under the 1967 Civil Code of Ethiopia, tenants had to pay 75 percent of their produce to their landlord, provide free firewood, free labour on the landlord’s farm and free work as servants, cooks and guards at the landlord’s home. Peasants faced constant fear of eviction. ‘There was a lot of corruption under Haile Selassie. He may have been an honest man but he was not a good leader,’ is Woldu’s summation of that time.

In 1969, with the Emperor’s 40th anniversary approaching, Woldu finally got his own farm. He had to apply to the local elders in Lahama for land and built his own sekela hut. He worked the land until his hands were rough and calloused. He harvested wild plants in the mountains and ploughed four different fields. Eventually, he managed to save up to buy a cow, goats and a donkey. Woldu explains that they are the basic domestic animals that every farmer needs to survive. After a year he had enough saved to buy another ox. ‘I was in my early 20s; I felt fit and healthy and was ready to be with a woman.’ He met Alemetsehay Berhe, who was working at a neighbouring farm.

‘She was a hard worker and extremely beautiful,’ Woldu recalls, smiling. ‘She was trusting, calm and quiet. We didn’t get married; there was no church service, nothing. We couldn’t afford any celebration. We relied on trust and our belief in God. She helped work the fields with me, weeding. It was hard and dirty work but Alemetsehay never complained. We were just pleased to get through each season with enough to eat.’

In 1973, though, famine devastated Wollo Province next door to Tigray. Estimates of those that died vary between 40,000 and 200,000. In Lahama’s winding river valley, Woldu and Alemetsehay managed to withstand the hardships brought on by the failed rains.

‘There was a bad drought, a terrible time, but it wasn’t everywhere,’ Woldu remembers. ‘If you had money there was still food in the markets. I was fine, I had made sure I had stored grain and had enough animals to get me through.’

The imperial government knew of the disaster unravelling in the north of Ethiopia but did little to help the peasants dying in their tens of thousands. To spare its reputation, Ethiopia also failed to seek international aid. British ITV correspondent Jonathan Dimbleby alerted the outside world to the catastrophe in Wollo. His raw documentary The Unknown Famine showed graphic scenes of the wasted cadavers of children who had starved to death. The impact in Britain was enormous, resulting in a public appeal that raised £6 million.

In early 1974 Haile Selassie’s reign began to unravel. Units of the armed forces mutinied and there were student demonstrations and strikes by teachers and taxi drivers. There were also suggestions that Haile Selassie, then in his early 80s, was losing his faculties. US lawyer and historian Dr John Spencer, who had advised Ethiopia on international legal matters for decades, visited the ageing monarch that year. He says: ‘It became apparent to me… that Haile Selassie was already retreating into a dream world. I withdrew with the piercing realization that the curtain of senility had dropped.’

In September 1974, a group of Marxist army officers became determined to overthrow the Emperor. Known as the Derg (meaning ‘committee’ in Ethiopia’s ancient language Ge’ez), the cadre of revolutionaries showed Dimbleby’s film, re-titled The Hidden Hunger, on Ethiopian national TV. Scenes of starving peasants were intercut with shots of Haile Selassie and his entourage sipping champagne, eating caviar and of the Emperor feeding meat to his dogs from a silver tray. It was the end for the Lion of Judah. Bundled into the back seat of a green Volkswagen Beetle in his palace driveway by rebel army officers, he was never seen alive in public again. The ‘King of Kings’ would die a prisoner on August 27, 1975, the cause, according to Derg officials, ‘respiratory failure’ following complications from a prostate operation. His followers, however, insist the 3,000-yearold Solomonic dynasty ended when the Emperor was smothered with a wet pillow. His remains were buried under a lavatory in the palace grounds, only to be discovered 16 years later.

The Derg was led by Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, who soon developed a bloodthirsty lust for absolute power. Former BBC news correspondent Michael Buerk, who would famously alert the world to Ethiopia’s 1984 famine, described him vividly as ‘an outstandingly evil bastard, even for a continent stiff with vicious dictators’.

High in Tigray’s secluded mountains the farming families of Lahama were anxious about what the fall of the Emperor would mean. ‘When the king of bees dies you worry what will happen to the rest of the hive,’ Woldu comments. ‘We worried after the Emperor went. We were scared there would be chaos and anarchy. We had no TV, radio or telephones. We had to rely on what people told us about the Derg. In the beginning Mengistu was a good man. He wanted equality and said he would cut out corruption. But then the terrible Red Terror came. Life was cheap. People were killed for no reason.’

The Derg revolution was followed by the mass murder of sympathizers of the previous regime and of university students. One hundred thousand people are said to have been butchered in the Red Terror. Their bodies were left littering the streets of Addis Ababa on the orders of Mengistu. To lie unburied in such a religious country is a terrible humiliation for the relatives of the dead. When family members came out at night to bury their loved ones, Derg soldiers were waiting for them. They hung the bereaved from lamp posts as a warning to others of what might come.

Mengistu attempted to force the teachings of Marx and Lenin, as well as the purges and forced resettlements of Soviet Communist leader Joseph Stalin, on an African subsistence-farming people whose first allegiance was to the extended family, then to the church or mosque. The Derg also nationalized banks, industry and rural land. Turmoil and bloodshed swept the country as revolution raged.

In the mountains of Tigray, a guerilla force, the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), was formed, advocating independence for the province. (Ethiopia’s present-day Prime Minister Meles Zenawi became its Chairman in 1985.) Bitter fighting between the TPLF and the government went on for years. Birhan’s face contorts at the mention of the Derg. The men with guns even came to the remote, wind-blown valleys around Lahama. ‘We tried to avoid the soldiers,’ Woldu recalls. ‘If the Derg soldiers wanted food we had to hand it over. It was a terrifying time.’

The rains had returned to the Highlands after the famine of 1973 and the harvests were plentiful in Lahama. Woldu and Alemetsehay decided to start a family and in about 1977 Lemlem, meaning ‘green’ or ‘fertile’, was born. Scratching his grizzled beard, Woldu says: ‘Alemetsehay prepared me a lunch of injera, then less than an hour later Lemlem was born. She was a lovely child, very sweet natured.’ Another girl, Azmera, followed in 1979 and two years later Alemetsehay was expecting again. This time with Birhan.

‘Lemlem and Azmera were very similar children,’ Woldu murmurs. ‘Both were quiet, placid and very contented. Birhan was different from her older sisters. She was the most quick witted. Unlike her sisters, Birhan never stopped talking.’

However, when she was just one year old, Birhan was struck down by a mystery fever. Woldu and Alemetsehay prayed to the Lord. When their daughter grew weak, her eyes swollen, the local traditional healers knew exactly what had to be done. Woldu took a razor blade and carefully made several vertical incisions on the arches of Birhan’s eyebrows. The ‘bad’ crimson blood flowed freely. Then using the blade again, he made another cut on her forehead, first a horizontal followed by a longer vertical incision that bisected the first. Slowly he intoned: ‘In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit’. The bad blood flowed again. Like many in Ethiopia, Birhan has the mark of Christ, a crucifix-shaped scar now on her forehead.

Christianity is fundamental to Birhan’s Highland people. The Ethiopian Orthodox religion arrived in these wild uplands some three centuries after Christ’s death when Rome was still officially pagan and much of northern Europe was still centuries away from converting. There are 30 Old Testament references to Ethiopia or ‘Cush’ as it was known to the Hebrews. Moses himself married an Ethiopian woman. In Genesis it is written that the Ghion River, believed to be the Blue Nile, which has its source in Lake Tana in the Highlands, ‘compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia’. The land is dotted with monasteries and holy relics. Should they stray from the path of righteousness, the God of the peasant farmers of Lahama is the vengeful and unforgiving Old Testament divinity of Abraham and Moses.

‘The Church has always been central to our lives,’ Birhan explains. ‘We follow the calendar by feast days. Every day of the month is dedicated to a particular saint. My father remembers our family history by the feast days.’

The Orthodox Church services are in Ge’ez, an ancient Semitic language related to Hebrew and Arabic, which is sub-Saharan Africa’s only ancient written language. It is the Latin of Africa, a liturgical language no longer spoken yet closely related to Ethiopia’s national language Amharic, as well as Tigrinya. The Ethiopian Church claims a fragment of the True Cross is buried under the Gishen Mariam monastery in the Wollo region. In the holy city of Lalibela a solid gold cross is said to have miraculously appeared as a mason chiselled the walls of one of the city’s famous rock-hewn churches. Legend has it that the holes in the stone surrounding Lalibela’s Bet Giyorgis Church are the hoof prints left by St George mounted on a horse. Birhan has never been to Lalibela but it is her long-held dream to make a pilgrimage there.

In Aksum, north of Mekele, Ethiopia’s greatest treasure, the biblical Ark of the Covenant, the wooden chest containing the stone tablets on which the Ten Commandments were inscribed, is said to lie in the treasury of the Church of Our Lady of Zion. However, only a single monk is allowed to see it. Replicas of the Ark, known as tabots, are kept in Lahama’s Kidane Mehret Church and in every church across Ethiopia.

Like most Ethiopians, Birhan is convinced the Ark lies in her homeland. Woldu shares her faith. ‘God has the power to make the sun rise every morning. Why shouldn’t the Ark be in Aksum?’ Many historians remain unconvinced, however.

Christianity arrived in Ethiopia in the fourth century spread by a Syrian monk called Frumentius. It is a story well known to Ethiopian schoolchildren. Captured as a boy when his ship docked on the Red Sea coast in what is now Eritrea, Frumentius was taken to the ancient city state of Aksum as a slave. The city in Tigray’s Highlands was one of the powers of the ancient world. At its height it ruled a kingdom from the Nile in Sudan, across the Red Sea to Yemen. The third-century writer Manni described Aksum as one of the four great kingdoms in the world along with Rome, China and Persia. Frumentius rose to a position of power and eventually converted Aksum’s King Ezana to Christianity, after which he became Ethiopia’s first bishop. Today, Ethiopians know Frumentius as Abba Selama, Kesaté Birhan in Amharic – which translates as ‘Father of Peace, Revealer of Light’.

Although Tigray is predominately Christian, Islam arrived in Ethiopia during the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad. Some of his most respected disciples found refuge in Aksum, leading Muhammad to command his followers to ‘leave the Abyssinians in peace’. Later the conquering armies of Islam swept through North Africa leaving Ethiopia cut off from the holy city of Jerusalem and the rest of Christendom. The word of the Prophet also spread down Africa’s east coast on the dhows (one- or two-masted, lateen-rigged ships) of Arab traders. To the west and south, the country was surrounded by deserts and fierce Lowland tribes. A marooned outpost of Christianity, it led to the belief that it was the kingdom of the mythical medieval priest–king Prester John, a realm whose wealth and vast armies would one day come to the aid of its Christian brothers in the north. Birhan explains that Ethiopian Christians and Muslims today live happily side by side. They respect each other’s faiths. Thus, Birhan’s early life in Lahama revolved around the Church and her parents’ little farm, a pre-industrial society that has changed little since the time of Christ.

‘I gradually built up my herds,’ her father says. ‘Having cattle means prestige and wealth – the same as having many children. From cows you get milk and butter and then money. Then life is good. God had looked kindly on me. My family were all healthy; my herds strong.’ At this point, Woldu pauses, remaining quiet for what seemed an age. The only sound was the twitter of weaver birds in a nearby acacia tree. His face suddenly contorts; his brown eyes far away as if seeing another landscape. ‘Then our world turned black,’ he murmurs. ‘As pitch black as the darkest night.’