In this acclaimed memoir, Mezlekia recalls his boyhood in the arid city of Jijiga, Ethiopia, and his journey to manhood during the 1970s and 1980s. He traces his personal evolution from child to soldier--forced at the age of eighteen to join a guerrilla army. And he describes the hardships that consumed Ethiopia after the fall of Emperor Haile Selassie and the rise to power of the communist junta, in whose terror thousands of Ethiopians died. Part autobiography and part social history, Notes from the Hyena's Belly offers an unforgettable portrait of Ethiopia, and of Africa, during the defining and turbulent years of the last century.

The author recalls his childhood in Ethiopia interspersed with information about the customs and everyday life in his hometown of Jijiga.

Contains primary source material.

In this powerful memoir, Nega Mezlekia recalls in vivid detail his boyhood in the arid city of Jijiga, Ethiopia, and his coming of age in the 1970s and 1980s, his country's most turbulent period. In a narrative that sparkles with wit, Mezlekia traces his own personal journey from boy to man. We meet Wondwossen, his best friend and collaborator in mischief; Mr. Alula, their embattled teacher; Mr.Tadesse, full-time school director and part-time poacher; Mustafa, the unconventional Muslim boarder; Mrs. Yetaferu, the Orthodox Christian boarder who manages to find a saint to worship each day of the year and thus successfully avoids gainful employment; and Yeneta, the local priest who is privy to the languages of heaven and hell. Mezlekia describes the difficulties that consumed Ethiopia after the fall of Emperor Haile Selassie and the rise to power of the communist Junta whose merciless Red Terror slaughtered 100,000 Ethiopian youths. Though Mezlekia was forced, at the tender age of eighteen, to join a guerrilla army, and had several brushes with death at the hands of reactionary exorcists, he somehow escaped the bloodbath. Notes from the Hyena's Belly teems with the smells, sights, and sounds of life in the Horn of Africa - of its violent, ingenious humans and its underworld of screeching monkeys, lions and hyenas. Part autobiography, part social history, and wholly captivating, this is an unforgettable portrait of a world where the boundaries of credulity are challenged daily. Out of this rich, sundrenched land where modern corruption rides ancient custom like a hungry bird of prey, Mezlekia crafts a world elegant in its aridity, extreme in its absurdity, and vast in its ironies.

A Library Journal Best Book Nega Mezlekia's memoir Notes from the Hyena's Belly was described in the New York Times Book Review as "the most riveting book about Ethiopia since Ryszard Kapuscinski's literary allegory The Emperor and the most distinguished African literary memoir since Soyinka's Aké appeared 20 years ago." Mezlekia now offers a first novel steeped in African folklore and teeming with the class, ethnic and religious struggles of pre-colonial Africa. In The God Who Begat a Jackal, the 17th-century feudal system, vassal uprisings, religious mythology, and the Crusades are intertwined with the love between Aster, the daughter of a feudal lord, and Gudu, the court jester and family slave. Aster and Gudu's relationship is the ultimate taboo, but supernatural elements presage a destiny more powerful than the rule of man. With Mezlekia's enchanting storytelling and ironic humor, readers glimpse African deities that have long since weathered away and the social cleavages that have endured through time.

"An important novel, rich in compassion for its anguished characters." —The New York Times Book Review This memorable, heartbreaking story opens in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 1974, on the eve of a revolution. Yonas kneels in his mother’s prayer room, pleading to his god for an end to the violence that has wracked his family and country. His father, Hailu, a prominent doctor, has been ordered to report to jail after helping a victim of state-sanctioned torture to die. And Dawit, Hailu’s youngest son, has joined an underground resistance movement—a choice that will lead to more upheaval and bloodshed across a ravaged Ethiopia. Beneath the Lion’s Gaze tells a gripping story of family, of the bonds of love and friendship set in a time and place that has rarely been explored in fiction. It is a story about the lengths human beings will go in pursuit of freedom and the human price of a national revolution. Emotionally gripping, poetic, and indelibly tragic, Beneath The Lion’s Gaze is a transcendent and powerful debut.

Biologists studying large carnivores in wild places usually do so from a distance, using telemetry and noninvasive methods of data collection. So what happens when an anthropologist studies a clan of spotted hyenas, Africa’s second-largest carnivores, up close—and in a city of a hundred thousand inhabitants? In Among the Bone Eaters, Marcus Baynes-Rock takes us to the ancient city of Harar in Ethiopia, where the gey waraba (hyenas of the city) are welcome in the streets and appreciated by the locals for the protection they provide from harmful spirits and dangerous “mountain” hyenas. They’ve even become a local tourist attraction. At the start of his research in Harar, Baynes-Rock contended with difficult conditions, stone-throwing children, intransigent bureaucracy, and wary hyena subjects intent on avoiding people. After months of frustration, three young hyenas drew him into the hidden world of the Sofi clan. He discovered the elements of a hyena’s life, from the delectability of dead livestock and the nuisance of dogs to the unbounded thrill of hyena chase-play under the light of a full moon. Baynes-Rock’s personal relations with the hyenas from the Sofi clan expand the conceptual boundaries of human-animal relations. This is multispecies ethnography that reveals its messy, intersubjective, dangerously transformative potential.