First published in Amharic in 1983, this shocking story about the military junta that governed Ethiopia in the 70s and 80s was banned and led to the author’s disappearance

This impressive novel, justifiably a modern classic in Ethiopia, was published in the Amharic language in 1983 but has only now been translated into English. The central character, Tsegaye, is a useful idiot (“wagging his tail for the big bosses”) in the military junta that ruled Ethiopia in the 1970s and 80s. The story is set in 1982, when the government launched the Red Star campaign, aimed at crushing the independence movement in Eritrea in the north of the country – or as one leader puts it to Tsegaye, “fighting to cement the survival of a proud and respected socialist Ethiopia”.

Tsegaye works as a film-maker in the “political initiatives office”, or propaganda department, so his main action in the conflict is filming in the Eritrean city of Asmara to “incite the public, make them angry … create in their psyche a state of action, not peace”. But he gets bogged down in worrying about the quality of his cameras and technical aspects of his videos, instead of getting on with the job.