The haunting essence of Nega Mezlekia’s powerful memoir is captured in his opening lines: “I was born in the year of the paradox, in the labyrinthine city of Jijiga. After a three-year absence, the rains had come, swelling the rivers and streams…. Queen Menen, wife of King Haile Selassie, lay dying. She was as reluctant to leave this world as I was to leave the womb.”

Pregnant with premonition of the horrors to come, Mezlekia’s beginning gives birth to an Ethiopian childhood, providing us with a potent metaphor for Africa and the loss of innocence.

Set in the 1970s and 1980s, The Hyena’s Belly is reminiscent of Ben Okri’s The Famished Road: like Okri, Mezlekia evokes the startlingly fertile landscapes of a child’s imagination. As Mezlekia lurches towards the uncertainty of adolescence, he fills the prosaic narrative with the evolution of Africa’s 1,000-year history.

In Mezlekia’s own history, his mother is killed by snipers, his father is executed, and he is imprisoned and tortured. At the age of 18, he is forced to join a guerrilla army in the civil war that breaks out following Selassie’s death in 1975. When Mezlekia leaves Ethiopia in 1983, he has little more than the clothes he is wearing. He makes his way to Canada via the Netherlands, and currently lives in Toronto.

The sad backdrop to this engaging memoir is how a cultured, ancient, and biblical civilization, an intricate society of religious devotion, is destroyed by a military junta that unleashes the Red Terror (1977-1991) killing 100,000 young Ethiopians. As my father Ken Saro-Wiwa wrote, “Africa kills her suns, that’s why she is known as the dark continent.”