Wore Negari: A Memoir of an Ethiopian Youth in the Turbulent '70s

"Wore Negari is the story of Mohamed Yimam and his friends in times of major social and political upheaval. Throughout the pages of the book, Mohamed narrates the struggle within himself to be a revolutionary like his peers. Sucked into a revolutionary current that he could not withstand, Mohamed flows with events of the seventies to a near disastrous end. In Wore Negari, he looks back and confronts his actions with unflinching honesty. This is a story of brave but misguided youth in their revolutionary fervor. Above all, it is a human story of a family in distress, a country in turmoil, an individual at war within himself, and young people with extraordinary courage who threw everything they had to the cause they believed in.

Wore Negari is also a discourse on the major events of the seventies, and the issues that pitted the left against the left, and the civil war that consumed them all. It is a story of survival against all odds and the responsibility the survivor assumes to tell the story to a future generation. Wore Negari attempts to give voice to and tell the stories of youth whose individual bravery and integrity would not otherwise be known by a people for whose “cause” they shed their blood.



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