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In 1974, when the Derg junta staged a military coup in Ethiopia, they imprisoned some 200 members of the imperial family in the cellars of the Menelik Palace,
Maaza Mengiste
I have a hazy childhood memory of soldiers breaking into our house. They had come to question my grandfather, who they believed was hiding someone they wanted to arrest. It was not long after the start of the 1974 revolution in Ethiopia that would depose Emperor Haile Selassie and install a military junta led by Mengistu Haile Mariam. The new regime, which called itself the Derg, was hunting down dissidents deemed ‘enemies of the state’. There were nightly gun battles near our home in Addis Ababa between rebel groups and government forces.
I was standing next to my grandfather in the dining area when the door burst open and three soldiers forced their way in. I remember one of them distinctly. He was slender-faced and young, his eyes so wild that he, too, might have been scared. My mind has superimposed his face on the other two men, so that when the memory arises, as it often does, the soldiers are identical triplets screaming at us in unison. My grandmother sho