The Book Liberator
Liberating Books
In 1984 Western reporters began to hear of a devastating famine that had struck Ethiopia. BBC reporting described the terrible situation as "biblical", and British people were especially affected by a report from Michael Buerk. |
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Perhaps the most famous initiative to address the famine was that driven by pop-star Bob Geldoff, in the form of "Band Aid": |
Despite its good-will, the Band Aid initiative promoted a peculiarly distorted image of Ethiopia. It's number one hit, recorded in just one day on 25th November, suggested that Ethiopians did not know when Christmas fell in the calendar. However, Christianity was taken up in Ethiopia before it was officially sanctioned in the Roman Empire! Ras Seymour Mclean determined to do something about this quite colonial imagery, and to present a different argument as to why Britain held a moral debt to Ethiopia. Here is his exclusive account: