Aba Yitades, the local priest, takes this challenge very personally. The father of three daughters, he is always alert to the new temptations they face – and all the more so when the arrival of a family of American missionaries threatens to put an end to the community’s most treasured traditions.
Steeped in the rich and unique culture of the Ethiopian highlands, this story of a village’s reluctant but inevitable modernization – and one woman’s tragic downfall – is told with Nega Mezlekia’s customary wit and charm.

“The publicity bumph for Ethiopian-born Nega Mezlekia’s second novel places him in the company of Gabriel García Márquez and Ben Okri, among others. I would add one more: Rohinton Mistry. Like Mistry, Mezlekia writes in an amused but compassionate voice about characters standing at cultural crossroads, trying to make sense of change.

The Yitades family sits at the heart of the tiny agrarian village of Mechara. Aba Yitades is the parish priest. This is a Christian community, part of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. One of the novel’s strengths comes from the author’s ability to show how Christianity mingles with rural Ethiopian culture – how place mediates faith, or creates particular religious practice. (This, too, echoes Mistry.)”
- Quill & Quire

“You don’t need to know that the years encountered in The Unfortunate Marriage of Azeb Yitades — beginning in 1961 and concluding in the 1990s — are among the most important in Ethiopia’s modern history. It’s not essential to understand that between the opening pages of Nega Mezlekia’s second novel and its conclusion, Ethiopia went through radical changes, including a revolution that occurred in 1974 that left the beleaguered country no better off than it had been before. You don’t need to understand the political ramifications of anything you come across in this book, nor do you need to grasp the manipulations that were occurring in the country that makes up most of the horn of Africa and that is surrounded by Eritrea, Djibouti, Kenya, Somalia and Sudan.
You don’t need to know because, like the very best of stories, The Unfortunate Marriage of Azeb Yitades works softly and on its own merits without any of the wider backstory. Readers with a working knowledge of modern African history will come away from The Unfortunate Marriage of Azeb Yitades with a different, perhaps fuller, understanding. But even without any of that, it’s a starkly human tale that works on many levels and would be equally compelling against many backdrops.
… Mezlekia’s style is gentle, even charming. He seems to tell his tale starkly, and without embellishment — almost like a village storyteller — but this simplicity is deceptive. There is more going on here — always — than what at first meets the eye.
… Mezlekia tells his story with wit and insight, he engages deeply and leaves you feeling richer for the experience. It’s the story of a country and a young woman coming painfully to adulthood: the story of modern Ethiopia and, somehow, the universal story of childhood lost that we’d recognize no matter where it was set.”
- January magazine

“I love Nega Mezlekia’s THE GOD WHO BEGAT A JACKAL. It is wonderful how he conveys such generosity of spirit with his gorgeous, lush storytelling.”
- LORENE CARY, author of Black Ice and Pride

“The God Who Begat a Jackal is everything a novel should be. It delivers an entire world – a profound, comical, moving and memorable one. The moral and social truths of this novel – subtly and brilliantly evoked – are reminiscent of the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Nega Mezlekia is a writer with extraordinary vision.”
- MARGARET CEZAIR-THOMPSON, author of The True History of Paradise

“Mezlekia portrays a world where magic and natural wonders are indistinguishable, where children walk through walls until they are taught that it is inappropriate to do so, where rulers and slaves are equally subject to the laws of nature and the humors of man. The God Who Begat a Jackal is a love story, a historical document, an anthropological exploration of the power of myth, and a warning by example of what might await a world that ignores the foreshadowing of religious war.”
- Therese Eiben, POETS & WRITERS

“Mezlekia has done it again. Spare yet lush, The God Who Begat a Jackal recreates a world that evokes the haunted but enchanting paradox that is East Africa. The envy is that his narrative voice rings so true – unique but universal and yet authentic to a particular time and place.”
- KEN WIWA, author of In the Shadow of a Saint

“The folly and brutality in this tale of star-crossed lovers and the brittle spoils of war resonate very clearly in our own time, and that’s no accident … Demons lurk and human flesh turns clear as glass in this long song of a novel. Its characters dwell in a world of magic and murder, potions and poison, riddles and divinations, and its fairy-tale quality suffuses not only the plot twists – duels, invisible ink, wild beasts that kowtow to our heroine – but also the language. English might not be the author’s mother tongue, but music lilts through … . That Mezlekia can sustain thrill, spell and doom for so long is a testament to his storytelling skill. … Mezlekia never descends to the heavy-handed lessons and paint-by-numbers description that other, more popular authors have done when attempting to immerse a largely white readership into another culture. He never stops his plot for blow-by-blow accounts of meals, costumes or rites, nor does he bother to translate each foreign word. We are expected simply to imagine. This respect for his readers’ intelligence creates a rare rapport, liberating Mezlekia’s scenery to unspool, on its own, in its own time, in our minds.”
- THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

“This is an Africa rarely glimpsed: not quite colonial and not yet modern. Mezlekia’s Abyssinia is both feudal and ancient, pagan and biblical, and it often bears uncomfortable parallels to our own time. … tantalizing … we’re reminded, in Mezlekia’s seductive prose, of Herodotus and his credulity-teasing sagas of love, bloodlines and power. THE GOD WHO BEGAT A JACKAL is a tall tale imbued with documentary detail and the weight of history, and its story lines are as ancient as they are timeless.”
- THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK REVIEW

“With a dose of magic realism that rivals his South American colleagues, Nega Mezlekia conjures in his debut novel an epic fairy tale set in pre-colonial Africa. This fable, more akin to Grimm than Mother Goose, is rife with erotic longing, political conspiracies, religious tyranny and unbridled sorcery. … Frequent, sprightly descriptions prove Mezlekia’s agility. The “twins were so emaciated that they cast no shadows,” he writes of two brothers, and the characterization is a fresh and simple delight. Such unassuming treats lighten the pall cast by the doom and foreboding that haunts this tale. Diviners and prophets are rampant in Mezlekia’s hands. And the legendary dimension, from the origins of the Mawu-Lisa religion to how to combat the ergums, or spirits, who exist between the dead and the living – though anchored in traditional folklore and historic fact – bestow an unbridled enchantment. … A beguiling and colorful parable whose end, though unhappy, is nevertheless is worth reaching.”
- HARTFORD COURANT

“Replete with the retelling of old legends and acts of magic realism. Spirits appear in whirls of dust, creatures like the Abettors decide wars, and magical potions revive the dying. … Luminously evok[es] a country where drought is endemic, the landscape austere, and food in short supply.”
- KIRKUS

“Mezlekia takes the elements of the simplest of fairy stories – forbidden love, an heiress and a storytelling slave – and embroiders them lushly. His heiress is the daughter of an African count, ruined at the age of 13 by the emperor’s lust, her skin turned transparent with shame until she is saved by the love of a court entertainer who can bring her fables, poems, history. But her world is threatened by an outburst of egalitarian religion and the Inquisition that intends to defeat it, led by a hunch-backed monk with a cartoon-book quality and a silver nose. … Splendidly exotic, set in a world of magic and fetish where cheetahs can sing and people rush away so fast they leave their shadows behind. Where enchanters grow fingernails at a foot a minute and a duke rides a three-legged zebra.”
- NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

“December isn’t usually a wonderland for new books to be released, but there are late blooms worth harvesting. For a time, I had an editor who exhorted his writers to deliver articles brimming with “sweep and majesty.” I thought of him recently, as I strayed into the terra-cotta sunlight of Nega Mezlekia’s first novel, The God Who Begat a Jackal. Set in precolonial Ethiopia, it is an epic love story between a slave and the daughter of a feudal lord [whose] greatest fear is her father’s wrath. No one can escape the fates foretold by the gods, the castes assigned in 18th century society or the ravages of Ethiopia’s religious and ethnic conflicts. Mezlekia, who left Ethiopia in 1983 and now lives in Toronto, elevates his tale with generous servings of history, metaphor and magical realism. Beguiling and musical, his narrator’s voice stirs the veils of the story to comment on Ethiopia’s history of slavery and treatment of women of noble and peasant birth. I felt transported to an unfamiliar, magical place.”
- THE BALTIMORE SUN

“The language is entrancing … Mezlekia’s true achievement is in depicting a pre-scientific age, where diviners are called to solve human problems and animal sacrifices are the order of the day, all the while retaining some relevance to our modern age. … The God Who Begat a Jackal brings the reader face to face with personal treachery, backstabbing and pitched battles.”
- THE CALGARY HERALD

“Can you imagine men so thin from hunger they cast no shadows? Or the skin of an anguished woman turning glassy, allowing everyone to witness the underlying organs and veins of her body as she exposes her grieving heart to the world? Nega Mezlekia can … . Merging his natural yarn-spinning skills with the story-telling gusto of The Arabian Nights and the African folk narrative, Mezlekia also demonstrates an obvious debt to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Colombian novelist whose One Hundred Years of Solitude brought the magic-realist style of writing into full blossom 34 years ago. … The story of Aster and Gudu is as old as Ethiopia, one of the most ancient sites of human habitation in the world. … There’s food for many books in that outlandish, tortured country at the crossroads of several civilizations. Fortunately, it is also a land of laughter and tall tales, which Mezlekia innovatively blends with romance and post-modern intelligence into a swirling broth as dark and mysterious as the ergum, the devil-men who exist between the realms of the real and the unreal. … The God Who Begat a Jackal … weaves a spell-binding web of fabulous dreams and laughter, propelled by diamond-sharp images and a liberal sprinkling of witty, unpretentious remarks … [It] is a delight so rich with laughter and jeweled moments of beauty that its few, dusty flaws recede into the dark and magical Ethiopian night.”
- THE VANCOUVER SUN

“[A] POWERFUL TALE OF WAR, LOVE, HATE, FAITH AND BETRAYAL … As we learned to our sorrow in September, few of us pay attention to troubles in distant mysterious regions until they explode in our face. The challenge for any author bent on penetrating our stupor beforehand is to snap us awake and keep our eyes propped open, despite the depressing nature of the tales. … Think of any long-standing world conflict and this simple, but woeful story can be laid over it like a template. Mezlekia is only excavating and reconstructing war’s foundations. He starts with excessive pride and greed. He shows how it escalates with small inhumanities and treachery. How it bloats when self-serving zealots piggyback along. And how it goes on inexhaustibly because of appalling wounds, diabolical retaliations and the absence of sensible people willing to call ‘halt.’
Characters in The God Who Begat a Jackal are at once fancifully unique and eerily familiar. … Simmering truths about warfare are made more potent with dashes of magic realism. … In the way he focuses his theme, yet spins a complex tale, in the way he draws clear parallels with modern horrors, MEZLEKIA HAS WRITTEN AN EPIC THAT RUMBLES WITH THE STRENGTH OF SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA. … This isn’t just a story about war, it’s a story about wars that we are witnessing in our lifetime, whether we are paying them heed or not.”
- THE EDMONTON JOURNAL

“CAPTIVATING … a book rich in magic realism which blends the history of pre-colonial Africa with mystical elements found in mythology and folklore passed down through generations. … Mezlekia has spun a tale of love against a backdrop of a war of religions in 18th century Ethiopia … If it’s true that an artist’s inner landscape is painted with the colour of home, and serenaded by the sights and sounds of years spent there, then Nega Mezlekia will be reciting tales of Africa for many years to come.”
- OTTAWA CITIZEN

“Due to his personal history, Mezlekia is uniquely placed to bring us an insider’s account of war. His experiences in Ethiopia, so different from those of most North Americans, have been transposed in this novel into something deeply and beautifully intelligible…A point of view that rewards readers with a world both startling and familiar, gentle and ferocious, revolutionary and resigned, and completely and utterly real.”
- THE SEATTLE TIMES

“Mezlekia transports readers to 18th-century Ethiopia, then called Abyssinia, where he unfolds a fable-like romance between a nobleman’s daughter and his slave…Rich storytelling instincts and sparkling prose.”
- WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD

“A magnificent joining of the oral tradition of storytelling and inquisitive determination of a historian….THE GOD WHO BEGAT A JACKAL is an all-encompassing, enriching tale that I thoroughly enjoyed and considered one of the best books of the New Year.”
- AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE BOOK CLUB (March Book of the Month)

“THE GOD WHO BEGAT A JACKAL is no simple fairy tale. Mezlekia delivers a serious narrative, rewarding those who abandon themselves to the world he creates with a startlingly sharper insight into their own.”
- BLACK ISSUES BOOK REVIEW

“Mezlekia reinvigorates the classic themes of inequality, oppression, and forbidden love by placing them in the context of feudal Ethiopia…in today’s post-Sept. 11 world, [it] reminds us of the role of religious fundamentalism in propping up exploitative governments.”
- THE ANNISTON STAR

“THE GOD WHO BEGAT A JACKAL is ostensibly set in 18th century Ethiopia, but it’s really a marvelous fantasy world where gods are real and evil shape-changing spirits called ‘ergum’ stalk the countryside.”
- THE CAPITAL TIMES, Madison, WI

“[An] imaginative quasi-historical novel….Mezlekia offers great insight…into the historical sources of contemporary Ethiopian society, as well as an entrée into early modern Ethiopia, a time and a place still unknown to most Western readers.”
- LIBRARY JOURNAL (Best Books of 2001 Selection)

“Readers will be drawn onward by an inviting fragrance of romance and mystery.”
- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

WINNER OF THE GOVERNOR GENERAL’S AWARD FOR NON-FICTION SHORTLISTED FOR THE TRILLIUM AWARD

“A lively cast of characters … worthy of Gabriel Garcia Marquez … By skillfully interleaving personal history, politics and Amhara fables, Mezlekia has created a remarkable account of what it takes … to survive the complete shattering of civil society. … Mezlekia has summoned, with imaginative directness and impressive tonal range, a world of uncertainty in which politics is never just background but permeates ordinary life – indeed, prevents it from ever being ordinary. He has produced the most riveting book about Ethiopia since Ryszard Kapuscinski’s literary allegory “The Emperor” and the most distinguished African literary memoir since Soyinka’s “Ake” appeared 20 years ago.”
- THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

“An affecting, transporting memoir of growing up fast during the grim years following the overthrow of Haile Selassie in Ethiopia. … Mezlekia has a born storyteller’s knack for pacing, and in his musical voice he manages to convey the helter-skelter of his existence, the turmoil and carnage, without simply turning the narrative into a bloodbath. But spilled blood there definitely was … Throughout the narrative the author includes brief histories, traditional stories, tales of hunger, pieces of gossip, and landscapes, allowing for a real picture show in the mind’s eye that coalesces finally into a life. … A story of high drama told with aplomb, a story of the kind that allows readers to put their woes into perspective.”
- KIRKUS (Starred)

“This lyrical memoir of an Ethiopian childhood echoes both the myth and the violence of the hyena. … [Mezlekia] treats the chaos and famine that enveloped his country with seriousness and style … and even while recounting famine and war, he never loses the wit that no doubt helped him to survive some of the worst humanity has to offer. … This lovely and terrible memoir will undoubtedly be well reviewed and thus reach readers interested not only in the fate of Africa but also in a lyrical account of a foreign childhood.”
- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

“It’s not just a remarkable story – it’s a remarkable story well told. With a novelist’s understanding of pacing and an enviable, arresting narrative voice, he recounts in the same measured tone boyhood pranks …and junta atrocities…. It’s the voice of Hans Christian Andersen or the Brothers Grimm, a voice that gently but not reluctantly informs the reader that good exists side by side with evil in this world and probably in the next, and that only a naïf (or maybe an American) would think otherwise.”
- Therese Eiben, POETS & WRITERS

“As much political history as personal memoir…well worth reading. Mezlekia is an articulate and affecting witness to an African tragedy that shows no signs as ending.”
- THE BOSTON GLOBE

“Nega Mezlekia’s riveting Notes from the Hyena’s Belly begins with a sentence both lyrically arresting and factually intriguing…and continues in a voice that is personal and political … Mezlekia’s eventual escape from a country of startling extremes – beautifully barren landscapes, droughts, floods, medicine men, and military juntas – [is] brought to bittersweet life by this exceptional writer.
- ELLE

“A stunning depiction of Ethiopia’s current culture and conflict.”
- BOOKLIST

“When I read his publisher’s accompanying note – before I had cracked the book open – and saw that the author’s memoir ‘deftly blends fact with fable, and parable with social history,’ my heart sank. A regime as terrible as Mengistu’s demands, I thought, dispassionate witness, not fable; sober testimony, not parable. How could you make things up more terrible than Mengistu’s use of mass starvation as apolitical technique, more appalling than the regime’s jocular prisons, where the death squads played I-see-you-I-see-you-not games with the terrified teenagers they had been sent to mutilate and kill? How could you be a fabulist when your mother was killed by a Somali rebel sniper’s stray bullet, your father assassinated, yourself jailed and tortured, forced into a guerrilla army? But I confess with relief that I was wrong. Mezlekia brings it off. The mix of humour, anecdote, parable and folk tale, blended with a clear-eyed view of what was happening around him, makes the regime more terrible, not less.”
- MARQ DE VILLIERS, in THE GLOBE AND MAIL

“Topical, moving, and fascinating, Nega Mezlekia concentrates his mind on his nation’s history as he tells his own tale in prose imbued with a sense of commitment to truth. It is the best memoir by an Ethiopian that I’ve ever read.”
- NARUDDIN FARAH, author of Maps and Secrets

“A masterful narrative that steeps the reader in Ethiopian folklore, myth, theology, and philosophy, blurring the boundaries between the spiritual and material worlds. Rich in wisdom, humor, and poetry, this is not simply the story of a boy coming of age, it is a portrait of a nation and its people.”
- GEORGE MAKANA CLARK, author of The Small Bees’ Honey

“The haunting essence of Nega Mezlekia’s powerful memoir is captured in his opening lines … 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. … 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. … 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 … As my father Ken Saro-Wiwa wrote, ‘Africa kills her suns, that’s why she is known as the dark continent.’”
- KEN WIWA, author of The Shadow of a Saint, in QUILL & QUIRE

“…[a] beautifully written and harrowing memoir…Mezlekia’s wry wit and sense of humour and irony light up the cloudy, stormy pages.”
- GAZETTE (Montreal)

“As writers from Jonathan Swift to Tennessee Williams have made clear, and as Job might have if he’d had time to write his own Book, the worse matters get, the funnier they can be made. This reliable literary theorem accounts for most of the laughs – and there are a lot of them – on Toronto writer Nega Mezlekia’s Notes from the Hyena’s Belly. The book is a memoir of his harried childhood in Ethiopia — almost equal parts wonder and humiliation – as well as of events following the 1974 overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie – almost wholly horrific.”
- NATIONAL POST

“Beautifully written and harrowing … Save in its most heart-stopping moments, Mezlekia’s wry wit and sense of humour light up the cloudy, stormy pages.”
- CALGARY HERALD

“Notes from the Hyena’s Belly has been compared to Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, and even if Ireland seems pretty far removed from Ethiopia, the comparison is a good one. Despite several engineering degrees … Mezlekia is a poet whose simple lyrical style is hypnotic. Like McCourt, Mezlekia has a storyteller’s affection for the worst characters: dilettante conmen, religious fanatics, a hateful legless elementary school teacher who drags himself across the ground in a flour sack. Where the two books are most similar is in the bitter comedy created out of the bleakest circumstances.”
- MONTREAL MIRROR

“There is much in Notes from the Hyena’s Belly … that is reminiscent of the writings of Ben Okri and Gabriel Garcia Marquez … Mezlekia brings together Ethiopian history and his own testimony in prose that burns brightly, sometimes with wry humour, sometimes with fierce irony. Even in the harshest scenes there are passages of pure poetry. . . no matter where Mezlekia chose to stop, you’d want more.”
- THE TORONTO STAR

“Mezlekia has forged an absorbing and often delightful account of the first decades of his life. …It’s well worth the read.”
- EDMONTON JOURNAL

“Hauntingly lyrical…Ingeniously blending Ethiopian history and folklore in a narrative sparkling with wit … Mezlekia crafts a world elegant in its aridity, extreme in its absurdity, and vast in its ironies. … a vital political and social commentary about the state of affairs in Ethiopia.”
- AFRICA SUN TIMES

“A gorgeous narrative of growing up amid stunning brutality and starvation. … However, instead of bewailing and lecturing, he treats his life, his country and his eventual survival with zest, spinning tall tales and incidents of torture and starvation into one miraculous web. Between moments of murder, superstition and famine he often finds the joke – the real absurdity that lurks behind life.”
- THE VANCOUVER SUN

“A glimpse into Hell. By some feat of alchemy, Mezlekia has transformed the nightmare that was his life in Ethiopia into a gripping story. Mandatory reading for anyone trying to understand Africa today.”
- ERIC McCORMACK, author of First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women

“Never mind a magical childhood, lovingly rendered; never mind a harrowing adolescence, told with dignity and quiet sorrow. What makes this memoir such a delight is the wonderment at crazy life and crazier fate, that informs every page.”
- CHARLES FORAN

“A marvellous book that sparkles with the innocence of youth while burning with the terror of an embattled and corrupt society. Nega Mezlekia gives us a glimpse of a country in turmoil, caught between its murderous history and the cynical intervention of superpowers, yet I often found myself smiling at the myths that sustained his family and laughing out loud at his descriptions of childish mischief. It’s a great read.”
- CHARLOTTE GRAY, author of Sisters in the Wilderness

“Fascinating … a delightful story at first, rather Frank McCourtish in that we are spared the suffering of the child, which is actually shocking and indefensible, in favour of the charm of village life. This provides a stunning contrast to the horror that follows. It deserves to be widely read.”
- SHARON BUTALA

“…a bittersweet but graceful evocation of youth in a world of turmoil and horror. This tale of an Ethiopian childhood is an elegant mix of the political and cultural, of innocence and experience. Writing with wry humour but without rancour, Mezlekia addresses the shared experiences and hopes of many Canadians.”
- GOVERNOR GENERAL’S AWARD JURY

“[Notes from the Hyena’s Belly] makes you weep and giggle simultaneously. . .”
- NOW Magazine (Toronto)