Richard Pankhurst (1927–2017)

A surprisingly fascinating memoir. Sylvia Pankhurst, the mother of Richard – and a famous campaigner for votes for women – opposed the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. She got to know the Emperor in exile and started a journal on Ethiopia. In 1956, she sold her London house and moved to Addis Ababa, at the invitation of the Emperor. Her son, an academic expert on the Irish pre-Marxist writer William Thompson, accompanied her, with Rita Eldon (an Oxford MA) whom he shortly married. Richard Pankhurst, who died in 2017 in Addis Ababa, has been described as “arguably the most prolific scholar in the field of Ethiopian studies”. Rita died – also in Addis Ababa, where they had lived all their lives (apart from 11 years during the Revolution), in 2019. She was also a noted Ethiopianist. This book is about their early years, up to Sylvia’s death in 1960 and the start of the Organisation for African Unity. It is about the people they met and knew, the times and the country. The Pankhursts were strongly anti-colonialist. But there is no discussion of democracy in the book, although elections for the Chamber of Deputies in 1957 are mentioned.… (more)