Oromay by Baalu Girma. Soho Press, 416 pages. 2025.
The first thing you should know about Oromay is that its author was “suspected” to have been assassinated for writing it. On Valentine’s Day 1984, months after its publication, the Ethiopian writer and journalist Baalu Girma departed his home in Addis Ababa to meet friends in a nearby town and never showed up. His car was later found on the side of a road, but Girma was nowhere to be found. To this day, his whereabouts are unknown.
The assumed culprits of Girma’s presumed death were the Derg, the military dictatorship that ruled Ethiopia from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s. Their motivation was likely retribution; Oromay is an unflattering portrayal of the Derg’s failed Red Star Campaign against Eritrean secessionists and its narrator’s disillusionment. Tsegaye Hailemaryam is the (fictional) secretary of the ministry of information, a broadcast journalist-cum-propaganda czar and, as a TV personality, the closest thing the dictatorship has to a friendly face. But Girma happened to be the Derg’s actual secretary of the ministry of information. This is the second thing you should know: the novel is a roman à clef.
Oromay might be one the most audacious novels ever written: Girma exposed the regime’s vulnerability while serving as its mouthpiece, the Ethiopian Deep Throat with an afterlife as complicated as Elvis. Such is the reverence for him in his home country, one rumor floated that Girma was still alive in a monastery on the shores of Lake Tana in Central Ethiopia.
The bio that can be pieced together from the meager English-language articles and biographical information on Baalu Girma reveals a talented man with a reckless tongue.
Outside of Ethiopia, Oromay has a small audience but, until now, no translation. There has been at least one attempt to manipulate their curiosity through black market (likely AI-assisted) English-language renderings, but Oromay’s first human translators, David DeGusta and Mesfin Felleke Yirgu, reveal a late-breaking literary classic in the repertory tradition of Penguin or New York Review Books. This edition is the culmination of a long-running effort by Girma’s estate and the Michigan-based Baalu Girma Foundation to see an approved and official English publication, with Soho Press (noted publisher of contemporary literary fiction, mysteries, and young adult) joining the game of literary revivalism.
Soho deserves massive props for revitalizing a classic from the Global South despite some rookie clumsiness in its production: the rudimentary jacket, more appropriate for an African highland helicopter tour brochure, doesn’t do much to convey Oromay’s nuanced style; the absence of a prefatory note misses the opportunity to introduce a foreign writer to a casual audience, and you wouldn’t know from the publisher’s description that this antiwar novel was penned by top official in a military dictatorship. What information exits about Girma online amounts to a smattering of blog posts, archived articles, and a serviceable Wikipedia entry. The bio that can be pieced together from the meager English-language articles and biographical information reveals a talented man with a reckless tongue.
Born in 1939 during the Italian occupation to an Indian father and Ethiopian mother whose marriage soon collapsed, Girma attended boarding school in Addis Ababa, where he placed second in a poetry contest and later organized a school-wide demonstration against its administration. As a university journalist, he penned criticisms of Emperor Haile Selassie’s administration and the Ethiopian parliament before accepting a scholarship to study at Michigan State University’s journalism school in 1961. The time abroad seemed to effect in Girma a reformation, when he returned to Ethiopia two years later, Girma became a favorite for promotions within the ministry of information. Before Girma turned thirty, he’d become editor in chief of a couple of prominent weeklies. But he’d never really grown out of his firebrand tendencies and was once reprimanded with suspension and a pay cut for penning a controversial editorial. Not long after, he published his first novel.
Beyond the Horizon (1970) tells the story of two characters trying to find common ground between them as their country falls into pandemonium. Perhaps it touched a nerve among Ethiopia’s diverse readership. His sophomore novel, The Bell of Conscious (1974), follows the efforts of a young teacher to improve the grim condition of his school and challenge local prejudices toward the students. The same year, the Derg deposed Emperor Selassie in a military coup. At the time, Girma was the editor in chief for an Ethiopian daily that had a reputation for unbiased reporting. The people trusted him and, after a while, so did the Derg. Three years after it came to power, Girma was once again promoted, this time to head the ministry of information.
He was outwardly committed to his role in the new order. Articles dating back to the late 1970s from the New York Times and Washington Post quote bullish statements he’d given at international press conferences (he spoke fluent English) and all television broadcasts, newspapers, and leaflets issued in its name were under his control. Girma believed in the regime, and the nationalistic fervor initially had a pull on his fiction. Two novels from 1980—The Call of the Red Star and The Author—are generally regarded as patriotic chest thumpers (the latter suspected of being a thinly veiled existential novel about Sebhat Gebre-Egziabher, a major figure in Ethiopia’s modernist literature accused of remaining silent on the atrocities of the Selassie and Derg governments).
It isn’t clear that Girma intended to flip from the Derg’s spokesman to their most prominent whistleblower, but his disenchantment likely began after observing the Red Star Campaign firsthand in 1982. Tsegaye’s eyes are opened by the experience of war and the friends, lovers, and faith he loses to it. “I saw what I saw,” he says to a comrade, “I’m never going to be part of war again.” It’s a sentiment that gives the title its symbolic double-edged cut. Within the book, oromay is the code name for an organized resistance, but its meaning is weighty. When a comrade asks Tsegaye about its meaning, he answers: “Done, finished, the end, it’s over.” But before the implication can continue, the comrade stops himself: “My assigned job is not ‘spy.’”
Keeping in mind that the ministry of information and the ministry of censorship were separate institutions within the Derg, certain passages come off as placative toward would-be expurgatory inspectors. Oromay opens with the author breaking the fourth wall to inform us that he’s about to tell the story of his protagonist. “Who is Tsegaye Hailemaryam?” he asks. “Be patient—life is too short to rush. . . . He is human, only mortal . . . also a little foolish, though aren’t we all?” Interjections like these appear like commercials between the book’s five parts. You see, Girma seems to imply, this is but a joke, and its butt happens to be the minister of information, which is me. Tsegaye shares an approximate name with the Derg’s actual military dictator Mengistu Hailemariam, which might be ruse in the form of an honorific gesture or just the coincidence of a common name.
Oromay is primarily narrated from the point of view of Tsegaye. who departs the bustling capital of Addis Ababa in Ethiopia’s central interior in a flight occupied by, as he cheekily puts it, “all the important people in Addis . . . we better not crash.” They are on their way for the sun-and-Italian modernism-soaked Asmara, one of the world’s most inadvisable UNESCO world heritage cities, the crown jewel of Derg-controlled Eritrea, and their headquarters in their fight against the insurgency. Eritrea was at that time under Ethiopian jurisdiction, and the real Red Star Campaign was the Derg’s effort to keep it that way. Tsegaye is a zealous participant: “We are destined to bring about the renaissance of Ethiopia,” he says to himself, “to bring pride, unity, prosperity and peace to the Revolutionary Motherland.”
Though he sees himself as a peacemaker, Tsegaye is initially given over to the ideological digressions of a true believer. His mission in Amhara to make a propaganda film and heads to a crowded marketplace to “win people’s hearts and minds.” This is the same tactic employed by American forces during Vietnam and the connection is appropriate—this campaign was the Derg’s Vietnam. “If it were easy to control public opinion,” thinks Tsegaye, “then there would be no need for war. Our battlefield is the human psyche.” Tsegaye has his crew capture him on tape bull-horning messages that the RSC has come to liberate Eritrea from the insurgents. “Do not fall for the bogus rumor of war,” he says, “Our mission is peace.” His job done, he’s ready for a cold beer.
The exchange and withholding of information tense the narrative and give the dialogue-heavy plot the feel of a play. Take the scene wherein Tsegaye is mocked by friends for his journalistic nosing:
“You journalists amaze me, really.”
“How so?”
“Saying this could turn into a good story? If you see someone in their death throes, you’d probably ask them, ‘How do you feel about dying? What are your thoughts on the matter?’”
But the scenes that play in Tsegaye’s absence—between his superiors; between members of the insurgency—that reveal the cloak-and-dagger intrigue to which he will fall prey. Tsegaye isn’t stupid; he doesn’t enter a room without taking stock of who’s there. He is, however, as Girma warned us, a bit foolish. Back in Addis, Tsegaye is an engaged man, but being a TV personality, he’s also a famous one. His recognition is enough to catch the attention of Fiammetta Gilay, a “northern beauty,” who has admirers on both sides of the conflict.
Fiammetta is set up to be a standard-issue Mata Hari, making her first appearance at a party in the company of an insurgent defector suspected of playing double agent. But the Ephron-esque romance between Tsegaye and Fiammetta is a big part of the novel’s page-turning charm. She knows things, he knows she knows things, but their affair is puckish: she calls him a moron, he gives her teasing interrogations: “You know you’re gorgeous, you really are . . . but seriously that night after Solomon’s party—where did you [and the defector] go?” They drink beer and listen to Ethiopian pop. Their bourgeois sensibilities is in their fondness for the Italian language and cuisine. It’s all fun and games until Tsegaye’s fiancé finds out.
With Tsegaye, Girma pulls a trick. His charisma and warmth make it easy to forget that Tsegaye is also a ranking member of a brutal government. Among its atrocities was the Qey Shibir, or Red Terror, a massacre that lasted from 1976–78 and took the lives of hundreds of thousands of the Derg’s perceived enemies. That goes unmentioned in Oromay. What is touched upon is the CIA’s involvement in the region’s affairs: “The United States will never forget the humiliation it was handed by Ethiopia when we closed their Kagnew Station right in the heart of Asmara,” thinks Tsegaye. “I’m sure they would love to get it back.”
After the convivial jingoism of the novel’s first half, the novel’s atmosphere darkens to that of a political thriller. Tsegaye stumbles upon internal treachery. Unconvinced by the defector’s reasons for changing sides, Tsegaye suspects a plot. But even the prospect of Fiametta’s betrayal fizzles into a secondary concern after Tsegaye follows a military unit to battle and is sobered by its foolish heroism and gory decimation. The book ends with Tsegaye in a cemetery—not a spoiler because it could end no other way—surrounded by the dead or people that want him so.
In retrospect, Oromay reads as a warning. Before it ended in 1991, the Derg’s civil war with Eritrean separatists would cost over half a million civilian casualties, devastate the Ethiopian economy, and along with a famine that that lasted between 1983–85, prompt a major diaspora seeking to escape the country’s hardships (along with Western support in the feel-good forms of We Are the World and Live AID.) Given his position, it’s hard not think Girma didn’t see the writing on the wall and given connections, it is perplexing that Girma he made no effort himself to flee.
We can only speculate on the disappearance of its writer, but Oromay’s criminal testimony is indisputable.
Maybe the weight of his own complicity grounded him, who’s to say, but Girma’s compulsion to use what was then likely classified material to drive his masterpiece’s plot-driven second half does come across as a conscientious gesture. Girma relied on the events of the actual Red Star Campaign whose “successes” it was his job to broadcast. The campaign’s humiliating failure wasn’t then public, and the combat Tsegaye witnesses, based on the actual Battle of Hill 1702, was still undisclosed for what it was: an armed conflict so harrowing that those who fought for the Derg are remembered as “the volunteers of death.” Not exactly the morale-raising literature any regime would want distributed, though they also foundered to prevent it from becoming a samizdat sensation.
In an interview with Derg dictator Mengistu Hailemariam after his fall from power in 1991, he denied knowledge of Girma’s likely death by claiming to have been the one who suggested the ministry of censorship clear Oromay and to have ordered missing person notices pasted after Girma’s disappearance. Mengistu suggested that others jealous of Girma’s success may have gone after him lone-wolf style, but commentators are unanimous that it’s a fat chance. Girma’s fate is why literary justice groups like Pen International (notwithstanding criticism of its American branch) and the Index on Censorship advocate on behalf of endangered writers—they continue to happen.
We can only speculate on the disappearance of its writer, but Oromay’s criminal testimony is indisputable. Under contemporary light, it is an intelligence leak filtered through a novel. This is what gives currency to its newfound recognition in the United States, where the aggressions against watchdog media and library books are already deepening in severity. The more Oromay is read, the greater risk it has of becoming yet another victim of literary and journalistic censorship in America. The same could be said for any literature that threatens nefarious administrations and their sycophants.