Mekelle Stories: Life in Time of War
On the night of 3 to 4 November 2020, war broke out in Tigray. Soon after Mekelle was bombed, people were stunned: should they leave the city? How to protect their loved ones? Where to get supplies? For two years, the war redefined the daily lives of Mekelle’s residents; while the capital of Tigray was not the scene of violent armed fighting unlike the countryside and other towns in Tigray, every aspect of urban life, both public and private, was turned upside down by the blockade imposed on the...
Éditeur : Centre français des études éthiopiennes
Lieu d’édition : Addis-Abeba
Publication sur OpenEdition Books : 7 avril 2025
ISBN numérique : 978-2-11-172327-6
DOI : 10.4000/13lms
Collection : Ad'É Books, Contemporary Horn of Africa
Année d’édition : 2025
ISBN (Édition imprimée) : 978-2-11-172326-9
Nombre de pages : 245
On the night of 3 to 4 November 2020, war broke out in Tigray. Soon after Mekelle was bombed, people were stunned: should they leave the city? How to protect their loved ones? Where to get supplies? For two years, the war redefined the daily lives of Mekelle’s residents; while the capital of Tigray was not the scene of violent armed fighting unlike the countryside and other towns in Tigray, every aspect of urban life, both public and private, was turned upside down by the blockade imposed on the entire region for over a year, by the influx of displaced people and by the echoes from the front.
We asked twenty women and men residing in Mekelle to tell us about their daily lives, day after day, event after event: how they coped with the shortages, the lack of health and communications services, the loss of income and the closure of schools. At the heart of these accounts of everyday life, they narrate how they resisted, despaired and struggled, and in which sources they did – or did not – find support, from their neighbours and family, to the Tigray Defence Forces.
With two researchers who themselves lived through these two years of war in Mekelle, the residents tell their stories. Some give numbers and dates, list the names of the places where they found refuge or fled to, and recall the most striking moments of their experiences of the war. Others describe the effects that fear, hunger, and their anger, hopes and despair had on them.
The book is divided into two parts: the first presents testimonies that have been transcribed verbatim, while the second brings together extracts based on interrelated themes and scales, and provide a glimpse of the collective experiences embedded in the individual stories.
Mekelle Stories opens a small window on the war in Tigray, seen from within a city, with its wellknown landmarks and its neighbourhoods. While the immensity of violence, suffering and trauma has yet to be documented, analysed and made known, this work reveals how the war affected and penetrated every part of the bodies and surroundings of the twenty people who tell their stories.

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