Sylvia Pankhurst

Sylvia Pankhurst, the former British Suffragette, devoted the last forty years of her life to Anti-Fascism and support for Ethiopia, for many centuries Africa’s principal independent state. She responded to Mussolini’s invasion of the country in 1935 by founding a weekly newspaper New Times and Ethiopia News, which she was to edit for twenty years. She protested against the Fascist use of poison-gas in Ethiopia, and published news of the Ethiopian patriot resistance. Her paper condemned Britain’s “appeasement” of the Axis Dictators, and supported the Republican Government in the Spanish Civil War. After Mussolini’s entry into the European War, on the side of Nazi Germany, she agitated against the return to Italy of her African colonies. Ever against colonialism, she clashed with the British Government in demanding the full restoration of Ethiopian independence, and advocated the “reunion” of the former Italian colony of Eritrea with Ethiopia. She raised funds for Ethiopia’s first teaching hospital, and wrote extensively on Ethiopian art and culture.
Having moved to Addis Ababa in 1956, with her son, the author, she founded a monthly journal, Ethiopia Observer, on many aspects of Ethiopian life and development. She died in 1960, and was buried with the Ethiopian Patriots, in front of Trinity Cathedral in Addis Ababa, in the presence of the Emperor.