Upon invitation of Prof. Olorunshola Adenekan , Prof. Sebastian Dom & Prof. Koen Bostoen, Prof. Dr. Serawit Debele (Bayreuth University) will give the UGent Master of African Studies 2026 opening lecture.
In this talk, Prof. Dr. Serawit Debele explores how Amharic literary texts frame empire through the rural woman turned prostitute as a central site of moral and political discourse. She focuses on two novels published within twenty years of the end of the Italian occupation of Ethiopia (1935–1941). The first, Endewetach Kerech (She Never Returned), is a historical novel by Asefa Gebremariam, published in 1954. The second, Setegna Adari (Prostitute), is an autobiographical novel by Enanu Agonafer, published in 1964. She argues that these texts transform women’s mobility, sexuality, and urban migration into signs of imperial rupture, national shame, and “undesirable” social change. In these narratives, the rural woman turned prostitute emerges as an epistemic category through which social crisis is diagnosed and anxieties about unexamined embrace of siltane (western civilisation) are articulated.
