Christian History Home > Issue 79 > A Leopard Among the Bannas
A Leopard Among the Bannas
Mahay Choramo faced down hardship and violent opposition to the murderous nomads of Ethiopia's southern frontier.
Aaron Belz | posted 7/01/2003 12:00AM
His name means leopard, but after 50 years of ministry in southwestern Ethiopia, he would rather be known as "Mahari"—merciful. Now in his eighties, Mahay earns 300 birr (less than $40) a month as an itinerant evangelist in this hot and rugged land.
Ethiopia, one of the world's oldest surviving kingdoms, is also one of its proudest. It holds the distinction of being the only African nation never to have been colonized (except briefly, during 1936-41, by Mussolini's Italy; Liberia also escaped colonization but was founded in 1822 by Americans). Its heritage stretches from figures such as the Queen of Sheba, who visited Solomon and is said to have had a son by him, to Emperor Haile Selassie, whose League of Nations address in 1936 stands as one of the great moments in twentieth-century political rhetoric.
Ethiopia's 440,000-square mile landscape is similarly mythic. The Semien mountains rise to 15,000 feet in the north, descending through hundreds of coffee plantations to rivers, waterfalls, ...
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