Ethiopian Orthodox Churches Images and Commentary with a Translation from Danish of Excerpts from Thomas Boberg’s 2019 Autobiographical Novel Africana

Abstract

The Danish poet and travel writer Thomas Boberg was born in 1960. During his childhood, Boberg lived in the inner part of the Østerbro district of Copen-hagen. As a teenager, he lived in Roskilde for some years, and he subse-quently lived abroad, based first in Barcelona, Spain, and later in Lima, Peru, before returning to the Copenhagen area to live. In 2021, Boberg moved his primary residence to the small Danish island of Fejø. In all, Boberg has spent eighteen years outside Denmark. He produced five volumes of travel memoirs before writing the “travel novel” Africana, which was inspired primarily by three journeys in Ethiopia of relatively brief duration and a stay of some months in the Gambia during the period 2013–2018. Boberg had spent time in the Horn of Africa already when he was in his twenties, and he undertook a journey to Sierra Leone in 2019 after Africana was published, thus following up on the time spent in West Africa in 2018. A substantial essay by Boberg describing the author’s experience in Sierra Leone, where he met and heard the life-story of a former child soldier in the civil war of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, was published in the Danish morning newspaper Information in two installments on January 3, 20204, and January 10, 20205, respectively.