From the late 1960s and early 1970s, most unexpectedly, a new postcolonial African literature in English was born: that of Ethiopia, a nation that did not know direct British colonial rule and that has always been proud of its political and cultural independence. But the wish for greater international audiences and worldwide recognition, prompted a series of writers to adopt English as a second literary language of choice. Abbie Gubegna (b. 1934) was one of the leaders of this movement that first started translating fiction and poetry formerly written in Amharic, the first national language of culture, and then producing original output in a peculiar form of hybrid English, which was provided with an unavoidable Amharic flavour in words and phrasing. And, although Abbie Gubegna has proved to be a very prolific full-time writer, Defiance is probably his most reputed work.
The story of Defiance is set in 1937 during the Italian occupation of Addis Ababa: the capital city of the nation and a place where the horrors of war are the background to the lives of a group of freedom-fighters, collaborators to the invading regime and Fascist oppressors. Consequently, this paper aims at studying in some detail the Ethiopian vision and strategies of resistance developed against the Fascist Italian invader—the only sub-Saharan African country to experience such direct dominion. In other words, a unique example of conflicting rights and competing discourses made fiction and was published years later, in 1975, under the new shelter of an emerging postcolonial context.