Gabriella Ghermandi – Maqeda (Official Music Video) Gabriella Ghermandi – Maqeda (Official Music Video)

Gabriella Germandi laughs as she recalls her distaste for the so-called Ethiopian Spice Girls – the pop band backed by charity Yegna who want to change the narrative and empower girls and women through music.

All-girl group Controversy in the UK Because the project is partly funded by British aid, some say it is a waste of taxpayers’ money. But for Ghermandi, the problem is the assumption that Ethiopian women must be taught by outsiders.

“I was like, what?” Ghermandi told the BBC. “They want to teach us how to empower women? Ethiopia? There are all these epic poems about women?”

Therefore, through music, the Ethiopian-Italian writer, singer, producer and ethnomusicologist Germandi also “tells the world that we have a long history with many brave women who have the same power as men.”

The result is a nine-track album called “Maqeda” — the Amharic name for the Queen of Sheba, a very important figure in Ethiopian history.

Each song is a tribute to female figures, communities, rituals and musical styles.

Many would call the album Ethiopian jazz, but it encompasses much more than that, Ghermandi said.

“It’s very rootsy Ethiopian music, but at the same time, there’s very progressive, rock and punk music. You can find everything.”

Carefully developed over four years, Maqeda brings together Ethiopian and Italian musicians she has worked with since 2010 as part of the Atse Tewodros project, as well as Senegalese guest musicians, a beatboxer and a body music performer.

“We wanted to digest the music,” Ghell-Mandy said of the collaboration, adding that each musician played a role in the arrangement “because I really wanted my two countries to become one.”

Born in Addis Ababa in 1965 to an Italian father and an Italian-Ethiopian mother, Germandi recalls the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the capital, Addis Ababa, where she spent her early years.

“Every place and every corner was filled with music and dance. I feel like I learned the rhythm that stays in my blood,” she said.

Down the street from her mother’s clothing store, there was a record store run by a Greek woman that played everything from Congolese music to the Beatles.

Where is the feeling Other African celebrities performed in nightclubs, where Germandi would go with her brothers, and on Sundays, tea dances were held at Italian expatriate clubs.

Although Germandi had no formal musical training, he became thoroughly immersed in the Ethiopian musical style through attending the many weddings and church ceremonies in his family’s life.

Traveling was another common phenomenon during Ghermandi’s childhood – thanks to her father.

In 1935, he left Italy to work in Eritrea, then an Italian colony. In 1955, he moved to Ethiopia, where he met her mother, who was 17 years his junior.

His construction work required him to travel to remote areas, and Germandi would often visit him.

She was just three months old when she was brought to the Rift Valley in southern Ethiopia. Her father wanted the local Ouida people to give her a moytse — a “pronounced name.”

For girls, a bull horn is blown – under a tree in the forest, an old and a young woman wait together, and whatever sound is heard becomes the name of the sound. The moytse of Gheermandi is tumlele, tumlele, tumlelela.

Her father died in 1978. At the time, the military dictatorship of Mengistu Haile Mariam ruled Ethiopia, so she moved to Italy as a teenager in the early 1980s. Ghermandi now lives between Italy and Ethiopia.

But those precious early experiences have stayed with her, and this latest album draws on her childhood visits to remote communities in Ethiopia and her meticulous research as an adult.

Gelmandi said she started with the community where she grew up — the Dorze people, native to Ethiopia’s southern highlands, whose women are village heads and sing in powerful polyphonic choirs.

You can hear this style of singing – with up to six voices or parts, each with a separate but harmonious melody – in the song “Boncho” – which means “respect” in the Gamo language.

Ghelmandy collaborated with an Ethiopian female poet to write Set Nat (She is a Woman) to counter an Ethiopian saying that a woman is successful because she is as brave as a man.

“I hate this sentence because it tells me that being a woman is not enough,” Gelmandi said passionately. “I want to tell the world that being a woman is enough!”

The song is led by a choir, whose call-and-response has a distinct rhythmic feel, in a 7/4 time signature. “It’s typical of Ethiopia—and it’s a reminder of my childhood,” she explains.

Another track, “Kotilidda,” pays homage to the matriarchal society of the Kunama people, who live near the border of Eritrea and Sudan. It showcases the avangala, a two-string instrument that sounds like a bass guitar and is played only by the Kunama people.

“I really wanted to fuse Ethiopian traditional instruments with modern instruments because Ethiopia doesn’t promote its traditional instruments enough abroad,” Ghermandi said.

“I also wanted to show Ethiopian artists that these instruments can speak to modern instruments – even though they are traditional, they are very modern at the same time.”

Meanwhile, Saba sings about the legendary story of the Queen of Sheba travelling on camel to Jerusalem to meet King Solomon.

Finally, the Masinko (a single-string violin) played an ancient Hebrew melody to show that Ethiopian Jews were descendants of the Sons of Sheba who followed her homeland after returning from what is now Israel.

Gelmandi points to parallels between that ancient, possibly mythical journey and the real journey of tens of thousands of Ethiopians today, fleeing conflict, oppression, drought and poverty in search of a new life elsewhere.

“The song has this idea of ​​walking and facing everything that comes along the way.”

Penny Dale is a freelance journalist, podcaster and documentary maker based in London

Maqeda of the Atse Tewodros Project was released via Galileo MC