“First Known Biography of an African Woman Finally Receives English Translation”
Published in
1 min readNov 3, 2016
“Walatta Petros, the subject of this biography, lived from 1592 to 1642. A noblewoman, Petros left her husband and lead the resistance against Jesuits and their mission to convert Ethiopian Christians to Roman Catholicism. This work lead the Ethiopian Orthodox Täwaḥədo Church to canonize Petros as a saint, and her biography was written by disciples in the Gəˁəz language in 1672. Since then, the biography has only been translated to Amharic, contemporary Ethiopia’s official language, and Italian, the language of Ethiopia’s 19th and 20th century European colonizers.”
