Gabriella Ghermandi draws inspiration from Ethiopia’s ancient queens for her new album “Maqeda”

Gabriella Ghermandi laughs as she recalls the anger she felt toward the so-called Ethiopian Spice Girls—the charity-supported pop group Yegna who hoped to use music to change society’s image and empower girls and women.

The all-female group sparked controversy in Britain because it was partly funded by British aid and some say it is a waste of taxpayers’ money. But for Ghermandi, the real problem was the assumption that Ethiopian women needed to be taught by outsiders.

“I just thought: what?” Ghermandi tells the BBC. “You want to teach us how to empower women? Ethiopia? With all its women’s epics?”

So Ghermandi – an Ethiopian-Italian writer, singer, producer and ethnomusicologist – also turned to music to “tell the world that we have a tremendous history of brave women who had just as much power as men.”

The result is a nine-track album called “Maqeda” – the Amharic name of 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 describe this album as Ethio-jazz, but it encompasses so much more, says Ghermandi.

“It’s a very rooted Ethiopian music, but at the same time there are very progressive, very rocky and punky sounds. You can find everything.”

Maqeda was lovingly developed over a period of four years and brought together the Ethiopian and Italian musicians she has worked with since 2010 as part of the Atse Tewodros Project – plus Senegalese guest musicians, as well as a beatboxer and a body music artist.

“We wanted to process the music,” says Ghermandi of the collaboration, adding that each musician played a role in the arrangements, “because I really wanted my two countries to become one.”

Born in Addis Ababa in 1965 to an Italian father and an Ethiopian-Italian mother, Ghermandi remembers the international flair of the capital where she spent her early years.

“Every place, every corner was filled with music and dance. And I think I learned the rhythm that stayed in my blood,” she says.

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

Fela Kuti and other African greats played in the nightclubs where Ghermandi went with her older brothers, and on Sundays there were tea dances at a club for Italian expats.

Although Ghermandi had no formal musical training, he became thoroughly immersed in Ethiopian musical styles through the many wedding and church ceremonies that were part of family life.

Traveling was another constant in 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 younger than him.

His work in construction took him to remote areas and Ghermandi visited them often.

She was only three months old when she was brought to the Rift Valley in southern Ethiopia. Her father wanted the indigenous Oyda people to give her a moytse – a “sound name”.

For girls, a cow horn is blown – and the sound heard by a very old woman and a very young woman waiting together under a tree in the forest becomes the sound name. Ghermandi’s Moytse is tumlele, tumlele, tumlelela.

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

But those precious early experiences have stayed with her, and her latest album is based on visits to Ethiopia’s remote communities during her childhood as well as careful research as an adult.

Ghermandi says she started with the community she grew up in – the Dorze people, originally from the southern highlands of Ethiopia, whose women are village chiefs and sing in powerful polyphonic choirs.

This style of singing – with up to six voices or parts, each with an independent but harmonious melody – can be heard in the song Boncho, which means “respect” in the Gamo language.

Together with an Ethiopian poet, Ghermandi created “Set Nat” (She is a Woman) to counter a popular Ethiopian saying that a woman achieves something because she is as brave as a man.

“I hate this saying because it always told me that being a woman is not enough,” says Ghermandi with passion in her voice. “And I want to tell the world that being a woman is more than enough!”

The song is led by a choir whose call-and-response singing in 7/4 time has a strong rhythmic feel. “It’s very typical of a part of Ethiopia – and it’s a memory of my childhood,” she explains.

Another track, Kotilidda, celebrates the matrilineal society of the Kunama people who live near the border with Eritrea and Sudan. It features the Avangala, a two-stringed instrument that sounds like a bass guitar and is played only by the Kunama people.

“I really wanted to mix traditional Ethiopian instruments with modern instruments because Ethiopia does not promote its traditional instruments sufficiently outside the country,” says Ghermandi.

“I also want to show Ethiopian artists that these instruments can have a dialogue with modern instruments – and at the same time be very modern, even though they are traditional.”

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

At the end, an ancient Hebrew melody is played on the masinqo, a one-stringed fiddle, in recognition of the belief that the Jewish community of Ethiopia is descended from those who followed the son of Sheba as she returned from the area of ​​present-day Israel.

Ghermandi points out the parallels between this ancient, probably mythical journey and the very real journeys made today by many thousands of Ethiopians who have fled conflict, oppression, drought and poverty to start new lives elsewhere.

“The song is about walking – and facing all the things you encounter on your journey.”

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

Maqeda from the Atse Tewodros Project is released via Galileo MC