Richard Keir Pethick Pankhurst OBE, historian and scholar of Ethiopia, passed away on February 16, 2017 at the age of 89 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where he made his home with his wife of sixty years, Rita Pankhurst (born Eldon). He was buried on the grounds of Holy Trinity Cathedral in Addis Ababa near his mother, Sylvia Pankhurst. She is the only European woman accorded this honor, which recognized her support for Ethiopia during the Italian Fascist occupation of the 1930s. Now her son has been similarly honored for his role as, in the words of Ethiopia's Foreign Minister Workneh Gebeyehu, “one of this country's greatest friends.”1
Richard Pankhurst authored more than twenty books on the history of Ethiopia, edited or compiled numerous others, and wrote many scholarly articles on a range of topics in Ethiopian economic, social, and political history, culture, art, and architecture (Rita Pankhurst 2002...