45 pages • 1 hour read
Benjamin ZephaniahRefugee Boy
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context: Eritrean-Ethiopian War
The Eritrean-Ethiopian War began in May 1998 and lasted until June 2000. The war started due to a border dispute between the two countries after Eritrea gained independence from Ethiopia in 1993.
Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie took over Eritrea after World War II, and Eritrea fought for its independence from 1961 until 1991. After Eritrea gained independence from Ethiopia, the two countries began to fight over their borders, particularly over a region called Badme. When they could not resolve the disagreement, Eritrea invaded Ethiopia in 1998, taking over Badme. By 2000, Ethiopia pushed Eritrea out and invaded portions of Eritrea in return. The war officially ended when the Eritrean-Ethiopia Boundary Commission was formed to establish the Algiers Agreement, which ruled in December 2000 that Badme belonged to Eritrea, although fighting continued until 2018.
The war caused hundreds of thousands of casualties from both countries. Survivors of the war reported that the armies from both countries used torture to devastate their enemies, with some claiming that Ethiopia used child soldiers. The graphic violence and threat to children caused many Ethiopians and Eritreans to flee to other countries in search of refuge. The war devastated the Ethiopian and Eritrean economies, leading to food shortages for the civilians who remained. Although the countries continued to fight for decades after the Algiers Agreement, they signed a peace treaty in 2018 and returned prisoners of war to their homelands.
Authorial Context: Benjamin Zephaniah
Benjamin Zephaniah was a British activist, writer, musician, and poet. He was born in England in 1958 and lived there until his death in 2023. Zephaniah’s work includes themes of racism, incarceration, and discrimination, as well as the influence of his Jamaican heritage.
Zephaniah drew inspiration from his personal experience of juvenile detention as a teenager and the explicit racism and discrimination he faced in England. He wrote several novels, including Refugee Boy, Gangsta Rap, Face, and Terror Kid, along with many collections of poetry. As an activist and musician, Zephaniah released an album called Rasta that called for the release of Nelson Mandela, who was a prisoner in South Africa at the time. The album title refers to Zephaniah’s religion of Rastafarianism, a Jamaican religion and social movement that venerates Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie as a religious prophet and the second coming of Jesus Christ. Rastafarianism highlights the importance of African unity and regards Africa as a holy land needing freedom from European oppression.
In addition to Zephaniah’s anti-racism activism, he was critical of the British Empire, particularly the British monarchy, for its association with colonization and slavery. Zephaniah called himself an anarchist and believed that societies could succeed without organized governments. In Britain, he believed in destabilizing and reworking the British political system so that the House of Parliament reflected the demographics of Britain more equitably.
