On May 30, 2019, Rita Pankhurst died at 91 after more than six decades tied to Ethiopia as a librarian, writer, and partner of historian Richard Pankhurst; Tadias published a family biography marking her life.
Born in Romania in 1927 and educated at Oxford, she worked at Ethiopia’s National Library, the university’s Kennedy Library, and the ECA library, wrote on Ethiopian women and Magdala’s books, and later co-authored Ethiopian Reminiscences with Richard.
She helped build Friends of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies networks and kept publishing on libraries, art, and cultural history into her final years while drafting a second reminiscence volume.
Kept as history and culture archive, the Tadias obituary dates the end of one of the most enduring foreign scholarly lives woven into modern Ethiopia.
Sources: Tadias Magazine