Dynamic, opinionated, gritty, and charismatic, Chimate Chumbalo successfully navigated male-dominated factional politics, experimenting with different strategies to create for her people the society that she wanted for herself. This unique anthropological account chronicles the uncommon experience of a woman serving as a local political leader in Ethiopia's turbulent empire, witnessing its transition to socialist state.

Until now Chimate has been lost to written history, for she worked on behalf of her grandson, the local administrator, or balabat.

Judith Olmstead lived with the sixty-year-old Chimate as part of her fieldwork in Ethiopia. She returned several years later to gather the life story of this inspiring, self-propelled woman. Readers will share Chimate's dilemmas and triumphs as she threads her way through traditional Ethiopian politics and mediates cases involving the Gamo peoples, who learn from early childhood to practice mediation as a means of resolving conflict.

Olmstead gracefully combines Chimate's compelling biography with accounts of local history, revolutionary upheavals, and unforgettable descriptions of life in rural Ethiopia.