Rita Pankhurst

Rita Pankhurst (née Eldon; 1927 – 30 May 2019) was a Romanian-born, Oxford and Paris educated, linguist, reporter and librarian in Ethiopia and in the United Kingdom. She was a director of the Haile Selassie I University library until 1976. She returned to the UK and she the oversaw the acquisition of the Fawcett Library. After being at the centre of the Ethiopian administration she and her husband published their joint auto-biography.

Life Pankhurst was born into an upper-class Jewish family in Jassy, Romania in 1927 and, due to rising anti-Semitism, moved with her family to England in 1938. She was educated at Perse School for Girls in Cambridge before she went on to Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University She then studied at Ecole Nationale des Langues Orientales Vivantes in Paris. Her career began as the foreign correspondent for London of the Japanese leading newspaper The Asahi Shimbun.

In 1956, the retired suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst who was a long-time friend of Ethiopia was encouraged by Haile Selassie to aid with women's development. Sylvia and her son Richard were to move into an imperial guest house in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa. Her son Richard, who had studied with the exiled Haile Selassie,

She, Sylvia, and Richard were very busy. There were no weekends and sometimes they worked around the clock. They were very involved in Ethiopia. Rita wrote and Richard wrote to an even higher degree.

Richard Pankhurst died in 2017 and she continued to work on the second volume of their autobiography. Rita died in Addis Ababa on 30 May 2019. Her funeral was at Addis Ababa's Holy Trinity Cathedral. Attendees included the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Hirut Zemene.

Private life She and Richard married in 1957 and they had two children, Alula and Helen.