Tadias Magazine
By Tadias Staff
Published: May 22nd, 2007
New York (TADIAS) – Below are photos from Rebecca Haile’s Book Signing event held at Hue-Man Bookstore in New York on Monday, May 21st.
Rebecca’s memoir Held at a Distance: My Rediscovery of Ethiopia was released this year.
—
Related:
Book Excerpt: My Rediscovery of Ethiopia by Rebecca Haile
By Dinaw Mengestu
The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
Joseph’s already drunk when he comes into the store. He strolls through the open door with his arms open. You get the sense when watching him that even the grandest gestures he may make aren’t grand enough for him. He’s constantly trying to outdo himself, to reach new levels of Josephness that will ensure that anyone who has ever met him will carry some lingering trace of Joseph Kahangi long after he has left. He’s now a waiter at an expensive downtown restaurant, and after he cleans each table he downs whatever alcohol is still left in the glasses before bringing them back to the kitchen. I can tell by his slight swagger that the early dinnertime crowd was better than usual today.
Joseph is short and stout like a tree stump. He has a large round face that looks like a moon pie. Kenneth used to tell him he looked Ghanaian.
“You have a typical Ghanaian face, Joe. Round eyes. Round face. Round nose. You’re Ghanaian through and through. Admit it, and let us move on.”
Joseph would stand up then and theatrically slam his fist onto the table, or into his palm, or against the wall. “I am from Zaire,” he would yell out. “And you are a ass.” Or, more recently, and in a much more subdued tone: “I am from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Next week, it may be something different. I admit that. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll be from the Liberated Land of Laurent Kabila. But today, as far as I know, I am from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.”
Joseph kisses me once on each cheek after he takes his coat off.
“That’s my favorite thing about you Ethiopians,” he says. “You kiss each other on the cheeks all the time. It takes you hours to say hello and good-bye because you’re constantly kissing each other. Kiss. Kiss. Kiss.”
Kenneth pours Joseph a scotch and the three of us raise our cups for a toast.
“How is America today, Stephanos?” Joseph asks me.
“He hates it,” Kenneth says.
“That’s because he doesn’t understand it.” Joseph leans closer toward me, his large moon-pie face eclipsing my view of every thing except his eyes, which are small and bloodshot, and look as if they were added onto his face as an afterthought.
“I’ve told you,” he says. “This country is like a little bastard child. You can’t be angry when it doesn’t give you what you want.”
He leans back deliberately in his chair and crosses his legs, holding the pose for two seconds before leaning over and resting both arms on his thighs.
“But you have to praise it when it comes close, otherwise it’ll turn around and bite you in the ass.”
The two of them laugh and then quickly pour back their drinks and refill their glasses. There is a brief silence as each struggles to catch his breath. Before either of them can tell me something else about America (“This country cares only about one thing…” “There are three things you need to know about Americans…”), I call out, “Bukassa.” The name catches them off guard. They both turn and stare at me. They swirl their cups around and around to make sure it looks like they’re thinking. Kenneth walks over to the map of Africa I keep taped on the wall right next to the door. It’s at least twenty years old, maybe older. The borders and names have changed since it was made, but maps, like pictures and journals, have a built-in nostalgic quality that can never render them completely obsolete. The countries are all color-coded, and Africa’s hanging dour head looks like a woman’s head wrapped in a shawl. Kenneth rubs his hand silently over the continent, working his way west to east and then south until his index finger tickles the tip of South Africa. When he’s finished tracing his hand over the map, he turns around and points at me.
“Gabon.” He says it as if it were a crime I was guilty of.
“What about it?” I tell him, “I hear it’s a fine country. Good people. Never been there myself, though.”
He turns back to the map and whispers, “Fuck you.”
“Come on. I thought you were an engineer,” Joseph taunts him. “Whatever happened to precision?” He stands up and puts his large fat arm over Kenneth’s narrow shoulders. With his other hand he draws a circle around the center of Africa. He finds his spot and taps it twice.
“Central African Republic,” he says. “When was it?”
He scratches his chin thoughtfully, like the intellectual he always thought he was going to become, and has never stopped wanting to be.
“Nineteen sixty-four? No. Nineteen sixty-five.”
“Nineteen sixty-six,” I tell him.
“Close.”
“But not close enough.”
So far we’ve named more than thirty different coups in Africa. It’s become a game with us. Name a dictator and then guess the year and country. We’ve been playing the game for over a year now. We’ve expanded our playing field to include failed coups, rebellions, minor insurrections, guerrilla leaders, and the acronyms of as many rebel groups as we can find—the SPLA, TPLF, LRA, UNITA—anyone who has picked up a gun in the name of revolution. No matter how many we name, there are always more, the names, dates, and years multiplying as fast as we can memorize them so that at times we wonder, half-jokingly, if perhaps we ourselves aren’t somewhat responsible.
“When we stop having coups, we can stop playing,” Joseph said once. It was the third or fourth time we had played, and we were guessing how long we could keep it up.
“I should have known that,” Kenneth says. “Bukassa has always been one of my favorites.”
We all have favorites. Bukassa. Amin. Mobutu. We love the ones known for their absurd declarations and comical perormances, the dictators who marry forty women and have twice as many children, who sit on golden thrones shaped like eagles, declare themselves minor gods, and are surrounded by rumors of incest, cannibalism, sorcery, and magic.
“He was an emperor,” Joseph says. “Just like your Haile Selassie, Stephanos.”
“He didn’t last as long, though,” I remind him.
“That’s because no one gave him a chance. Poor Bukassa. Emperor Bukassa. Minister of Defense, Education, Sports, Health, War, Housing, Land, Wildlife, Foreign Affairs, His Royal Majesty, King of the Sovereign World, and Not Quite But Almost the Lion of Judah Bukassa.”
“He was a cannibal, wasn’t he?” Kenneth asks Joseph.
“According to the French, yes. But who can believe the French? Just look at Sierra Leone, Senegal. Liars, all of them.”
“The French or the Africans?”
“What difference does it make?”
We spend the next two hours alternating between shots and slowly sipped glasses of Kenneth’s scotch. Inevitably, predictably, our conversations find their way home.
“Our memories,” Joseph says, “are like a river cut off from the ocean. With time they will slowly dry out in the sun, and so we drink and drink and drink and we can never have our fill.”
“Why do you always talk like that?” Kenneth demands.
“Because it is true. And that is the only way to describe it. If you have something different to say, then say it.”
Kenneth leans his chair back against the wall. He’s drunk and on the verge of falling.
“I will say it,” he says.
He pours the last few drops of scotch into his cup and sticks his tongue out to catch them.
“I can’t remember where the scar on my father’s face is. Sometimes I think it is here, on the left side of his face, just underneath his eye. But then I say to myself, that’s only because you were facing him, and so really, it was on the right side. But then I say no, that can’t be. Because when I was a boy I sat on his shoulders and he would let me rub my hand over it. And so I sit on top of a table and place my legs around a chair and lean over and I try to find where it would have been. Here. Or there. Here. Or there.”
As he speaks his hand skips from one side of his face to the other.
“He used to say, when I die you’ll know how to tell it’s me by this scar. That made no sense but when I was a boy I didn’t know that. I thought I needed that scar to know it was him. And now, if I saw him, I couldn’t tell him apart from any other old man.”
“Your father is already dead,” I tell him.
“And so is yours, Stephanos. Don’t you worry you’ll forget him someday?”
“No. I don’t. I still see him every where I go.”
“All of our fathers are dead,” Joseph adds.
“Exactly,” Kenneth says.
It’s the closest we’ve ever come to a resolution.
—-
From The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu. Copyright (c) 2007 Dinaw Mengestu, Published by Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA), all rights reserved
Tadias Magazine
By Tadias Staff
May 18th, 2007
New York (TADIAS) – The following is an excerpt from Rebecca Haile’s new book Held at a Distance: My Rediscovery of Ethiopia.
Rebecca Haile was born in Ethiopia in 1965 and lived there until she was eleven years old. When the Emperor was deposed by a military coup, Rebecca’s father, a leading academic in Addis Ababa, was shot while “resisting arrest.” Barely surviving, he escaped with his family and settled in central Minnesota where they struggled with the cultural and financial strain of their drastically changed circumstances.
Rebecca grew up in America harboring her precious childhood memories of Ethiopia. She attended Williams College and went on to graduate from Harvard Law School. In 2001, she was the first member of her family to return to Ethiopia.
—
Held at a Distance: My Rediscovery of Ethiopia by Rebecca Haile
“I want the two of you to pack some clothes tonight because this weekend we’re going to drive to Nazareth town to visit Ababa Haile and Tye Emete. If we don’t do that, we will probably take a plane to join your mother and father in America.”
With those casual words, my Aunt Mimi tried to prepare my sister Sossina and me to leave Ethiopia even as she downplayed the voyage by equating it with a Sunday drive to my grandparents’ home in the country. Mimi dared not promise us the trip to the United States, much less name a specific date. Those were unpredictable days in Ethiopia—days when people who disagreed with the regime didn’t know whether they would see the sun rise the following morning, days when, my uncle Tadesse swore, you couldn’t trust your own shadow. By then, government soldiers had nearly killed my father, and my parents had fled the country. How could my aunt and uncle assure us that no one would block our family’s reunion?
Now, twenty-five years after those final tense days, I am on an overnight flight back to Addis Ababa. I am sitting next to my husband, Jean, staring restlessly out the window at the inky ground below. As we cross from southern Egypt into northern Ethiopia, an hour or so before we are to land, the horizon finally begins to lighten. Soon, the sky over the vast highland plateau is awash in a deep, clay red. Jetlagged and on edge, uncertain what to expect from the country I am not sure I can still call home, I am grateful for this beautiful prologue to the month that lies ahead.
I left Ethiopia in 1976, two years after the army deposed Emperor Haile Selassie and sent a powerful wave of turmoil and state-sponsored violence crashing across the country. Along with countless others, my parents were swept up in that wave and soon the life they had built together had been completely washed away. In the summer of 1976, my parents, my sisters and I found ourselves abruptly deposited in the United States, stripped of our possessions and expectations and left to start over financially, professionally and emotionally. I was ten when it became clear we could not stay in Addis Ababa and had just turned eleven when my sisters and I reunited with our parents in a small central Minnesota town. That first summer, as we watched our host country celebrate its bicentennial birthday with fireworks and cheers of freedom along the banks of the Mississippi, not one of us imagined how long it would be before we would see Ethiopia again. When I returned in the spring of 2001, I was the first in my family to do so.
—
From Held at a Distance by Rebecca Haile. Copyright (c) 2007 Rebecca Haile, Published by Academy Chicago Publishers, all rights reserved.
Tadias Magazine
By Marcus Samuelsson
Photos by Gideon Kifle
I WAS VISITING THE BAHAMA SPICE farm, a small, private farm where the faint, musky smell of cloves and cardamom danced on the breeze. Before me stretched a riotous tangle of greenery, sprouting spices I never imagined I’d have the opportunity to see growing—much less all in one place. As a chef, seeing how the spices I use daily are cultivated was like being in my own personal garden of Eden. It was an awe-inspiring afternoon I will never forget.
A guide walked me through the farm, challenging me to recognize the different spices that grew before us. Handing me a leaf from a large tree, he urged me to smell it to see if I could recognize the aroma. I sniffed and ventured a guess—“Cinnamon?”— and he smiled, happy to have stumped me. “No, it’s nutmeg,” he said, cracking open the mottled yellow fruit to reveal the tough brown kernel of nutmeg at its center.
And so it went on our journey along the rambling path that ran through the spice patches. Before me, vanilla beans, ginger, cardamom, cloves, lemongrass, cocoa, cinnamon—all the magical flavors that inspire me every day—sprang from the ground, seemingly at random: a nutmeg tree here, a vanilla bean vine there, a cinnamon tree in the distance. We pulled ginger roots and lemongrass stalks from the ground, and watched our guide climb the branches of a tree to pluck a blossom that yielded tender, plump pink cloves, which would later be dried until they were shriveled and brown.
At the end of the tour, one of the boys accompanying us twisted a length of rope into a
a figure 8, hooked his feet into it, and used it to help him shimmy up the trunk of a tall, graceful coconut tree, disappearing into the sky to send a storm of coconuts raining down on us. Back on the ground, he cracked open a coconut and handed it to me. As I sipped the fresh, warm juice, I remembered hearing that long-ago sailors passing Zanzibar used to claim they could smell the scent of cloves drifting from the island far out to sea.
Today, Zanzibari farmers still eke out a living growing spices on small plots of land, but there was a time when spice plantations brought great riches to Zanzibar, a time whose legacy can still be seen in Stone Town, the faded but opulent heart of this vibrant island. Stone Town is one of the most magical cities I’ve ever visited. It’s a city of surprises—twisting narrow streets that seem to lead to nowhere, grand Arab palaces, Persian baths, mosques, temples, churches, hotels, restaurants, and shops, and sudden glimpses of the Indian Ocean framed between the crumbling stone buildings.
This magical, mysterious town is the place where the African, Arab, and Indian worlds meet. Hundreds of years ago, African fishermen, Arab and Persian traders, and Indian merchants all settled on the island. The Portuguese occupied Zanzibar beginning in 1503, but were forced out by the Omani Arabs in the late 1600s. Their defeat was followed by more than two hundred years of rule by Arab sultans.
The sultans transformed Zanzibar, introducing cloves from Madagascar and building the first spice plantations. Thanks to the spice trade, the island quickly grew rich and the newly wealthy townspeople began rebuilding their mud homes with stone. The traditional Islamic modesty of these homes was accented with beautifully carved and studded doors, which are now one of the hallmarks of Stone Town. I was told these doors served a dual purpose—their ornate carving was a way for wealthy homeowners to show off their riches, while the studs were a symbol of protection for the inhabitants.
But, as in many of the places I visited in Africa, you can’t ignore history. All this grandeur has a dark side: at the height of the slave trade, as many as sixty thousand slaves a year were transported from the mainland to Zanzibar and sold to owners in Arabia, India, and French Indian Ocean possessions. I visited one of the prisons where the slaves were held—a cramped, dark, stark contrast to the stunning palaces built by the sultans who grew rich from the sale of slaves and spices.
During my brief visit, I drank in the sights, smells, and sounds of Zanzibar: fishermen sailing off in elegant dhows as the sun set over the Indian Ocean, the scent of grilled fish wafting from Stone Town’s nightly waterfront market at Forodhani Gardens, and the calling of the muezzin—the crier who summons the Muslim faithful to prayer five times a day from the mosque near our hotel. It’s a place of magic and mystique, whose very name conjures up a sense of enchantment and the smell of spices.
Recipe compliments of Marcus Samuelsson
C H I C K P E A – E G G P L A N T D I P
Hummus is now so ubiquitous that it’s hard to remember it was once an “exotic” food. It
was the first Moroccan food I ever had, and since that first bite I’ve grown to love the simplicity of Morocco’s many dips because they’re so easy to enjoy. You can serve this hummus-style dip on its own with warm pita wedges, as a spread on sandwiches, or as a distinctive accompaniment to grilled fish or chicken.
2 cups dried chickpeas, soaked in cold water for 8 hours
and drained
1 carrot, peeled and cut in half
1 medium Spanish onion, cut in half
4 garlic cloves, peeled
2 eggplants, cut lengthwise in half
4 cup plus 2 tablespoons olive oil
2 bird’s-eye chilies, cut in half, seeds and ribs removed
1 teaspoon Harissa (page 30)
1 teaspoon ground cumin
Combine the chickpeas, carrot, and onion in a medium saucepan, add 4 cups water, and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and simmer until the chickpeas are very tender, about 11⁄2 hours. Drain, reserving 1 cup of the cooking liquid.
Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 300oF. Toss the garlic and eggplant with 1⁄4 cup of the olive oil and arrange on a roasting pan, eggplant cut side down. Roast for 40 minutes. Add the chilies to the roasting pan, cut side down, and roast for another 10 minutes. Set aside until cool enough to handle.
Scoop the flesh from the eggplant and transfer to a blender. Add the roasted garlic and chilies, chickpeas, harissa, cumin, the remaining 2 tablespoons oil, and 2 to 3 tablespoons of the reserved cooking liquid. Puree, adding more of the cooking liquid 2 to 3 tablespoons at a time as necessary, until the mixture is smooth and creamy. Serve at room temperature with warm Pita Bread (page 151).
MAKES 3 CUPS
You can purchase Marcus Samuelsson’s new book: Soul of A New Cuisine at Amazon.com
Above: Forbes highlight EthiDolls through an interview with
Co-Founder & CEO Salome Yilma. Video posted by Dire Tube.
Tadias Magazine
Created by Two Ethiopian Women: EthiDolls to Spread
a New Vision of Africa
By Margaret Heneghan
Updated: Monday, August 16, 2010
New York (Tadias) – As young girls in Ethiopia, Yeworkwoha Ephrem and Salome Yilma were part of the first generation to help their native land bridge into the modern world. Today, they are New York City entrepreneurs working to preserve African culture for future generations.
Through their start-up company EthiDolls™, Ms. Ephrem and Ms. Yilma are developing African signature dolls and accessories that teach history and tradition, as well as celebrate cultural diversity.
“As a child, I believed that the world had infinite possibilities because all around me women had equal responsibility for life. School, play, my mother’s work, my father’s work — all were life,” says Ms. Yilma, EthiDolls’ chief executive officer. “This notion has always grounded me and allowed me to thrive – personally and professionally – uninhibited by the many prejudices we all experience as we go through life.”
“I have my parents to thank for this precious gift; their emphasis on integrity, education and aspiration has always been my touchstone,” she says. “We at EthiDolls believe that these are the same gifts all parents wish to bestow on their children. And we hope to awaken this same spirit of leadership in today’s young African-American girls and their multicultural playmates by offering a new vision of the African experience. We believe that connection to the rich historic cultural heritage of Africa will be a good source for young people to extract a sense of pride and self empowerment.”
Video: Ethiodoll CEO & Founder Salome Yilma on Forbes
Established in 2003, EthiDolls launched its first product line in December 2006 with the “Makeda: Queen of Sheba” doll, storybook and CD narration. The line is based on the ancient legend of Makeda, “The Queen of Sheba,” the first female ruler of Ethiopia, the land known as the “cradle of civilization” because people throughout the world today can trace their roots to it.
The dolls are collector quality and hand-crafted for EthiDolls by Madame Alexander® maker of the popular collectible doll line and no detail or expense was spared to capture the Queen’s majestic image. The doll stands 16 inches tall and has 18 points of articulation from head to toe, including hair and lashes made of top-of-the-line kanekalon fiber and gold hoops and bangles for her wrists. The fabric used for the costume is rich in detail, hand woven in Ethiopia, and is an authentic representation of the traditional Ethiopian dress still worn today.
The accompanying items are of equal quality. The storybook is beautifully illustrated by a young Ethiopian artist, and the CD provides a compelling narration of Queen Makeda’s rise to the throne and her relationship with King Solomon.
EthiDolls launches the Queen Makeda merchandise as African culture emerges into popular consciousness and as “edutainment”— learning through a medium that educates and entertains — is on the rise. According to the Toy Institute of America, dolls rank as the toy industry’s second-largest product category in dollar volume with sales of $2.7 billion in 2005. The superior quality and authenticity of the product line also will appeal to the doll collector community, which vies with stamps and miniatures as the No.1 hobby group in the world.
“Our true aim is to enrich the lives of young girls of African heritage especially in this fast-paced and media savvy age we live in,” says Ms. Ephrem, EthiDolls’ executive vice president. “And we’re also pleased to contribute to the growing and important movement of African-American families researching heritage and re-connecting to cultural traditions. We’re eager to serve this market with upscale, quality merchandise that meets their high expectations.”
EthiDolls will launch several more dolls based on African royal figures in 2007. Currently, the company is utilizing the rapidly growing direct-to-consumer marketing and distribution channels to sell Queen Makeda merchandise. Future plans include distribution in targeted specialty shops and other locations that provide unique family experiences.
For more information about how to purchase Queen Makeda products, visit www.ethidolls.com.
Tadias Magazine
By Sosena Kebede
May 3, 2006
So I woke up at 8:45am after going to bed at 11:00pm last night and I reported to duty at Tikur Anbessa Hospital (hereto referred to as TAH).
The hospital is run down, there is barely enough lighting to see your way in the hallways, the wards reek of a mixture of antiseptics, body odors, and whatever else. Medical equipments are scarce, outdated and in some cases out of commission.
Above: There is barely enough lighting to see your way in the hallways.
Photography by Sosena Kebede
The Out patient Clinic (OPD) is mainly run by resident physicians. Consultants usually see subspecialty patients and are available for consultations. Patient rights including a right to privacy or modesty is barely existent. Patients are examined in a semi-office type room with one stretcher in the room. There is no gown, no privacy in that small room. Patients have to undress in the full view of the doctor and the nurse as well as who ever else may be around at the time in that small room. (Oh, the cell phone of the doctors rings at times in the middle of exams and the doctor interrupts the exam while the patient is lying half naked and talks on the phone. Later on, I found out that the cell phone is used as a pager equivalent in this hospital so to be fair most calls seem to be work related). What topped my experience today was when the examining physician at one time literally pinched an older woman’s pendulous left breast by the nipple and raised the whole breast up in the air like a tent while listening to her heart! I was mortified, and I so badly wanted to slap his hand off of her.
Above: The Out patient Clinic (OPD). Photography by Sosena Kebede.
Because not all patients can be seen by a consultant some complicated cases are seen by residents alone which made me feel uncomfortable to say the least. Today, one of the residents came to ask the cardiologist’s opinion on how to manage an elderly gentleman who apparently is in third degree heart block intermittently (A heart conduction abnormality that can be fatal). There is no pacer (a pacer, as the name implies, is a device used to” pace” the heart when its intrinsic ability to pace its own rhythm fails) and the gentleman declined admission for monitoring purposes citing financial reasons. It turned out that he couldn’t afford any medications either. Decision was made to send him out and have him come back in three weeks!! Wow. I felt helpless; as I am sure these physicians have million times over. I gave the old man some money for medications. He kissed my hands and I walked out chocked up, knowing that he is one of many, and one couldn’t possibly help all… I saw the physicians exchange glances as I walked out. Perhaps they were amused by what they perceived to be a naïve gesture on my part. Perhaps, they thought here is another American trying to be a hero.
Clearly the volume and the acuity of care is way above what these exhausted and frustrated physicians can handle. The system seems to be crumbling and I wondered how they make it day to day, patients and physicians alike.
At the end of a long day, I stood looking outside the window on 8th floor while waiting for my ride to go home. I saw a beautiful landscape of Addis. A spectacular chain of mountains cradle rows of shacks and rusty tin roofs. The high rises that pop their heads above the shacks don’t hide the story of this city. This city holds some of the wretched of this world.
Above: 8th floor offices. Photography by Sosena Kebede.
May 4, 2006
I attended grand rounds today and was once again impressed by the quality and clarity of presentation and the professional attitudes of the residents and even more impressed by how bright they are as demonstrated by their wide differential diagnoses. I sat at the back of the conference room proud to call them my people. I don’t think my residents in America with all the information excess at their fingertips and a lot of spoon feeding could generate as much differential and show such insight into disease processes as these residents.
In the department of Internal medicine, there is one lap top and LCD projector that is kept in the main office but the residents use overhead slides for their presentations. The screen for projection is torn at the corner and is held by a wide masking tape and creates an indentation on some of the hand written words that project on its surface. I struggled to read their hand written presentation but I preferred to listen to them anyway, so it didn’t matter.
Diagnostic modalities such as CTs and echos are hard to come by. The hospital does not have an MR. The single CT scanner the hospital has, I am told is broken and has been so for the last 12 months! Patients who require CTs will have to go to private clinics to get them done. With a prohibitive cost for these diagnostic procedures most patients who need them can’t get them.
The physicians here work under some of the most emotionally devastating circumstances, with very little reward and no job satisfaction whatsoever. I found out that every physician now works at a private clinic to supplement their income at the government hospital. This includes the resident physicians as well.
There is no heart hard enough and a mind so callus that it can’t feel pain, outrage, disbelief, and despair at what I am seeing in Ethiopia.
Out of the many sad cases here are a couple that I will probably never forget. We saw a 20 some year old male who came to the cardiology clinic for follow-up of his cyanotic heart disease. He was born with “a hole in his heart” and because of this defect the oxygenated and deoxygenated blood mix and gives patients such as this one “cyanosis”( bluish hue to their coloring), which is one of the hallmarks of low oxygen in the blood. During this visit, the patient is told to continue taking his medications (which will not fix the problem!) and “try and pursue his chance to go abroad to get definitive treatment”. The only way to cure this type of defect is by surgical method and that is not available in Ethiopia. Of course this young man, who is a college student can’t go abroad and he will die here. I wondered what he is studying and how long he will stay alive. Ethiopia’s life expectancy is about 43 years of age, I don’t think he will make it that far.
An 18 year old girl who looks not a day older than 13 (she is severely malnourished) came with her dad for follow-up of her shortness of breath and trouble lying flat. During physical exam her heart looked like it’d pop out between her left sided rib spaces and you barely have to put your stethoscope on her chest to hear the loud booming murmur (a heart murmur is a sound made as blood rushes out of the heart chambers via its valves and can be a sign of heart valve problems). She had distended neck veins and is breathing heavy. This girl has a very sick heart, and you didn’t need to be a doctor to see that. I saw her echo live and the cardiologist, (who is clearly very bright and in my opinion second to none) pointed out the girl’s massively stretched heart chambers and the severe valve leakages. She is clearly a surgical case but he pointed out because of her malnourishment he didn’t think that ENAHPA (Ethiopian North American Health Professionals Association, a group of Ethiopian and non-Ethiopian health professionals from North America that are expected to come mid May to do cardiac surgeries) will consider her to be a good surgical candidate. The girl’s father who accompanied her has sad eyes and didn’t say a word and seems to have no clue as to what is going on with his daughter. The little girl spoke in whispers I could barely hear, and she kept her eyes down cast and continuously wrung her fingers that were folded on her lap. The name and the body frame may change but this case and the whole scenario was déjà vu all over again for me.
There is a frighteningly minimal amount of conversation that goes on between patients/their families and these doctors. The patients and their families who at times travel several kilometers to make it to this hospital are so mishandled starting at the hospital gate all the way to the clinics. Part of this ill-treatment that I perceive (the Amharic word “Mengelatat” I think fits the bill better than any other English term I can come up with) I believe may stem from a general lack-luster “customer service” practice in our culture. Also, my experience has been that harsh words are freely hurled by people in “authority” to people who are perceived to be either inferiors or subordinates in some ways without fear of repercussions. A hospital guard who carries a gun is at liberty to scold a family member of a patient at the hospital gate; as would an older man in car to a female pedestrian, an adult to a child or a physician to a patient, just to name a few. Added to that, the frustrations that come from working under such difficult conditions may make people appear to be heartless. Regardless, it is a sad state of affairs.
Above: B8. Photography by Sosena Kebede.
Today, I felt overwhelmed by all I saw. After work I met with a friend of mine at a café (there is a miracle right there, my good old southern friend from Wilmington North Carolina, now sitting across the table from me in the country of my origin!) and I broke down and cried about this whole package of life in Ethiopia. He cried with me.
May 8, 2006
The residents essentially manage most of the patients. While I rounded on hematology patients with one of the Hematologist, I was impressed by these residents as they discussed the management of leukemias, multiple myelomas etc. They know the chemotherapeutic agent dosages, all the side-effects. They administer and monitor treatment after consultation with the sub specialist. Infectious diseases are plentiful in kind and number in Ethiopia. I had to acquaint myself anew with some of the tropical diseases such as Leishmaniasis and Schistosomaisis etc, which I was once taught in the US as topics of historical significance in the western world.
Before rounds I was listening to a bunch of residents discuss a case of pleural effusion (fluid in the lungs) and its managements. They know what they are talking about and the camaraderie and team play exhibited seems to be far superior to what I have seen in America. I was also very happy to overhear that they do most of the medical procedures and although limited, do have access to ultrasound guided thoracentesis,(a method by which fluid from the lungs is drained using ultrasound guidance). Most of these guys (unfortunately with the exception of two females they are all guys) seem to be highly motivated, after having arrived at this stage of their lives after much trials and tribulations. (Naturally, there are exceptions to the rule). They work under such suboptimal conditions, with very limited support system, and meager educational resources. Their motivation to learn makes me wonder if I will ever want to teach in
America again.
May 10, 2006
I had a very full day today-long rounds and lectures to the residents. What a pleasure though.
I have had some opportunities to mingle with people and form friends in the hospital and outside of it. The recurring theme among physicians and non-physicians is that people in Ethiopia are increasingly being made to abandon intellectual/ academic pursuits for entrepreneurships in order to survive. (There is nothing wrong with entrepreneurship or business if done honestly, but it should not be the only means of existence in a modern society). One young professional couple shared with me how some of their close friends who have only high school education have gone into “business” and are living large, whereas people like them who have invested a significant number of years in education are left to struggle to make ends meet. Their expertise for knowledge transfer and their contribution to pulling Ethiopians out of the dark ages of ignorance seems to be overlooked. The way I see it, Ethiopian intellectuals are given very little incentive to make this country their home.
While discussing this topic with one individual I heard very disturbing news about a parliamentary discussion that was televised recently. Apparently, the prime minister of Ethiopia was discussing with members of the parliament on how Ethiopia can improve its Chat business in the international market. Chat is a marijuana like substance that is grown in Ethiopia and has an addictive and mind altering properties. This recreational drug is now creating a huge problem among the youth and adults alike and is blamed for a significant number of road fatalities especially among long distance truck drivers who drive while under the influence. Everyone can list many bad public policies, but this one defies explanation and borders on insanity.
May 11, 2006
I saw an elderly male carrying an emaciated adolescent kid and walking up the steep hill via the Radio Fana road going to TAH today. Beside him, also was a middle aged guy carrying a plastic bag. I saw them trudging up that steep hill in silence, obviously exhausted from a long journey, and quite clearly unable to afford a taxi fare to bring a sick child to the hospital. I wondered how long they traveled today and where they came from. I wondered what illness the child had and what other “mengelatat” (harassment) awaits them starting at the TAH gate. I wondered when they will eventually be able to see a physician. I also wondered if that child was going to walk out of TAH alive…
I see many elderly and sick people climbing the stairs at TAH all the way up to the 8th floor because the only one functioning elevator (that sometimes fails to function) is reserved for those who are severely sick such as those who require stretchers. I helped carry a heavy bag for a lady walking up the stairs this afternoon. She was very happy to share the burden and was talking to me in between halting breaths until one of the ladies who works in house keeping on 5th floor addressed me as “doctor”. At that point, the lady I was climbing the stairs with took the plastic bag I was helping carry from my hands, thanked me profusely and went her way, without even giving me a chance to say that it was no big deal.
I also see rows of people sitting on the benches and on the floors of the hospital waiting for their turns to see a doctor. Some look like they need to be in ICU immediately. Not that the medical ICU which has 4 beds and the most rudimentary cardiac monitors and not much else, will avail much of anything, but at least they will be in a bed of some sort. From what I gathered there are only two mechanical ventilators in the ICU; there are two “crash carts” (carts that hold emergency medications and defibrillators in the event of cardiopulmonary arrest)-one in the ICU the other in the OPD area. Emergency medications are not always available, therefore medical emergencies in general have a predictable dismal outcome.
During lunch break today a very soft spoken and pleasant laboratory technician was talking about how tuition for her daughter has increased by 50% and she and her husband don’t know how they are going to be able to keep their only child in the same school. Everywhere I turn I hear “sekoka” (woes). Sometimes it is almost impossible to comprehend this level of social devastation in one country. The poor have clearly grown poorer over the past decade or two, and the minority of “middle class” are frantically struggling not to join others into the quick sand of poverty. There is wide spread sense of hopelessness and dejection in people of all ages, and gender. People are preoccupied with trying to figure out how they can make it from one day to another.
I talk about misery sitting in an upscale café/bookstore, eating grilled veggie sandwich, drinking green tea, and working on my lap top. I have my palm pilot and cell phone on the table, both very much operational and invaluable even here in Ethiopia. On the bottom floor of this beautiful contemporary café called Lime Tree café is a snazzy day spa called “Boston Day Spa, Where luxury and Glamour Meet”. I am very comfortable. When I am done writing this piece I will walk across the street of Bole, where rows of internet cafes, pastry shops, high end boutiques and shiny high rises are lined up. I might as well be in America. I will eventually walk into a two storey beautiful house where the maids will wait on me. Now that is much better than I have it in America. This is what I call the “artificial” life of Addis Ababa. This is a life that only a very small minority of Ethiopians live.
Many things annoy me even infuriate me, but none like people who measure developmental advances of the country using these “artificial” methods. Rome was not built in a day, and nor will Ethiopia be. I am not against road constructions and the erection of high rises. I am not necessarily against the SUV driving, designer clothing wearing, Sheraton Hotel partying, Europe vacationing crowds. I am however against those who use this minute fraction of the reality in Ethiopia to measure “development”. I am against complacency and indifference to the pressing issues of basic human needs food, shelter, clothing, health care, education and safety to all the people of Ethiopia.
May 12th 2006
There were four successive bomb blasts in Addis today. One was close to TAH and it occurred while I was giving a lecture on Sub acute Bacterial Endocarditis to the medical students. Everyone looked pretty unmoved by the whole thing and outside the building it was business as usual. People on the street either talked about something entirely different, or they casually made comments about how they believe the government itself is responsible for these blasts. Two of the four blasts happened in a taxi and a bus (I could very well have been in one of those taxis), and a total of four people died with over 20 injured, some very seriously. Waiting for a taxi to go home right after the blast I saw a group of people sitting at a café near Ambassador Hotel having a good old time. The thought that came to mind was that Ethiopians have become accustomed to death and dying of all forms including terrorist killings that they carry on their lives pretty much how the Israelis and the Palestinians must carry on. Just when I thought it couldn’t possibly get any worse…!!
May 15, 2006
I keep fairly busy at TAH, and I am enjoying getting to know people a little bit better everyday. One of the physicians asked me today why I wanted to come to Ethiopia to work. This is a well seasoned physician that has served in the institution for a long time and I think he wanted to know if I knew what I would be getting myself into. I know that Ethiopia’s problems are complex and individual efforts may be miniscule but if there is enough of us I believe the scale will eventually tip. The scale may not tip in my life time but I am willing to leave my “negligible” contribution on the offering plate.
It is easy to get overwhelmed by all that is wrong around here, but in my simplistic personal view, there is still a lot of untapped sources. These sources are easy to miss because they are not big and they don’t leave visible dents on the surface of our problems, and they certainly don’t make the headlines. Most of these sources are also not measured in monetary in kind, and thus may appear not to be that valuable. I am thinking of the power of compassion that moves us to own the pain and suffering of others and make it our own. I am thinking of daily acts of simple kindness at individual levels. I am thinking of touching other human beings, both literally and figuratively. During rounds I made sure I laid my hands on each patient and addressed them by their names. I also always asked the patients and their families if they had any questions before we left their bedside. I made it my business to communicate to them by words, attitudes and actions that their issues concern me and they matter to me. Two days ago, the father of a 15 year girl with leukemia shook my hand and said to me in Oromiffa (was translated to me by one of the residents who speaks the language) that for them to” be touched by a doctor is like medicine itself ‘.
I will always remember what someone said to me: “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care”. If the students and the residents I worked with this month will remember only this piece of advice my time with them has been worth it.
Talking of simple kind acts, today’s was a special one. I was leaving TAH when a woman asked me where the “cherer kifle” (radiation room) was. Of course I didn’t know where it was but since she and a young man are bringing a very sick elderly woman who could barely walk, (she was moaning and looked like she was about to collapse), I offered to investigate for them. Once I found out it was on 2nd floor, they asked if the “lift” (elevator) will automatically stop on the floor, apparently it was their first time to take an elevator. I took the elevator with them and walked them to radiation oncology and gave their chart to the nurse and inquired for them when they will be seen. There are no wheel chairs, no hospital staff that help triage these sickly patients. The radiation/oncology area it turned out was quite a walk and I kept looking behind me at the sick woman and the man supporting her and said words of encouragement such as “Ayezwot desrsenale” (loosely translated: hang in there, we are almost there”). After we arrived in the radiation room the elderly lady sat on the bench she took my hand and kissed it (for the second time in 10 days, and it brought tears to my eyes. Such deep gratitude, for such a small act…) and said some of the most beautiful merekat (blessings) to me. The one that stood out the most was “Enkifat enkwan ayemtash” (“may you not even stumble”). I loved hearing that. I bowed my head several times, in acknowledgement, Ethiopian style, and said my Amens to all the blessings. It touched me so much, that it surprised me. In a land where verbal cursing is not uncommon it is good to hear a torrent of blessing for a change.
Above: With one of my favorite patients. Photography by Sosena Kebede.
June 16, 2006
I was rushing out through the OPD gate to meet someone for lunch when I run into one of the residents I know. We talked about what it is like to work and live in Ethiopia as a physician. My conversations with the same physician although not entirely based on a new theme gave me a reinforcement of what most intellectuals/professionals in this country are feeling. He told me that his salary rated among the highest but for a family of seven (five kids and a wife) it will be sufficient for two weeks only. Like many others he is also supplementing his income with a second job in the form of a private clinic work. He recounted that once upon a time, he too had great aspirations and dreams to bring about a change in the society. He told me after several episodes of banging his head against a brick wall he has decided to lead a quite life and support his family. This physician, who is soft spoken and accomplished, like many others has contributed a lot to that institution and to the country at large. How many peoples’ dreams and visions have died, I wondered.
I am reminded of the Biblical verse that says “a small yeast will leaven up an entire dough”. This is true of good as well as bad influence (“leaven”). I do believe, that though we might not see this happen in our generation, if we are determined we can be the leaven, the catalyst, to bring about a paradigm shift in this country. We can be the catalysts who will initiate the process of change from the cycles of poverty to self sufficiency.
I was very fortunate and truly feel honored to have met so many people that have done so much and have the potential to do so much more in Ethiopia. Some are tired, others are tiring out. That is why we need reinforcements to be deployed to them. With all the apprehensions that I feel at times, I can’t wait till I go back to Ethiopia. One of my self assigned missions now is to recruit as many as are willing to be part of that reinforcement.
—
About the author:
Ethiopian-born Sosena Kebede served as an Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine at Hanover Regional Medical Center until April 2006. She spent her childhood in Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Botswana before settling in the United States in 1988. She holds a B.S. from Duke University, and a Medical Doctorate from University of North Carolina. She is currently enrolled in the Public Health Program at Johns Hopkins.
Tadias Magazine
Art Talk
May 11, 2007
New York – Born in 1968, in Aroussi, a rural village in Ethiopia, Etiyé Dimma Poulsen was orphaned at age two. Adopted by a Danish friend of the family, Gunnar Poulsen, Etiyé Poulsen’s turbulent childhood led her through Ethiopia, Tanzania, Kenya, and finally to Denmark. As a remedy for the constant uprooting and difficulties of communication that characterized her childhood, she began to paint at the age of fourteen. When no other alternative existed, painting became her expressive outlet. Poulsen studied art and art history in Denmark for two years. At 22, she traveled to France to live with partner and fellow artist Michel Moglia. Inspired by Moglia, Poulsen began sculpting in ceramics to once again communicate her worldview and emotions. In 1993, she relocated her studio to Antwerp, Belgium, where she presently lives and works.
Her elegant sculpture suggests lyric elisions and manipulation of the commonplace, yielding extraordinary and personal perceptions. Simultaneously balanced between the traditional and the modern, they evince refined sensibilities that explore new aesthetic territory derived from her travels to varied cultural arenas and an awareness of the formalist sculpture sources involved with the nature of the material she uses, including it’s cultural connections. The body of her works has the force of a determined idea. They are so profoundly personal to the artist that they all but command an equally personal response. Totemic, elongated and possessing a quiet dignity with detailed facial expressions and delicately glazed bodies, the figures evolve out of a complex process in which clay is put on an iron mesh armature and then painted before it goes through the firing process. Chance also plays an important role during the firing process and accepted as a natural part of creation by the artist. This allows for the formation of cracks which give the works their distinct characteristics, a unity of paint treatment and over-all tonalities.
Poulsen’s works have been exhibited in Africa, Europe and the US including 2000 Dakar Biennale, Senegal; 2002 Alliance Francaise, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; 2003 Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, 2004, Museum of World Culture, Goteborg, Sweden, 2006, Skoto Gallery, New York.
She is also represented in several public and private collections such as The Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, Museum of African Art, Washington DC, Jean Paul Blachere Foundation, France and The Hans Bogatzke Collection of Contemporary African Art, Germany.
Defining herself as a cultural hybrid, Poulsen has always been drawn to African art and aesthetics. She attributes this attraction to an unconscious cultural memory. Consciously, she uses Ethiopian art as a tool in her creative process. She rejects the “primitive” stigmatization of artists of African descent and views it as a barrier to her own artistic expression. When language barriers grew too great, Etiye’s paintings and sculptures spoke for her. The works of Etiyé Dimma Poulsen, she stresses, are the embodiment of her vision and emotions which she attempts to communicate to the world.
Aztec Woman, 2005, mixed media, 23x10x4 inches.
Source: Skoto Gallery. Working around Archetypes: New Sculptures by Etiye Dimma Poulsen
Tadias Magazine
By Liben Eabisa
Updated: May 11th, 2007
New York (TADIAS) – The arrival of the first Ethiopian diplomatic delegation to the United States on July 11, 1919 made headlines in Chicago, where journalists eagerly awaited their opportunity to meet and interview the delegation.
At the time Woodrow Wilson was serving as the 28th President of the United States. In Ethiopia, Empress Zawditu, the eldest daughter of Emperor Menelik, was the reigning monarch.
Dejazmach Nadew, Empress Zawditu’s nephew and Commander of the Imperial Army, along with Ato Belanteghetta Hiruy Wolde Sellassie, Mayor of Addis Ababa, Kentiba Gebru, Mayor of Gonder, and Ato Sinkas, Dejazmach Nadew’s secretary, comprised the first official Ethiopian delegation to the United States in the summer of 1919.
The main purpose of their trip was to renew the 1904 Treaty of Amity (Friendship) between the United States and Ethiopia (brokered when President Theodore Roosevelt authorized US Ambassador Robert P. Skinner to negotiate a commercial treaty with Emperor Menelik).
The treaty had expired in 1917. This four-man delegation to the United States became known as the Abyssinian mission.
The delegation headed to the White House in Washington D.C. after their brief stay in Chicago.
Empress Zawditu of Ethiopia (In office: 1916 to 1930) and US President Woodrow Wilson (In office: March 4, 1913 – March 4, 1921). Photos: Public Domain.
The group visited the U.S. at a time when blacks were by law second-class citizens and in some places the most common crime against American blacks was lynching. Before leaving Chicago, a reporter for the Chicago Defender, an African American newspaper, asked the Ethiopian delegation what they thought about lynching in the U.S. The representatives responded “[We] dislike brutality… lynching of any nature, and other outrages heaped upon your people.”
African-Americans were inspired to see a proud African delegation being treated with so much respect by U.S. officials. Newspapers reported that in honor of the delegation’s visit “the flag of Abyssinia, which is of green, yellow, and red horizontal stripes, flew over the national capitol.”
The Chicago Defender reported that the delegation expressed their support for the struggle of American blacks and gave them words of encouragement. A member of the press had inquired if the group had advice to African-Americans. Ato Hiruy Wolde Sellassie, who spoke fluent English, replied: “Fight on. Don’t Stop.”
The Ethiopian presence at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City, dressed in their traditional white robe and pant attire attracted large attention.
Upon arriving in Washington D.C. they took up residence at the former Lafayette Hotel and awaited their formal presentation at the White House.
“It perhaps is of much interest to know that the Abyssinian religion is the oldest Christian religion in the world”, Captain Morris, the delegation’s chaperon, told reporters. “The queen of Sheba, who visited Solomon was once their queen, and the present ruler is descended from the queen of Sheba.”
The Ethiopian Mission enjoyed an overall warm welcome and before returning to Ethiopia they toured the cities of New York and San Francisco. They also visited an Irish Catholic cathedral, a Jewish synagogue, the Metropolitan Baptist Church in Harlem, and Yellowstone National Park.
—-
About the Author:
Liben Eabisa is Co-Founder & Publisher of Tadias Magazine.
Related:
History: US- Ethiopia Complicated Alliance
Ethiopia: US-Africa Relations in Trump Era
A Memoir of First US Diplomat’s Meetings With Emperor Menelik
African American and Ethiopian Relations
President Obama Becomes First Sitting U.S. President to Visit Ethiopia
Above: From left- Stephanie Fontenoy Tesfaye Tessema, Etiye
Dimma Poulsen, Etiye’s husband – back right, and Liben Eabisa.
Photos by Ray Grist
Event Name: Book launch & Reception for Publisher Reynold Kerr
Date: Sunday, May 6, 2007
City: Harlem, New York
Venue: Museum of Art and Origins
Address: 430 West 162 St
Phone: 212 740 8888
Host: Dr. George Preston
Note: Read Review of the book on Tadias Magazine
Send your hot shots to hotshots@tadias.com
Above: From left – Publisher Reynold Kerr, Helen Demoz, Liben Eabisa, and Rahel
Above: Japanese-born Ceramics artist Ayano
Above: Etiye Dimma Poulsen and Tesfaye Tessema
Above: Stephanie Fontenoy and Dr. George Preston
Above: Stephanie Fontenoy, George Preston and Liben Eabisa
Above: Liben Eabisa and Stephanie Fontenoy
Above: Etiye Dimma Poulsen and Liben Eabisa
Tadias Magazine
By Tseday Alehegn
This feature was first published in our print issue in 2005
New York (TADIAS) — In the hamlet of Washingtonville, New York, lies the scenic campus of Brotherhood Winery, a national historic landmark and America’s oldest winery, established in 1837. According to the Washingtonville Village Historian, Edward J. McLaughlin III, the original owner John Jacques “had planted a vineyard in the rear yard of his lumber business store, shipping the harvest of grapes to the Isles of Manhattan for 15 cents a pound.” When the price of grapes fell, Jacques experimented with pressing the fruit into juice and started producing wine. Subsisting on the sale of sacramental wine during the prohibition years, Brotherhood Winery continued its winemaking legacy.
Today Brotherhood Winery is a popular site for tourists, producing a wide assortment of award-wining wines, including Chardonnay, Johannisberg Riesling, Seyval Blanc, Chelois, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Pinot Noir. Under the supervision of Cesar Baeza, an internationally-renowned Chilean winemaster and new owner of Brotherhood Winery, a new dessert wine called Sheba Tej made from pure organic honey is now part of the premium wine list. Although the honey wine may be newly introduced to the Hudson Valley, Ethiopians have known it for centuries as “Tej”.
Brotherhood Winery, a national historic landmark and America’s oldest winery, established in 1837. (Photo: TADIAS)
Tej, or honey wine, is one of the world’s earliest fermented drinks, mentioned in ancient texts and scriptures, and consumed before the time of Christ. Traditionally, in Ethiopia, Tej was prepared primarily by women. In his book A Social History of Ethiopia, Historian Richard Pankhurst writes, “None except nobility and the highest chiefs and warriors were privileged to drink Tej.”
The honey wine’s popularity, all the same, surpassed the environs of the royal courts to be enjoyed by all sectors of ancient and modern Ethiopian society. Tej became a favorite during feasts and celebrations, notably weddings. The unique wine recipe contains no sulfites nor grapes, just pure honey. Legend even has it that Tej was one of the many gifts carried by Makeda, the Queen of Sheba, to Jerusalem’s King Solomon.
Honey wine was also known as mead and enjoyed in other parts of the ancient world. According to S. W. Andrews’ accounts of mead and meadmaking, in classical Greek mythology, the ‘Nectar of the Gods’ was a honey concoction known as Melitites; and the term “honeymoon” refers to the old tradition of newly weds drinking wine and feasting on honey cakes for one lunar month after their marriage, in the hopes that their actions would make their union more fertile.
America’s oldest winery began producing one of the world’s oldest wines after an African American entrepreneur, Ernest McCaleb, met and initiated a joint collaboration with Brotherhood Winery. McCaleb is founder and CEO of Sheba, Inc., a company focusing on the production and distribution of organic Ethiopian honey wine. Prior to founding Sheba, Inc., McCaleb had spent significant time conducting and financing highly successful import/export businesses in Ghana, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Cameroon, Gabon and Sierra Leone. His corporate offices were located on Wall Street in New York City and Western Avenue in Lagos, Nigeria, and his import/export financing company generated over $250 million in sales of cement, rice, sugar,and other commodities to governments and major businesses in West Africa.
A chance meeting with an Ethiopian in Paris gave rise to his eventual introduction to Ethiopian honey wine. Having a great passion for Africa, its diversity, traditions, and history, McCaleb continued on his entrepreneurial quest and established Sheba in 2003 with the sole purpose of producing authentic honey wine according to ancient Ethiopian traditions. To that end, he arranged for three generations of Ethiopian women — a mother, her daughter and granddaughter — to travel from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to New York’s Brotherhood Winery to demonstrate how Tej is prepared. Winemaster Baeza studied how this first batch of Sheba Tej was made. The careful end product was a naturally fermented, organic drink with a pleasing golden yellow hue — an ancient, spicy, semi-dry, full-bodied wine. The aroma of honey and wild flower permeated the air, and the Tej was joyously tasted by Baeza and the employees of Brotherhood Winery in conjunction with a hearty meal of Injera and Wot prepared by the three Ethiopian women.
Since then, Sheba Tej, produced at Brotherhood Winery has won awards at international honey wine festivals, and is distributed in many stores across the U.S. and the Caribbean. “Since I’ve begun doing this,” McCaleb says, “I’ve learned more about this rich history, and as I give tasting sessions I have become even more inspired. This is beyond the commercial success. It’s about pride and heritage, which those women taught us when they came to Brotherhood Winery.”
Ernest McCaleb, Founder & CEO of Sheba, Inc. (Photo: TADIAS)
The nutritional benefits and health promoting agents in honey itself are to be marveled. Honey, when stored properly, can remain edible for centuries, having almost no expiration date. According to a recent study conducted by Gross Market Research for the National Honey Board, four out of five households in America use honey in various capacities — as a sweetener, source of carbohydrate, anti-oxidant, skin cleanser, and even as an antiseptic to heal burns and wounds. Pure honey contains several important vitamins, including Thiamin, Riboflavin, Niacin, Folate, Vitamin B-6, and Vitamin C. Numerous essential minerals, such as Calcium, Iron, Zinc, Potassium, Phosphorus, Magnesium, Selenium, Copper, and Manganese, are also contained in honey. Honey continues to be used to alleviate symptoms of allergies, anemia and several chronic diseases, including asthma and high blood pressure.
Sheba Tej — prepared from pure, organic honey and preserved without the use of sulfites — retains the nutritional qualities of honey while at the same time making for an excellent wine with meals, or alone as an aperitif.
By producing and introducing Sheba Tej to the world, McCaleb and Brotherhood Winery are not only sharing in Ethiopia’s rich heritage but also fusing together the oldest tradition of winemaking in America with the ancient culture of preparing honey wine in Ethiopia. Their efforts have strengthened American and Ethiopian ties and, in the process, brought the famous ‘Nectar of the Gods’ to your dining table.
So uncork a bottle of Sheba Tej, pour generously into your cups, raise them, and proclaim the traditional Ethiopian toast, “Le tenachin!” To our health!
——————
About the Author:
Tseday Alehegn is the Editor-in-Chief of Tadias Magazine. Tseday is a graduate of Stanford University (both B.A. & M.A.). In addition to her responsibilities at Tadias, she is also a Doctoral student at Columbia University.
Related:
A friend to remember – Ernie of Sheba Tej dies (December, 2007)
ABOVE: Members of Batoto Yetu, an African cultural children’s dance group based in New York. Julio Leitao is seated on center, second row.
BY GEORGE NELSON PRESTON
Batoto Yetu means “our children.”
Dancing in the Footsteps of Chibinda Ilunga
We recently had the opportunity to interview Julio Leitao, the internationally renown producer, choreographer, musicologist and consultant to governments on matters of traditional African culture.
In Swahili, the lingua franca of Eastern and much of Central Africa, batoto yetu means “our children.” In 1990 Julio Leitao, an Angolan born immigrant founded Batoto Yetu in East Harlem, New York City. Batoto Yetu is a children’s dance troupe dedicated to a cosmopolitan understanding in a post-ethnic world through the spreading of the African cultural heritage.
Preston: When did you arrive in the United States of America?
Julio Leitao: I came here from Lisbon the 7th of July, 1985 when I was 18 years old, in pursuit of a personal career in classical ballet. I studied at the Dance Theater of Harlem with Maggie Black. In 1989 I joined the Princeton Ballet.
Preston: How is it that you grew up in Portugal?
Julio Leitao: I arrived as a political refugee from Zambia in 1976 when I was 9 years old. My mother and seven brothers escaped the turmoil in Angola. We got separated from my father. We walked southerly all the way from the Kasai. We were living in a displaced person’s camp. We found out five years later that our father was dead. We were living in the Bush at Malba when we were finally rescued. From there we made our way to Portugal.
Preston: What was it like to grow up in Portugal, as an African Child from a country that had so recently won its independence through a long and bloody conflict with its former colonizer? I think I am correct to say that Portugal was the last European Colonial die-hard holdout in all of Africa.
Julio Leitao: When you are black and talented, you are perceived as special: artist, an athlete. I was a highly regarded soccer player and I embraced dance in a variety of forms from classical to folk. I had become a consistent media presence on a weekly basis. But this somehow made me more aware of my own racial reality.
Preston: You mean the dichotomy between the European’s response to the African in general and you in particular?
Julio Leitao: Yes. We Euro-Africans, born in Africa and having grown up in Europe. A people of convenience. Nowadays they’d prefer to give a job to an Eastern European.
Preston: Tell me some more about this reality that you awakened to, this paradox of identities. It seems to have been the catalyst that changed your pursuit of a personal career in dance to culture bearer to the Diaspora and beyond.
Julio Leitao: When I was sixteen years old, fate introduced me to Debbie Allen. She was in Portugal, a cultural emissary. Through my personal exposure to her during my dancing, choreographing and duties at the conservatory, I discovered the difference in how they treated her and me in their peculiar hierarchy of importance. They treated her like a goddess and I become nothing. The fact that this Black American could command so much respect made me think, I must go to New York to earn greater respect. This was during one of the major periods of intense fighting in Angola between UNITA and the MPLTA.
So by 1989 I was teaching classes for the National Black Theater in East Harlem. Then I started teaching children for free right there in the project playgrounds. I taught them dances such as mukanda from the Chokwe people’s boy’s initation rites, tshisela, another Luba dance, mutuashi, a Luba dance from the Kasai, and ndombolo, a pop dance, very commercial but great fun to watch. We did kapetula, an Angolan street culture dance and semba, from the Ovimbundu of Northwest Angola. Semba is the mother of samba. They also learned sabar from Senegal.
Preston: So we can say that Batoto Yetu was literally born of our children. What are you doing right now in addition to teaching dance and touring the U.S.A?
Julio Leitao: Since 1996 I worked with the Portuguese government to promote cultural awareness among the youth in Portugal. This is primarily a cultural service, but you can see the implications…its an important link with expanded social services as well. This is, mainly in Lisboa and Setubal.
Reflections
I mused on the cultural and family heritage of Julio. His mother’s first language was Kiluba, his father spoke Lingala, Kikongo, Portuguese, French, German and English. In the late 16th century Luba chieftains of the Ilunga dynasty began a campaign of exploration, discovery and conquest that was destined to create the cultural unification of what is now southeast DRC, northern and central Angola and west-central Zambia. Starting in eastern Lubaland , the Ilungas expanded their reach into the Katanga and Kasai of what is now the southern provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (ex Zaire). Around 1600 Chibinda Ilunga, a great Luba hunter-pathfinder met Lweji, a Lunda queen, and the Ilunga lineage expanded. The Chokwe in the north central of what is now Angola were then tributary to the Lunda. In the mid nineteenth century the Chokwe broke from the Lunda and the Chokwe culture including Chibunda, Ilunga’s revitalization of sacred kingship spread amongst the neighboring Mbundu, Lwena, Inbangala, Luchazi and Luvale peoples. Peoples, nearly all of whose homelands Julio and his family were to traverse on their way to sanctuary in Zambia.
For this writer, Julio’s birthplace, his long trek through the Kasai, Katanga and the terminus in Zambia followed greatly in the literal and cultural path of the Ilunga dynasty. He and his family had traversed much of the territory unified by the Ilungas. Now, here he was in New York City, teaching the dances of these very same peoples.
I thought of the uncommonly beautiful statues of the Chokwe and Lunda chiefs who trace their franchise to rule to the Ilungas. These statutes depict Chokwe chieftains in their royal hats and seated in postures of authority. Either seated and playing a thumb piano, or standing and holding medicine horns, rifles or walking staffs. Their outsized feet remind us of their great treks through forest and savanna.
Above: Generic Portrait of Chibinda Ilunga. These statues represent the present and pastChokwe chiefs all the way back to Chibinda Ilunga. Wood, H. 10.” Anonymous loan to the Museum of Art and Origins.
At age seven, Julio had found himself and the remnants of his family trekking along the footsteps of the Ilungas from Kasai, through Angola and finally to escape in Zambia. They had traversed the tribal territories of the Luba, Lunda, Kongo, Chokwe, Luchazi. Years later, in1989 Julio would introduce the dance steps of these peoples to the children of Africa, Europe and the Americas. All this makes me think of a phrase from the Baghavad Gita: The foot of the dance is everywhere in the whirling circumference.
Above: D.J. Sirak spinning Afro beat, World, Hip Hop, Reggae New Groove and Ethiopian
Every Saturday is African Relaxation Session at The Shrine in Harlem, New York. A place to check out if you are African and passing through New York.
Photos by Sirak Getachew (D.J. Sirak)
Event Name: African Relaxation Session
City: Harlem, New York
Venue: The Shrine
Address: 2272 Adam Clayton Powell Blvd. (B/N 133 & 134)
Hosts: D.J. Sirak & D.J. Birane
Music: Afro beat, World, Hip Hop, Reggae, New Groove and Ethiopian
Date: Every Saturday
Send your hot shots to hotshots@tadias.com
On Thursday, April 26, the audience in the Cellar Kitchen at Macy’s Herald Square, the world’s largest store, received an important lesson in cooking up flavorful Ethiopian dishes from Philipos Mengistu, owner and Executive Chef of Queen of Sheba restaurant in New York City.
Philipos demonstrated why crowds are flocking to his midtown Manhattan eatery. He was assisted by his wife Sara and Asiana Blount, manager of Macy’s Herald Square Special Events, and the staff at Macy’s Culinary Council.
Tadias was there to cover the event. Here are images from the show.
Photos by Liben Eabisa
City: New York
Event Name: Cooking demonstration by Philipos Mengistu, owner and Executive Chef of Queen of Sheba restaurant
Host: Macy’s Herald Square Special Events
Venue: Macy’s Herald Square
Address: 151 West 34th Street
Date: Thursday, April 26, 2007
Above: Asiana Blount, manager of Macy’s Herald Square Special Events, prepares Philipos for the show.
Above: Philipos was assisted by his wife Sara (left) and Asiana Blount, manager of Macy’s Herald Square Special Events (middle).
The audience was treated to servings of Yebeg Tibis (Ethiopian lamb stew).
Above: Philipos at the end of a hugely successful event.
Above: Philipos at his midtown Manhattan restaurant. Photo by Helina Metaferia.
Above: Tibarek’s second encounter with snow.
A New Mom Celebrates Her Ethiopian Daughter’s First Birthday in America
BY JILL VEXLER
Barely unpacked from Addis, with Tibarek, my newly adopted, almost six year old daughter, she was invited to two birthday parties for children in our building, a boy’s eighth and twin’s sixth. Speaking minimal English, their parents and I marveled at their unique way of communicating after just a few afternoons of play. I was overjoyed.
Above: Pre-party nosh: Jill ties
an apron on Tibarek’s dress.
Photo by Jeremy Scharlack.
The first party arrived, and Tibarek went to help decorate. The party was a production. Helium balloons, magicians, balloon sculptures (her favorite), face-painting, games, gift bags, pizza, and cake. Tibarek joined in the high energy as if she had been reared on New York birthday parties. I started thinking about her fast approaching birthday. When I told her she, too, has a birthday, her expression was as if it suddenly hit her: EVERYONE has a birthday and would have a party. In my limited Amharic, I told her, her birthday was soon, “negge…negge….” (tomorrow.…tomorrow). No language gap here. Yes, friends! Yes, balloons! Yes, pizza! We listed children to invite. We knew seven kids from our building, and the Washington Square playground where I saw her gregariousness in action the first day we came.
Above: Tibarek wearing sunglasses
like those in the gift bags she gave to her
friends on her birthday.
Photo by Jeremy Scharlack.
Entertaining is my second nature, and our loft lends itself to great parties, but a child’s birthday party was daunting. I plunged into calls to other mothers, balloon artists, and magicians. I wanted a memorable party: not too indulgent, expensive, or programmed. I was petrified by the seemingly superfluous gifts other children received. The idea: “in lieu of gifts, please make a donation to Worldwide Orphans Foundation in Ethiopia,” entered my mind but felt self-righteous and pretentious. Tibarek had not been in the US two months, maybe she should plow through wrapping paper like all the other kids. Friends might give her things that would never occur to me, and they were also “Welcome to America” gifts. I still felt I had to counter-balance the possibility of a “Barbie Invasion,” with a clever, fun, homemade celebration.
Above: Tibarek opens gifts.
Photo by Jeremy Scharlack.
My anxiety reflected my self-consciousness about American abundance, and my newness as a mother, more than it did Tibarek’s possible temptation to materialism. I reflected on her kindness and generosity. I had seen her on the playground, giving her bubble wand to a little boy, caring for an infant as she went down the spiral slide, making sure everyone had a turn with the ball. She would easily incorporate this special day into the vast newness that engulfed her life. Deep down, then, it must have been my own pressure to make MY daughter’s party fun, “cool,” and approved of by parents who had already been to dozens. The individualist in me did want not a “cookie-cutter” occasion. A unique party for a unique daughter.
At fifty-seven, I had plunged into a wonderful, dramatic life change: creating a family. My world opened to new people, new culture, new worries, and new learning. My inner anthropologist loved the challenges culturally, and linguistically that a child from Ethiopia presented. I fell in love with the culture during a three week trip volunteering at the AHOPE Orphanage. I met Tibarek, and immediately set the adoption procedure in motion with the Minnesota Children’s Home and Family Service. New Ethiopian friends in Addis, and through them, others in New York, enriched the experience in ways that I never imagined. And here she is – charming, energetic and learning English at break-neck speed.
Creativity set in. I asked my cousin Jeremy, a professional photographer in New York, to set up a studio in the loft. I asked Eddie, who has framed ten exhibitions for me, to give me leftover matte board for kids to frame for Jeremy’s instant photographs. I went to the hobby store for glitter, glue, and treasures for collages on the frames. I called Peter and Diana, who have every costume under the sun, and the dress-up corner was born. The party was shaping up but not enough kids and way too many adults!
My dear Israeli friend and caterer Chava, has a daughter about Tibarek’s age. Chava offered to make cupcakes for kids to decorate. With Chava, they would squeeze bags of icing! I was excited when I realized that the party was the week-end after the Gala for Worldwide Orphans Foundation and the fabulous Dr. Sophie, the pediatrician who checked Tibarek’s health in Addis, would still be in New York with her two young nephews who live in New Jersey. Then, Tibarek’s New York pediatrician, the divine Dr. Jane and her terrific partner Diana would bring their two sons, one Ethiopian, one Vietnamese. Young twins of new Ethiopian friends in New York agreed to come, as well as Meron, an Ethiopian little girl adopted by kind Irene. A little boy from Djbouti and his sweet, supportive father, Angel from Mexico in Tibarek’s ESL class, and a cute Japanese two-year old from the playground were other guests. Tibarek’s god-mother, Terrell, would take the train from Washington. From five children, we ended up with 16, and 38 adults!
The day before the party, Saturday, was Tibarek’s “real” birthday. We went apple picking with a group of kids visiting from Ethiopia, and to a surprise party for our friend George who turned 70. He and his wife Joelle had greeted Tibarek, her godmother, and me, after the flight from Ethiopia. Tibarek adores them. As George uncovered his surprised, teary eyes, he picked Tibarek up and announced, “our newest friend who just arrived in America turns six today!” Seventy-five strangers instantaneously sang “Happy Birthday” to my child. Now I was the one with tears in her eyes.
Above: Tibarek holding her
birthday cupcake.
Photo by Jeremy Scharlack.
After putting Tibarek to bed Saturday night, I decorated the hallway and blew balloons, wanting her to awaken to ambiance that said, “Today’s the day!”
The morning before the party seemed to last forever. Finally, Jeremy arrived with camera, lights and printer; friends brought food; we put music on. As each guest came, Tibarek became the hostess with the mostess- directing adults to go “down to that part of the house” and, with her arm around each child, she escorted each to the crafts and photography areas. She amazed us all as we watched her grace and ease as a social butterfly, speaking non-stop English! Over two hours later with more glitter on the Turkish rugs than on the photo frames, consuming of countless cupcakes, pizzas, juices, hummus, cheese, bread, and wine (adults only!), the party was a success. New friends, families of every imaginable configuration, had celebrated Tibarek’s first birthday in America. Generous and thoughtful gifts that honor her are treasures. She plowed through the wrapping paper like a natural.
She is already talking about her next birthday. Thank goodness it is still nine months away!
Above: Tibarek and Dr. Sophie Mengistu, the pediatrician who
checked Tibarek’s health in Addis. Photo by Jeremy Scharlack.
—–
About the Author: Jill Vexler is a cultural anthropologist who does field work in Latin America, North Africa , Israel, Greece, Asia , Eastern Europe and New York City. She designs cultural heritage and social history exhibitions. She volunteered at the AHOPE orphanage, where she fell in love with Ethiopian culture.
The inaugural show for Addis Heights millennium arts exhibition series featured 23-year-old Helina Metaferia, a U.S.-born Ethiopian-American artist from Washington, D.C.
Here are images from the opening hosted by Addis Heights Lidjoch Org. The project is sponsored by Tadias Magazine and Africalling.com.
Photos by Gideon Belete
City: Harlem, New York
Event Name: Opening of Addis Heights Millennium Art Exhibition Series
Featured Artist: Helina Metaferia
Show Title: Finding Womban – An Exploration of femininity through painting.
Host: Addis Heights Lidjoch Org.
Venue: OC West
Address: 11 Edward M. Morgan Place (157 & Broadway)
Date: Saturday, April 21, 2007
Send your hot shots to hotshots@tadias.com
Above: Featured Artist Helina Metaferia (left) and writer Andrea Bostan. Photo by Angelica.
Above: Featured Artist Helina Metaferia (left) and Leah Abraha (right).
Above: Leah Abraha
Above: Enjoying spring weather outside OC West
Above: Helina Metaferia and friend
Above: Hilawe Girma
Above: Adebola Osakwe, owner of OC.
Above: Helina’s parents
Above: Tizita Fekredengel
Above: Helina’s parents
Above: From left – Actor Freedome Bradley, Africalling’s Gideon Belete, and John
Above: From left – Tizita , Liben Eabisa, and Eleni.
Above: Joelle Dussek (Production & Events Consultant), on the back ground – Kidane Mariam (Ethio-Cuban Cinematographer)
Above: Ayele
Above: Esabel
Above: Liben Eabisa and Helina Metaferia
Above: From left – Freedome Bradley, Nemo Semret and Liben Eabisa
Above: Helina Metaferia (left) and Leah Abraha
Above: From left – Freedom Bradley, Gideon Belete, John and Nemo Semret
Above: Part of the proceeds from the sale of the book Abyssinia of Today (Robert P. Skinner’s memoir, a narrative of the first American diplomatic mission to black Africa), helps to pay part of the production cost for the Millennium Art Exhibition Series.
Above: Gideon Belete.
Above: Kidane Mariam (Ethio-Cuban Cinematographer)
Photos by D.J. Fitsum
Event Name: Teddy Afro Concert
City: San Jose, California
Venue: The Rosewater Hall
Address: 1880 Murphy Ave.
Host: AGT Investment, Inc.
Date: January 20th, 2007
Email your hot shots to hotshots@tadias.com
Want to laugh? Read a poem about Hot Shots.
Click here for events near your city or visit Liben’s Events List at www.libenslist.com
Related: Jailed Singer Teddy Afro: ‘A Political Symbol’ (LA Times)
Judiciary, Press Freedom in Ethiopia Questioned over Teddy Afro’s Trial
Above: Tseday Alehegn during her walks through Harlem with Tesfaye Tessema
By Tseday Alehegn
Before arriving at Artist Tesfaye’s studio in Harlem, his home of twenty years, we took a tour of historic areas where Ethiopian and African-American ties runs deep and undisturbed. We traversed slowly and observantly across Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard, named after the fiery pastor of Harlem’s legendary Abyssinian Baptist Church, and walked through African Square, lined with colorful West African vendors and stores. Continuing our promenade towards Lenox Avenue, we spotted an Ethiopian-owned cafe called Settepani, a popular hangout for Harlem’s young elite. As we strolled by Jackie Robinson’s Park, a young African American man, recognizing our Ethiopian ancestry, smiled and greeted us with a hearty Tenayistelegn!
Above: Top left, Jackie Robinson’s Park; Middle Right, Harlem’s legendary Abyssinian Baptist Church. Photos by Tseday Alehegn
Walking through Harlem with Tess (as he is known in Harlem), two things become quickly evident: The first being that this neighborhood has, as the artist tells us, “a feeling of home.” And the latter, that his love for this community fuels his art.
Above: Tesfaye Tessema in Brooklyn, New York. Photo by Liben Eabisa
One of his recent exhibitions at Skoto Gallery in New York (one of the first galleries to specialize in contemporary African Art in the United States), was entitled Addis Improvisations: Art from Harlem. This series is an afrocentric, jazzy-expression of joint heritage.
Above: Left, Addis Improvisation III, 2004, acrylic on canvas, 72×54 inches. Right, Addis Improvisation I, 2004, acrylic on canvas, 72″x39″. Photos courtesy of Skoto Gallery.
Tesfaye’s journey to Harlem can be traced back to his early high school days, when he was a student at Menelik High School in Addis Ababa. On one particular day, his class was excused and students were asked to attend a special gathering at the National Theatre. “We were told that an important person from Harlem had arrived, and we saw several men dressed in fancy suits setting up their musical instruments on stage. Their leader was called Duke Ellington,” he recalls. The young Tesfaye was mesmerized as the concert began with Ellington’s famous “A-Train” composition. This extraordinary opportunity to listen to Ellington play jazz remained etched in Tesfaye’s mind, his first introduction to jazz and to Harlem.
Many years later, after arriving in Washington, D.C. to pursue a Masters of Fine Arts at
Howard University, he developed lasting friendships within the African-American community, and rekindled his passion for Harlem. After completing his art studies, Tesfaye moved to Harlem. He now lives in the same building where Duke Ellington once resided. “I feel at home here,” he says. “I tell my African-American friends that, just as they look for their roots, I search for my branches. Together we form a tree.”
Harlem, and jazz in particular, have profoundly impacted Tesfaye’s art. Speaking about his career as an artist, he says, “My art lately is an improvisation. I consider myself a jazz painter. I play jazz with my brush.”
Above: Left, 155th/Amsterdam Avenue II, 2003, acrylic on canvas, 24″x16″. Right, Addis Improvisation V, 2004, acrylic on canvas, 72″x54″. Photos courtesy of Skoto Gallery.
Art itself had also been an integral part of Tesfaye’s childhood experience. “I’ve known art since I knew myself,” he says. “While other children played together, I grew up in a household with no other children, so art became my game. I played art. I drew on walls with charcoal, and I looked around for natural objects to create color – green from leaves and yellow from mustard,” he shares. “Whenever I accompanied my mother to church, I used to stare at the paintings on the walls during prayers. To me, this art was able to express spiritual concepts that are not as easily expressed through words.” After attending Menelik school, Tesfaye longed to enter the National Fine Arts School — conveniently located right next door. He was accepted and commenced formal studies in art there before going on to pursue graduate studies at Howard.
Tesfaye Tessema is not only a master painter but also a master print maker and a muralist. He also uses etching, lithography, and mixed media. His art has been collected by prestigious institutions, such as the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the United Nations in New York City. Alongside the works of famous African-American artists such as Romare Bearden, Tesfaye Tessema’s paintings are prominently featured in the Schomburg Center’s publication Black New York Artists of the 20th Century. The United Nations transformed one of his paintings into a stamp that raised over $300,000 for famine relief in Ethiopia. He was also commissioned to paint a mural by the Museum of African Arts (the Smithsonian) on Capitol Hill. Tesfaye stands as one of the only contemporary Ethiopian artists to display his artwork at established institutions like the Guggenheim Museum in New York. His art has been exhibited at various universities throughout the U.S. as well as internationally in France,Germany, England, Japan, and many other countries.
Above: Addis Improvisation IV, 2004, acrylic on canvas, 56″x54″. Photo courtesy of Skoto Gallery.
Throughout his career, Tesfaye has emphasized his appreciation for public art. “I think people have the right to claim my art,” he says, seeing art as his service to individuals and contribution to the public in general. He uses the sights and sounds of his two communities, Ethiopian and African-American, to make art that positively reinforces their harmony.
“I would really like the world to know that all of us are artists,” he says. “There are no special people made to be artists. What comes out on the canvas is what we’ve all taken in from our environment, expressed through our own personal interpretation.”
A Harlem moment with Tesfaye teaches us to appreciate not only the art but also the artist.
———————–
About the Author:
Tseday Alehegn is the Editor-in-Chief of Tadias Magazine. Tseday is a graduate of Stanford University (both B.A. & M.A.). In addition to her responsibilities at Tadias, she is also a Doctoral student at Columbia University.
Tadias Magazine
By Ayele Bekerie, PhD
Updated: April 18th, 2007
New York (TADIAS) — Seventy two years ago, African Americans of all classes, regions, genders, and beliefs expressed their opposition to and outrage over the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in various forms and various means. The invasion aroused African Americans – from intellectuals to common people in the street – more than any other Pan-African-oriented historical events or movements had. It fired the imagination of African Americans and brought to the surface the organic link to their ancestral land and peoples.
1935 was indeed a turning point in the relations between Ethiopia and the African Diaspora. Harris calls 1935 a watershed in the history of African peoples. It was a year when the relations substantively shifted from symbolic to actual interactions. The massive expression of support for the Ethiopian cause by African Americans has also contributed, in my opinion, to the re-Africanization of Ethiopia. This article attempts to examine the history of the relations between Ethiopians and African Americans by focusing on brief biographies of two great leaders, one from Ethiopia and another one from African America, who made extraordinary contributions to these relations.
It is fair to argue that the Italo-Ethiopian War in the 1930s was instrumental in the rebirth of the Pan-African movement. The African Diaspora was mobilized in support of the Ethiopian cause during both the war and the subsequent Italian occupation of Ethiopia. Italy’s brutal attempt to wipe out the symbol of freedom and hope to the African world ultimately became a powerful catalyst in the struggle against colonialism and oppression. The Italo-Ethiopian War brought about an extraordinary unification of African people’s political awareness and heightened level of political consciousness. Africans, African Americans, Afro-Caribbean’s, and other Diaspora and continental Africans from every social stratum were in union in their support of Ethiopia, bringing the establishment of “global Pan-Africanism.” The brutal aggression against Ethiopia made it clear to African people in the United States that the Europeans’ intent and purpose was to conquer, dominate, and exploit all African people. Mussolini’s disregard and outright contempt for the sovereignty of Ethiopia angered and reawakened the African world.
Response went beyond mere condemnation by demanding self-determination and independence for all colonized African people throughout the world. For instance, the 1900-1945 Pan-African Congresses regularly issued statements that emphasized a sense of solidarity with Haiti, Ethiopia, and Liberia, thereby affirming the importance of defending the sovereignty and independence of African and Afro-Caribbean states. A new generation of militant Pan-Africanists emerged who called for decolonization, elimination of racial discrimination in the United States, African unity, and political empowerment of African people.
One of the most significant Pan-Africanist Conferences took place in 1945, immediately after the defeat of the Italians in Ethiopia and the end of World War II. This conference passed resolutions clearly demanding the end of colonization in Africa, and the question of self-determination emerged as the most important issue of the time. As Mazrui and Tidy put it: “To a considerable extent the 1945 Congress was a natural outgrowth of Pan-African activity in Britain since the outbreak of the Italo-Ethiopian War.”
Another of the most remarkable outcomes of the reawakening of the African Diaspora was the emergence of so many outstanding leaders, among them the Ethiopian Melaku E. Bayen and the African American John Robinson. Other outstanding leaders were Willis N. Huggins, Arnold Josiah Ford, and Mignon Innis Ford, who were active against the war in both the United States and Ethiopia. Mignon Ford, the founder of Princess Zenebe Work School, did not even leave Ethiopia during the war. The Fords and other followers of Marcus Garvey settled in Ethiopia in the 1920s. Mignon Ford raised her family among Ethiopians as Ethiopians. Her children, fluent speakers of Amharic, have been at home both in Ethiopia and the United States.
Pan-Africanists in Thoughts & Practice
Melaku E. Bayen, an Ethiopian, significantly contributed to the re-Africanization of Ethiopia. His noble dedication to the Pan-African cause and his activities in the United States helped to dispel the notion of “racial fog” that surrounded the Ethiopians. William R. Scott expounded on this: “Melaku Bayen was the first Ethiopian seriously and steadfastly to commit himself to achieving spiritual and physical bonds of fellowship between his people and peoples of African descent in the Americas. Melaku exerted himself to the fullest in attempting to bring about some kind of formal and continuing relationship designed to benefit both the Ethiopian and Afro-American.” To Scott, Bayen’s activities stand out as “the most prominent example of Ethiopian identification with African Americans and seriously challenges the multitude of claims which have been made now for a long time about the negative nature of Ethiopian attitudes toward African Americans.”
The issues raised by Scott and the exemplary Pan-Africanism of Melaku Bayen are useful in establishing respectful and meaningful relations between Ethiopia and the African Diaspora. They dedicated their entire lives in order to lay down the foundation for relations rooted in mutual understanding and historical facts, free of stereotypes and false perceptions. African American scholars, such as William Scott, Joseph E. Harris, and Leo Hansberry contributed immensely by documenting the thoughts and activities of Bayen, both in Ethiopia and the United States.
Melaku E. Bayen was raised and educated in the compound of Ras Mekonnen, then the Governor of Harar and the father of Emperor Haile Selassie. He was sent to India to study medicine in 1920 at the age of 21 with permission from Emperor Haile Selassie. Saddened by the untimely death of a young Ethiopian woman friend, who was also studying in India, he decided to leave India and continue his studies in the United States. In 1922, he enrolled at Marietta College, where he obtained his bachelor’s degree. He is believed to be the first Ethiopian to receive a college degree from the United Sates.
Melaku started his medical studies at Ohio State University in 1928, then, a year later, decided to transfer to Howard University in Washington D.C. in order to be close to Ethiopians who lived there. Melaku formally annulled his engagement to a daughter of the Ethiopian Foreign Minister and later married Dorothy Hadley, an African American and a great activist in her own right for the Ethiopian and pan-Africanist causes. Both in his married and intellectual life, Melaku wanted to create a new bond between Ethiopia and the African Diaspora.
Melaku obtained his medical degree from Howard University in 1936, at the height of the Italo-Ethiopian War. He immediately returned to Ethiopia with his wife and their son, Melaku E. Bayen, Jr. There, he joined the Ethiopian Red Cross and assisted the wounded on the Eastern Front. When the Italian Army captured Addis Ababa, Melaku’s family went to England and later to the United States to fully campaign for Ethiopia.
Schooled in Pan-African solidarity from a young age, Melaku co-founded the Ethiopian Research Council with the late Leo Hansberry in 1930, while he was student at Howard. According to Joseph Harris, the Council was regarded as the principal link between Ethiopians and African Americans in the early years of the Italo-Ethiopian conflict. The Council’s papers are housed at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University. At present, Professor Aster Mengesha of Arizona State University heads the Ethiopian Research Council. Leo Hansberry was the recipient of Emperor Haile Selassie’s Trust Foundation Prize in the 1960s.
Melaku founded and published the Voice of Ethiopia, the media organ of the Ethiopian World Federation and a pro-African newspaper that urged the “millions of the sons and daughters of Ethiopia, scattered throughout the world, to join hands with Ethiopians to save Ethiopia from the wolves of Europe.” Melaku founded the Ethiopian World Federation in 1937, and it eventually became one of the most important international organizations, with branches throughout the United States, the Caribbean, and Europe. The Caribbean branch helped to further solidify the ideological foundation for the Rasta Movement.
Melaku died at the age of forty from pneumonia he contracted while campaigning door-to-door for the Ethiopian cause in the United States. Melaku died in 1940, just a year before the defeat of the Italians in Ethiopia. His tireless and vigorous campaign, however, contributed to the demise of Italian colonial ambition in Ethiopia. Melaku strove to bring Ethiopia back into the African world. Melaku sewed the seeds for a “re-Africanization” of Ethiopia. Furthermore, Melaku was a model Pan-Africanist who brought the Ethiopian and African American people together through his exemplary work and his remarkable love and dedication to the African people.
Another heroic figure produced by the anti-war campaign was Colonel John Robinson. It is interesting to note that while Melaku conducted his campaign and died in the United States, the Chicago-born Robinson fought, lived, and died in Ethiopia.
Above: John Robinson
When the Italo-Ethiopian War erupted, he left his family and went to Ethiopia to fight alongside the Ethiopians. According to William R. Scott, who conducted thorough research in documenting the life and accomplishments of John Robinson, wrote about Robinson’s ability to overcome racial barriers to go to an aviation school in the United States. In Ethiopia, Robinson served as a courier between Haile Selassie and his army commanders in the war zone. According to Scott, Robinson was the founder of the Ethiopian Air Force. He died in a plane crash in 1954.
Scott makes the following critical assessment of Robinson’s historical role in building ties between Ethiopia and the African Diaspora. I quote him in length: “Rarely, if ever, is there any mention of John Robinson’s role as Haile Selassie’s special courier during the Italo-Ethiopian conflict. He has been but all forgotten in Ethiopia as well as in Afro-America. [Ambassodor Brazeal mentioned his name at the planting of a tree to honor the African Diaspora in Addis Ababa recently.] Nonetheless, it is important to remember John Robinson, as one of the two Afro-Americans to serve in the Ethiopia campaign and the only one to be consistently exposed to the dangers of the war front.
Colonel Robinson stands out in Afro-America as perhaps the very first of the minute number of Black Americans to have ever taken up arms to defend the African homeland against the forces of imperialism.”
John Robinson set the standard in terms of goals and accomplishments that could be attained by Pan-Africanists. Through his activities, Robinson earned the trust and affection of both Ethiopians and African Americans. Like Melaku, he made concrete contributions to bring the two peoples together. He truly built a bridge of Pan African unity.
It is our hope that the youth of today learn from the examples set by Melaku and Robinson, and strive to build lasting and mutually beneficial relations between Ethiopia and the African Diaspora. As we celebrate Black History Month in the United States, let us recommit ourselves to Pan-African principles and practices with the sole purpose of empowering African people. The Ethiopian American community ought to empower itself by forging alliances with African Americans in places such as Washington D.C. We also urge the Ethiopian Government to, for now, at least name streets in Addis Ababa after Bayen and Robinson.
I would like to conclude with Melaku’s profound statement: “The philosophy of the Ethiopian World Federation is to instill in the minds of the Black people of the world that the word Black is not to be considered in any way dishonorable but rather an honor and dignity because of the past history of the race.”
—-
About the Author:
Ayele Bekerie was born in Ethiopia, and earned his Ph.D. in African American Studies at Temple University in 1994. He has written and published in scholarly journals, such as , ANKH: Journal of Egyptology and African Civilizations, Journal of Black Studies, The International Journal of Africana Studies, and Imhotep. He is an Assistant Professor at the Africana Studies and Research Center of Cornell University. He is a regular contributor to Tadias Magazine.
To further explore the history of Ethiopian & African American relations, consult the following texts:
• Joseph E. Harris’s African-American Reactions to War in Ethiopia 1936-1941(1994).
• William R. Scott’s The Sons of Sheba’s Race: African-Americans and the Italo- Ethiopian War, 1935-1941. (2005 reprint).
• Ayele Bekerie’s “African Americans and the Italo-Ethiopian War,” in Revisioning Italy: National Identity and Global Culture (1997).
• Melaku E. Bayen’s The March of Black Men (1939).
• David Talbot’s Contemporary Ethiopia (1952).
Born in Ethiopia, Yadesa, also known as Yaddi, immigrated to the United States in 1995. Yaddi showed an interest in art since his early childhood. Even though he does not remember when he started painting, as a sixth grader his school commissioned him to paint a mural.
Above: Dreamer
Yaddi’s first exposure and memories of art was as a child gazing at murals often found in Ethiopian Orthodox churches. These murals used line drawings filled with bold, vibrant colors.
Above: Worshippers
In Seattle, Yaddi studied art at Seattle Pacific University where he earned his Bachelors degree in Visual Communication. He also attended Seattle Central Community College and received an Associates of Art degree in Graphic Design.
Yaddi’s exposure to African Art and western art gives him a unique opportunity to understand their relationship as well as their differences. While studying art history Yaddi examined how every art genre and classification derived or inherited from each other, and the existence of one was based on the existence of the other. He also examined the influence of African art on western art and vice versa.
Above: Madonna
Yaddi believes his work is a byproduct of the cultural diversity he enjoyed while living in Addis Ababa and Seattle. In his work he tries to capture the life of those who are ‘invisible’ to the mainstream, and he hopes that his work will become a tool for social change.
Above: Prisoners of Haven
—-
To contact the artist please write to: YADESA BOJIA, 13745 34th Ave. S. Tukwila, WA 98168 Tel: 206-501-9958
Photos by Onye Anyanwu
Event Name: Ethiopian Light: Photographs by Aida Muluneh
City: New York
Venue: Contemporary African Art Gallery
Address: 330 West 108th St, #6 (at Riverside Dr.)
Hosts: Bill & Reese Karg
Date: Thursday Nov. 2, 2006
Email your hot shots to hotshots@tadias.com
Above – Left: Stylist/Designer Mobalji & friend, Middle: Attorney Nicole Coward (Consultant to Tadias), Liben Eabisa, and friend, Right: Photographer Andrew Dosunmu & Stylist/Designer Mobalji
Above – Left: Actor Freedome Bradley & Reese Karg, Middle: Africalling’s Gideon Belete, Attorney Nicole Coward & Reeses’ Mother, Right: Nemo (President of InvisibleHand Networks), Gideon, Nicole Coward & Reeses’ Mother
Above – Left: Photographer Andrew Dosunmu, Casting Director Onye Anyanwu, Attorney Nicole Coward, Right: Gideon, & Reeses’ Mother
Photos by D.J. Fitsum
Event Name: Hollywood LeHabesha: Ethiopian New Years Party
City: Los Angeles, California
Music: Amharic, Hip Hop, Reggae, Old School and R&B
Date: September 9th, 2006
Email your hot shots to hotshots@tadias.com
Want some laugh? Read a poem about hot shots.
Want some laugh? Click here to read Wogesha’s poem about hot shots.
Click here for events near your city or visit Liben’s Events List at www.libenslist.com
Photographs by Peter Palm
Tadias: Thank you, Brook, for taking your time to do this interview with us and congratulations for being our featured model on this issue. Please tell our readers when and how you started modeling?
Brook: Thank you, Tadias, for this interview and the opportunity to address your readers. It is a great honor to be this issue’s featured model in Tadias.
My modeling career started about five years ago following my brief involvement with a modeling contest search called “The Face of Africa”. I had been dreaming about modeling for a long time; but knew very little about the actual work and I certainly did not have any contacts to speak of. I entered the contest in Ethiopia just for fun, and to my delight, I was chosen as one of the two winners at the national level – from a talent pool of over 300 contestants!
In preparation for the regional contest in Uganda, we received very thorough training in all aspects of modeling: from makeup and hairdo to the catwalk and posing for the photo shoots. I learned so much in this short period during the photo shoot and had the most fun I ever had. I did not win in Uganda but I felt like a winner because by now I had fallen in love with modeling and discovered my passion.
Tadias: What are your interests and what do you enjoy doing the most?
Brook: My interests have revolved around modeling; I love fashion magazines; I don’t just look at the pages, I study each page, how well the fashion item is presented, the models’ make-up, their poses, their smiles, and what makes them stand out.
Tadias: What is the best part of being a model?
Brook: It is so much fun! I love the hectic activities backstage, the friendship among the models, and wearing beautiful clothes that I used to admire in magazines. I love the exciting atmosphere and my professional role in it. And then I always end up making new friends.
Tadias: What is the hard part for you?
Brook: The hard part is the inability to get the kind of work that can get you noticed by the top international agencies. It is a very competitive business as you know, but it is very frustrating when you can’t even get the opportunity to compete because of work permit issues and the like. I have worked hard to capture the attention of some important modeling agencies, only to be ruled out due to my foreign status.
Tadias: People tend to think that models have high self esteem because they have put themselves in that glamorous field. Is that true for you?
Brook: I think people have high self esteem because they have been raised in a loving environment that nurtured and supported them. Authentic self esteem comes from within and is independent of glamour and glitter. I have been blessed with a network of family and friends that believes in me no matter what field I choose.
Tadias: What is your career ambition and where do you see yourself 5 years from now?
Brook: My ambition is to achieve my highest potential in the career that I love and enjoy. Five years from now, I see myself as a top model on international runways. I am certain that I will achieve my dream because I believe in myself and I am prepared to work hard and do whatever it takes to succeed.
Tadias: Who is your role model and why?
Brook: That’s easy! My ultimate role model and inspiration is Liya Kebede, an Ethiopian success story, international supermodel for top designers, the “Face of Estee Lauder”, wife and mother of two, humanitarian who gives back to Ethiopia, and still humble. She is beautiful inside and out, and I am so proud of her. When it gets a little tough for me, I just remember Liya and I’m encouraged to keep going.
Tadias: Name three things that you can’t live without…ok make it four.
Brook: I can’t think of THINGS that I couldn’t live without. But clearly, my lifeline is my family and friends whom I love and who love me back unconditionally. Of course, my passion for fashion and modeling comes next. I love all kinds of fashion and I love to experiment with my own creations, combining different pieces and coming up with entirely different looks. Next on my list would be Ethiopian food; my soul-food. Last, but not least, I couldn’t live without laughter. I love to laugh and even when things get rough, I remember not to take myself too seriously and laugh at the circumstances.
Tadias: If people from the fashion industry want to get in touch with you for work, how can they reach you?
Brook: For now my primary means of contact remains my email address, bruktawitk@yahoo.com. God willing, I’ll join the ranks and have an agent to represent me in the future.
Tadias: Is there anything else that you would like our readers to know?
Brook: I want to express my gratitude to your readers for their show of interest in me and my career. I recognize the importance of your support in this business. It keeps me humble while at the same time it encourages me to succeed and honor your readers as well.
Above: Bob Marley in concert at Convocation Hall in Toronto,
Canada. Photo by Erin Combs for Toronto Star / Zuma Press.
Tadias Magazine
Events News
Apr 10, 2007
New York – On Saturday night, the New York African Film Festival hosted an evening of Ethiopian films at Lincoln Center. There was a series of short films to close the night, but the evening opened with the star-studded premiere of Africa Unite, Stephanie Black’s new documentary about the 2005 concert in Addis Ababa. Black previously directed the celebrated anti globalization film Life and Debt.
Highlighting the vision for African unity to which Bob Marley was devoted, the Africa Unite concert was performed for over 350,000 people gathered in the historic Meskel Square of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to celebrate what would have been his sixtieth birthday. The twelve hour concert, featuring internationally acclaimed artists, is interwoven throughout this film, illuminating the global influence of a man who defined his own aim as “spreading the message of unity and equality, to end the needless suffering of mankind.”
Click here to read more about the event.
Related:
Addis Gessesse: The Man Behind the Africa Unite Concert (Tadias)
Photos from the the 2005 concert in Addis Ababa (Tadias)
Above: Some came by road from at least as far as Kampala to
attend the Africa Unite Concert in Addis Ababa in 2005. (Tadias)
Above: Japanese Rastas were among those enjoying the
festivities. Photo from Tadias Archives.
Above: Cedellia Marley Booker, Bob Marley’s mom,
flew in from Florida to perform at the opening night
of Africa Unite. Photo from Tadias Archives.
Above: The beats of the Stone Love Sound System inspire
dancing. Photo from Tadias Archives.
Above: Members of the Rastafarian community came from Sheshemene,
about 250km south of Addis Ababa, to attend the concert. Photo/Tadias.
Above: Angelique Kidjo performs at the event. Photo/Tadias.
Above: Two Rastafarian brothers pose for the camera. (Tadias)
Above: Addis Gessesse, the person behind the 2005 concert in
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Photo by Ayda Grima for Tadias Magazine.
Tadias Magazine
Outside With the Insider
By Mik Aweke
Posted: Apr 6, 2007
New York (Tadias) – Hanna Gessesse points to a photograph in one of her father’s albums. The photograph was taken two years ago in Addis Ababa and shows the main stage of the Africa Unite concert, which was the brainchild of her father, Addis. On the giant backdrop behind the stage hangs a larger-than life mural of a legendary reggae singer.
“That’s Bob Marley,” says Hanna. At three years old, Hanna is like most children her age. She complains when a certain reporter steals her father for an interview in their backyard. “I want to go with you, Daddy,” she cries. “Daddy, pleeeeease!”
But in being able to recognize Bob Marley’s likeness, even when drawn rather crudely as it was on the backdrop, she is definitely unlike most other toddlers her age. But perhaps it’s not so surprising to those who know her father, Addis Gessesse – music manager of Rita Marley and most of the Marley family and man behind the landmark Africa Unite concert. The concert, and the other month-long series of events, saw half-a-million people crowd the streets of Addis Ababa to watch the Marley Family, the I-Threes, Baaba Maal, and Angelique Kidjo perform in celebration of Bob Marley’s 60th Birthday.
One of the biggest and most star-studded African concerts the continent has ever seen started out, six years ago, as little more than a vague dream in the mind of Addis Gessesse.
Addis Gessesse took a long and winding road through the music business, a road that included as much struggle as good fortune. A road that begins with his life as a struggling immigrant student from Ethiopia and shepherd of his younger brothers in Chicago, then to life as an established entity in Jamaica and New York, working with acts like Ziggy Marley and Earth, Wind, and Fire, and then full-circle back to the extravagant concert in Addis Ababa two years ago.
That same long and winding road eventually leads down a quiet, tree-lined street in the residential neighborhoods of Jersey City, New Jersey – to a big, musty, old-fashioned Victorian house. There is ivy growing up the windows in the front and a small, weedy yard in the back. Addis is short, stocky and has a moustache. He wears clothes typical of an unassuming father from the suburbs, though with a somewhat boyish flair: crisp Nike running shoes, khaki shorts, and an open flannel shirt exposing a thin gold chain underneath.
Over three decades ago, Addis left behind his family and his three brothers to attend college in the United States. Not long after he graduated with a degree in management, his brothers, who happened to be musicians, followed him and began life anew in Chicago.
“Their arrival here totally changed my whole life,” says Addis. His voice is soft, calm. “Because I loved my brothers and I was doing everything to make them successful in this country. While doing that, I got immersed in their music.”
With a degree in management still fresh in his pocket, Addis made the decision that changed the course of his professional and personal life: to devote himself to his brothers and their music. “My brothers really have a lot to do with it,” he says.
The group that his brothers formed was called Dallol. Addis managed the group, which along with his brothers included a few of their friends from Addis Ababa University, and though they started out playing traditional Ethiopian music, soon after moving to Chicago and coming into contact with different styles, they made the transition towards reggae. With the support of a professor at Northwestern University, a fellow Ethiopian named Abraham Demoz, who acted as a surrogate father to the young men, Addis and his brothers were able to secure a rehearsal space on the campus and cultivate their sound.
In 1982, while steadily carving out a name for themselves in Chicago, Dallol got the break that they had been waiting for, an invitation from Rita Marley to play in Jamaica. Acting as their manager, Addis brought the group to Kingston where they played at the first Bob Marley birthday celebration after the reggae superstar’s death in 1981. It was in Jamaica that his working relationship with Rita and the Marley family began.
“At the time Rita gave us everything that we needed, including financial support and she was very excited for us as Ethiopians to come and perform in Jamaica. At the time she was still grieving the death of her husband and she felt we became a sort of support for her.”
Still, as significant as his contribution was to Rita’s life at the time, Addis cannot compare it with the influence Rita has had on his. “I owe a lot to that woman. She was very instrumental in helping me make music as a career. Very few people do that for you.”
Addis spent a year in Jamaica in the early eighties, which he remembers with much fondness. He lived down the street from what many consider the Mecca of reggae music, Bob Marley’s Tuff Gong headquarters at 56 Hope Road. This was back in the days when the Wailers were still making music and Ziggy had yet to finish high school. Addis would go on, in the following years, to organize with Rita the world tour for Bob Marley’s posthumous Legend album. The tour included the Wailers and the I-Three’s and helped spur sales of the album, which to this day remains one of the bestselling albums of all time.
From 1988 to 1991, Dallol was the official band for Ziggy Marley. The group, Addis makes it a point to remind me, has the distinction of being the first band of Ethiopian musicians to reach platinum record sales with Conscious Party (1988), as well as a gold record with Ziggy’s follow- up album, One Bright Day (1989).
After the world tours and a brief stint in Los Angeles, where he worked with Earth, Wind, and Fire, Addis returned with his brothers to Chicago, but his professional drive and his desire to travel had not died with the tours. “As we went along, Dallol wanted to do their own thing and I didn’t want to stay in Chicago,” he says. “So I moved to New York.”
“You know we all go in our own little phases of doing things,” he continued. “And my project became more or less, like, anything higher level, anything big.” What followed was a project called Race Against Racism, a series of largescale concerts, along the lines of Africa Unite, which took place in Europe and drew half a million people to concerts in Paris, Rome and Milan.
For Addis, who remains humble about his success, finding someone influential to believe in you is the key ingredient (along with discipline, he adds) to a successful career in music – though the insight might very well apply to any number of industries. Just as Rita Marley gave him his start in the business all those years ago, Addis is intent on discovering new, young talent. In particular, he wants to bring undiscovered Ethiopian musicians out of the tight orbit of the Ethiopian community into the larger universe of world music.
Besides being a lifelong friend of the Marley family and manager of Ziggy, Rita, and Stephen, Addis is the man behind the careers of some of the biggest names in contemporary Ethiopian music. He discovered Teddy Afro, who is still one of Addis’s clients. “Teddy is my major project right now,” he says, as a U.S. tour and record release are underway.
His New York-based artist management firm, Addis Management, has helped launch the careers of some of the biggest names in Ethiopian pop. His interest in bringing Ethiopian music to a larger arena started with a chance encounter that took place in the backyard of his quiet New Jersey home. Midway through reciting his impressive list of clients, Addis stops: “And then this young lady came into the picture.” The “young lady” he is talking about is Palm recording artist, Gigi.
“Gigi came to me, to this house. Some guys brought her in. I didn’t know who the hell she was and I wasn’t too crazy about anything at the time, because I was doing a lot of things. She sat down out here and she started singing. And I saw talent.”
It would be only a matter of time before he took hold the reins of her career, first advising her to move to New York (she was living in San Francisco at the time) and then introducing her to his network of music industry contacts.
“I said to Gigi, ‘I don’t want to brag about who I know or what I can do for you, but I can put you on the map.’” He eventually introduced the young singer to Chris Blackwell, and Blackwell, the innovator who founded Island Records and guided the careers of artists like Bob Marley & The Wailers, U2, and Melissa Etheridge, signed Gigi to a multi-album deal with his Palm record label. (Through Addis, Blackwell also signed Teddy Afro to a similar deal, which is currently in the works.)
While we talked, he kept his cell phone at arms length. At any moment, he could get the call that would send him to Ethiopia to attend to one of his numerous business ventures. In recent years, Addis has not limited himself to managing artists and arranging concerts overseas. His portfolio is quite diverse, with a list of obligations that range from a reggae club in Chicago, which he opened with his brothers several years ago, to a farm in the Ethiopian countryside, to an ambitious school building project in the villages of Ethiopia through the One Love Africa Foundation.
Part of the appeal of throwing a concert like Africa Unite in his homeland was the positive exposure it would give to Ethiopia. Says Addis, “Nothing positive comes out of that country, and we wanted to change that. And I think with our own little contribution we achieved that. To where people started saying, things can be worked out in Ethiopia, things can work in Ethiopia.
“When you have half a million people in one location for a concert no matter which country you’re in, from the most advanced nation to the worst voodoo society on earth, there’s always going to be an incident. But everybody came, enjoyed the music, and went back home without a slight incident. This to me shows the pride that I have in my culture. You cannot find that anywhere.”
—————–
About the Author:
Mik Awake is a writer based in New York.
By Samuel Kinde , Tewodros Kidane, and Girum Kifetew
Ethiopia has the world’s lowest number of text messages sent per day, but recent development of the first Ethiopic text messaging (SMS) has inspired texting in widely used scripts, such as Hindi and Chinese.
Two challenges conspired to make mobile communication in Ethiopia, particularly, text messaging (SMS) a late-comer in the world scene. The first challenge is that the Ethiopic writing system (also called Feedel, Fidel or Geez), consists of more than 340 characters. Mapping these characters on a 12-keypad was un-attempted. Overcoming this challenge of displaying Ethiopic characters on any existing cell phone whether from Motorola, Nokia, or Siemens requires some tricky solutions – not impossible; but nonetheless difficult. The second challenge has nothing to do with technology but is a direct result of an unfortunate political environment, where fear of technology forced the country’s telecom company to discontinue even English-language SMS, in this country of 75 million people. This gives Ethiopia the distinction of being the only country in the world where mobile text messaging (SMS) is officially banned.
So, faced with these two challenges, how does one develop a solution that makes Ethiopic SMS a reality right now? The unlikely technical solutions to these two problems are what inspired us – by seeking language commonalities – to extend our work to languages and scripts of more global and market importance.
The solution to the first challenge is to find ways to embed these Ethiopic characters or letters such as 
into the mobile phone – any mobile phone carried by the majority of mobile phone users inside and outside Ethiopia. This requires developing a technology in processing fonts in some innovative form and uploading them into the mobile phones through various means such as data cable, Bluetooth technology, or through a mobile phone’s web browser. This solution which makes almost all phones in the market become Ethiopic-aware for text messaging purposes by simply downloading a program called FeedelSMS has – we later found out – an interesting implication. As we tested the program on many mobile phones, it became apparent to us and to our technology partners and advisors that the same technology could be used to make any phone in the world – say Hindi-aware , Arabic-aware, or even Chinese-aware. To prove this point, we had to actually learn (by ourselves) the rudimentary basics of the alphabets of some of these languages – particularly Arabic and Hindi. To our utter amazement, it turns out that Hindi (also called Devanagari) falls under the so-called Abugida – 
or syllabic writing system classification just like our own Ethiopic! The linguists define Abugida as a writing system in which consonants are associated with a following vowel as every Ethiopian school kid knows. Lucky for us, almost half-of the world’s scripts like the majority of Indic (Indian) languages, Arabic, Hebrew, etc fall under the Abugida system. To make things more interesting, we learnt that at least some of the Hindi characters are very similar to Ethiopic characters.
Take the case of the Hindi character ‘क’, for example. If you remove the “hat” on top of this character, you will immediately notice that it is the same as – you have guessed it right – the Ethiopic 
.
It gets interesting. If you see the other derivatives such as कु =
कि =
का =
कॅ = Therefore, in a totally unexpected way, our own writing system, Feedel, inspired us to develop a mobile software called HindiSMS in 2006 that can be downloaded to any mobile phone around the world and turn it into – in an instance – a Hindi-aware cell phone. This is not to say that there was no Hindi SMS prior to our product. What it means is that our product fills in a lucrative niche market for consumers who buy cell phones with no pre-installed Hindi fonts.
The solution to the second challenge (banned SMS in Ethiopia) also opened up opportunities for us to discover the application of our software in the global mobile market. Faced with this man-made barrier where we can not use Ethiopia’s telecom network to send or receive SMS messages, we came up with a solution that involved buying and configuring our own (cheap) servers that let customers employ mobile data access (called GPRS or EDGE) to exchange SMS messages. This marriage of the traditional wireless network with the mobile internet – it turns out – had numerous advantages that fit very well to the vision of universal SMS – sending SMS to and from anywhere in the world in any desired language. The beauty of this approach – we later understood very clearly – was that it breaks any barrier imposed by carriers knowingly as is the case in Ethiopia or unknowingly. Furthermore, this approach of using a combination of mobile internet with wireless network also flattens the price structure of SMS. In other words, Ethiopic SMS message sent between Addis Ababa and Nazret will cost the same amount as a Chinese SMS sent from Beijing to San Francisco. To our product’s credit, the HindiSMS product developed by our group became the first mobile application to demonstrate the successful sending and receiving of live Hindi SMS message from India to users in the US in October, 2006. In the live test-run, a user in Mumbai, India and a subscriber of AirTel became the first person to ever send & receive a Hindi SMS from a mobile phone in India to a user in California.
Looking back at the progress of the technology in the past year and the steady acceptance of Ethiopic SMS among Ethiopians, and across-border Hindi SMS among Indians, it is with a sense of some satisfaction that we note that the living script, Ethiopic, has been the source of inspiration for a vital and – what some think of as a substantial – contribution to mobile technology.
—–
For more info visit feedelix.com.
A Conversation with Dinaw Mengestu
Dinaw Mengestu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1978. In 1980 he immigrated to the United States with his mother and sister, joining his father, who had fled the communist revolution in Ethiopia two years before. He is a graduate of Georgetown University and of Columbia University’s MFA program in fiction. A former intern at The New Yorker, he is the recipient of a 2006 fellowship in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts. He has also recently reported stories for Harper’s and Jane magazine, profiling a young woman who was kidnapped and forced to become a soldier in the brutal war in Uganda, and for Rolling Stone on the tragedy in Darfur.
The following is a conversation about The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears, the debut novel of this immensely gifted young writer who eloquently evokes the experience not only of Ethiopian and African immigrants in general, but of African-Americans, and of all Americans whose identities are being redefined in a quickly evolving society.
How much of your own story and your family’s story is in this novel? How did you learn about your family’s experience?
The novel is definitely a blend of fact and fiction. The parts of the narrative that are true were told to me over the course of many years, sometimes by accident, sometimes deliberately. As is often the case with fiction, a certain factual detail becomes the starting point from which the rest of the narrative takes off. My uncle, for example, was a lawyer in Addis, and he was arrested and died during the government’s Red Terror campaign. The details of his death, however, are entirely unknown to me or anyone else in my family. Similarly, another uncle who was a teenager at the time did flee Ethiopia for Sudan during the Revolution, and while we’ve discussed his journey, it’s always in relatively vague and general terms, and that’s partly where the fiction element comes. It allows you to create the details that can bring a story to life.
Why do you think that the lives of African immigrants in the United States have been so little explored in fiction until now?
There have clearly been dozens of wonderful novels written by Africans about Africa. The African diaspora experience in America, however, is still in its early stages, especially with Ethiopia. My generation is the first to grow up in America, to know it well enough to write about it from “inside” the culture, so to speak, and I imagine as the years go on, there will be plenty of other similar narratives.
Although your book is written from the point of view of an African immigrant from Ethiopia, it is also in a sense an African-American novel, set in a primarily black neighborhood in Washington, D.C. Can immigrants from Africa offer a new perspective on race relations in the United States?
I wouldn’t say that this is an African novel, or African-American novel. To me, it’s a novel about America, with all of its competing and sometimes conflicting identities. Of course, growing up black and African in America has shaped my writing and experiences in more ways than I could possibly state, and yet I have to argue for the singularity of my opinion and perspective on this, which is to say I grew up and continue to live in different communities, some predominately white, some predominately African-American or African. Personally, for me, if there is a new perspective on race relations that comes from being an African immigrant it stems from this sense of never wholly identifying with one category.
More specifically, can you talk about some of the different ways that African-Americans and African immigrants experience American society? What is the relationship between the two communities like?
Obviously there is no simple or short answer to that question. If anything though, I would have to say it’s easy for people not to understand just how removed and disempowered many minority communities, particularly African immigrants and African-Americans feel from the country’s power structures, political, social, and economic. As for the relationship between the two communities, like any two closely intertwined communities there is a give and take, with ample room for misunderstanding and disappointment. In DC, for example, many within the African-Americans community were angered at a proposal to rename a part of the historically black U street corridor “Little Ethiopia.” That anger, of course, is entirely understandable, and in its simplest form, comes out the question, whose experience in America matters more?
Sepha Stephanos, your narrator and main character, has a very tentative romantic relationship with a white woman who moves in next door. Are the barriers to their relationship primarily personal, racial, economic, or some inextricable combination of all those?
In Sepha’s case, the barriers are very much a mix of all these factors, but perhaps most important to the novel is that mix of race and economics. I wanted to show how together the two can create vast, seemingly inseparable gulfs between people. Recently much more attention has been paid to the growing class and economic divide within America, and that divide, when coupled with race, magnifies the tensions even more.
The neighborhood in which you set your story is Logan Circle, which is rapidly being gentrified. More bluntly, prosperous white people are moving in and bringing economic pressures to bear on the poor black people who already live there. Can this sort of change ever go well?
Gentrification is one of those words in constant circulation these days, not only in DC but also in New York and I’m sure many other cities throughout the country. When it means mass displacement, the type of which is happening throughout DC and New York, where entire communities are being turned over, then no, I don’t think these changes ever really go well. At the same time, however, there has to be room for economic revitalization and rebuilding, the type that allows for a community to rebuild its own resources—schools, homes, businesses—while allowing for new growth.
Judith, the white woman in the novel, is a professor of American history, and one of her favorite quotation is from Tocqueville’s Democracy in America: “Among democratic nations new families are constantly springing up, others are constantly falling away, and all that remain change their condition; the woof of time is every instant broken and the track of generations effaced.” Does this quotation still describe the essential dynamic of American society, for immigrants and native-born citizens alike?
My interest with Tocqueville comes in large part from how accurate I think many of his observations about America still are. Tocqueville, while at times highly critical of America and its democratic spirit nonetheless respected the country’s inherent dynamic nature. Families, language, all of these are in a constant state of flux and evolution, which is a part of the great American myth—and I don’t use that term pejoratively—that each individual has the ability to change their circumstances, better their lives, and make themselves an entirely knew man or woman. Of course that ties in directly with one of the more common criticisms about America, which is its lack of regard for history.
Do you think there’s something new about the latest wave of American immigrants over the past few decades? Are their experiences in some ways fundamentally different from the experiences of the European immigrants of the early twentieth century, for example?
Obviously America’s ethnic make up is rapidly changing. The Hispanic community has become the largest minority community in the country, while at the same time there have been an ever-increasing number of African immigrants. Undoubtedly their experiences are going to be different, while at the same time, they will also be marked by some of the same burdens ranging from discrimination to low-paying jobs.
What do you think your novel has to say to all Americans, regardless of ethnic or racial background, about national identity?
I don’t know if novels are supposed to say anything. I think they exist to complicate and expand upon our understanding of the world and it is up to the reader to create their own personal meaning out of the narrative.
Is it ever possible for an immigrant to overcome the sense of being stuck between two worlds that Sepha feels? How is it done? What is the price that must be paid?
I’m sure many immigrants can and do overcome that sense, although I can’t say I personally know any. I was born in Ethiopia but I’ve grown up entirely in the United States and yet I’ve held on deliberately, at times fiercely, to a country that I hadn’t seen in twenty-five years. Many other immigrants I’m sure have a much stronger sense of the country they left behind and so perhaps for them it has less to do with being stuck between two worlds as it does with moving between two different realities. In Sepha’s case, Ethiopia has been physically left behind and he lives with that absence and refuses to let it go because nostalgia and memory are all he has.
Your title is taken from Dante’s Inferno. Can you recite that passage and explain how it is related to your story?
The passage comes from the last few lines of the Inferno, just as Dante is preparing to leave Hell. “Through a round aperture I saw appear, some of the beautiful things that Heaven bears, where we came forth and once more saw the stars.” I read the Commedia as an undergraduate, and then read parts of Robert Pinsky’s translation years ago. The last lines always stuck with me, as many wonderful lines in poetry often do. In this particular case it was the idea of beauty that struck me most. It’s an idea central to the novel, and it’s a word repeated throughout the narrative. Dante still has not made it to heaven yet, and won’t until passing through purgatory, and so there is an ambiguity to the language. The beautiful things are not named or described, and won’t be until Dante finally reaches heaven. And yet of course he can see a hint of what that beauty is. He knows it’s there even if he has not attained it. Joseph, one of the novel’s central characters, latches on to that idea of a visible but not yet attained heaven as a metaphor for his understanding of Africa.
Although your novel does not take place in a single day, Sepha goes on a crucial day-long journey through the streets of Washington that inevitably calls to mind Leopold Bloom’s journey in Ulysses. Was that a correspondence you were consciously seeking to evoke?
I wasn’t thinking of Ulysses explicitly while writing this novel, although of course I was aware of Bloom’s one-day journey through Dublin. The novel that probably proved the most influential in imagining Sepha’s trip through Washington DC was Saul Bellow’s Herzog. I’m sure even subconsciously the letters that Sepha reads were an echo of the letters that Herzog is constantly writing in his head as he wanders through New York and his own past.
Another work of literature that figures significantly in the novel is The Brothers Karamazov, which Sepha reads to Naomi, Judith’s bright young daughter. Are there thematic parallels between that work and your own?
The Brothers Karamazov was one of those novels that once read, never leave you, but I can’t say I chose it out of any obvious thematic parallels. I’m not even sure I would ever want to think of the novel in terms of thematic resonance. Alyosha’s speech that Sepha commits to memory at the end of the novel does tie in with a lesson that Sepha wants to pass onto Naomi, and of course himself, namely that we all seek some form of salvation from who we are and what we’ve become and that it’s possible to find that salvation in a memory of who we once were.
Sepha and his only friends, two fellow African immigrants named Ken and Joseph, regularly play a sarcastic game together. One of them names an obscure African dictator, and the others have to name his country and the date of the coup that put him power. Why are they so bitter and hopeless about their home continent?
I don’t actually think of them as being hopeless. Bitter, yes, but if anything it’s a bitterness born out of love. If they did not love and mourn for their home countries, and for the continent as a whole, they would never spend so much time mocking and eulogizing Africa. They are all realists, to one degree or another, and what they will not do is romanticize any of the continent’s failures, most notably those of its leaders.
You recently wrote a major piece about the crisis in Darfur for Rolling Stone, and you’re headed off now to Uganda on another assignment. What’s your own view about Africa’s future?
I still see more hope and potential in Africa than I do despair, and I say that after having seen it at its very worst. Part of why I went to Darfur and now northern Uganda is because like many Africans, I was tired of seeing the continent’s conflicts described as “hell,” or “hellish.” Yes, there is more misery and suffering than any one person should ever have to bear, but even in the case of Darfur, that is not the entire story. Underlying that misery and violence are remarkable people who continue to endure and survive despite their corrupt leaders.
When and how did you decide to become a writer?
I don’t think most writers ever decide to write. For me, it was something that I did because I had to. It’s been my way of managing and making sense of the world I live in.
Are you planning another novel yet? Can you describe what it’s about?
I am working on another novel, but it’s in such an early stage that I would hate to say what it will or will not become. I’m still figuring that out, which is part of the joy of writing.
—
Read here excerpt from The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
By Azeb Tadesse
The Fregenet Foundation works with a most vulnerable, often overlooked population: children. The foundation is named for a girl’s dream of returning to Ethiopia and working with disadvantaged children.
Fregenet was exceptional, and touched lives of many around her. Her friends remember her as “…friendly, good-natured, and showed good sense.” To her family she was a “symbol of all happiness, love and warmth.” She had decided on completion of her education to work for a non-profit. Her dedication brings to mind the saying, “Upon our children – how they are taught – rests the fate – or fortune – of tomorrow’s world.” The day before her tragic accident, she interviewed for a children’s non-profit, graduating from Metropolitan State University, with a degree in accounting, a month earlier. On that faithful day, she was blocks from home when a car fleeing police clipped her SUV causing it to roll, and fatally injuring Fregenet.
Above: Fregenet Tafesse, 1974-2003
Rather than let her dream die, Fregenet’s family resolved to keep her alive by picking up where she left off, and realizing her vision of working with children. A friend eulogized her by saying, “If we talk today about Fregenet’s smile, her warmth, her love, her generosity, her compassion, her humility, or her courage, it’s not just to praise her, but to speak to you, the people left behind, the people who have to live in this world. Gifts like her, granted to us from heaven, come few and far between. Do not let her go without deep contemplation on what you have learned from her.”
What her family learned was the importance of caring for the less fortunate, and for the future generation. They established a foundation dedicated to providing education to children from low-income families in Ethiopia. The first Fregenet School (Fregenet Kidan Lehitsanat) opened its doors in the fall of 2004, and enrolled children between the ages 4 to 6 from a small, impoverished community in Addis Abeba.
Above: Students at Fregenet Kidan Lehitsanat
Importance of early education
Nelson Mandela said that, “Education is the great engine to personal development. It is through education that the daughter of a peasant can become a doctor, that the son of a mineworker can become the head of the mine, that the child of a farm worker can become the president of a great nation.” Early education is when a child’s emotional, physical, and intellectual environment has profoundest impact on their future. In the West, the importance of early childhood education have been documented and integrated into public education. In Ethiopia, kindergartens are not part of the public school system, therefore only available to a few children. It is up to private institutions and individuals to invest in pre-school and kindergarten. According to the Ethiopian Ministry of Education, in 2003, only 2 percent of kindergarten age children are in school.
In the US, research indicates students who had early scholastic exposure are employed sooner, less likely to be on welfare, and less likely to have a punitive experience courtesy of the criminal justice system. Programs such as Head Start illustrated the impact of early childhood stimulation. A study by the Abecedarian Project, which provided pre-school for 111 African-American families in Chapel Hill, North Carolina found:
35 percent attended a four-year college before age 21
By 21, 65 percent were either still in school, or gainfully employed.
At age 3, I.Q. scores were 17 points above average.
Importance of early education in Ethiopia
Ameliorating the plethora of Ethiopian problems in the future requires an investment in high-quality education today. Studies imply preschool and kindergarten education can decrease early pregnancy and the consequent female dropout from basic education, help overcome economic barriers, and increase aspiration for higher education. Within the national education plan, preschool and kindergarten are not a priority. Most resources are directed towards grades one to eight, and to vocational education. Provisions for early education are provided by non governmental organizations a nominal fee, and for a significant fee by private institutions.
Fregenet Kidan Lehitsanat (an NGO) is attempting provide children in one neighborhood in Addis Ababa with the elements for a successful life. Children learn academically: math, English and art, as well as hygiene and social IQ. Many are from extremely disadvantaged households where often times there is just one parent struggling to make ends meet. If not for the school, many of the children would be left to their own devices and spend the day on the streets. Instead, they are nurtured and cared for by dedicated staff and their families in turn have a peace of mind knowing their child is safe.
As Fregenet foundation celebrates its third anniversary this September, it would seem that Fregenet’s promise to the children is being fulfilled through the foundation. In the years since its opening, the school has increased enrollment from 31 to 100 students, it has moved to a larger location and has even added a first grade class to accommodate its first graduates. Future plans include programs for the children’s parents such as computer labs, library and even a clinic. These new programs are intended to improve the home and family lives of the students and extend their learning and growth from school to home. Most importantly, the expansion of the programs to include parents acknowledges that children’s environment plays a big part in their education and future development and to be effective one must also work with their larger environment for “[E]ducation commences at the mother’s knee, and every word spoken within the hearing of little children tends towards the formation of character.”
To find out more about Fregenet and the Fregenet Foundation please visit: fregenetfoundation.org
Above – Left: Sirak Sabahat (Ethiopian-Israeli Actor), Middle: Liben Eabisa (Founder & Publisher of Tadias), Right: Mesfin Addi (Founder of Akukulu Academy)
Photos by Teseday Alehegn
Event Name: Tadias Magazine 12th Issue Release Party
City: Harlem, New York
Venue: Tsiona Gallery
Hosts: Linda & Yohannes with Tadias Magazine
Email your hot shots to hotshots@tadias.com
Above – Left: Meron Tesfa Michael & friend, Tony Kassa, Henock Temesgen, Right: Mesfin Addi and friends
Above – Left: Mesfin Addi & Ernest McCaleb, Right: Fekade Mengistu & Henock Temesgen
Above – Left: Adam Saunders & Lydia Gobena, Middle: Italian Photographer Paulo Toby & friend, Right: Ethiopian-Israeli Actor Sirak Sabahat
Above – Left: Peggy Williams & Ernest McCaleb (Founder & CEO of Sheba Tej), Right: Nathan, Aster Yilma and Linda (Tsiona Gallery)
Click here for events near your city or visit Liben’s Events List at www.libenslist.com
Above – Left: Blen II Catalogue contributors Robel Kassa,
Middle: Salem Berhanu, Right: Blen Art Show Coordinator Ephrem M. Girma
Photos by Helina Metaferia
Event Name: The 4th Annual Blen Art Show
City: Washington, D.C.
Venue: Artful Gallery
Hosts: The Blen Team
Email your hot shots to hotshots@tadias.com
Left: Woodcut work by Abebe Zelelew participating from Dallas, Texas
Right: Zena Tesfaye Teferra
Left: Professor Achamyeleh Debela and his wife
Right: Azeb Mengestu (Member of The Blen Team)
Left: Participating artist Meseret Desta
Right: Participating artist Mekbib Gebretsadik (Meseret Desta’s husband)
Left: Masai Haileleul (Addis Art Gallery) and artist Solomon Asfaw
Right: Robel Belete & Rahel Woldemariam
Left: Painting by Martha Mangestu participating from Ethiopia
Right: Ruth Ayenew and participating artist Elsa Gebreyesus
Click here for events near your city or visit Liben’s Events List at www.libenslist.com
Photos by Sirak Getachew (D.J. Sirak)
Event Name: Habesha Relaxation Session
City: Harlem, New York
Venue: The Shrine
Address: 2272 Adam Clayton Powell Blvd. (B/N 133 & 134)
Hosts: D.J. Sirak & D.J. Birane
Music: Afro beat, World, Hip Hop, Reggae and New Groove
Date: Every other Saturday
Email your hot shots to hotshots@tadias.com
Click here for events near your city or visit Liben’s Events List at www.libenslist.com
Above: Photo by Matthew E.
Helina Metaferia – This Issue’s Featured Artist
Born in Washington D.C. to Ethiopian parents, Helina Metaferia is a painter, a yogi and graphic artist. She attended Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Morgan State University, where she obtained her BA in Fine Arts. She has exhibited her work at the Eubie Blake Cultural Center, the World Space Center, and the James Lewis Museum.
She is selected to appear as the first guest artist at the upcoming Addis Heights Millennium Arts Exhibition Series in Harlem, New York.
Above: Free Womban, acrylic, pastel and charcoal on paper, 18” x 24”
Artist’s Statement:
The most sacred part of a woman is now reduced to a dirty word. What has once been celebrated and understood as a source of power and creativity is now being cut, abused, and condemned. Many women are taught to be ashamed and embarrassed of their own bodies, especially their wombs. A lack of emotional and spiritual connection to one’s womb is the basis for physical disease, painful or irregular menstruation, misplaced sexuality, poor self-esteem, and other imbalances.
Above: Intuitive Womban, acrylic, pastel, and charcoal on paper 18” x 24”
The mixed media series, Finding Womban, is the visual depiction of women who are on a journey of liberation by healing and rejoicing in their own femininity. The striking and raw faces of women on a quest for soul identity are interwoven with rich subliminal backgrounds of abstracted wombs. The women in the paintings wear explorative expressions, each one seeking to reclaim a power beyond their gender and sexual nature. As the viewer searches for the abstracted wombs within the paintings, the viewer experiences a similar quest to the portrayed woman who, in turn, is searching for her own feminine essence.
Above: Water Womban, acrylic, pastel, and charcoal on paper 25” x 35”
Creating these works of art has been a very vulnerable, intimate experience for me. I birthed each painting so I could begin the process of undoing negative conceptions, self-heal, and find strength in my own womanhood. Inspired by Queen Afua’s book Sacred Womban, Finding Womban is about a journey that each female must endure to feel whole and free.
Above: Opening Womban, acrylic, pastel, and charcoal on paper 18” x 24”
Learn more about the artist at: metaartist.com
For details about Helina’s upcoming show, visit libenslist.com
By George Preston
Publisher Reynold Kerr originally may have conceived of Our Mother Africa as a primary school primer on the common origin of all humanity in the horn of Africa. But it is much, much more. In fact, adults may gain more from this book than children. Here is why: it presents a science based explanation of the origins of mankind in Africa, their global dispersal and ostensible physical differences readily grasped educative and entertainingly by all readers from early childhood through adulthood.
To begin with, Our Mother Africa, the book, is the child of Mother Africa; the exhibition of classical African sculptures of maternity figures which was on view at the Schomburg Center in Harlem, New York (2002) before it traveled to the prestigious Centro Conde y Duque in Madrid (2004), accompanied by a symposium of internationally recognized scholars that included participation by the American, C. Daniel Dawson, Rogelio Martinez Fure of Cuba. The title of the catalog companion to the exhibition Mother Africa bears the name of the art exhibition and magisterially serves African motherhood with 96 superb photographs of sculptures from the length and breadth of the continent.
Our Mother Africa is a great foreign language primer. It is written in English, Spanish, French and Norwegian. Short paragraphs never longer than about fifty words each describe a single aspect of human similarity within diversity. The editing of syntax and the prodigious use of cognates actually allows a speaker of one of these four languages to teach himself any one of the other three.
A photograph of a classical African maternity figure accompanies each of these paragraphs from the original exhibit and an illustration by the painter and sculptor Gustavo Lopez-Armentia. Mr. Lopez-Armentia was a representative of Argentina to the Sao Paulo Biennale and exhibits annually at Reese Galleries on NYC’s 57th street, making this a contemporary fine art book in its own.
It gets even better. Our Mother Africa is an excellent primer for the novice collector of African art or college students interested in getting a feel for the art styles of West, Central and East Africa. Thirty one illustrations of regional, ethnic and chronological styles including Coptic Ethiopia, sculptures of well known styles such as Baule, Yoruba and Kongo and lesser known works from the Sukuma, Kwere and others are accompanied by a descriptive text and locater maps. And now this: the public school system in the Dominican Republic has just ordered 20, 000 copies of Our Mother Africa.
Title in Amharic lettering: Addis Heights Font
Abyssinia of Today
A Book By Robert P. Skinner (The First U.S. Ambassador to Ethiopia)
For over a century now close relations between the United States and Ethiopia have endured nearly uninterrupted.
The extraordinary relationship between the two countries begun in 1903 when President Theodore Roosevelt Authorized 37-year-old Robert P. Skinner to negotiate a commercial treaty with Emperor Menelik.
Upon returning home from this historic trip to the Emperor’s Court, Skinner wrote a remarkable memoir recounting his two-month journey to Ethiopia. Abyssinia of Today is a fascinating narrative of the first American diplomatic mission to black Africa.
Those who do not have a copy of Ambassador Skinner’s original issue of Abyssinia of Today will find this completely authentic centennial reprint a valuable piece of Ethiopiana.
To order your copy, send an email to books@tadias.com, or call 646-920-3211.
Price: $19.99, plus shipping and handling.
Tadias Magazine
By Meron Tesfa Michael
Updated: March 24th, 2007
New York (TADIAS) – Kezkaza Wolafen (2003) by Tewodros Teshome and Etse Beles (2004) by Kidist Bayelege are two blockbuster movies that were released by the recently blooming Ethiollywood film industry. By design, the women of Etse Beles are survivors, independent, and in charge of their destiny; while the women of Kezkaza Wolafen are mainly victims, dependent, and vulnerable, whose existence is defined by the men in their lives. Between Kezkaza Wolafen’s reductive and Etse Beles’ superwoman representation these two films brilliantly identified areas where modern feminism meets traditional values in Ethiopian society. While the commonality of these links is obvious, the interpretation articulated by the filmmakers’ depiction of gender roles draws one’s attention to the discourse of womanhood in contemporary Ethiopian society.
Kezkaza Wolafen is a story about an educated and professional young woman whose middle class lifestyle has been sustained by men who sought to marry her. First, we are introduced to the “bad guy” who financially supported the family because the young woman’s hand was promised to him by her late father. What is supposed to be evil about him is his insistence of marriage against her will, and his plan to avert her from her higher education, and impregnate her – in other words he symbolizes an obstacle to the idea of progress. Later, we are introduced to another man – the lover boy who rescued her from the bad guy. He helped her to finish school, found her a job in his company, provided for her family, and even taught her how to drive. The young woman of Kezkaza Wolafen is portrayed as a good student, obedient daughter, and loyal friend. She is also timid and passive; rage is not in her nature. At one point when the going gets tough, she is seen attempting to commit suicide.
Etse Beles is about the life of undocumented Ethiopian immigrants in America. The story revolves around a young woman and her three roommates – two girls and a guy. Disillusioned by the harsh reality of life as illegal aliens, where dreams are crushed and fantasies unfulfilled, these four turn to alcohol and drugs to fill the void in their lives. Before long, scoring, apparently a very expensive habit, becomes the highlight of their bleak existence. If you thought a marital fall-out, or being an illegal immigrant, or HIV positive are the worst things that can happen to these characters, you would be mistaken. For these four, once the habit kicks in, life spirals downward until they hit rock bottom and their miserable lives crumble. Etse Beles is about choices, adversity, despair and endurance. The main character is not an intellectual and she doesn’t represent any moral superiority. On the contrary, she lies, cheats, and steals. There is also no doubt that she is in charge of her existence, and blunt, brash, dauntless and dopey all at the same time, owns her virtues and shortcomings. In Etse Beles, when the going gets tough, the woman’s task is not to coil-n’-hope to die, but to play the card she has been dealt with and fight it out.
It is incontrovertible that both Kezkaza Wolafen and Etse Beles carry deep and valuable social messages by addressing human torments and dilemmas that are common in the community they are targeting. In both films male and female characters suffer from the consequences of their choices as well as from social injustice. However, the apparent difference between these movies lies in the degree to which roles are defined by the characters’ sexuality. Ethiollywood’s response to gender is not outright offensive, brutal, or degrading. Nevertheless, in most cases Ethiollywood films are full of subtle insinuation and stereotyping that are to the detriment of womanhood. In a social environment where there is no defined collective awareness that is guided by gender-just concerns, the message that movies convey may be crucial because they depict the institutionalization of ideas and meanings. Neither of the two films discussed here claims to be blatantly propagandist for one cause or another when it comes to “the battle of the sexes.” All the same, when viewed from a female perspective, it is clear that one is ostensibly progressive but conformist and the other truly but silently radical.
Subtle stereotyping, relatively invisible, is insidious because it is still demeaning and patronizing. In Kezkaza Wolafen, the heroine is mostly portrayed as someone striving for some sort of intellectual enlightenment, first as a university student and later as a professional woman. Such generous attribution is obviously an attempt to bring the stereotype of modern woman into the discourse. However, the unfortunate aspect of this is that the addition may not be as progressive as one could imagine, because the young woman’s own competency is never allowed to be established by her actions. For example, not once has she been allowed to take the higher moral role within her community. Rather, the source of her “progressiveness” is trivialized by her total lack of control over her destiny. In spite of all the effort made to glorify her as an intelligent woman, toward the end she is diminished by a Shakespearean suicide-plot over something that may or may not have happened – once again providing an opportunity for her lover boy to rescue her. The act of suicide instead of promoting fortitude, conveys the idea that she is an incompetent quitter, who is for someone in her social position, extremely naive.
The other danger of subtle stereotyping is its power to promote masculinity as a value. In both films the norm of male power is projected through roles of bosses, fathers and other authority figures. By depicting these male-roles as something to be feared, admired or sympathized with, honor and glory are linked to masculine identity. For instance, all of the young woman’s achievements in Kezkaza Wolafen are due to the intervention and generosity of men. This undercuts any notion that we could have had of her capability as a competent member of society, and we are led to assume that she is not an independent young protégé, but rather a person in need of protection and help. We may initially assume that this is a gender-neutral manifestation of the power-mongering that is common in traditional and underprivileged societies. But then again, the fact that in Kezkaza Wolafen the message ‘manly men control and protect their women’ floats effortlessly, and the fact that characters and roles were not allowed to grow beyond the customarily defined boundaries promotes the operating assumption that men are the real wielders of power and women are passive dependent bodies to be possessed.
On the other hand, Etse Beles, ingeniously questions this notion by offering an alternative reality, where there are no defined roles or boundaries and women are active participants in their own destiny. The women of Etse Beles do not claim to represent progressive or traiditional social roles. By distributing power and guilt equally among the male and female characters, by allowing the female characters to live in their own world, make their own choices, fail and survive on their own terms, the film weakens the force that promotes chauvinism.
While Kezkaza Wolafen invokes a superficial gestures towards progressive attitudes in women, in hindsight it is not as revolutionary as Etse Beles. Rather, it is a film that engages with the legacy of our socio-cultural chauvinism in a non-confrontational way. Thus, while Kezkaza Wolafen constructs a somewhat positive view of women, the overall image of victimhood and incompetence promotes existing ideas of woman’s disparate position in society. In contrast, Etse Beles – certainly not a 21st century feminist manifesto – is a breath of fresh air to this notion of womanhood. What is revolutionary about the main character of Etse Beles is that in the process of performing her roles as a sister, wife, daughter and girlfriend, the plot allows her to play the often forgotten but most vital role — herself. With no man to be blamed for her failures or come to her rescue, she is allowed to be a being with a soul – reckless, vital and competent – a woman determined to claw her way out of the pit she has dug herself into.
We watch movies because we find them interesting, not because we find them particularly useful or relevant to our personal lives. But then why should we care about the images portrayed by something that is purely meant for entertainment purposes and only requires a couple of hours of our time? We care because films are to society what candy is to our teeth — though sweet, a diet in excess will rot one’s perception of reality. Popular culture’s entertainment is escapism and voyeurism. Concern with popular culture arises when people realize that a movie is a snapshot of reality that is extracted, recast, and marketed. Even when we recognize them as unrealistic, continued exposure influences our view of reality.
In Kezkaza Wolafen both the heroine and the hero have close friends. These brilliant supporting actresses and actors party too much and are irresponsible in their sexual quests. From various dialogues we are made to believe that he does it for fun, and she is just a gold-digger. Later we watch the female character’s health deteriorate and eventually die of HIV/AIDS. On the same token, we are presented with a scene where the male character learns of his HIV positive status. Interestingly, rather than watching him die, within minutes of finding out his status, he declares that he is going to teach the public how to protect itself from the disease. While the idea of his transformation is commendable, the disgraceful death of the woman’s faith and nobility to him is open to a number of interpretations. Should her death be perceived as a woman’s due for flouting the code of social conduct?
The point here is that filmmakers are in a unique position to selectively appropriate gender issues contextually in conjunction with the dominant socio-political norms, and gender representation is open to the influence of competing tendencies, be it the market, cultural capital, communalism, or women’s empowerment articulations. However, with the shortage of female-centered films in the Ethiollywood, with the dearth of positive role models and the brute reality of hundreds of millions of women internalizing the roots of their own destruction, would not a film that plays down the negation within female consciousness be more useful? The danger with films like Kezkaza Wolafen is that a sympathetic representation leads the audience to empathize with, rather than question, such negations. It begs the question: Is Ethiollywood ready for strong, free, unique female characters?
Ethiollywood filmmakers are currently standing at the crossroads between modern feminism and traditional values and are confronted with two possible routes when it comes to designing our symbolic reality. Either they will challenge our attitudes with the possibility of a reality that exists outside past legacies, or reinforce the patriarchal chauvinism attitude that denies a woman’s right to be recognized as a proactive entity — with more options than suicide. Unfortunately, Kezkaza Wolafen is careful in looking after the comfort of its audience and misses an opportunity to articulate the forward-thinking that society would expect from its intellectual women. Etse Beles, while it certainly is not making any cognizant claims within a feminist emancipation context, by allowing the heroines to take center stage, allows us to take a peek at a world where women – even those that are social outcasts – have freewill and, somewhere between the good and bad, have an overwhelming desire to live onscreen.
My agenda is not to challenge the legitimacy of either one of these films on moral grounds. On the contrary, it is to uphold their efforts and to highlight the ways in which their formal preoccupations reflect the obsessions of the society which produced them. Filmmakers, without being obnoxious, can question these obsessions. Between these two films, to which category an Ethiopian woman identifies herself with is entirely up to her perception of self. However, promotion of stereotypes and symbols by drawing from a ready reservoir of gender differentiating myths and legends is not going to help anybody, especially when it is projected by a medium that is considered egalitarian, secular and, in many ways, larger than life.
—————–
About the Author:
Meron Tesfa Michael is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science. Her area of research interest includes the politics of gender identity, ethical partiality, and social stratification in new-fangled democratic states. She lives in Harlem, New York.
This is an event organized by The Mic Goes Global (Bridging the Cultural Gap Through Music) – the brainchild of Ethiopian-born Sirak Getachew (D.J. Sirak) & his friend Bintou of Staka Productions. Arriving from Addis Ababa to the graffiti-filled streets of the Bronx, D.J. Sirak was introduced to the hip-hop phenomenon at an early age.
“I remember arriving at New York’s JFK airport at the age of nine and settling in a Bronx neighborhood. Being the only Ethiopian on the block and at school, it was hard to keep my own culture alive”, he says.
“As time went on, however, hip-hop became my means of bridging the cultural gap between myself and my new community.”
In the short time since the program began, it has gained recoginition from various media organizations including, MTV, The Source, The Village Voice, Tadias Magazine and local TV stations.
“Hip-hop has helped me fuse my past and my heritage with my present in an artistic and socially meaningful way”, he tells us. “Its time to get global!”
Click here to see photos from this and other events or visit Liben’s Events List at www.libenslist.com
Above:Church, Mädhane Aläm at Mäjate, Ethiopia, 1892-1893; Private Collection, France, before 1973; Sam Fogg, London; Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, 1998, by purchase.
New York, NY — The Museum of Biblical Art examines the exhilarating artistic heritage of one of the world’s oldest Christian kingdoms in Angels of Light: Ethiopian Art from the Walters Art Museum, opening Friday, March 23, 2007.
For the showing, towering metalwork crosses, brilliantly colored icon paintings, decorated manuscripts, and other rare objects have been drawn from one of the largest and finest collections of Ethiopian art outside of Addis Ababa—that of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland.
Angels of Light covers a vast sweep of time, from the 4th century, when Ezana, the King of Aksum, converted to Christianity, to the 19th century. Altogether, 44 masterworks speak to the manner in which Ethiopian artists infused their works with a unique sense of form and color, continually absorbing and transforming influences from other cultures.
“Ethiopia’s artistic heritage defies expectation, blending Semitic oral traditions and African colors and patterns with Italian narratives and Byzantine icon forms. I believe that many visitors will be amazed by what they see, from the hot yellow and red colors of the painted icons to the dramatic processional crosses, draped in fabric,” says Ena Heller, director of MOBIA.
Ethiopian culture has deep roots: the first Ethiopian emperor is even said to have been the son of the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon. According to tradition, it was he, Menelike, who brought the Ark of the Covenant to the country from Jerusalem, thus crowning Ethiopia as the new Israel.
“Today, too often we forget that Ethiopia was a world power, along with Rome and Persia, for much of the first millennium of the common era,” says Gary Vikan, Director and Curator of Medieval Art at the Walters Art Museum. “The Walters’ collection of Ethiopian art is a relatively new addition to the Museum—initiated only in 1993. Yet the power of these objects has already earned them an invaluable place in the story we tell of the cultures of Eastern Orthodoxy, alongside the Byzantine, Greek, and Russian cultures.”
By the 15th century, Ethiopia had developed a tradition of icon painting that rivaled the production of icons in Byzantium and Russia, and the new kind of painting emerging in Renaissance Italy. Representing this high point in the history of Ethiopian art in Angels of Light are nine rare panel paintings, diptychs, and triptychs, each representing a distinct style or iconology. One is a large tempera on panel called “Our Lady Mary with Her Beloved Son and Archangels Michael and Gabriel,” which is thought to have been created by a painter of the royal court between 1445 and 1480. The artist suggests an easy, human affection between Mary and Jesus in the way he depicts the pair locked in a rapt gaze and holding hands, encircled by folds of cloth. The choice of the Virgin and Child as a subject here, and the use of forms familiar from Byzantine or Italian models, confirm that Ethiopian artists were aware of Western traditions. Even more directly linked to the art of the Mediterranean is a triptych painted approximately 200 years later, depicting the Virgin and Child flanked by the archangels and scenes from the life of Christ, the apostles, Saint George, and Saints Honorius, Täklä Haymaont, and Ewostatewos. The central panel is based on a famous icon from the Roman basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore that was believed to have been painted by Saint Luke the Evangelist.
The illuminated books and scrolls in Angels of Light are especially powerful reminders of the passionate faith of medieval Christians in Africa. In particular, a pair of illuminated charts dating to the late 14th century or early 15th century bring to light an exercise of scholarship and devotion that seems mind-boggling in today’s “Google” age. On a single sheet of parchment, framed by classical arches surmounted by birds, the Canon Tables provided priests with an early cross-referencing system to reconcile the different accounts of Christ’s life. Also in this section of the exhibition is a 16th-century gospel book, in nearly pristine condition, which features full-page portraits of the Evangelists painted in bright bold color and an assured line.
Eight medieval bronze processional crosses will be stationed together in the MOBIA gallery, their varied geometric patterns offering a delight to the eye and mind. Meant to be seen against the sky or by candlelight, their abstract shapes are a hybrid of Byzantine and Islamic forms, incised, perforated, welded, and /or cast by master artisans. In one cross from the late 12th or early 13th century, the sign of Christ, as described in the Gospel of Matthew, can be made out in the curved abstracted form. Upon close inspection, 13 small crosses emerge from a seemingly unbroken weave of tiny interlocking circles in a 15th-century staff.
Ideally situated near the Red Sea, and encompassing one of the branches of the Nile river, Ethiopia was able to establish strong ties in both trade and religion with nations around the Mediterranean Sea. A prayer book with its worn leather satchel, a parchment scroll in its leather carrying case, folding icons (diptychs) and small books speak to the benefit of a portable gospel faith in a cosmopolitan center of trade.
Learn More at The Museum of Biblical Art
By George Nelson Preston
On Friday April 27, the solo exhibition of NYU’s Artist-in-Residence, Maluwa opens at the Kimmel Center in New York City.
Maluwa brings more than just a fresh look to the silhouette. Those with a weak sense of art history are likely to think of Kara Walker when looking at Maluwa because both artists work in silhouette. The silhouette is the contrivance of the French Minister of Finance and amateur Etienne de Silhouette (1709-67). In its original form it was a profile portrait filled in with black, thereby eliminating all features except the contour of the profile. Thus, the derogatory adjective, silhouette, suggesting an empty policy. The silhouette is a child of its originator’s recall of Italian quattrocento portraits.
These portraits in turn were derived from the —so to speak– high profile personages depicted on ancient coins.
This is why it is impossible to look at a silhouette without nostalgically recalling the content of First or Second Style Renaissance portraits in profile. You would ask, what happened to the beautiful faces of Ghirlandaio’s Giovanna Tornabuoni, those profile portraits by Pollaiuolo and Botticelli and what about Mantegna’s magnificent talking profiles of the Duke of Montefeltro and his wife?
So anyone working in silhouette had better come up with something of formal (or contra-formal) integrity. You can use this dilemma as a point of departure for the works of both Maluwa and Walker. Beyond that, the two are as different as night and day. Maluwa’s contour is rendered in studied neglect in contrast to Walker’s emulation of the precision of Renaissance contour in scissor cut images. Then, there is the place of the text which in Walker is indispensable to the image, didactic and intellectualized.
Maluwa’s silhouettes in contrast speak to an ancestral presence, the spirit or ethos of a culture and less to how that culture and its people has been brutalized. Here, there is cosmic memory, ancestral recall, not a history lesson in picture-text juxtaposition.
The images may sometimes be the shadows of forgotten or praised ancestors whose stillness recalls the Egyptian law of frontality but break away from it in body torsion contained in the flatness of the silhouette. References to the stars and stripes place some of these works in a very contemporary political context but the feeling that comes across is not of the present but of those aspects of our culture desired but still elusive: the American dream as something dreamed a long time ago. Maluwa uses some devices that could attain a greater degree of clarity or intent. We often see symbols that remind us of: greater than, less than, absolute value, is contained in, contains, member of, logical sum, divided by, plus, minus —and so forth. These along with the Egyptian sensibility seem to evoke hieroglyphs. The the symbols are rendered so casually that one cannot tell if they are meant to be taken literally or are just a sketchy compliment to the silhouettes.
Learn more about the artist at maluwa.org
The year is 1985. “Operation Moses” is at its peak — the massive airlift of thousands of “Falasha,” Ethiopian Jewish refugees, who are fleeing oppression in their native country. One Jewish boy, marked for a rescue-flight to Israel, dies as the story begins. Another boy, a Christian (Moshe Agazai), secretly takes his place. He does so with the tacit cooperation of both the dead boy’s mother, and his own mother. At age 9, “Schlomo” (as he is renamed; we never learn his earlier name) is too young to realize his life is being saved. He knows only that he is being cruelly separated from his real mother, and that he must never ever reveal his true identity to anyone. Israeli authorities are very severe about deporting pretenders they discover among the rescued. His adoptive mother dies, apparently of tuberculosis, very shortly after their arrival. Schlomo is now completely on his own. He proves a gifted but difficult student. He learns Hebrew easily, but refuses to eat. In his heart, he speaks to his mother in Africa each night by addressing his thoughts to the moon, overhead. He picks fights with schoolmates. He finally even flees the dormitory one night, headed south to Ethiopia wearing little more than a bedsheet. The authorities overtake him. They then arrange for Schlomo to be adopted by a liberal, French-Israeli couple, Yael (Yael Abecassis) and Yoram (Roschdy Zem). And so begins the most hopeful, and healing journey of Schlomo’s young life. The way is still fraught with difficulty. He not only has new parents, but new siblings. (He also has a warm, droll new grandfather, played by Rami Danon.) They all adjust to one another by stormy degrees. However, a deep and mutual love is gradually forged, especially between the boy and his new mother, Yael. She becomes his ferocious protector when the parents of Schlomo’s schoolmates recoil from his color, or what they pre-judge to be his lack of intellect, or what they imagine to be the diseases he may have brought with him from Africa. Yael will have none of it. She curses their pettiness, and wins the confrontation.
His adoptive father Yoram is no less fierce in his love, especially when a group of fundamentalist clerics at the Chief Rabbinate of Jerusalem manhandle the boy in a misguided effort to ritually “cleanse” him (attempting to take a drop of blood from his penis), in tandem with every other Ethiopian they can lay hold of. Through this episode, which triggers a riot and afterward sparks vigorous marches of protest, we become privvy to rich layers of conflict and nuance in Israeli society which are seldom communicated in the American news media. Around this time, the boy pays a visit to a prominent Ethiopian rabbi he sees on television, Qes Amhra (Yitzhak Edgar). Qes agrees to write letters to Africa for the boy. If the old man suspects that his new young friend is secretly a gentile, he lets it pass. As a teenager, circa 1989, Schlomo (now played by Mosche Abebe) grows tall and princely. He falls in love with a local beauty Sarah (Roni Hadar). She is as much in love with him, but her father vehemently, even brutally, opposes the match. Racial prejudice is a factor. Yet Sarah’s father also intuits something we and Schlomo know to be true — that deep down, he is inauthentic. Schlomo counteracts this by mastering the Torah. He enters a steep intellectual competition known as The Controversies, in which he must debate profundities of Scripture with no margin for error. Qes tutors him in nuances of spiritual law, but advises him to understand it from his heart. Schlomo is obliged to debate the skin-color of Adam. The very topic is a pointed insult aimed at him by Sarah’s father, one of the judges, yet Schlomo speaks to it beautifully. Nevertheless, her father remains unmoved by his triumph. Sarah still loves him, but as he becomes an adult (played by Sirak M. Sabahat), Schlomo keeps her at arm’s length. However deeply he has assimilated, however passionately he has embraced the spiritual and intellectual rigors of Judaism, there is no one he feels he may trust with his secret. Moreover, he longs to be reunited with his biological mother. The eventful, surprise-filled climax of Schlomo’s journey centers on the reconciliation of these particular sufferings, and his bold actions toward healing …
Tadias Magazine
By Dr. Worku Abebe
New York (TADIAS) — Traditional medicine has been defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) as “the sum total of all knowledge and practices, whether explicable or not, used in the diagnosis, prevention and elimination of physical, mental or social imbalances and relying exclusively on practical experience and observation handed down from generation to generation, whether verbally or in writing.” This system of health care is also known as folk medicine, ethnomedicine, or indigenous medicine. In some countries, including the US, the terms complementary or alternative medicine are used interchangeably for traditional medicine.
It is generally accepted that traditional Ethiopian medicine is the outcome of long and dynamic interactions among African, Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew traditions. These interactions, combined with the variations in the country’s unique ecology and diverse ethnic groups, make the traditional medical system in Ethiopia very rich and complex. Records show that the existence of such a health care system can be traced back to the period prior to the 16th century. Although the expansion of modern medicine appears to influence some aspects of the traditional system, traditional Ethiopian medicine remains rooted in magico-religious beliefs and empirical knowledge from the natural environment.
An estimated 80% of the Ethiopian population relies on traditional medicine. Socio-cultural appeal, accessibility, affordability, and effectiveness against a number of health problems seem to foster its widespread use. Consistent with the increasing global interest in alternative medicine, the demand for traditional medical therapies in Ethiopia is on the rise. In 1986 over 6,000 practitioners were registered with the Ministry of Health. More recently, the Ethiopian Traditional Healers’ Association, which was established in 1987, reported a membership of 9,000 healers. A few experts estimate the number of traditional medicine practitioners, vendors, and collectors in the country at more than 80,000.
Above: Commandment Keepers Synagogue in Harlem, NYC.
Photography by Chester Higgins. ©chesterhiggins.com
By Tseday Alehegn
Ethiopia, also called Yaltopya, Cush, and Abyssinia, stands as the oldest, continuous, black civilization on earth, and the second oldest civilization in history after China. This home of mine has been immortalized in fables, legends, and epics. Homer’s Illiad, Aristotle’s A Treatise on Government, Miguel Cervante’s Don Quixote, the Bible, the Koran, and the Torah are but a few potent examples of Ethiopia’s popularity in literature. But it is in studying the historical relations between African Americans and Ethiopians that I came to understand ‘ Ethiopia’ as a ray of light. Like the sun, Ethiopia has spread its beams on black nations across the globe. Her history is carefully preserved in dust-ridden books, in library corners and research centers. Her beauty is caught by a photographer’s discerning eye, her spirituality revived by priests and preachers. Ultimately, however, it is the oral journals of our elders that helped me capture glitters of wisdom that would palliate my thirst for a panoptic and definitive knowledge.
The term ‘Ethiopian’ has been used in a myriad of ways; it is attributed to the indigenous inhabitants of the land located in the Eastern Horn of Africa, as well as more generally denotive of individuals of African descent. Indeed, at one time, the body of water now known as the Atlantic Ocean was known as the Ethiopian Ocean. And it was across this very ocean that the ancestors of African Americans were brought to America and the ‘ New World.’
Early African American Writers
Although physically separated from their ancestral homeland and amidst the opprobrious shackles of slavery, African American poets, writers, abolitionists, and politicians persisted in forging a collective identity, seeking to link themselves figuratively if not literally to the African continent. One of the first published African American writers, Phillis Wheatly, sought refuge in referring to herself as an “Ethiop”. Wheatley, an outspoken poet, was also one of the earliest voices of the anti-slavery movement, and often wrote to newspapers of her passion for freedom. She eloquently asserted, “In every human breast God has implanted a principle, it is impatient of oppression.” In 1834 another anti-slavery poet, William Stanley Roscoe, published his poem “The Ethiop” recounting the tale of an African fighter ending the reign of slavery in the Caribbean. Paul Dunbar’s notable “Ode to Ethiopia,” published in 1896, was eventually put to music by William Grant Still and performed in 1930 by the Afro-American Symphony. In his fiery anti-slavery speech entitled “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” prominent black leader Frederick Douglas blazed at his opponents, “Africa must rise and put on her yet unwoven garment. Ethiopia shall stretch out her hand unto God.”
First Ethiopians Travel to America
As African Americans fixed their gaze on Ethiopia, Ethiopians also traveled to the ‘New World’ and learned of the African presence in the Americas. In 1808 merchants from Ethiopia arrived at New York’s famous Wall Street. While attempting to attend church services at the First Baptist Church of New York, the Ethiopian merchants, along with their African American colleagues, experienced the ongoing routine of racial discrimination. As an act of defiance against segregation in a house of worship, African Americans and Ethiopians organized their own church on Worth Street in Lower Manhattan and named it Abyssinia Baptist Church. Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. served as the first preacher, and new building was later purchased on Waverly Place in the West Village before the church was moved to its current location in Harlem. Scholar Fikru Negash Gebrekidan likewise notes that, along with such literal acts of rebellion, anti slavery leaders Robert Alexander Young and David Walker published pamphlets entitled Ethiopian Manifesto and Appeal in 1829 in an effort to galvanize blacks to rise against their slave masters.
Above: Reverend Calvin Butts.
©chesterhiggins.com
Adwa Victory &‘Back to Africa’ Movement
When Italian colonialists encroached on Ethiopian territory and were soundly defeated in the Battle of Adwa on March 1, 1896, it became the first African victory over a European colonial power, and the victory resounded loud and clear among compatriots of the black diaspora. “For the oppressed masses Adwa…would become a cause célèbre,” writes Gebrekidan, “a metaphor for racial pride and anti-colonial defiance, living proof that skin color or hair texture bore no significance on intellect and character.” Soon, African Americans and blacks from the Caribbean Islands began to make their way to Abyssinia. In 1903, accompanied by Haitian poet and traveler Benito Sylvain, an affluent African American business magnate by the name of William Henry Ellis arrived in Ethiopia to greet and make acquaintances with Emperor Menelik. A prominent physician from the West Indies, Dr. Joseph Vitalien, also journeyed to Ethiopia and eventually became the Emperor’ trusted personal physician.
For black America, the early 1900s was a time consumed with the notion of “returning to Africa,” to the source. With physical proof of the beginnings of colonial demise, a charismatic and savvy Jamaican immigrant and businessman named Marcus Garvey established his grassroots organization in 1917 under the title United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) with branches in various states. Using the success of Ethiopia’s independence as a beacon of freedom for blacks residing in the Americas, Garvey envisioned a shipping business that would raise enough money and register members to volunteer to be repatriated to Africa. In a few years time, Garvey’s UNIA raised approximately ten million dollars and boasted an impressive membership of half a million individuals.
Notable civil rights leader Malcolm X began his autobiography by mentioning his father, Reverend Earl Little, as a staunch supporter of the UNIA. “It was only me that he sometimes took with him to the Garvey U.N.I.A. meetings which he held quietly in different people’s homes,” says Malcolm. “I can remember hearing of ‘ Africa for the Africans,’ ‘Ethiopians, Awake!’” Malcolm’s early association with Garvey’s pan-African message resonated with him as he schooled himself in reading, writing, and history. “I can remember accurately the very first set of books that really impressed me,” Malcolm professes, “J.A. Rogers’ three volumes told about Aesop being a black man who told fables; about the great Coptic Christian Empires; about Ethiopia, the earth’s oldest continuous black civilization.”
By the time the Ethiopian government had decided to send its first official diplomatic mission to the United States, Marcus Garvey had already emblazoned an image of Ethiopia into the minds and hearts of his African American supporters. “I see a great ray of light and the bursting of a mighty political cloud which will bring you complete freedom,” he promised them, and they in turn eagerly propagated his message.
The Harlem Renaissance & Emigrating to Ethiopia
In 1919 an official Ethiopian goodwill mission was sent to the United States, the first African delegation of diplomats, in hopes of creating amicable ties with the American people and government. The four-person delegation included Dadjazmatch Nadou, Ato Belanghetta Herouy Wolde Selassie, Kantiba Gabrou, and Ato Sinkas. Having been acquainted with African Americans such as businessman William Ellis, Kantiba Gabrou, the mayor of Gondar, made a formal appeal during his trip for African Americans to emigrate to Ethiopia. Arnold Josiah Ford, a Harlem resident from Barbados, had an opportunity to meet the 1919 Ethiopian delegation. Having already heard of the existence of black Jews in Ethiopia, Ford established his own synagogue for the black community soon after meeting the Ethiopian delegation. Along with a Nigerian-born bishop named Arthur Wentworth Matthews, Ford created the Commandment Keepers Church on 123rd Street in Harlem and taught the congregation about the existence of black Jews in Ethiopia. Meanwhile, in the international spotlight, 1919 was the year the League of Nations was created, of which Ethiopia became the first member from the African continent.The mid 1900s gave birth to the Harlem Renaissance. With many African Americans migrating to the north in search of a segregation-free life, and a large contention of black writers, actors, artists and singers gathering in places like Harlem, a new culture of black artistic expression thrived. Even so, the Harlem Renaissance was more than just a time of literary discussions and hot jazz; it represented a confluence of creativity summoning forth the humanity and pride of blacks in America – a counterculture subverting the grain of thought ‘separate and unequal.’
Above: Commandment Keepers Synagogue. ©chesterhiggins.com
As in earlier times, the terms ‘Ethiopian’ and ‘Ethiop’ continued to be utilized by Harlem writers and poets to instill black pride. In other U.S. cities like Chicago, actors calling themselves the ‘National Ethiopian Art Players’ performed The Chip Woman’s Fortune by Willis Richardson, the first serious play by a black writer to hit Broadway.
In 1927, Ethiopia’s Ambassador to London, Azaj Workneh Martin, arrived in New York and appealed once again for African American professionals to emigrate and work in Ethiopia. In return they were promised free land and high wages. In 1931 the Emperor granted eight hundred acres for settlement by African Americans, and Arnold Josiah Ford, bishop of the Commandment Keepers Church, became one of the first to accept the invitation. Along with sixty-six other individuals, Ford emigrated and started life anew in Ethiopia.
Ethiopian Students in America: Mobilizing Support
In November 1930, Taffari Makonnen was coronated as Emperor of Ethiopia. The event blared on radios, and Harlemites heard and marveled at the ceremonies of a black king. The emperor’s face glossed the cover of Time Magazine, which remarked on “negro newsorgans” in America hailing the king “as their own.” African American pilot Hubert Julian, dubbed “The Black Eagle of Harlem,” had visited Ethiopia and attended the coronation. Describing the momentous occasion to Time Magazine, Hubert rhapsodized:
“When I arrived in Ethiopia the King was glad to see me… I took off with a French pilot… We climbed to 5,000 ft. as 50,000 people cheered, and then I jumped out and tugged open my parachute… I floated down to within 40 ft. of the King, who incidentally is the greatest of all modern rulers… He rushed up and pinned the highest medal given in that country on my breast, made me a colonel and the leader of his air force — and here I am!”
Joel Augustus Rogers, famed author and correspondent for New York’s black newspaper Amsterdam News, also covered the Coronation of Haile Selassie and was likewise presented with a coronation medal.
After his official coronation, Emperor Haile Selassie sent forth the first wave of Ethiopian students to continue their education abroad. Melaku Beyan was a member of the primary batch of students sent to America in the 1930s. He attended Ohio State University and later received his medical degree at Howard Medical School in Washington, D.C. During his schooling years at Howard, he forged lasting friendships with members of the black community and, at Emperor Haile Selassie’s request, he endeavored to enlist African American professionals to work in Ethiopia. Beyan was successful in recruiting several individuals, including teachers Joseph Hall and William Jackson, as well as physicians Dr. John West and Dr. Reuben S. Young, the latter of whom began a private practice in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, prior to his official assignment as a municipal health officer in Dire Dawa, Harar.
Italo-Ethiopian War 1935-1941
By the mid 1930s the Emperor had sent a second diplomatic mission to the U.S. Vexed at Italy’s consistently aggressive behavior towards his nation, Haile Selassie attempted to forge stronger ties with America. Despite being a member of the League of Nations, Italy disregarded international law and invaded Ethiopia in 1935. The Ethiopian government appealed for support at the League of Nations and elsewhere, through representatives such as the young, charismatic speaker Melaku Beyan in the United States. Beyan had married an African American activist, Dorothy Hadley, and together they created a newspaper called Voice of Ethiopia to simultaneously denounce Jim Crow in America and fascist invasion in Ethiopia. Joel Rogers, the correspondent who had previously attended the Emperor’s coronation, returned to Ethiopia as a war correspondent for The Pittsburgh Courier, then America’s most widely-circulated black newspaper. Upon returning to the United States a year later, he published a pamphlet entitled The Real Facts About Ethiopia, a scathing and uncompromising report on the destruction caused by Italian troops in Ethiopia. Melaku Beyan used the pamphlet in his speaking tours, while his wife Dorothy designed and passed out pins that read “Save Ethiopia.”
In Harlem, Chicago, and various other cities African American churches urged their members to speak out against the invasion. Beyan established at least 28 branches of the newly-formed Ethiopian World Federation, an organ of resistance calling on Ethiopians and friends of Ethiopia throughout the United States, Europe, and the Caribbean. News of Ethiopia’s plight fueled indignation and furious debates among African Americans. Touched by the Emperor’s speech at the League of Nations, Roger’s accounts, and Melaku’s impassioned message, blacks vowed to support Ethiopia. Still others wrote letters to Haile Selassie, some giving advice, others support and commentary. “I pray that you will deliver yourself from crucifixion,” wrote one black woman from Los Angeles, “and show the whites that they are not as civilized as they loudly assert themselves to be.”
Although the United States was not officially in support of Ethiopia, scores of African Americans attempted to enlist to fight in Ethiopia. Unable to legally succeed on this front, several individuals traveled to Ethiopia on ‘humanitarian’ grounds. Author Gail Lumet Buckley cites two African American pilots, John Robinson and the ‘Black Eagle of Harlem’ Hubert Julian, who joined the Ethiopian Air Corps, then made up of only three non-combat planes. John Robinson, a member of the first group of black students that entered Curtis Wright Flight School, flew his plane delivering medical supplies to different towns across the country. Blacks in America continued to stand behind the Emperor and organized medical supply drives from New York’s Harlem Hospital. Melaku Beyan and his African American counterparts remained undeterred for the remainder of Ethiopia’s struggle against colonization. In 1940, a year before Ethiopia’s victory against Italy, Melaku Beyan succumbed to pneumonia, which he had caught while walking door-to-door in the peak of winter, speaking boldly about the war for freedom in Ethiopia.
Lasting Legacies: Ties That Bind
Traveling through Harlem in my mind’s eye, I see the mighty organs of resistance that played such a pivotal role in “keeping aloft” the banner of Ethiopia and fostering deep friendships among blacks in Africa and America. I envision the doors Melaku Beyan knocked on as he passed out pamphlets; the pulpits on street corners where Malcolm X stood preaching about the strength and beauty of black people, fired up by the history he read. The Abyssinia Baptist Church stands today bigger and bolder, and inside you find the most exquisite Ethiopian cross, a gift from the late Emperor to the people of Harlem and a symbol of love and gratitude for their support and friendship.
Above: Emperor Haile Selassie,
Reverened Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.,
on May 27, 1954.
Several Coptic churches line the streets of Harlem, and the ancient synagogue of the Commandment Keepers established by Arnold Ford continues to have Sabbath services. The offices of the Amsterdam News are still as busy as ever, recording and recounting the past and present state of black struggles. Over the years, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture has carefully preserved the photographic proofs of the ties that bind African Americans and Ethiopians, just in case the stories told are too magical to grasp.The name ‘Ethiopia’ conjures a kaleidoscope of images and verbs. In researching the historical relations between African Americans and Ethiopians, I learned that Ethiopia is synonymous with ‘freedom,’ ‘black dignity’ and ‘self-worth.’ In the process, I looked to my elders and heeded the wisdom they have to share. In his message to the grassroots of Detroit, Michigan, Malcolm X once asserted, “Of all our studies, history is best qualified to reward our research.” It is this kernel of truth that propelled me to share this rich history in celebration of Black History Month and the victory of Adwa.
In attempting to understand what Ethiopia really means, I turn to Ethiopia’s Poet Laureate Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin. “The Ethiopia of rich history is the heart of Africa’s civilization,” he said. “She is the greatest example of Africa’s pride. Ethiopia means peace. The word ‘ Ethiopia’ emanates from a connection of three old black Egyptian words, Et, Op and Bia, meaning truth and peace, up and upper, country and land. Et-Op-Bia is land of upper truth or land of higher peace.”
This is my all-time, favorite definition of Ethiopia, because it brings us back to our indigenous African roots: The same roots that African Americans and black people in the diaspora have searched for; the same roots from which we have sprung and grown into individuals rich in confidence. Welcome to blackness. Welcome to Ethiopia!
About the Author:
Tseday Alehegn is the Editor-in-Chief of Tadias Magazine. Tseday is a graduate of Stanford University (both B.A. & M.A.). In addition to her responsibilities at Tadias, she is also a Doctoral student at Columbia University.