Remembering Ethiopia's Poet Laureate Tsegaye Gabre Medhin on his birthday

Blogger's Note:  Ethiopia’s greatest playwright, poet, producer, art director and essayist was born on this day August 17, 1936 (Nehassie 11, 1928 E.C.) This is a reprint of his biographical sketch which I published last year in my annual publication 'Biographical storybook with calendar: 2003 E.C. edition'. Enjoy the read and listen to the voice of this great HAGERWEDAD (patriotic) Ethiopian reading selection of his new & old poems which was recorded in 2003. ABREN ZIM INBEL (3:12); ABA GEDA ILMA(10:35); PETROS YACHIN SEAT(17:25); Aesop(29:15); AWASH(43:08);AY MERKATO(55:52)

Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin 1928 – 1998 E.C.(1936-2006)

Tsegaye was born on August 17, 1936 in the highland village of Boda, near the hot springs town of Ambo, west of the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. His father Gabre Medhin Roba was engaged in farming and cattle-herding, before he got recruited as a soldier in the war to fight the Fascist Italian invasion of Ethiopia. As a 13 year old, Tsegaye wrote a play called King Dionysus and the Two Brothers and saw it staged in the presence, among others, of Emperor Haile Selassie. Tsegaye later attended the prestigious General Wingate secondary school in Addis Ababa. His interest was to study drama and since there was no school for ―theatre arts‖ then, Tsegaye asked his school director to be transferred to Addis Ababa's Commercial school, where the budding playwright thought would be prepared for administrative career in theatres. Upon graduating from Commercial school in 1956, he wrote and produced couple of Amharic plays including Belg (Autumn, 1957); Yeshoh Aklil,Crown of Thorns,(1958) which were staged at the prestigious Haile Selassie I Theatre, later National Theatre. In the mean time, Tsegaye studied law and received LL.B. Degree from Blackstone School of law in Chicago.
In 1959 Tsegaye won a scholarship from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) that enabled him to travel abroad for study at two famed venues, the Royal Court Theatre in London and France's Comèdie Française. On returning to Ethiopia in 1960, he devoted himself unreservedly to the development of the country's National Theatre. Prior to and during the time he was nurturing a nascent Ethiopian National Theatre, Tsegaye continued to write and produce several Amharic plays. Besides his own writings, Tsegaye adapted some of Shakespeare‘s plays including King Lear (which was banned), Othello and Macbeth; as well as Moliere‘s Tartuffe and Doctor In Spite of Himself.
Tsegaye also wrote plays and essays in English which include a prize winning essay for Fulbright Fellowship competition on What Does World Brotherhood Mean to Me, in 1959 as well as scores of short poems, some of which are reproduced in Ethiopia Observer Magazine in 1965. Among the two plays he wrote in English, Oda Oak Oracle (1965) and Collision of Altars (1977). Oda Oak Oracle was staged not only in Addis Ababa but also in Britain, Denmark, Italy, Rumania, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, the United States in 1964 and recently in 2007 at Stanford Summer Theatre, Palo Alto California.

The prodigious Poet continued his productivity unabated in the turbulent revolutionary period of the 1970‘s and churn out plays that depicted the onset of the 1974 Ethiopian Revolution. Of the five Amharic plays produced by Poet Tsegaye between 1974 and 1979, three of them — Ha Hu Besedst Wer(ABC in Six Months, Inat Alem Tenu (adapted from Bertold Brecht‘s Mother Courage) and Melekte Wez Ader (Message of the Worker)were banned.
A selection of his Amharic poems were published in 1973 under the title: Issat wey Abeba(Fire or Flower) and were widely read. Tsegaye‘s creative power continued blossoming in the 1980‘s. He produced historical plays based on the lives of Menelik (banned), and on Zeray Deres as well as Gammo, a play on the Ethiopian Revolution which was also banned. As an ardent patriot, Tsegaye was proud of Ethiopia's long history of independence, and of her unique cultural heritage. He insisted emphatically that his country needed heroes, and used the theatre deliberately to teach his compatriots to respect the Ethiopian heroes of their past. One of the most widely acclaimed of his plays, Tewodros, commemorates the life of the charismatic Ethiopian emperor of that name. The Emperor, a pioneer reformer and modernizer, committed suicide in 1868 rather than fall into the hands of a British expeditionary force which had been dispatched against him. Another of Tsegaye‘s plays, Petros Y‘achin Se‘at (Petros at the Hour), tells the story of Abuna Petros, an Ethiopian bishop, who accompanied Ethiopia's freedom-fighters in their struggle to resist the Italian fascist occupation, and who ultimately was captured and hanged by the Italian forces. Even if advancing age, health problems and the toll of the decades past were weighing on him, Tsegaye continued to write, research, travel, lecture and produce dramas for the stage in the 1990‘s. In 1993, Tsegaye‘s Play with an accent on peace titled Ha Hu Weym Pe Pu (ABC or XYZ)—to create life or to snuff out life—was banned. In 1994, a reproduction of one of his earlier plays, Petros at the hour, depicting the Ethiopian Patriarch butchered by the Italian Fascists, was banned. Of thirty-three plays Tsegaye has produced between 1951 and 1997 more than half of them (eighteen) have been banned. All in all, Tsegaye noted in one interview that thirty-six of his forty-nine literary works have been censored in whole or in part since he began his career in the 1950‘s. In 1976 he was arrested right onstage as he was directing his play on the Ethiopian Revolution, Abugida Qeyiso. He notes that all the regimes he has survived in have been equal opportunity hackers as far as his works were concerned. Tsegaye always believed in the unity of the Ethiopian people and felt that this by far transcended purely political matters of the day.
Throughout his life as a prolific poet and playwright, Tsegaye has won a variety of awards including: Emperor Haile-Selassie I International Prize for Amharic Literature in 1966; the Gold Mercury Ad Personam Award in 1982, Fulbright Senior Scholar Resident Fellowship Award at New York‘s Columbia University in 1985; Human Rights Watch Free Expression Award in New York in 1994; Honorable Poets Golden Laurel Award given by the Congress of World Poets and United Poets Laureate International in Buckinghamshire in 1997. More recently, the Norwegian Author‘s Union, together with the Royal Norwegian Ministry of Cultural Affairs conferred its coveted prize, the Annual Freedom of Expression Prize on Tsegaye.
Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin, died in Manhattan on 26 February 2006, at the age of 69.
This biographical sketch was compiled from the following sources:
Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsegaye_Gabre-Medhin
Negussie Ayele – Blaten Geta Tsegaye on www.ethiopians.com
Molvaer , R. (1997) Black Lions: The Creative Lives of Modern Ethiopia‘s Literary Giants and Pioneers.

Lawrenceville, NJ: Red Sea Press, 1997.