From the unaltered wilderness of the Simien Mountaints to ancient Lalibela, to the major tributary of the great Nile river, the Blue Nile.
With this video we pay homage to the great poet and playwright Laureat Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin.
A prolific writer, who wrote about a wide variety of subjects, including Ethiopia’s long history of independence and it’s unique cultural heritage. Tsegaye was noted as a human rights activist, he developed a style that was “serious, highly poetic, but most importantly, no longer concerned with Church morality and the exploits of the aristocracy, but with the evils of life as experienced by the poor." This resulted in multiple Ethiopian governments frequently censoring his plays and poems.
Gabre-Medhin was also known for his poems ‘Proud to be an African’( the anthem of the African Union) and he honoured “earths first mother of all fertility” with his poem ‘The Nile’. A stanza of this poem, showed at the end of the video, symbolises how Gabre-Medhin insisted emphatically that everybody should know the cradle of humankind, lies in Ethiopia.
Laureat Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin (17 August 1936 – 25 February 2006)
Created by Max Palm and Mitchel van Essen
Honorable mention: Olaf Tempelman, Volkskrant correspondent for helping us in the research stages of the project.
