The extraordinary life of Ethiopia's 93-year-old singing nun

  • Category: Music
Emahoy Tsegué-Mariam Guèbrou.

By Kate Molleson

She sang for Haile Selassie but later retreated from the world, living barefoot in a hilltop monastery, perfecting her bluesy, freewheeling sound. Kate Molleson on The Honky Tonk Nun, her documentary about Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou. (The Guardian)

I’m no great singer, but Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou only really trusted me after I had sung to her. “Something from your country,” she instructed. So I found myself in the tiny bedroom of this 93-year-old Ethiopian composer-pianist-nun, croaking my way through the verses of a Robert Burns song.

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Peter Abrahams was the symbol of white blood in black veins

  • Category: Arts
Peter Abrahams

By Godwin Siundu

In Summary

- By virtue of his mixed heritage, and the fact that he was an African living in the Carribean, the South African author who fought apartheid with his pen was the face of the contra-diction that is racial prejudice.
- Peter Abrahams - as he was better known - was born in 1919 in Johannesburg to an Ethiopian father and a coloured mother, whose own black father was married to a white French mother, at a time when racial biases were yet to be legislated.
- He was educated in South Africa and England, where he began his career as a writer.

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Deliverance: A Tale of Colliding passions and the Muse of Forgiveness

  • Category: Books
Deliverance, a Tale of Colliding passions and the Muse of Forgiveness

Book Review by Semere T. Habtemariam
Title: Deliverance: A Tale of Colliding passions and the Muse of Forgiveness
Author: Dr. Bereket Habte Selassie
Genre: Historical Novel
Pages: 330
Publisher: RSP (Red Sea Press)
ISBN: 9781569025178 (HB) and 9781569025185 (PB)

A new novel by Dr. Bereket: Deliverance, a Tale of Colliding passions and the Muse of Forgiveness

Reading Dr. Bereket’s latest book, “Deliverance: A Tale of Colliding Passions and the Muse of Forgiveness” is like sitting around a campfire being regaled by a masterful storyteller who was among the group that midwifed the revolution in Ethiopia. It is an engrossing tale of tragedy which would please the gods of Mount Olympus looking down on human actions from the clouds and laughing at man’s delusion and myopia. But for mortals, it is a clarion call for somber reflection for “ultimately the passions of the moment will [have to] give way to dispassionate reflection putting the common good above factional and personal interests.”

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Nomads in the Shadows of Empires

  • Category: Books
Nomads in the Shadows of Empires

Book Review by Fekadu Bekele (PHD)
Title: Nomads in the Shadows of Empires
Author: Gufu Oba
Pages: 366
Publisher: Brill
ISBN-10: 9004244395, ISBN-13: 978-9004244399
ISSN: 1568-1203

This book about nomadic tribes in the frontier of two countries, namely Ethiopia and Kenya, deals with the impacts of two contesting Empires, Ethiopia which had not yet transformed to a fully developed nation-state with thousands of drawbacks, and the British Empire which had highly developed and a colonial power which had extended its imperial rules over many countries. As a matter of fact its colonial policy had impacts on the social conditions of African Indigenous peoples in Ethiopia.

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