Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin

Loret Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin (17 August 1936—25 February 2006) was Poet Laureate of Ethiopia, as well as a poet, playwright, essayist, and art director.

Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin, from an Tsegaye was born,(Baptized an Orthodox Christian)in Bodaa village some 120km from the capital near Ambo, to an Oromo father, who was away fighting the Italians, and an Amhara mother from North Shewa Zone. (The two groups speak languages from entirely different linguistic groups, Cushitic and Semitic respectively; the latter has an alphabet of some 300 letters.) As many Ethiopian boys do, he also learned Ge'ez, the ancient language of the church, an Ethiopian equivalent to Latin; he also helped the family by caring for cattle. He was more unusual in beginning to write plays when at the local elementary school. While still at elementary school he 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 British Council-supported General Wingate school – named after British officer Orde Wingate. He subsequently attended the Commercial school in Addis Ababa, where he won a scholarship to Blackstone School of Law in Chicago in 1959. In 1960 he travelled to Europe to study experimental drama at the Royal Court Theatre in London and the Comédie-Française in Paris. Upon returning to Ethiopia, he devoted himself to managing and developing the Ethiopian National Theater – which institution staged an impressive memorial for its former director.

During this time Tsegaye travelled widely; he attended the UNESCO-organised First World Black Festival in Dakar, Senegal, and the Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers. In 1966, at the age of only 29, he was awarded his country's highest literary honour: the Haile Selassie I Prize for Amharic Literature joining the club of such distinguished previous recipients as Kebede Michael. The Prize earned him the title of Laureate, by which he has ever since been known.

Following the Ethiopian revolution of 1974, Tsegaye was appointed for a short time as vice-minister of Culture and Sports, and was active in setting up Addis Ababa University's department of Theatre Arts. In 1984 he wrote an extended, and very poetical, essay "Footprints in Time", which appeared with photographs by the Italian photographer Alberto Tessore, as a "coffee table" book. It traced Ethiopian history from the prehistoric time of Lucy, the first-known hominid that had recently been found in the Afar Desert in eastern Ethiopia.

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