Alemseged tesfai biography template
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My interest in the necessity of Eritreans claiming ownership over their own history actually started before my direct involvement in the Eritrean liberation struggle. The years 1941-1962 stand out as the years when the Eritrean identity solidified after 50 years of Italian colonial rule.
In the meantime, I had for long been interested in Eritrean history.
The survival of the Eritrean identity is, to a large part, attributable to this characteristic, indeed this soul, of Eritrean society.
- Could you elaborate on the process you undertook to research and ensure the historical accuracy and cultural sensitivity in your narratives?
I spent many months examining the primary sources available at the RDC, the newspaper articles and political speeches from the period; the Eritrean Government, Assembly, Supreme Court documents and files; the Ethiopian, “Federal”, UN, British and American documents, etc.
Yet, during decolonisation, its people were singularly excluded from the right to self-determination, for external reasons: superpower rivalry over the country’s strategic position on the Red Sea; a mistaken notion of irreconcilable sectarian differences within Eritrea’s population, invoked in order to brand it a society unfit for statehood; and Ethiopia’s imperial claim, based on mythical historical connections.
The Ethiopian call for Eritrea’s return, supported by the UK and the US, sealed its fate at the international level.
It will ultimately tell the stories of the individuals, both in positions of authority and out in the streets, who helped push or draw back the progress of the country’s march to independence.
I am hoping the book to make interesting reading and not be a formal treatise on political and legal issues. He was also fluent in several languages, broadening his research and reading horizons.
A quarter of a century ago, Alemseged abandoned a promising academic career to join the fledgling Eritrean People’s Liberation Front to fight for Eritrea’s freedom.
It has been translated into Tigre, Italian and a German version is under way.
These sources do give quite a significant insight into the events in the country during the period in question. I went to various elementary and secondary schools in Eritrea and Ethiopia. Tesfaye Gebreab’s, “The Nurenebi File,” which I translated into English, would also effectively serve the purpose. The “other” war referred to here is fought not in the actual battlefields, but in the wombs of women.
When this comes as government policy by a colonizing nation, its psychological effect is devastating. I have also published two books for children. It is also a narration of a people being initiated into the intricacies of world politics for which they had not been prepared. The whole story had thus to be retold from the Eritrean perspective – the receiving end of an imposed narrative.
In 1997, I got the opportunity to lead a research project into the history of the pre-revolutionary and the revolutionary periods of Eritrean history. His interest extended beyond law to history, literature, and the social sciences. The Other War was staged at the West Yorkshire Playhouse Theatre in Leeds in 1997, and it was also aired as a BBC play of the week in 2001.
After independence, I published a collection of war diaries, short stories and plays, most of which I had written during the war, especially in my intermittent participations in actual battlefield combat.
Eritrea has a unique history waiting to be told. In many ways, Eritrean nationalism does defy accepted notions on the subject.