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In memory of my uncle Tegadalay Zere’abruk Zeferetsion.__________________________________ Paulos Yrgaw
You can call it apoptosis or altruism, however, if there is anything which defines the terms, it is the very crust and a story of my dearest uncle Tegadalay Zere’abruk Zeferetsion. Way before my uncle appeared in the ever complex cosmic dance and way before he joined the daring journey of the human race, however, there was a family. A family indented in an age of innocence and Rousseau’s Romanticism. In a sea blazed with World War II after-taste, the family came into existence and created a semblance of an oasis of a serenity where faith, honor and country were the code of conduct. The sense of tranquility and a synch with the vibes of nature in a life of a town, which had earned fame and legends, after more than half a century had elapsed was tragically to find itself in the manacles of an abject poverty and a dire negligence by the intrigues of the nobilities and the Emperor at the helm. Adwa the town whose inhabitants stereotypically garnered a reputation of an intellectual reserve, and who were once confused for Caucasians for defeating the Italian self found their “ephemeral” pride in obliterating the Italian “master”, sidelined or confined to a museum display when the Emperor resolved to punish Tigrai for conspiring to overthrow his throne. The resolve was not only directed to tame the First Weyane uprising, it was to be sustained for many years to come by systematically putting Tigrai in a cold and darkness and by forgoing Tigrai from sharing of any economic benefits and infra or supra-structure institutions. It was within this dire and turbid socio-political and economic realities that my maternal grand-parents, Welelay Ezgi’haria Gebru and Goitai Haleka Zeferetsion Gebretsadik tied the knot in an altar of God. In an age where offspring were believed to be taken care of by life itself and where the dictums of King David and Prophet Jeremiah (Ermias) were taken as articles of faith, the fertile womb brought into the world of Abe Gubegna five boys and a girl whose lives are to be imprinted with the then rising political turmoil and its consequences. In the mean time, if my memory serves me right, as Dr. Gelawdewos Araya put it in his debut book, Tigrai remained to be not only one of the poorest provinces in the world but the poorest province in the world. When my mother, the eldest of them all got engaged to my father in an early age, the rest of my uncles attended the scant school’s curriculum in Adwa to break the eerie darkness which hovered the clouds of the province which was to take a life time and a sacrifice of a generation to bear fruition. The army of idealists and visionaries whose call for a socio-political and economic change threatened the edifice of the Imperial State, found a receiving end in the agrarian, blue collar and white collar marginalized segments, to rise in unison in a bid to eject the nation from pervasive backwardness and elitism into a better nation where nations and nationalities live in an equal footing to aspire to their potentials. When the cause found its intellectual vigor and roots entrenched in intense nationalism in high schools and higher institutions in every corner of the nation, it was the young generation whose mandate as a vanguard transmuted the theoretical abstraction into a pragmatic rendition. And it was within this fervent and yet vibrant political reality that my uncle Zere’abruk came into the picture. My uncle, the tall and incredibly handsome, second from the youngest was born in the mid 50s in Adwa. In an early age, Zere’abruk exhibited an aura of logical stubbornness and a sense of defiance in a time of challenges and standing up for the weak and meek when the latter is in the mercy of bullies and conceited nobilities. His most indelible characteristic was perhaps, his rebellious spirit against authorities when the latter abuses its power for personal ends. My grand-mother, Welelay, would shrug it off with a reasonable caution when residents in the vicinities come to complain about her son’s stubbornness and disrespect to “authorities”. She would however, reprimand him to please the neighbors while she gives him a positive feed-back in a bid to make a man out of him. Later on, as the tragic realities of the province in particular and the nation’s in general unfolded, clandestine pamphlets and left-leaning books such as condensed versions of “Das Kapital”, “Communist Manifesto”, “Prison Note-Books”, “God and the State” and others frequented the household which turned it into a politically charged adobe. As the zeitgeist of the era became ripe and irresistible, my uncles joined the noble cause with others in droves where Dedebit became a Sierra Maestra of Tigrai. The spirit of rebelliousness which became a hall-mark of his life, Zere’abruk disappeared into the thin air without bidding farewell to my grand-mother who had just lost my grand-father to a natural cause. When she learned that her son had joined the T.P.L.F., she made several futile attempts and journeys to find him. The obsession later on took a life of its own coupled with the inability to see her sons and the long and bitter struggle against the regime. I vividly remember as she lived with us in the final years of her life, she sobbed and broke down to tears in the middle of the night. When we frantically approached her and asked her what happened, she said that she saw her son in her dreams and felt as if she was about to meet him in a middle of a road when she suddenly woke up from her sleep. Welelay, a woman of a strong personality who does not easily swayed with emotions, spent the rest of the night sobbing and drenched in tears. Unable to return into the age of innocence where she was born and raised in, and before she gets a glimpse of an image of her sons, she left us to a better world. As her eyes peered everyday into a deep distance as if she was about to meet her sons, Zera’abruk my dearest uncle as well, believing in the noble cause, fell in a fierce battle against the Dergue in Western Tigrai and laid to rest in un marked grave somewhere in the land. A land which was to find liberty, sense of economic prosperity and social equality in his blood. Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) in “Matrix” says to Neo (Keanu Reeves) as he lay dying beside a flat-liner E.C.G , “the Oracle told me that I would fall in love with a dead man”.
Paulos Yrgaw |
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