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  • A Life of SolidarityAn Interview with Kifle Selassie Beseat
  • Dagmawi Woubshet (bio) and Kifle Selassie Beseat

This interview was conducted on July 30, 2014, in Paris, France. It was edited by Dr. Ayele Bekere and lidj Getatchew Tesfaye on September 13, 2015, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

WOUBSHET:

Gashe Kifle, let me begin by conveying to you my sheer joy, my sheer pleasure, how much of a rare privilege it is for me to sit with you and have this dialogue. So thank you for extending me this honor and the privilege of your company.

BESEAT:

It is a mutually shared feeling and I really mean it in depths. Despite the difference of age between you and me, the fact that you are speaking to me, as you started by saying according to our tradition, Gashe Kifle, “my elder brother Kifle,” and indeed you are my brother. Sharing the little I know with a brother like you is, for me, a privilege also.

WOUBSHET:

Thank you. You were born in 1941, and have lived an enviable life. You are truly a renaissance man, and I hope readers will be able to gather that by the end of this interview. Let’s begin there, 1941: Give me a sense of the circumstances of your birth and your early childhood.

BESEAT:

Well, I grew up in a family where sharing was something of a daily life. Sharing the little we had with people serving in our house, for example. I remember when I was four years old a boy called Tesfaye was working in my family. His mother was preparing injera and wot, and he would also herd sheep and lambs in a land close to ours. This was in Addis. We were the same age, we shared the same bid, and whatever I had I had to share it with him. And I remember our childhood expressions of play and poetry, when I would ask him este melaseh (እስኪ ምላስህ) [let me see your tongue] He would draw out and show me his tongue, and say ebab yelaseh (እባብ ይላስህ) [let a snake lick you].Or, he would say to me este mengagah (እስኪ መንጋጋህ) [let me see your gums]. I knew this was a trick so I would refuse, but sometimes I’d forget and show him, and he would say esat yangagah (እሳት ያንጋጋህ) [let the fire burn you]. It’s small things like that, the sharing of these kind of jokes that were as important as sharing bread. We were sharing the same kind of food and the same patterns of life. Also, this is the same time that I started attending school. We began to study under a tree instructed by a priest hired to teach us Amharic. The insistence of my family, especially my father, was before we could know any foreign languages we had to know Amharic. In my case I was pushed to know even more because I didn’t attend a boarding school, like my only sister, and lived with my family. That is how at ten I knew [End Page 55] practically the basics of mathematics, all in Amharic. Also at ten I was lucky enough to attend what we call yeferenj temari bet [a Western school]. It was a French Lycée. I didn’t know the European alphabet, so I had to start from scratch. Luckily enough in Addis Ababa there were two libraries, Saba and Gianopoulos libraries, where the latest books that were appearing in France were accessible in Ethiopia. And at a very reasonable price that any middle class Ethiopian could afford to buy for his kids. This is how I came to understand what was going on in the imagination of the rest of the world by reading books. I liked French literature, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and so on, but not only French literature also Dostoyevsky. I don’t know why but I was very attracted to Russian literature. And not only Dostoyevsky, but also Tolstoy and of course Pushkin. And not only the Orthodox Christian side of that civilization. In the Slavs like we Africans there is a tendency that is excessive in giving and excessive, now and then, in taking.

WOUBSHET:

Indeed.

BESEAT:

This...

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