Meron Hadero, author of “The Street Sweep”, is the 2021 AKO Caine Prize for African Writing winner, Goretti Kyomuhendo, the Chair of the AKO Caine Prize Judging Panel announced on Monday July 26.
During the virtual announcement, Kyomuhendo said, “The genius of this story lies in Hadero’s ability to turn the lens on the clichéd, the NGO story in Africa to ‘do good and do it well.’” She further added that “What stood out for the judges was the story’s subtle, but powerful ending, and how everything comes brilliantly together in a clever twist.”
Hadero, whose short story “The Street Sweep” was shortlisted among four others, becomes the first Ethiopian to win the highly coveted and equally competitive literary prize for African writers. However, this is not her first time to be on the competition, as her short story, “The Wall,” was shortlisted in 2019.
“The Street Sweep” features a young optimistic man, Getu, his mother and an American expatriate, Jeff Johnson. Getu is hopeful that Jeff Johnson will consider their friendship and change his ragged life into great fortunes. However, Getu’s mother is cynical and sceptical at the same time, as she looks at Jeff and the NGOs in their locality as nothing less of scams.
Hadero explores the interracial dynamics in a postcolonial nation-state of Ethiopia. She presents the non-existent relationship between the Ethiopians and the Euro-American workers in Ethiopia, offering us a peek into the classicism that is widespread in such a society.
Fearlessly, Hadero criticises the irony of the policy framework that exists to serve the capitalistic interests of the western countries while degrading the existence of her people. She also looks at the extent to which white saviourism has corrupted the hopes of Africans to regain their dignified position in their own countries. In a nutshell, Hadero’s story is one of every postcolonial African nation.
Other shortlisted writers were Uganda’s Doreen Baingana with the short story “Lucky,” Rwandan-born Namibian Remy Ngamije with the short story “The Giver of Nicknames,” Kenyan Troy Onyango with the short story “This Little Light of Mine,” and Ugandan-Canadian Iryn Tushabe with her short story “The Separation.”
Ethiopian Meron Hadero sweeps the board at the Caine Prize
Art from the Horn of Africa Makes Exciting Debut in Sweden
An intergenerational group exhibition, From Modern to Contemporary: Artists from the Horn of Africa and Diaspora (10 June–17 August 2021) at the independent art space CFHILL in Stockholm marks the first Scandinavian showcase of artists from this region.
This collaboration with London and Addis Ababa-based Addis Fine Art continues CFHILL’s commitment to offering an exhibition platform to international curators, artists, and galleries. Works by 19 artists including sculpture, painting, textiles, video, and photography are shown in five main galleries across two floors, highlighting important artists of Ethiopian, Eritrean, and Sudanese descent spanning the modern era to the present. Among them are two modern masters, and the first graduates of the Allé School of Fine Arts and Design at Addis Ababa University, the oldest art school in East Africa: Lulseged Retta and Tadesse Mesfin, who is also a long-time Allé educator.
Founded by the artist Alle Felege Selam, the Allé School of Fine Arts and Design was the first art school in Ethiopia, and for over six decades has produced an impressive cohort, including seminal text-based painter Wosene Worke Kosrof, Elizabeth Habte Wold, and educator Bekele Mekonnen.
Works by Retta and Mesfin are included in the first of four sections that organise the show chronologically and thematically: ‘The Modernists’, which looks at the first graduates of the Allé School of Fine Arts and Design in the 1970s.
Retta’s figurative acrylic on canvas painting Setate (2010) shows two women cooking in rich saturated hews; and Mesfin’s Pillars of Life: Patience II (2020) is a striking portrait of Ethiopian women in the marketplace part of an ongoing series celebrating women working as small-holder vendors in Ethiopian cities.
Works by Retta and Mesfin are included in the first of four sections that organise the show chronologically and thematically: ‘The Modernists’, which looks at the first graduates of the Allé School of Fine Arts and Design in the 1970s.
Retta’s figurative acrylic on canvas painting Setate (2010) shows two women cooking in rich saturated hews; and Mesfin’s Pillars of Life: Patience II (2020) is a striking portrait of Ethiopian women in the marketplace part of an ongoing series celebrating women working as small-holder vendors in Ethiopian cities.
‘The Diaspora’ brings together second-generation immigrants living in Europe and the U.S.A., including Tariku Shiferaw, Helina Metaferia, and Atong Atem, all in their twenties, who reflect on the hybridity of diasporic lives. Atem’s afrofuturist photographs created in the past year, such as Eva in Green and Ruth with Veil (both 2020), comment on an identity politics rooted between tradition and contemporaneity.
Similarly, Metaferia’s fantastic headshot collages Headdress XX and XIX (both 2021) celebrate the overlooked histories of BIPOC women’s labour within activism, and the generational impact of civil rights eras of the past on today’s social justice movements. Archival imagery, including Black Panther newspapers and civil rights era photographs, are amalgamated into crowns of adornment upon portraits she has photographed of women who are involved in contemporary liberation movements.
In one of the ground-floor galleries, Ethiopian-American artist Tsedaye Makonnen’s totemic, pillar-like light emitting sculpture Senait & Nahom, The Peacemaker & The Comforter I (2019) is in conversation with the artist’s Astral Sea IV (2019), a deep blue cape adorned with hundreds of laser-cut mirror pieces drawing from Ethiopian Coptic cross motifs.
The cloak is activated when worn by Tsedaye in her performance art, which is a total body of work that explores the transhistorical forced migrations of Black people globally. The cape faces Tariku Shiferaw’s Sky Walker (Miguel) (2021), a densely layered painting of thick, differently coloured bars against a sky-blue ground.
In the final thematic section ‘Emerging Artists’, a new guard of exciting female artists living in the continent and as part of the diaspora range from Selome Muleta’s figurative explorations of femininity and intimacy; Tizta Berhanu’s abstract renderings of emotive gestures; and Yasmeen Abdullah’s humanistic depictions influenced by the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish.
A standout presentation is the grouping of works by Adiskidan Ambaye, Daniela Yohannes, Atong Atem, and Selome Muleta, which creates a compelling space of intimacy, with representations eliciting imaginations of the future.
Muleta’s photographic acrylic and oil pastel portrait Tsédal XXI (2021) is drawn from the artist’s series that depicts women in her life posing inside fictive interiors; while Yohannes’ Ontological Terror (2021) meditates on alternative and mythological Black realities through the vision of a nude, light blue female figure in flight, surrounded by blue flames against a deep blue, dreamlike landscape.
Ambaye, the only other sculptor on view alongside Makonnen, is a welcome inclusion with contorted wooden sculptures created from gestural drawings. Liberty (2019) and Queen of Sheba (2020) appear as if they were moulded from a single block but are composed of handcrafted smaller slices of plywood fused to form the whole, the surface carefully sanded and smoothed by the artist. Ambaye likens this process to the way an eraser rids drawings of errors while sketching.
The curatorial thesis adopted by the exhibition’s organisers, Addis Fine Art’s co-founders, Rakeb Sile and Mesai Haileleul, situates the nuances, interconnectedness, and cultural specificities pertinent to artists from this part of the continent. ‘Africa is a complex and diverse continent’, they note. ‘The term “African art” is often used as a shorthand for art produced in certain regions of a continent of over a billion people.’
They add: ‘Regional specificity matters, hence why we decided to group the Horn of Africa for this exhibition as each country that makes up this part of the continent shares certain ethnic, religious, and cultural similarities.’
Ethiopia presents a compelling case in exploring nuances of the region due to its unique history as a country that was never colonised but was occupied by Italy for approximately five years, developing a counternarrative to the singular view of modernism coming to the continent through colonial contact.
East Africans in particular Somalis and Eritreans are among Sweden’s largest immigrant communities. From Modern to Contemporary does not stake a claim as the definitive overview of artists working in this region or its diaspora; rather, it offers long-overdue insight on key developments in the region and across its diaspora over 50 years.
Organisers hope the show will resonate with the sizable East African population in Stockholm to see themselves, their culture, and their beliefs represented. ‘We are excited to hear feedback from members of this community on the exhibition,’ say Sile and Haileleul.
Co-organiser and CFHILL’s co-founder Michael Elmenbeck adds: ‘Eritreans are one of the largest diaspora groups of Africa descendant in Sweden, and if we can showcase cultural objects that so many are able to connect to in different ways, the exhibition has fulfilled its purpose.’
The result is a cross-temporal presentation that eschews definitive conclusions in order to open up starting points for further research, critical reflections, and interest in art from the Horn of Africa. It is an exciting proposition that one hopes will contribute not only to developing communities, but to the developing histories of East African art, opening up a deserved critical perspective on the region.
(OCULA)
Think, organize & transform
In a world dominated by adroit selfishness and deft manipulations of relations, social or otherwise, gullibility can be fatal. Unfortunately, we Africans don’t seem to grasp the imposed cruel reality that continues to play havoc in our collective lives. Flag independence didn’t bring much, as a more nuanced scheme that goes by the name neocolonialism, soon usurped collective thoughts and actions. Thanks to the numbing educational systems adopted in the early days of our independence (by our gullible leadership), our innate criticality was made to systemically vanish from serious discourse, giving way to the highly celebrated zombification of learned idiocy. All in all, our increasingly valueless societies have become clueless about all and sundry. Herein lies the grave danger to our very survival!
THINK. Critical thinking is one of the essentials of life. To be without it, particularly in the complex societies of out time, is to beg for chaos and destruction. Undermining this important facet of life (by almost all African countries) has allowed useless/unsustainable schemes to take over our existence, collective or otherwise. To be able to deconstruct the modern world system that is built on our continual impoverishment and chaos requires high caliber efforts. Internalizing the principles of the prevailing world order without being able to analyze its consequences will not take us far. To start with, the reigning global system is based on the irrational and brutal domination of both man and nature! The results of callous exploitation of life and life support systems are now clearly upon us and collective humanity is becoming acutely aware of this destruction. Hence, blindly following the dominant system is a non-starter. Not surprisingly, our learned zombies, or what we affectionately call our ‘Ivy Idiots’ and our ‘belly thinkers’ do not have what it takes to bring about transformative changes to our miserable situation. Neocolonial modernity, be it of the neoliberalism type or otherwise, is a dead end. Flogging a dead horse only results in the unsightly broadcasting of carcass and nothing more, so to speak. Africa must resort to its organic intellectuals, supported by its impoverished sheeple (human mass) to bring about genuine emancipation, per force! Here we are talking about an overall emancipation. An emancipation that is in a symbiotic relationship with nature, hence, necessarily spiritual!
ORGANIZE. People oriented organizations must be the new agents of societal transformations. Oligarchs worshipping at the pillar of accumulation cannot and will not bring fundamental changes, however much our compromised states preach about the ‘superhuman virtues’ these vultures. There is a whole lot to be learned from the experience of late & early 21th century ‘Oligarch Russia’. Organizations to transform society from what it is to what it ought to be must rely, first and foremost, on the emancipated sheeple and not on inhuman capital. The working stiff, not only traditional labor, but also the enlightened component of the massive peasantry, entrepreneurs (social, etc.), activist intellectuals and the likes should play leading roles. Africa’s once leading parties/entities that were vanguards of the liberation struggle are going the way of the Dodo, literally speaking! From ANC to EPRDF, from MPLA to ZANU/ZAPU, etc. these once progressive entities have failed to understand and cope with the aspiration of their sheeple, within the dynamically changing world. Their obsession to deeply get incorporated in the prevailing polarizing globalization has resulted in alienating their human base. These rudderless parties of old, with increasingly phony pretensions, have become only subservient to the global parasitic system and its criminally inclined oligarchs. It is time for change in the way the African people are organized!
Africans need to set up genuine movements that are aware of Africa’s predicaments in the existing world system. The ‘make believe’ world of our learned idiots is passé. Blindly following the prescriptions of global dominant interests will only lead, at best, to impotency. After all, why should the African natives remain completely subjected to the whims of monopoly capital and its stealing oligarchs in cahoots with degenerate politicos at the service of polarizing globalization? We encourage the committed and kosher old guards, if they still have some energy left in them, to split from the visibly degenerated polity of their institutions and join the putative insurrections that are now in the offing. The youth must start its own independent analysis of what is brewing, with a view to channel its energy to the urgently needed transformation!
TRANSFORM. Transformation, continental or otherwise, needs the above two as preconditions, i.e., thinking and organizing. Without having these two prerequisites in place, Africa will only move from one blind alley to another. Economic depravation cannot be mitigated by mere obedience to the reigning diktat, reinforced by current neoliberalism. Capital investment, promoted by state-led principals of emerging states or by corporate-owned states of the old core countries, will not be sustainable if devoid of equity and empowerment! Moreover, climate change and other natural pestilences (to say nothing about man-made ones to come) that will be more pronounced in the years to come, promising a journey of misery and unmitigated poverty, require new paradigms of societal arrangements. The coming African liberation will require a determined approach that has yet to come to the fore, even in countries like Ethiopia, where the tradition of fighting injustice was once an honorable undertaking!
Safety of IDPs
Trish Okenge is the Country Director of Ethiopia at Food for the Hungry (FH) and serves out of FH’s office in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Trish joined FH as a Project Administrator in Rwanda in 1996. She was promoted to various roles, such as Program Coordinator, until 1999. She returned to FH as the Program Director in Rwanda in 2012, then moved to Uganda to serve as a Country Director in 2014. Trish began her current role as Country Director in Ethiopia in January 2019. In this role, Trish is responsible for programmatic leadership and strategy, including donor relations, networking and relationship management among partners and other NGOs, ensuring Ethiopia’s program strategy is in alignment with FH’s organization strategy, and reaching desired program goals. Additionally, she oversees program and operations aspects of the country office, including human resources, finance, logistics, security, IT, resource development, and humanitarian and development programs.
Trish is passionate about leadership development, organizational health, developing thriving staff members, and church empowerment within FH communities. She says, “FH affords me the opportunity to live out my faith in concrete action, living out my calling.” She talked to Capital about how FH is assisting the needy. Excerpts;
Capital: When did FH get involved with the building of Sebacare 4?
Trish Okenge: FH became involved during Sebacare 4 site selection and detailed implementation planning stage together with IOM, UNICEF and Samaritans Purse in mid-March, 2021. Following a successful WASH facilities design consultation with the WASH cluster which is coordinated by UNICEF, FH started the construction of WASH facilities (latrines, showers and water systems) in April, 2021 and completed it in June, 2021.
Capital: Do you have an estimate on when the camp will be ready to start housing displaced peoples?
Trish Okenge: It was originally planned to relocate IDPs to the camp at the end of May, 2021. However, most of the shelter and WASH facilities were not ready by then and the regional emergency response coordination authorities decided to move IDPs in to the camp on 15th of June, 2021 anticipating that the facilities would be ready by then. Finally, WASH facilities and the shelters were ready by the anticipated timeline but IDPs haven’t been relocated to the camp yet.
Capital: What does the process of housing people look like?
Trish Okenge: UNHCR, IOM and Samaritans Purse are actively engaged on shelter construction at the Sebacare camp site. UNHCR and IOM have been building communal shelter blocks with HouseHold (HH) partitions inside of it whereas, Samaritans Purse has built HH blocks. Sebacare 4 is the only camp in Mekelle currently and covering a portion of the IDPs shelter needs. When the committee thinks about housing people, everything needs to be considered like shelter, water and hygiene, protection, infrastructures that the IDPs will need like access to markets, places of worship, safe places for children, education, and health services as a start.
Capital: Has FH taken on initiatives like this in the past? If so, where and when?
Trish Okenge: In camp settings, FH had had interventions to support Eritrean refugees at Shimelba camp before the Tigray region conflict. More recently, FH has been involved supporting Eritrean refugees at Adi-Harush camp. Specific to constructing WASH infrastructure for IDP’s, FH constructed latrines, showers, and water systems in Mozambique recently.
Capital: Tell me about the gender-specific sanitation being built in Sebacare 4. Why is this needed and how was it lacking in other IDP camps?
Trish Okenge: FH implemented sex-segregated WASH (latrine and shower) for women/girls in order to shelter them from potential abuse. FH believes that women and girls should equally use the facilities without fear or shame. Culturally, women won’t use latrines being used by men, therefore to ensure equal service for men and women, WASH facilities should be gender-specific and located at a near proximity to women’s place as much as possible to avoid the potential danger of long walking distance in-between their place and the sanitation facility. All of the sanitation facilities built by FH at Sebacare 4 are lockable from the inside. At some other camps we learned that even though the sanitation facilities are sex-segregated they may lack light and are located at a considerable distance away from where women and girls live. As a result, such sanitation facilities won’t be accessible for women and girls at night.
Capital: In areas in which there was no gender-specific sanitation, what were the consequences?
Trish Okenge: Women/ girls usually won’t be willing to use the sanitation facility in that case. It may result in environmental pollution due to open defecation and it encourages the use of flying toilets. Moreover, the lack of gender-specific facilities for women and girls in the camp setting is psychologically damaging. It is possible that these women and girls were exposed to some form of abuse during the conflict and if favorable conditions are not in place for them, they may end-up in a more traumatic condition due to day to day fear and shame of using no gender –specific sanitation facilities.
Capital: How will FH and those working on Sebacare ensure the safety of all IDPS housed in the camp?
Trish Okenge: Sebacare 4 camp has to be well protected for the safety of the IDPs and all of the facilities in the camp.
There should be a responsible authority to administer the camp to ensure the general safety of the IDPs
Once the IDPs move, FH has a plan to train IDPs representatives (women and men) from each shelter cubicle on how to protect IDPs’ safety and encourage them to report incidences to the responsible body. Beneficiary protection mechanisms will be put in place where reporting options are explained.
FH will liaise with camp administration & authorities responsible for protection and security; with regard to crime, abuse and exploitation, ensuring that monitoring, reporting and response mechanisms are established and known to all of the camp community in order to facilitate access to justice;
FH implements its own internal beneficiary safeguarding policy to ensure no harm to IDPs while staff are operating the aid service for the needy community members.
Capital: In your view, what does a safe IDP camp look like? What are the requirements to make a camp safe?
Trish Okenge: The camp should be free from any form of violence such as Sexual violence Rape, assault, molestation, inappropriate touching. Psychosocial violence Harassment, bullying, or causing fear, stress or shame. Physical violence Beating or fighting leading to injury or death. Socio-cultural violence Social ostracism, political marginalization, social norms with negative impacts
The camp should be free from injuries related to facilities inadequate design or unsafe construction, such as through sharp edges, slippery floors, collapsing pit latrines, or contact with hazardous wastes.
Well protected (fenced) and controlled access from the main road
It should be away from the conflict area and flood zones
Facilities in the camp should be accessible for all age groups and inclusive
It should be well lit: at minimum, sanitation facilities should be located at near proximity for night time access specially for women and girls.
The camp needs an active camp administration and functioning incidents reporting and feedback mechanisms
The camp needs well-established environmental health management and needs to be equipped with facilities to ensure a safe environment.
The camp should have a women’s and girls’ safe space for counseling, referrals and guidance
The IDPs camp should be organized enough to limit the entry of external perpetrators.
All the facilities supporting the life of the IDPs in the camp should meet minimum SPHERE standards.
The aid workers working in the camp need to know and practice Code of Conduct and implement Do No-Harm principles
Capital: How is FH working to meet those requirements in Sebacare 4?
Trish Okenge: FH strives to maintain a safe camp for IDPs within the scope of the interventions we do. Also, FH deliberately implements beneficiary safeguarding policy to ensure IDPs safety. The WASH facilities that we constructed are carefully aligned to SPHERE standards and the design has been agreed upon through consultation of a wide number of stakeholders.
Capital: Why did FH choose to focus its work on the women and girls affected by the crisis?
Trish Okenge: People with a range of special needs are groups FH prioritizes in all of its interventions. Women and girls are the most vulnerable segment of the IDP population. Working in view of addressing their vulnerability, to ensure their safety and security among the IDPs, is our priority. Also, people with range of special needs are groups FH gives priority with all its interventions.
Capital: How is FH working to prioritize the women and girls who will be housed in Sebacare 4?
Trish Okenge: FH considers women and girls’ vulnerability in the planning, design and implementation of emergency response project. In view of that FH strives to maintain women and girls’ safety and security factors within the WASH intervention of the Sebacare 4 camp. Also, FH has plans to promote behavioral change on protection perspectives such as any type of Gender-based violence that can be expected to happen in the camp setting from time to time.
Capital: What are FH’s other projects in the Tigray region?
Trish Okenge: WFP project (general food distribution- Tselemti, Mai Tsebri, Dimma)
DRA WASH project (WASH NFI’s, food, and cash distribution – Alamata, Shire)
JEOP project (Food distribution- Naeder, Adet, Tahtay Maychew, Abergelie Yechilla, Tanqua Milash)
KOICA Eritrean Refugees’ Support project (Adi Harush camp)
OCHA agricultural support project (seeds and fertilizer- Naeder, Tahtay Maychew)
IOM RRF Shelter NFI project (Axum)
UNFPA Women and Gils Friendly Spaces (GBV response and prevention- Mekelle, Shire, Humera)
Capital: What is FH’s overarching goal for its work in Tigray? In other words, what would you like to accomplish beyond the specific initiatives?
Trish Okenge: FH aims to see the end of human suffering in Tigray Region
Capital: Have you or do you have plans to expand these projects beyond Tigray and into other regions of Ethiopia that are in need?
Trish Okenge: Yes, based on funds availability, we strive to work and grow to our vision (to see human suffering ended worldwide)
Capital: What impact would you like FH to have on the people housed in this camp and those benefiting from your aid projects?
Trish Okenge: FH wants to see IDPs benefiting from our interventions and their life conditions improved and comforted.
