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[Awash]

Gennene Debebe Reincarnated in Keren

Awate Team 6 days agoNegarit 68

In the mid-seventies, a young boy attended a concert of a band assembled by General Werqu, the commander of the Ethiopian occupational army that spread from Karrora, to Umhager and Keren. The concert was held at Forto, where the young boy was jailed a few months earlier. Grudgingly returning to Forto as a spectator, he went through a tragi-comedic experience that is still vivid in his memory. Years later he wrote about it. Particularly, he remembered a certain low-rate singer named Gennene Debebe, who screamed a song of four, short, mediocre lines that he repeated for 20 minutes:

Kereneytu Ketema, Kereneytu Ketema
Belbie ‘mengaaaalehu endtegegni Girma.

The singer had launched his singing career a few months ago in Asmara where he spurted his genius lyrics:

Asmeraytu Ketema, Asmeraytu Ketema
Belbie ‘mengaaaalehu endtegegni Girma.  

Gennene toured many Eritrean cities screaming the same song except he changed the name of the town he was in.

Currently, an Ethiopian propaganda musical troupe is touring Eritrea and it held a concert in Keren, similar to the one Gennene Debebe held decades ago. Certainly a few youngsters have grudgingly attended the show. In the future, at least one of the young children will write about the tragi-comedic experience just like I did. Yes, my hometown watched a supremacist singer shamelessly calling them Ethiopians, in Keren, the cradle of the Eritrean struggle against Ethiopian occupation. Even Hamelmal Abate, the Ethiopian singer, like many propaganda singers, sang flatteringly describing the people of Keren, a town she arrived to only a few hours earlier! It was a typical flattery of an  azmari-bet where tipsy patrons could not tell if what they hear through the loudspeaker is the voice of a braying donkey or a humanoid. 

It seems the Ethiopian supremacists who can’t live without shedding blood for too long, are summoning the demons by endlessly provoking Eritreans, and they are blowing the whistle for the start of part two of the tragic past.  This time, the role of the collaborators and enablers of yesteryears is taken over by Isaias and his cohorts, while, Abiy Ahmed has assumed the role of the pompous Haile Selassie. The project manager is Radwan Hussein, Abiy’s ambassador, who was irritated by the Nov. 15, 2019 Gedab News that exposed the secret that he was not accredited more than a year after he arrived in Asmara. That concert is a revenge by Abiy and Redwan (and of course Isaias) because the news embarrassed them so much they wanted to prove to their patrons that their relationship is fine.

Here follows my story of “the young boy” who attended General Werqu’s concert decades ago, the precursor of the recent concert that I missed because I can’t visit Eritrea that has become a worse prison than the one I grew up in. It’s part of a chapter from my book “Of Kings and Bandits”.

http://awate.com/gennene-debebe-reincan ... UBk7AMFfW0