East Africa

Do you know what a ዳስ ጣል is? It is not a song. It is not a poem. It is a tearing of the soul made visible. It is what we do when a giant falls — when someone so immense, so irreplaceable, leaves this earth that the living cannot simply weep and move on. They must build a shelter. They must gather under it. They must sit in the dust, tear their clothes, and brief each other on the magnitude of the loss. Tedy Afro sang ዳስ ጣል for Ethiopia. He believed Ethiopia had died. But I am no longer sure I was ever married to that Ethiopia. The Ethiopia that Abiy Ahmed rules — the Ethiopia that bombed our hospitals, starved our children, appointed a puppet president named Tadesse Werede (breaded like bread by the genocidaire himself) — that Ethiopia is not my mother. My mother is Tigray. And Tigray, my brothers and sisters, is the giant that has fallen. So I raise this ዳስ ጣል for Tigray. Not because she is dead — no, never dead — but because she has been wounded so deeply that only a shelter of grief...

There is a Tigrayan proverb that says, “ኩሉ ንምርኣይ ምቅናይ” — being alive proves everything. But what does it prove when a man, entrusted with the fragile hope of a traumatized region, chooses not to stand upright but to be kneaded, flattened, and baked into the bread of his people’s butcher? What does it prove when the president of the Tigray Interim Administration, a man who should be the voice of the voiceless, becomes the echo of the genocidaire who starved his own citizens? *Abiy Ahmed breaded Tadesse Werede like bread.* The phrase is bitter, but it is exact. Like dough that has no will of its own, Tadesse was mixed, shaped, and left to rise in the oven of Abiy’s propaganda machine. And now, golden and hollow, he is presented to the world as a fresh loaf of “legitimacy” — while the real Tigray crumbles into dust. *Let us rewind the tape of shame.* Not long ago, the state-controlled television channels of Abiy Ahmed — those same big mouths that once denied the rape of mothers, the bombi...