The Audacity of the Plot to Replace Geez Script with Latin

The Audacity of the Plot to Replace Geez Script with Latin

In a bar in Washington DC owned by an Eritrean exile, a group of aging bachelors from Eritrea were having one of the usual loud and interminable chats, sometime around the end of the 80s. The day was Timket holiday, celebrated together by the Tewahdo and the Catholic of the Geez Rite Christians from both Eritrea and Ethiopia, besides the others such as Easter and New Year.

The bar owner, a jovial person, was observant and was dressed for the occasion, not realizing that his act has aroused the anger of a former student militant in the corner, who lamented the shared holidays in both Ethiopia and Eritrea; he felt the age-old custom was weakening the nationalist aspiration, in other words, his badge of honor.  This anecdote evokes a parallel event in the social engineering project of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front.

A language conference to replace the Geez Script with a Latin script was convened in meda ostensibly for purpose of technological development, said Idris Aba Arre (place and date was not made available) in his seminal writing on the “Mother-tongue” policy under the regime in post-independence Eritrea.¹ However, according to him, the attempt was dropped because many of the participants were “bitter” about the idea, which implies the existence of a political space for dissenters within the EPLF organization.

To the contrary, the norm was absolute intolerance and repression, which did not even spare Idris Aba Arre himself, a former disabled tegadalay, from incarceration; with his whereabouts unknown to this very day. Was he accused of questioning the “Mother-tongue” policy, or for leaking of the plot to discard the Geez Script, or for both? Speculating about this is however irrelevant for it is not required to present victims with a charge before slamming people into jails in Eritrea since the ghedli days.

We should note the paradox, however. The fact that the secret spilled from a member of another confession in Eritrea, who felt aggrieved of the circumstances of the Arabic language he dearly cherished, tells a lot about the silence and collaboration of the Christian highlanders in the demise of their culture.

Sad as it is, the issue is nevertheless the audacity of the organization. A champion of the grievance that blamed Ethiopia for unilaterally abolishing the Federal arrangement to use Arabic and Tigrigna as official languages, and the alleged burning of books written in those scripts within autonomous Eritrea, was to conspire a couple of decades later to erase the script of Geez. Age-old cultures and customs are nothing to it, as long as the project serves its purpose of rabid nationalism. The act of separating the Eritrean Tewahdo Church from the Patriarchate of Ethiopia is an adequate proof. The irony in this is that the perpetrators were avowed communists a few years back.

Eritrean nationalists of the kebesa types want it both ways: they want their land to be recognized as the precursor to Axumite civilization, if it helps buttress the nation state, completely ignoring their past plot to drop the civilization based on pre-Geez or Geez script, which was the foundation of it. This nefarious act was not even attempted by either European missionaries or Italian colonial authorities in the past. In comparison, the praxis of the EPLF and the regime in its image has been nihilism, and an obsession with a clean slate. Hence, it may be time to replace the Tigrigna saying, "Ge" bel keytgage with "Ge" bel kitgage. All is not gloom and doom however.

Yegizaw Michael is a famous painter of my liking. In several of his works, random alphabets of the Geez are incorporated with other themes, which lends the artifacts weight and power. His brush strokes keep alive the pre-Geez scripts, and images of the stele of the Axum civilization for the willing warsay.

Post script: had the project to Latinize the Geez writing materialized, their famous trench line for many battles on the mountaintop at Af’abet known as ”Fidel Pe”(as in “T” in Geez) fro its shape would have been termed today “Alphabet T”. Although the project to replace Geez with a foreign script was aborted, the organization had never desisted from usurping Geez for its own purposes.²

References

[1] Awate Archives, Why Idris Aba Arre is Arrested, Awate Team, September 13, 2012.

[2] Lebona, Zekre; Eritrea: The Usurpation of the Christian Religious Power and Lexicon; Nov 17, 2012; Asmarino.com.

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