Eritrean Literature - Renaissance

Renaissance

The incoming British administration had a much more enlightened attitude to its subjects than its predecessor. Edward Ullendorff has said that, "The 30 years from about 1942 until the early 1970s witness the greatest flowering of Tňa writing hitherto encountered". One of the driving forces behind this blossoming was the Eritrean Weekly News. Supported by the British authorities, this publication went through 520 issues over ten years from 1942, with a circulation of around 5000 copies. It was edited by Ato Waldeab Waldemariam, another employee of the Swedish mission in Asmara, and published a wide range of fiction and non-fiction as well as news stories. The paper was also associated with the Tigrinya Language Council, a body established in 1944 to promote a modernised, correct form of the Tigrinya language.

Despite this literary renaissance, no Tigrinya books were published until the late 1940s. This has been attributed to a lack of funds and publishing know-how among the Tigrinya intelligentsia, and to the continuing control by Italians of the country's few printing presses. The breakthrough came in 1949, when Yacob Ghebreyesus published Legends, Stories and Proverbs of the Ancestors. Ghebreyesus was a Catholic priest and teacher, and published his collection of a hundred stories, 3300 proverbs, and various poems in order to provide reading material for his pupils.

The first Tigrinya language novel appeared in 1949-50, although it was originally written in 1927. A Story of a Conscript, by Ghebreyesus Hailu, tells the story in 61 pages of a group of Eritreans forced to fight for the Italians in Libya. The hero returns to his village after many travails, only to find that his mother has died in his absence. He composes a melkes poem mourning her death and condemning the rule of the Italians. Another novel, Dawn of Freedom, published by Teklai Zeweldi in 1954, has a similar theme, telling the story of several generations of one family opposed to Italian rule. It is written on a more sophisticated technical level than Hailu's work, often interweaving multiple narrative strands in a single chapter. A third work published around this time, Resurrection and Victory by Zegga-Iyesus Iyasu, is an "unambiguously moralistic and religiously didactic" allegory. Over the next 20 years, many further volumes appeared in the already-established traditions of didactic fictions, novels, anthologies and translations.