Menghistu Lemma's poem “Basha Ashebir in America” vividly recounts the experience of Basha Ashebir, an Ethiopian diplomat who was thrown out of a whites-only restaurants in Washington DC, in the early 1950s. After a verbal confrontation with the restaurant manager, Basha Ashebir had to resort to using his stick, to no avail. Seeing how Basha was perplexed by the ordeal, it was an African American who explained to him why the manager refused to serve him and eventually kicked him out: becuase of his skin color.
Learning from each other is not new for African Americans and Ethiopians. As far back as the 18th century, Ethiopians and African Americans have worked together. To move away from the segregated setting of the Church, they established the Abyssinian Baptist Church, which became the first African American Baptist congregation in New York and the fourth in the nation. Similarly, in 1930s Harlem, African Americans rallied around Dr. Malaku Bayen, Ethiopia’s envoy to the Black World, to help him put an end to Fascist Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia throught the Ethiopian World Federation.
Furthermore, thanks to great civil and human rights advocates such as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and countless generations of conscious individuals who fought discrimination, African immigrants are able to take advantage of political and economic refuge in the United States. Nowadays, not only can Ethiopians eat at any restaurant, they are also the proud owners of African restaurants all over the United States.
Ethiopian artists and scholars in the Diaspora also drew their inspiration from the African American experience. Haile Gerima, who lives and works a pan-African life, learned from decades of personal encounters with African American issues and personalities. Haile, who teaches film at Howard University, has in his film Sankofa, taken us on the harrowing journey African Americans took through the middle passage and struggling through the arduous life of an African slave in an American plantation. Throught the movie Sankofa, we are re-born anew by the rediscovery, grounded in the present but connected to the past and to the spirits of our ancestors.
Skunder, which we will publish his history on this blog soon, also studied and often discussed the African American experience as it related to Africa. He voraciously consumed and learned from all African American creative productions. Through studying Black music from childhood, he incorporated what he learned from Jazz and Blues to his art. Hearing Ornette Coleman and Miles Davies create their own unique and revolutionary improvisational Jazz, Skunder similarly revolutionize African traditional art.
Continuing to work together improves the likelihood that our children will have role models, philosophers, historians, architects, scientists, artists and freedom fighters, that look like them. Then, we can start to utilize our bestowed gifts and by doing so, give back to the Black culture that nurtures us.
In this spirit, Ephraim Isaac, one of the first Africans to obtain a PhD at Harvard, and establish the African American department there, stresses the importance of mobilizing the Greater African Diaspora to celebrate the upcoming Ethiopian Millennium. The Ethiopian Calendar, which turns 2000 in less than one year, is one aspect of the rich Black heritage that goes back to the birth of humankind.
What better way to thank Dr. King and countless others for their brave vision, than to celebrate this Black Millennium and to fulfill the dreams of visionaries who had used Ethiopia as a rallying call for freedom, justice and peace. For it is one of the things that can continue to shape our shared experience, and most importantly, works to unite us.
In the words of Menghistu Lemma, the Black Diaspora should focus on what unites us: understanding that we are one people with different names.
The Amharic Version of the poem, coming soon.
