Fikru Gebrekidan Associate Professor Department of History St.

Thomas University Fredericton, Canada From Orality to Literacy: A Cursory Glimpse into the History of Blind Education in Ethiopia Paper submitted to: The History of the Blind and Blindness Representations, Institutions, Archives: An International Perspective International Colloquium (Paris: June 26-30). In the 1520s Francisco Alvarez recorded his utter shock in seeing the disabled, including the blind, in the ranks of the Ethiopian priesthood. A century later, another Portuguese traveler wrote of the theological debate he had with a well-learned Ethiopian blind monk. Early in the twentieth century Memhir Gelanesh Haddis, also blind, became the first female pioneer in the teaching of qine, one of the four branches of learning in Ethiopian traditional church education. More recently, in August 2007, Ethiopian websites and private newspapers mourned the passing of Aleqa Ayalew Tamru, a leading blind cleric and author of several theological books. In a country better known for underdevelopment and poverty, how does one explain such unusual achievements among the disabled?1 Church education has a long history in Ethiopia. Thanks to the spoken word as the ideal medium of religious instruction, gifted blind boys often enrolled in church schools along with their sighted peers. As adults, many led a relatively well-integrated life, supporting themselves as teachers, theologians, and church elders, and a few even became legends in their own rights. This paper thus argues that Ethiopian church schools demonstrated a high level of tolerance and accommodation of the blind. By contrast, since its introduction in Ethiopia in the late nineteenth century, Western-style education has thrived on an elitist worldview in which the interests of the disabled have

mattered little. Because of this, the history of church education and the place of the blind in it should be studied further, all the more so because of its relevant lessons to the ongoing national conversation on mainstreaming and integration. As a poor country Ethiopia has a large number of blind people, perhaps in the hundreds of thousands. Because of the social ills of urbanization and rural overcrowding, beggary has sharply escalated in recent centuries and blind beggars now have a conspicuous presence in public places such as markets and houses of worship. Historically, the blind eked out a living in manners not much different from the peasantry. If they owned land, they could lease out plots of it under share-cropping arrangements. Many specialized in handcrafts such as spinning, weaving, basket-making, wicker-caning, and pottery. Others mastered a musical instrument and sang for living, while still others practiced traditional medicine.2 What renders the Ethiopian experience rather unusual is the extent to which the blind were inclined to spiritual and intellectual pursuits. Blind children often excelled in traditional church education, through which they grew into respectable members of the community. In the twentieth century, as the Haile Selassie government tried to modernize the educational sector, this positive precedent would inspire the establishment of the first schools for the blind. Ethiopian colleges have since graduated hundreds of blind students, who live and work like any average citizen of a developing country. About a dozen of them hold doctoral degrees from European and North American universities where they teach and research, and a few are national icons as artists and disability rights activists. Relative openness to blind education went hand-in-hand with a distinct national history. Unlike in the rest of Africa where Christianity was introduced in the nineteenth century through European missionaries, Ethiopia adopted Christianity as the state religion as early as the fourth century. To this was added the indigenous literary tradition, the Geez script, which has been in use in the country for over two millennia. Both Christianity and the literary tradition profoundly influenced social and political institutions, not least the central role played by the Orthodox church in spiritual and intellectual life. However, the Ethiopian past also manifested characteristics

shared by many African societies. Despite the advent of a writing system, sometimes known as Ethiopic, the society remained primarily oral. And because of the emphasis on orality, the blind were easily integrated in the intellectual life of the church with titles and remunerations.3 Although the name Ethiopia appears several dozen times in the Old Testament, it is only in the last six hundred years that the old world came to know the whereabouts of Ethiopia. In medieval Europe rumors of Ethiopian Christianity had given rise to the legend of Prester John, a Christian king who supposedly reigned across a vast and powerful empire. In the fifteenth century European explorers coupled their search for a sea passage to India with the search for the said kingdom. Finally, in 1521, three Portuguese travelers reached the highland African nation, which they continued to refer to as the land of Prester John. They sojourned in the country for six years, the astute Fr. Francisco Alvarez chronicling the details of their movements and encounters.4 In his firsthand accounts, Alvarez made a few direct references to disability in Ethiopia. From the district of Barnegais (present-day Eritrea) came the largest number of the disabled in the country.5 In the monastery of Aba Gerimma alone, famed for its works of miracle, Alvarez reported of the congregation of more than three thousand cripples, blind men and lepers.6 What Alvarez found most shocking was, however, the inclusion of the disabled in the ranks of the Ethiopian clergy. In one of the churches he visited, he saw several priests with paralyzed limbs, as well as a friar who had come entirely blind. Alvarezs main curiosity rested on the latter, perhaps because the blind were the most marginalized in his European homeland. How was he, who never had eyes, to be made a priest for the mass? , How could he know learning, or administer the sacrament? he wondered.7 Alvarez then explained to his Ethiopian host, Emperor Dawit I, how such individuals fared in his country, Portugal. I answered that in our country such as the blind would be organ blowers and bell ringers, and do other things which there are there, and which there are not in this country. And if they did not serve in monasteries or churches, that the Kings of the country had in their cities and towns

large hospitals, with much revenue, for the blind and cripples, and sick and poor.8 In the history of Christendom, the exclusion of the disabled from clerical appointments was a time-honored tradition. The famous verses in Leviticus, 21:17-23, specify several disabilities or blemishes, including blindness, that prevent one from being ordained as priest. In fact, records indicate that the Ethiopian church also subscribed to the Mosaic requirements, which raises the possibility that what Alvarez witnessed was a rare exception. As far as one can tell from the kings matterof-fact reaction to Alvarezs concerns, however, it was clear what the latter saw was indeed a common practice, which means the discriminatory verses were honored more in their breeches than in their observance. Only in subsequent centuries, perhaps as a result of repeated criticisms by the foreign observers, would the Ethiopian church reinforce strictly the ordination of its priesthood in accordance with Scriptural precedents. Alvarez and his colleagues paved the way for the arrival of Catholicism in Ethiopia through Jesuit missionaries. Not surprisingly, seventeenth-century Ethiopian church history was dogged by a continuous Christological dispute. It pitted the Portuguese and their converts on the one hand and the Ethiopian Orthodox Monophysites on the other, a division that would grow increasingly more complex and dangerously volatile. In the 1620s Jeronimo Lobo engaged in a doctrinal debate with a blind monk, whom he described as conversant and knowledgeable in the Scriptures.9 A century later, an unnamed European missionary also faced off with Arat Ayna Esdros, the famous blind theologian.10 According to an Ethiopian tradition, the foreigner demanded to know in which direction lay the gaze of the Trinity. Esdros had a torch lit and asked if the light faced in any particular direction. When his opponent admitted that the torch gave light in all directions, Esdros claimed that God too was omnipresent and could not be anthropomorphized.11 How is one to explain the reference to such prominent blind men in the historical records? While in theory Ethiopian civilization possessed a millennia-old literary culture based on an indigenous writing system, the importance of literacy never penetrated into the everyday life. Parchments were expensive to produce and paper was not locally manufactured, which meant only a few had access to

the written word. To make up for the dearth of written materials, ecclesiastical education emphasized memorization and recitation, both of which well suited the blind. One can also cite a secondary reason why the church attracted a large number of the physically disabled and not just the visually impaired. In a society where the farmer was the backbone of the economy, and the soldier the romanticized idol, church education provided a platform to those who fitted neither class. The four stages of study in their rough Western equivalents comprised nibab bet (elementary school), zema bet (high school), qine bet (college), and metshaf bet or tirguame (graduate school). Nibab (reading) combined the mastering of the Geez script with a series of routine prayers memorized by heart. Zema focused on the techniques required for the various types of church service or liturgy: the appropriate hymns and chants, the playing of the cestrum and the drum, and the corresponding steps and body movements. Qine, where the blind had the least disadvantage, specialized in language skills such as poetry, rhetoric, and composition. Metshaf bet epitomized a high-level scholarship, namely translating and commenting on Scriptural texts, or even studying world history using Geez translation of Coptic and Arabic sources.12 Initiation to nibab began at the local parish church under the local yeneta (village teacher). If the family had enough hands for work in the field, the precocious boy would transfer to a more formal school, often days away, for the second and third stages of his training. Zema bet and qine bet provided rudimentary lodging and makeshift classes, which meant students had to spend their spare time fetching firewood and begging for food in nearby villages. Only if still inclined to the contemplative life of the mind would the talented student proceed to one of the remote monasteries for further tutoring under a reputed master.13 At anytime the sighted pupil could revert to a vocation or take on the plough, or join church service as a deacon. The blind compensated their limited job options with more years of studying, even into ones late adulthood. The lackluster settled as village teachers or yeneta. The well educated became qine teachers and scholars; others administered parishes; and a few even distinguished themselves as legal advisors in the royal court.14

In 1961 was published Zemena Berhan (era of lightness), a book dedicated to Emperor Haile Selassies philanthropic work among the blind. In it the author, himself a product of church education, sampled the achievements of several blind men and one blind woman. There was the eighteenthcentury judge, Arkeledis, whom Emperor Dawit III made a palace confidant because of his resourceful handling of difficult and intricate murder cases.15 Minase Bekele brokered a peace between Emperor Iyasu I (Dawits father) and his powerful regional contender: Dejaj Yosedek of Gojjam. The king rewarded Minase for his wisdom and quick wit, but those same qualities alienated many a jealous cleric. The pejorative Amharic saying, a gathering in which a blind man is present and the sea with a shark fish will not last long undisturbed, was said to have begun in Minases lifetime.16 Memhir Gebreyesus of the nineteenth century, like Esdros before him, was conferred the honorific title of arat ayina in recognition of his extraordinary erudition. In the court of Emperor Tewodros, Gebreyesus was particularly known for advocating lighter sentences, including the commuting of capital punishment to life imprisonment. He was also critical of those who adopted a literal interpretation of the Fetha Negast, the traditional penal code built mostly on Biblical traditions.17 In Gebreyesuss footsteps followed Aleqa Getahun, another outstanding legal scholar. Getahun was a member of the committee charged with the translation and refinement of important Geez manuscripts, including the Fetha Negast and Haymanot Abew, into secular Amharic. His leadership role earned him personal acknowledgements from Emperor Haile Selassie, who invoked the analogy of Cherubim to explain that Getahun had many more eyes than just the two he could not use.18 As hinted earlier, the Ethiopian society shared the gender biases of patriarchal societies. Although the members of the elite could arrange for the home education of their daughters, church schooling remained the exclusive privilege of boys, and this was no exception among the blind. Even here there were unusual talents who defied the norm. In the eighteenth century, there was the story of Debritu Makonnen who had the type of education normally reserved for boys. It was, however, through her gift in handcrafts that Debritus name was passed on to posterity. After presenting Empress Mintwab with a colorful apron she herself wove, and on which the queens name was emblazoned,

Debritu was made the palace head weaver and given some privileged status.19 Even more extraordinary than Debritus was the case of Memhir Gelanesh Haddis. Gelanesh was home schooled by her own father, a clergyman, who no doubt was familiar with the learning potential of blind children. Her intellect and courage helped her overcome the many barriers she faced as an adult, and Gelanesh went on to make history as the first female teacher of qine. Gelaneshs unique exploits have finally begun to be appreciated, and in April 2010 the centennial anniversary of her birthday was commemorated on the Voice of America Amharic Service. Last but not least on this list of blind savants is Aleqa Ayalew Tamru. Born in the province of Gojjam in 1922 or 1923, Ayalew lost his parents before the age of four to a smallpox epidemic during which he himself became blind. Once of age, his aunt enrolled him in the nearby Dima Giorgis, which incidentally happened to be the leading qine bet in the country. Among his mentors included two blind teachers, both of whom Ayalew remembered fondly for their large qine sessions of as many as four hundred students. While in school Ayalew supported himself by sawing debelo (cloak made out of unprocessed sheep skin and normally worn by the church students), and by also selling the hide after softening and stretching it. Ayalews uncle was a senior church official in the capital city, and in the 1940s the ambitious young man moved to Addis Ababa where he continued his religious studies alongside experimental Braille classes at the Swedish Evangelical Mission. Having gradually risen through the ranks as preacher, author, and parish administrator, in the early 1960s Ayalew was made the chair of the Liqawint Gubae (council of scholars), a position he held for close to thirty years. With wife and fourteen children he survived unscathed the Red Terror of the Marxist government of the seventies and eighties, but he was not as lucky under the succeeding regime. In 1994, Ayalew was forced to retire without pension for having openly criticized the governments appointment of a new patriarch, which many agreed was in violation of church canon. He died in September 2007, a widely admired church elder as evident in the many laudatory obituaries in the private press.20 The scholarly contributions of Esdros have been the focus of at least one academic paper, and in recent years the life of Gelanesh has attracted some research interests.

Beyond that, Ethiopian studies has had little to say on the exemplary lives of blind individuals. When the first secular school for the blind was completed in Sebeta in 1963, its dormitories bore the inspirational names of Esdros, Getahun, and Gebreyesus. But here, too, the names have long fallen to disuse as subsequent administrations were not interested in the historical memory of the traditional past. To understand why the contributions of blind scholars are little acknowledged in modern Ethiopian studies, one has to consider the distinct worldview of the so-called founding fathers of the discipline. Nineteenth-century explorers laid down the foundation of present-day Ethiopian studies. Unlike their Portuguese predecessors, these modern-day itinerants were mostly Protestants who had even less knowledge and appreciation for the Ethiopian Orthodox church. They all came from the industrialized part of Europe that was even more far removed from Africa, culturally and technologically, and the biases in their travel narratives reflected that. James Bruce, the first Protestant visitor to Ethiopia (1769-1771) published a sensational account of a fierce and barbaric society, where the gouging of eyes and the cutting of tongues of war captives were routine practice. Bruces tall tale of debauchery, killing, and maiming and blinding would pioneer a distinct European genre on Ethiopia, exoticism and violence (or so-called Abyssinian savagery) being the main selling lines.21 No one exploited Bruces proto-type of wild Ethiopia better than William Cornwallace Harris. In 1841 Harris had been received as a guest by King Sahle Selassie of the southern province of Shewa. Sahle Selassie was partially blind, which prompted the English diplomat to refer to him as the one-eyed king.22 The kings favorite son, Seife-Selassie, had also contracted blindness because of ophthalmia, a condition that Harris, with his medical training, was able to cure.23 Harris described Seife-Selassie in princely terms as an extremely aristocratic and a fine-looking youth, from which one gets the impression that he was also well groomed under private tutors.24 Then, as if for a dramatic effect, Harriss attention shifted to a multitude of alms seekers on their way to the palace compound. What motivated him was not a humanitarian impulse but, rather, a nineteenth-century racial schadenfreude. He thus wrote:

The palsied, the leprous, the scrofulous, and those in the most inveterate stages of dropsy and elephantiasis, were mingled with mutilated wretches who had been bereft of hands, feet, eyes, and tongue, by the sanguinary tyrants of Northern Abyssinia, and who bore with them the severed portions, in order that their bodies might be perfect at the Day of Resurrection. The old, the halt, the deaf, the noseless, and the dumb, the living dead in every shape and form, were still streaming through the narrow door; limbless trunks were borne onwards upon the spectres of mules, asses, and horses, and the blind, in long Indian file, rolling their ghastly eyeballs, and touching each the shoulder of his sightless neighbour, groped their way towards the hum of voices, to add new horrors to the appalling picture.25 Disability, as a metaphor for racial primitivism, had a long pedigree. But such voyeuristic extravaganza of mayhem and decrepitude could happen only in the post-enlightenment era, during which middle-class Europeans found themselves increasingly detached from the plight of the disabled poor. Earlier, Portuguese Jesuits had reported their encounters with disabled Ethiopians in a matter-of-fact tone. To their Protestant counterparts of the industrial era, the disabled generally remained invisible even if disabling conditions such as smallpox outbreaks were often noted. In the rare instances that the blind and the crippled appeared in the literature, as they did in Harriss famous excerpt, their inclusion was meant to underscore racial backwardness. In a sense, stereotypes of the disabled as the living dead and the myth of African racial primitivism fed off each other, giving the impression that Africa was populated by an amorphous mass of wild, sickly, and lesser humans. This unwieldy association of disability with primitive societies would carry on into the twentieth century, discouraging a critical engagement with disability studies among Africanists, including Ethiopianists. By the late nineteenth century, explorers and adventurers had given way to various groups of missionaries, who in turn turned to their respective governments for military protection. Ethiopians defended themselves successfully against Europes colonial ambition, but not against its mission schools that purveyed Eurocentric worldviews.26 The mission schools offered little that the blind were not in a position to grasp. Their teachings of the humanities, particularly the reading of the Gospels and the mastery of

foreign languages, did not necessarily require the use of sight. But this was the nineteenth century, when the European practice of institutionalizing the blind in special schools was at its peak. Missionaries therefore understood their exclusionary centers as perfectly normal, not to mention their literacy-centered worldview which made the recruitment of blind students counterintuitive.27 It would perhaps be an overstatement to say that the nineteenth-century mission schools widen the gap between the sighted and the visually impaired, since only a very small number of Ethiopians benefitted from their instructions. However, the negative trend was set. Even after the government gradually took on its new role as the main provider of Western-style secular education, the same discriminatory policy would continue unchecked into the twenty-first century. The socio-economic cost of such policy of exclusion is not difficult to fathom. Among other drawbacks, it would make beggary, the occupation long associated with disability, an even more integral characteristic of the urban underclass.28 This is not to lambaste the role of missionaries, whose impact on the modernization process of Africa is quite complex. In many parts of Africa missionaries spearheaded the introduction of special education, albeit in a segregated setting. Gidada Solon, the first Ethiopian to receive Braille education, in fact owed his good fortune to the missionaries. From the western province of Wallaga, Gidada grew up under harsh circumstances as a street beggar. In 1921, at the age of twenty, his life changed for the better after he began attending Bible classes at the American mission. The head missionary, Fred Russell, took interest in what he saw was a gifted young man and arranged for the private tutoring of Gidada using imported Braille texts. Pastor Gidada, as he later became to be known, would go on to have a distinguished career as a popular preacher and respected church elder, his achievements reminiscent of the many traditional blind teachers discussed earlier. Gidada would earn an even greater national recognition posthumously when one of his sons, Negaso, became the president of the Federal Republic of Ethiopia in 1994.29 Despite Gidadas introduction to Braille early in the century, the first formal schools for the blind, with Braille medium and boarding facilities, were established in the 1950s and 1960s. The mission-run schools in Bako,

Gimbi, and Welayta were primarily vocational, specializing in handcraft training. Little aware of the long history of blind education in the country, they did not imagine academic pursuits as a practical option for a poor country. Only the schools in Sebeta and Asmara, run and funded by the Haile Selassie I Foundation, provided the needed academic support up to the completion of high school. Haile Selassie, the HSIF benefactor, had met successful blind role models, including Aleqa Getahun and Pastor Gidada, and was therefore an enthusiastic backer of blind education. His regular Sunday schedule comprised a drive to the Sebeta Merha-Iwran School for the Blind, situated on a modern campus about fifteen miles outside the capital city, as a result of which the school became a philanthropic showcase and a must-visit site by foreign dignitaries. The smaller sister school in Asmara, now the capital city of the newly independent country of Eritrea, catered to blind children from the northern provinces, also with a similar emphasis on academic curricula.30 In the long-term, it was the academic vision that made a difference. Although vocational training was practical for those who lost their sights as adults, workshop life neither brought economic self-reliance nor encouraged social integration. At any rate, because of the Marxist governments hostility toward the missionaries, in the 1970s the vocational schools had their ownership transferred to the Ethiopian National Association of the Blind (ENAB). The HSIF schools were also taken over by the governments Ministry of Education but without policy change or administrative interference. Including graduates from the ENAB-run schools with budgets from the Christopher Blind Mission (CBM), perhaps close to a thousand blind children have since received modern education. Hundreds have attended colleges, about a dozen of who have gone on to complete their doctoral degrees in overseas universities. Among the latter is Bairu Tafla, a senior professor at the University of Hamburg in Germany and one of the leading historians of Ethiopia.31 Such academic successes should not camouflage serious systemic flaws, however. The international trend in the last several decades has been to complement Braille literacy with audio-visual computer technology, such as screen readers and screen magnifiers. In Ethiopia, while government schools and institutions have invested in standard computer technology, they have done nothing of the

kind when it comes to adaptive devices. The result has been an even wider gap in computer literacy and access to the information age, both of which have had adverse effects on the competitiveness and employability of the blind.32 Second is the negative social attitudes that continue to be encountered, especially from Western-trained educators and bureaucrats. In the 1950s and 1960s, as the first groups of blind students tried to enroll in high schools and the university, a major resistance came from officials of the Ministry of Education, and the students had to beseech government patrons to intervene on their behalf.33 For many years the history department at Addis Ababa University had refused to accept blind students as history majors on the basis that they were not able to read maps; and a few other disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences, including philosophy and psychology, still maintain a sighted-only admission policy. It is true that college students, upon successful graduation, are fully employed in government institutions, mostly as teachers and lawyers. What is true is also the explicit discrimination that these individuals experience when it comes to career advancement. To date, whenever leadership positions open up, senior blind civil servants continue to be bypassed for junior sighted colleagues, the rationale being that, as department heads and directors, the former cannot read through and sign sensitive documents independently. It is worth mentioning here that, in contrast to the glass ceiling in government offices, the church has maintained a relatively more proactive policy of promotion, as in the appointments of Aleqa Ayalew and the many others before him to senior posts.34 Finally, the most pressing question regarding the fate of modern blind education in Ethiopia today, even more than technology and job-place discrimination, is how to reach to the tens of thousands of blind children across the country. The handful special schools for the blind have been unduly expensive to construct and maintain, and even then they serve only a small fraction of the population. Mainstreaming, or the integration of blind children into regular schools, might be the solution in the long-term. But mainstreaming requires the allocation of vast resources both in the provision of learning logistics and in the training of manpower, not to mention the need for a greater preventive eye care in order to shrink the size of the blind population. The cost is so herculean that only

partnership with international donors can make a real difference.35 In conclusion, blind education in Ethiopia has a long history. Religion-oriented, church-run, oral-prone, traditional schools kept their doors open for the blind for centuries. With their graduates often holding privileged clerical positions, church schools provided the best outlet for upward social mobility among the blind. Unfortunately, the opposite has been true with the literacy-centered secular schools. Since the introduction of Western-style schools in Ethiopia in the late nineteenth century, modern education has become the exclusive domain of the ablebodied. Reform efforts were tried in the 1950s and 1960s with the establishment of schools for the blind where blind children could have access to secular education through Braille literacy. The schools have transformed the lives of many individuals, but at the same time their overall relevance has remained insignificant because of high cost and limited enrollment capacity. Given the international commitment to universal primary education for all, it is time the Ethiopian government took the mainstreaming option more seriously. As mentioned, the logistics of mainstreaming requires the need for a close cooperation between the Ethiopian government and the international community. For a theoretical blueprint or a role-model sample on inclusive education, however, the government does not have to shop too far. Instead of reinventing the wheel or trying to borrow one from elsewhere, the government can, and should, tap into the rich experience of the church schools to learn what works best and what does not. Here is indeed an example where a modern institution has much to learn from its traditional counterpart or, as historians like to say, where the past informs the present.

Ethiopians, unlike Westerners, do not use family names. The individual is identified by the first name, the name given at birth, together with the fathers first name to avoid confusion with other individuals with similar first names. Church officials are known by their first names but in conjunction with their titles. The titles used throughout this paper include: aleqa (professor or parish administrator), memhir (teacher or professor), and arat ayna (which literally means he with four eyes, and is applied rarely to the most accomplished church scholars). 2 Bairu Tafla, The Blind in Ethiopia, Braille Monitor (Sep., 1967): 586-591. 3 John Binns, Theological Education in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, Journal of Adult Theological Education 2, 2 (Oct., 2005): 105. 4 Francisco Alvarez, Narrative of the Portuguese Embassy to Abyssinia during the Years 1520-1527, trans. Lord Stanley of Alderly (New York: Burt Franklin, 1970). 5 Ibid., p. 91. 6 Ibid., p. 89. 7 Ibid., pp. 249-250. 8 Ibid. p. 250. 9 Donald Lockhart, trans., The Itinerario of Jeronimo Lobo (London: Hakluyt Society, 1984), p. 221. 10 Arat Ayna, literally he with four eyes, is a rare honorific title given to those who mastered the four branches of learning. Blind from childhood, Arat Ayna Esdros is said to have traveled widely and visited many monasteries, consulting over three hundred manuscripts. Watford identifies him as one of the leading and most original thinkers of eighteenth-century Ethiopia. He cites a contemporary source in which Esdros is described as the meeting point of all traditions because of his extensive works of commentary and textual analyses. He also cites the well-known church scholar, Heruy Woldeselassie, who wrote: Until the present day, the commentary of Mamhar Esdros is wetly loved, and is taught in every church and monastery. R. Cowley Watford, Mamhar Esdros and His Interpretations, Proceedings of the 6th International Ethiopian Studies Conference (Tel Aviv: 1980), p. 41. 11 Nebiye-Lool Yohannes, Zemena Berhan (Addis Ababa: Berhanena Selam, 1961), pp. 80-81. 12 Binns, Theological Education in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, 107-109. 13 Ibid. 14 Bairu, The Blind in Ethiopia, 587-588. 15 Nebiye-Lool, Zemena Berhan pp. 81-85.
16

The actual Amharic saying is Iwir yewalebet debir, asa yaderebet bahir, saybetbet aydrim Ibid., p. 86-90. 17 Ibid., pp. 91-95. 18 Ibid., pp. 99-101. 19 Ibid., pp. 85-86. 20 All the information about Aleqa Ayalew is based on taped interviews he had with the author on June 6 and June 13, 2006. 21 For a discussion on how Bruces travel accounts transformed European perceptions of Ethiopia, see Fikru Gebrekidans Bond without Blood: A History of Ethiopian and New World Black Relations, 1896-1991 (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2005), pp. 1314. 22 William Cornwallis Harris, Highlands of Ethiopia, vol. 2 (London: Longman, 1844), p. 287.
23 24

Ibid., p. 243. Ibid. p. 242. 25 Ibid., p. 244. 26 For a discussion of the arrival of the mission schools in Ethiopia, see Bahru Zewdes Pioneers of Change: The Reformist Intellectuals of the Early Twentieth

Century (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2003), pp. 29-30. 27 It was not unusual for missionaries to try to evangelize among marginalized groups such as low castes, slaves, and minorities. With regards to disability, especially blindness, their views were more conventional than revolutionary. For a discussion of the Western church and its view of disability, which in part explains the exclusionary worldview of the nineteenth-century missionaries, see Samuel Kabue and Ester Mombo, Disability, Society, and Theology: Voices from Africa (Limuru, Kenya: Zapf Chancery, 2011), pp. 49-53. 28 This idea builds on Messay Kebedes thesis, namely that Ethiopian leaders since the late nineteenth century have equated modernization with Westernization. Instead of refining their traditional educational system to meet contemporary challenges, they have opted for an apish imitation of European worldview, Eurocentrism, through the wholesale adoption of Western educational curriculum. The result has been the proliferation of social malaise, not to mention economic and political underdevelopments. See Messay Kebedes Radicalism and Cultural Dislocation in Ethiopia: 1960-1974 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2008). On the profligacy of beggary see Ronald A. Reminicks Addis Ababa: The Evolution of an African Urban Cultural Landscape (New York: Edwin Mellen, 2010), pp. 198-210. 29 For Gidadas life history se his own autobiography, The Other Side of Darkness, (New York: Friendship Press, 1972). Gidada dictated his story in English to Ruth McCreery and Martha Vandevort, who organized and edited the book. 30 For a detailed study of the origin and growth of the first school for the blind in Ethiopia, first located in Addis Ababa proper and then moved to the outskirt town of Sebeta, see Wendim-Teka Shiferaws Sebeta Merha-Iwran School for the Blind, B.A. Thesis (Addis Ababa University, 1983). For an assessment and recommendations on the educational facilities in the 1950s, see H. Zvi FederbushResheff, Education for the Blind in Ethiopia (Jerusalem: Ministry for Foreign Affairs Department for International Cooperation, 1962). 31 This data was extrapolated from the many taped interviews the author had with various ENAB officials, including Tafese Mogese, Getachew Desta, and Amare Asfaw, in the months of May-July 2006. 32 This disparity was pointed out to the author by Metmku Yohannes, an ex-attorney who had a long history of involvement with disability-related issues in Ethiopia. Metmku cited the example of the School-Net Project to demonstrate the everwidening technological gap. Over the 300-million USD allocated by the World Bank in 2001 in order to provide computers and network infrastructure for schools across the country, nothing was set aside for the special needs of blind students and blind teachers. Email and phone communication between Metmku Yohannes and the author: July 23, 2013. 33 The first blind student to enter high school and the university was Bairu Tafla. Bairu had to waste an entire year without school right after the eighth grade, for no high school would readily admit him because of his blindness. Later, as one of the elected board members of ENAB, he also remembered how much easier it was to work with the Ministry of the Interior, staffed mostly by the church-educated traditional elite, instead of the Ministry of Education, the preserve of the Western-trained technocrats. Taped interview with the author: Nov. 2, 2006. 34 Most of this information, which is commonplace knowledge among the Ethiopian blind, was communicated to the author repeatedly by several informants whom he interviewed on tapes in May-July, 2006. 35 For a discussion of the multifaceted challenges of mainstreaming, or inclusive education, see Tirussew teferra, Disability in Ethiopia: Insights, Issues, and Implications (Addis Ababa: Addis Ababa University, 2005), pp. 108-111.