Theatre from a Political Fabulist: Teklehawariat Teklemariam and the First Ethiopian Play: Fabula: Yawreoch Commedia (Fable: The Comedy of Animals)

Abstract

This article looks at an Ethiopian fantasy play produced in 1921. It is a play that draws on both European and African influences to create a story utilising anthropomorphic animal characters. In his introduction to Fabula: Yawreoch Commedia (Fable: The Comedy of Animals) (English translation, Belayneh Abune, 2010), the writer, Teklehawariat Teklemariam (1884-1977), mentions three fabulists; the ancient Greek of possibly African extraction, Aesop, the French La Fontaine and the Russian Ivan Krylov, whose stories he had loved as a boy and who had inspired his fantasy writing. Teklehawariat came to theatre after being brought up in Russia during his teenage years and this was also where he encountered animal fables; neither form having been part of his earlier Ethiopian religious-focused education. However, from Ethiopia the play took both a range of biblically inspired animals representative of ideas of good and evil, the poetic form, qene, which was the main mode of oral creativity in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, and the linked concept of samena worq (wax and gold), whereby an outer story conceals alternative, deeper layers of meaning. Teklehawariat used this form in the hope that the animal characters would entertainingly engage his noble audience while simultaneously veiling his covert but scathing condemnation of incompetence and corruption in the Ethiopian court so that he would not provoke the ire of the ruling Empress Zauditu.