A brief history of the birth and growth of newspaper production in Ethiopia would be incomplete without an equally brief overview of the history of modern printing because the birth of a newspaper is inconceivable outside the printing press. We are talking here about the history of newspaper printing in Ethiopia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; long before the advent of the modern electronic and online newspaper production.
It is generally believed that modern printing was started in Ethiopia in the last half of the 19th century around the port town of Massawa, now part of Eritrea. Available historic evidence also suggests that Europeans first introduced printing in the north of the country.
In 1865, a certain Lorenzo Bianchi had printed a book on Amharic language method in Massawa. And in 1880, Lazarist missionaries had published a book of Ge’ez and Amharic grammar in Keren. And around 1886, Swedish missionaries had set up a printing press at a place called Monkulo in Eritrea.
In 1888 a magazine called Corriere Eritrio was published in Massawa. And in 1890 a magazine called Journal Franco-Ethiopien was published and distributed in Djibouti. Another important development of that period was the advent in Addis Ababa, of the printing press and shortly afterwards of the newspaper. According to the late Professor Pankhurst, who wrote extensively about Ethiopian history, economy and politics says, quoting another source, that an Amharic printing press had been brought to the capital by an enterprising French merchant “as early as 1897, but was “never used.”
Pnakhurst also said that first Amharic language newspaper was started by a certain Blata Gebre Egziaber before 1890. It was not however a newspaper in the modern sense of the term. It was rather a weekly hand-written sheet of which 50 copies were distributed each week in the capital.
As such, modern newspaper printing was started during the time of Emperor Menelik who is generally believed to be the first modernizing monarch in Ethiopia. According to another information provided by the Ministry of Information in 1966, “A Franciscan missionary by the name of Father Marie Bernard who set up a dermatological clinic in the eastern Ethiopian town of Harar around 1891 was often credited for having started modern printing there around 1901.”
Kavadia’s four-page newspaper, known as Aemero was a weekly written by hand. Menelik himself chose the name of the newspaper. Only 24 copies of the maiden issue of Aemero were distributed. Later on, Kavadian imported a printing machine known as “polygraph” and could thus print and distribute 200 copies.
Emperor Menilik who was closely following the development of the printing press in Ethiopia offered to Kavadia a new printing press in 1907. But it was impossible to continue to print Aemero at that time due to financial constraints. Until 1915, the printing press was confined to printing government legislation and commercial materials. After a two-year interruption, Aemero started to come out again in 1925 under the editorship of the same Kavadia. In the first few years of its existence, Aemero was reflecting the leadership of Menelik and disseminated nationalist and patriotic feelings.
The Ethiopian Herald was launched 42 years after Aemero was born. As the first English language newspaper, The Herald is now 80 years old. Measured against human longevity, this may be considered a long time. But looked at from the point of view of the history of newspaper publishing, it is a relatively brief period of time. “The earliest newspapers date to the 17th century Europe when printed periodicals began rapidly to replace the practice of hand-writing newssheets. The emergence of the new media branch has to be seen in close connection with the simultaneous spread of the printing press, from which the publishing press derives its name.”
According to available data, the first newspaper in Ethiopia was Aemero which began publication on January 17, 1901. The creation of the Amharic newspaper was ordered by Emperor Menelik. A Greek businessman, Andreas E. Kavadia edited the newspaper. In other words, the first newspaper in Ethiopia was published 300 years after the first newspaper-like publications called newssheets started to appear in Europe. The temporal gap between the creation of newspaper in Europe and Ethiopia is huge because so many things have happened and the printed media have witness tremendous advances while Ethiopians did not know the existence of such a potent means of written communication.
The development of the print medium has followed a tortuous and difficult path. A recent historical survey of that period, says that in the decades following the founding of Aemero, the number of periodicals increased with the major changes and developments that took place in the country.
However, the positive developments in the print medium were interrupted for five years between 1935-1941 due to Fascist Italy’s invasion and occupation of Ethiopia although pro-Fascist publications appeared during this period and disappeared after liberation.
The crystallization of a number of government-owned newspapers such as the Amharic Addis Zemen and the English Ethiopian Herald that came into existence in 1941 and 1943 respectively. Yezareitu Ethiopia (Ethiopia Today), a weekly Amharic tabloid came into being in 1952 and went out of circulation in 1996 after serving the same purpose as the other two publications. Right from the start, newspapers in Ethiopia, including The Ethiopian Herald, down to this time, were all owned and operated b y the government at least for two main reasons.
First thing, the publishing or printing newspaper is a very expensive undertaking that required a huge amount of capital and equipment to operate and the government was the only agency that could owned and maintain such an operation. The second reason was that as a country long isolated from the outside world, Ethiopia had little opportunity to know about the world and make itself known to the world.
The modernization of the country that started under emperor Menelik, allowed the country to open up to the world and try to establish stable diplomatic relations with European states. This facilitated or allowed the emergence of newspapers in Ethiopia. The first newspapers were printed in Amharic and dealt with local issues.
As Ethiopia’s foreign relations expended particularly after WWII, foreigners started to be interested in the country while a small educated elite emerged in the country and started to operate the print media, particularly producing foreign language newspapers starting from scratch. The Herald was not the only foreign-language newspaper. There was also a French-language newspaper called Addis Soir that came into being long after The Herald was created. According to available information, Addis Soir was a daily French language newspaper designed to serve the growing Francophone community in Addis Ababa following the founding of the Organization of African unity (OAU) in 1962.
At least three generations of journalists have so far worked for The Ethiopian Herald. The first was the generation of journalists and editors who launched the newspaper and helped it survive through thin and thick. As indicated above, The Herald was launched as a weekly on 3 July 1943, Jan Hoy Simpson, an Englishman was its first editor. Later editors were from the United States. The first Ethiopian editor was Ato Yacob Wolde Mariam, in 1960. The Herald became a daily at the end of 1958, as did Addis Zemen.
In the 1970s and 1980s, that is to say after the Ethiopian Revolution of 1974, various editors have taken over the first generation of newspapermen and women who worked hard to lay the foundations of what was to become the only English-language paper in the entire country. Among them was Kiflom Adgoy, an Eritrean who served the paper until he left back in 1994 and was replaced by interim editors who served for brief stints until a permanent editor in chief was found.
To the first generation of editors belonged two exceptionally talented editors and writers like Ahadu Sabure and Be’alu Girma who studied in the United States. Ato Ahadu Sabure was not only a noted veteran journalist and editor of The Ethiopian Herald but also a public servant who worked as ambassador in neighboring countries like Somalia and Djibouti.
He has also written a book that chronicles the final years of the Ethiopian monarch and the rise of the military regime. According to a profile of the veteran journalist, Ahadu Sabure’s “journalistic life spanned just a decade, yet it was the early stage of radio broadcasting when the Addis Ababa public would head to different squares of the city to catch broadcast of the news.”
Bealu Girma is a renowned Ethiopian writer and journalist who also studied journalism in the United States and served in his capacity as reporter, editor and author and later on became the permanent representative of the old ministry of information under the Derg. He was previously the editor-in-chief of the Amharic daily Addis Zemen. According to his brief profile, Be’alu was also a reporter of The Ethiopian Herald and then the Editor-in-Chief of the English Addis Reporter magazine that was popular for its critical, investigative and analytical articles. His critical spirit was evident in his last novel entitled Oromay (The End) and caused him so much trouble that led to his disappearance in 1984. His whereabouts are unknown to this very day.
There were also very hard-working and talented journalists and editors among the second generation of The Ethiopian Herald editors and reporters. Yet, the quality and content of the paper has undergone sharp changes during this period. The quality of the writing and reporting has somehow declined from what it used to be under the first crop of journalists, reporters and editors. This may be due to the general declining in the quality of English education in the country and the poor state of reading culture among the educated population.
The third or fourth generation of The Herald journalists consists of present day reporters and writers whose main challenge might be to introduce some kind of renewal in order to improve the quality and presentation of the newspaper which was once celebrated as one of the leading publications in the continent.
The Ethiopian Herald is continuing to serve the objectives around which it was initially launched, namely to serve as the bridge between the local and foreign communities while at the same time introducing the country to the outside world. This is perhaps the most important aspect of The Herald’s mission at present while its news and reporting contents in general need more depth and timeliness to satisfy the needs of the local educate elite as well as expatriates who need and expect more in-depth and objective reporting of current events.
The Ethiopian Herald is of course bound to stay around to celebrate its 100th anniversary in a matter of twenty years. That would be an occasion for the newspaper to show that it has lived up to the expectations of the local and foreign readers in order to become a mass circulating and influential publication in the country.
BY MULUGETA GUDETA
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD TUESDAY 4 JULY 2023
