Thirty years ago on July 29, the poet and playwright, Mengistu Lemma, who Richard Pankhurst considered the Bernard Shaw of Ethiopia, died at the age of 65.

Mengistu made a remarkable impact on the development of Ethiopian literature with his pre-revolutionary works, which were primarily comedies. The most famous was The Marriage of Unequals in 1964. Later he also produced more serious works that reflected on the political situation, including poems such as Basha Ashebir in America, and Scramble for Office, a satirical play.

Jane Plastow, Professor of African Theatre at the University of Leeds in the U.K., and a former colleague of Mengistu at Addis Ababa University, shared some memories with the Ethiopia Observer.

Generous colleague

I first met Mengistu in 1984 when I arrived in Ethiopia to teach in the Theatre Arts Department and he was also teaching there. He was a kind and generous colleague, especially as I was very young and knew very little about Ethiopian culture at the time. Mengistu was very concerned about the relatively low academic standards of many of our students and was greatly concerned that we try to nurture a culture of excellence. In meetings he was always kind and gentle and I liked him very much.

He was always cautious in being open about his political views – remember this was the time of the Derg and very few felt they could be open except with trusted friends. However, it was clear he despised many of the political climbers at the University and wanted nothing to do with them.

Bored but inspired

I interviewed Mengistu a couple of times for the book I subsequently wrote, African Theatre and Politics, which is partly about Ethiopia.

He told me a few stories. One was about his despair when the Emperor sent him to work for the Embassy in India and he had nothing to do. It was here he polished up his first play, which he had started before he left, intending it as a wedding present for a friend. He told me he spent various drunken evenings with a Sudanese colleague, who quoted a lot of Shakespeare, and eventually he felt he had to take on a project to fill his time more productively, so this is when he turned to play writing, drawing on lots of theatre books from the U.S. Embassy.

He also obviously hugely admired his father and spoke of his connections with Eritrea, which he felt he had to conceal. Mengistu told me that the play he wrote, Kassa, was originally to be set in Eritrea. He changed it substantially to fit in with the Derg after a first draft was written in 1973. So he changed the location and title and moved the main character from being a priest based on his father to just an old man. He also told me it was directed in a way he didn’t like and that it was stopped for a while and he had to appeal to Prime Minister Fikre Selassie Wogderess to get it reinstated.  But they moved shows from the popular Sunday spot to Fridays, as any discussion of fascism was seen as suspect.

Social reformer

He was influenced, like all others I spoke to at the time, by Shakespeare and J B Priestley, but he was passionate about the need to build on Ethiopian cultural traditions and particularly on the heritage of qene, a unique style of Ethiopian poetry.

He was certainly not a Marxist. He was more a liberal socialist reformer. He didn’t want to lecture people but to make them think. He was a true intellectual. What he hated was repression, so some plays were delayed because he couldn’t speak openly at the end of the imperial period and then later he strongly resisted attempts by the Derg to make him speak in support of them. In his plays, he is always talking about the difficulty of maintaining personal integrity and keeping a balance between good and bad forces from Ethiopian tradition and from the West.

I really liked and valued Mengistu, who was generous and supportive to me. I think everyone had huge respect for him as a playwright. Looking at his work, he is always interested in personal integrity. You see this time and time again in his plays. What he hates are people who sell out for wealth, or power, or rank. He is of course also a social reformer. The early plays are hugely critical of the aristocracy and of ignorant clergy – both Christian and Muslim.

And then later of course he targets hypocritical upper classes in his remake of JB Priestley’s play and then the man who has sold out in The Mighty and the Lowly. So I think the pattern is quite consistent. He seems quite despondent about the possibilities for actually changing the world for the better, but, above all, I think he does believe one should hold on to one’s own integrity and virtue.

(The photo of  Mengistu Lemma, courtesy of his son Alemayehu Mengistu.)