Season 3, Episode 13: “A Song You Can’t Sing Alone" ft Meklit Hadero

My father Ayele Hadero was born and raised in a small village called Wekecho in the Southern Ethiopian region of Kembata. The elementary school in his hometown was run by missionaries. He went there for free, and in exchange he spent a year teaching the younger students all the reading, writing, and arithmetic he had learned.

But eighth grade was as far as the village school went, so after that, he had a choice: Stay in Wekecho and continue teaching or leave home behind to go to the closest high school, which was 400 miles away in a town called Endibr.

He didn’t know anyone in Endibr, but my dad told me he had three things that helped him say yes to the journey ahead. Number 1 - a big determination, number 2 - faith in God, and number 3 -150 ethiopian birr (equal to around $75 USD at that time), collected for him by knocking on doors across the whole community. So while he was still very much a kid, my father left his parents, siblings and the family farm behind, to keep on learning.

Armed with high marks in the National Exam, my father had no problem getting into high school, and was immediately the top student in his class. But he struggled economically. That 150 birr dwindled quickly for tuition, food, lodging and books. My father’s teachers were two American Peace Corps volunteers, Phillip Lebelle and David Levine.

They saw his brilliance and potential and they also knew their top student simply couldn’t keep going without support. And so, they took him under their wing. He lived at their house, and they paid his tuition. In turn, he ran errands, cooked, knitted sweaters, collected water from the river, fixed what needed fixing. But most importantly, he studied and excelled. This opportunity changed his life completely. He went to college, got his medical degree from Addis Ababa University, and eventually — as you know, — moved to the United States.

I often wondered if my father’s early departure from his childhood home was the reason that he never sang the songs of Kembata to me. I used to think maybe he didn’t remember them, or maybe he didn’t have anyone to sing them with, because these were communal songs meant to sing with the village, songs you could not sing alone.

When I started working on an album of Ethiopian traditional music a few years ago, I knew I wanted to find a song from Kembata to include on the record, one that would have been sung in my father’s home village of Wekecho.

If you do a google search for music from Kembata, only a handful of songs come up. There’s just not that much out there. The clips I found were short, low fidelity, with no context offered. Not nearly enough to find a track for the album.

But I had an idea. Years ago, in southern Ethiopia there was a music event called the Festival of 1000 Stars, where 56 tribes and ethnic groups from the south got together to share their music, dance and food. Friends told me a group from Kembata had participated, so I tracked down a Soundcloud recording of the 2008 festival, and listened minute by minute through three days of tape, until I found the group from Kembata. They were singing a song called Geefata.

I took the song to my father, and he lit up. He was like an instant open book, so excited, and bubbling. He wrote out the words for me and translated it. It turned out, this was an important song. Geefata is for times of communal celebration, it’s a song that would have been sung at the end of a successful hunt or a community holiday or any happy get together.

The lyrics include gems like -

Hurray! Hurry!

Here we are all of us

We have arrived,

we have arrived.

We are here to celebrate the changing season, the flowering season

Are we not?

Our strong and beautiful ancestors show us how to take a red horse and ride it in celebration

Play the drum!!! Play that drum!!

Let us dance

Come on my mother’s son and daughter, my brothers, my sisters

let’s dance to this song, to the drums.

To play the drum is Kembata’s culture.

We honor the mountain, we have such will and strength.

We can move the Handura mountain and the Hambericho mountain.

If we push it together, the Hambercho mountain will move

I knew I had to record it and I did. We reimagined it. The song is number five on my brand new album A Piece of Infinity, out now on Smithsonian folkways records.

In the last fifty years, Geefata has started to disappear from Kembata. Even though it used to be a part of daily life, now people sing it less and less. That's another reason I wanted to record it, but more than just that, to shine it. To shine this powerful communal song into a space where people from all over the world could know the beauty coming out of this one corner of Ethiopian life, that I am lucky enough to have a direct line to.

Thank you to each of you for your open ears, and for listening to Season 3 of Movement with Meklit Hadero. Thanks to my Dad, Ayele Hadero, for helping me work with the song, Geefata and reimagine it from my home in San Francisco. If you’re inspired to support this work, tell a friend about these stories, leave us a review on Apple podcasts, or go to our website movementstories.com to learn more.

Music and migration, remixed.

This episode of Movement was produced by me, Meklit Hadero, and our Senior Editor, Megan Tan.

Our co-founder and sound designer is Ian Coss. Our co-creator and podcast godmother is Julie Caine. Our broadcast partner is the World and we are distributed by PRX.