Afework was so much more than those long ago metaphors extolled in our minds. He was a rural boy, blessed with loving parents and who grew into an artist with piquancy for life and a love of challenge, a pied piper who brought our nation to the modern era of philosophical aesthetics. A man of the African renaissance, he epitomised the African, who knew the true meaning of the very essence of compassion, of duty, of style, of beauty that changed the trajectory of many lives through art, the basis of the highest spiritual development.
He taught us that beauty is everything that the human spirit finds
pleasing and congenial to the exercise of spiritual and intellectual freedom;
an avant-garde concept of aesthetics that began to challenge traditional views,
in his pencil, stained glass, brushes and canvas…
Words cannot describe how the world would
feel when we know that Afework will not be with us in person anymore, a
senseless vacuum of incredulity for
the loss of a laureate that personified intellectual, spiritual and moral vigour. These fleeting memories
will remain frozen in our mind forever, the tapestry of art Afework has left in
his paintings, stained glass windows, in the Africa Hall, St George Cathedral, The
Trinity Cathedral, Maskal Flower, in his work on the ‘Backbones of African Civilization, ‘African Movement’,
African Atmosphere, ‘African Unity’ and African Heritage’.
I knew
the legend Afework through his works of art and his compassion for humanity
that many may not have been fortunate enough to share; as a board member of the
Red Cross during the 1984 famine that hit our nation with apocalyptic force and
a million compatriots perished. He raised his voice against a regime that
heralded terror and pestilence -- what was branded by BBC THE HIDDEN FAMINE’.
Afework raised his voice in the global advocacy for change when he led the
candle light vigil on the eve of Glasnost ‘LIGHT THE DARKENSS’ ‘yibra bechelemebet’ in 1989.
Today is
our chance to say thank you to a colossus who perked up our lives, to truly realize
what we are now without his persona. Nevertheless, if we did not know what he has
done to inspire hundreds of Ethiopian young artists, especially during the past
five years, life without him would have certainly brought back harrowing images
of the dark ages before the renaissance.
Out of that tension between his elitism, which
stoked Afework’s ambition and a post-Cold War dream in his bones of a leveling democratic shtick in Africa, emerged, through art, his frenzied comprehension of
the African fantasy of a new era, an idea that espoused his virtue of
aristocratic arrogance and human nobleness that merged with a scuttle for
accomplishment.
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