Yibrah Tesfazghi was born in 1954 in Sere'e, a village in the Akele Guzay Region of what is now Eritrea, shortly after the end of a prolonged drought. He entered life in a Hedmo, a traditional Eritrean home with masonry walls, wooden ceilings, and a soil roof, where his mother, Weizero Abeba Reda, gave birth to all her children on a Ni'edi, a stone-and-mud bed, assisted by midwives without formal medical training. Formal education did not exist in Sere'e; instead, learning happened at Saint Mary's Church, an Orthodox sanctuary where Qeshi Neguse Atzebaha, the head priest, led night lessons in Tigrigna and Ge'ez. Students gathered under the flickering light of kerosene lamps called Lamba, memorising religious texts through oral recitation, as pens and paper were nearly absent. Transportation was unreliable—the village had only one blue bus that ran sporadically, its arrival dependent on the driver's mood and available space, while most people relied on horses, mules, or donkeys. Radios were rare; by the early 1960s, just eleven existed in Sere'e, and most lacked batteries, leaving word of mouth as the primary source of news. On the morning of his journey to the city, just before his sixth birthday, Yibrah was told by his mother they were visiting his grandfather—no mention was made of school. He encountered the bus for the first time, a light blue vehicle that appeared monstrous and terrifying, belching smoke and raising dust as it approached. He resisted boarding, believing he was being led into danger, until villagers and his mother persuaded him to enter. Once inside, he reacted to the electric light bulb above his seat by blowing at it repeatedly in an attempt to extinguish it, convinced it was a flame like that of the Lamba.
The boy who once feared a bus as a fire-spewing monster later navigated corporate America, yet never fully left behind the world where knowledge was whispered under kerosene light. His first encounter with technology was not curiosity but terror, a reaction shaped by a reality where even a lit bulb seemed unnatural. That journey from a village with eleven radios to a global corporate stage reveals the depth of displacement required for an African dream to find footing abroad. The silence around what happened to the other children who stayed behind speaks louder than any triumph.
Editorial note: AI-assisted opinion, not established fact. Full disclaimer →
