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Life and ministry
Gebre Kristos Tekle Haymanot was born near Aksum in 1880. He was the eldest son of the Protestant aläqa Tekle Haymanot Mihirka and taught for several years at the Swedish Evangelical Mission (SEM) School in Asmara.
In 1920, Gebre Kristos moved to Addis Ababa. The Swedish wanted him to teach at their boys’s school, yet Ras Tafari Makonnen (later Emperor Haile Selassie) appointed him director of his new printing press, Berhanena Selam. He also became the editor of the Berhanena Selam newspaper. In 1927, Gebre Kristos printed an article against Mussolini (translated by the then director of the local ‘School for the Falashas’, Taamrat Emmanuel) that earned both of them an indictment from the Italian embassy.
Gebre Kristos wrote textbooks on arithmethics and world history and collaborated on a book on geography. He also supported the SEM missionary Rev. Olof Eriksson in his translation work and the revision of the Amharic version of Barth’s Bible Stories (Asmara: SEM, 1928).
Gebre Kristos Tekle Haymanot is the author of some songs that are included in the 1925 edition of the hymnal Səbhat läʼamlak.
He passed away in 1932.
Note
Both the Swedish Evangelical Mission (already in the 1920s) and the German Hermannsburg Mission (in the early 1930s) used duplicators in Oromia. Did Gebrekristos help them import the machines into the country or purchase them in Addis Ababa?
Note that Rev. Eriksson was in charge of the printing press in Asmara before moving to Addis Ababa. Did Gebrekristos already work with him back then?
Songs in hymn book
Səbhat läʼamlak (1925)
- Nr. _ _ _
[None of his songs included in the 2007 edition]
Further reading
Arén, Gustav. Envoys of the Gospel in Ethiopia: In the Steps of the Evangelical Pioneers 1898-1936. Stockholm: EFS förlaget; Addis Ababa: The [Ethiopian] Evangelical Church Mekane Yesus, 1999. [Esp. p. 190-92,view online]
Kumlachew Fantahun. “Gäbrä Krəstos Täklä Haymanot”, in Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, vol. 5, ed. A. Baussi in cooperaton with S. Uhlig, p. 331‒33. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2014.