Hanna Girma - Bante Lay - New Ethiopian Music (Official Video)

Hanna Girma - Bante Lay - New Ethiopian Music (Official Video)

A young man of Beni Amru

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Writer: Efendi Muteqi

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Today (August 24/2023), many people have been sending a photo to my inbox that shows a young man from Beni Amru standing in the middle of a crowd. The photo is not real. A Facebook user named Ras Habte, who admires the photos distributed by the old Ethiopian Tourism Commission, has made his own makeup on that photo (as it is called "montage" or throw back).

The actual photograph showing the youth of Beni Amr was taken by the American journalist Michael Blair and published in the famous National Geographic Society magazine. He is what you see below.

I wrote as much as I could about Beni Amru youth in my book "Eritrean Dream". Here I present to you again what is written in the book.

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According to Eritrea's current distribution, its western part is structured under the zone called "Gash Barka". This Gash Barka zone is home to the Kunama, Nara and Hdareb ethnic groups. But the main population of the zone is called "Tigre". Among the ethnic groups of Eritrea, Tigre is the second most populous ethnic group after Tigrinya. The Eritrean who has achieved great fame in many parts of the world was also born from this nation. He is the young man of Beni Amr who lived very close to us.

The youth of Beni Amru has been a talker for many years. The young man became the talk of many people because his identity is not as well known as the poster. As a result, various stories have been created about him.

For example, some people say, "Crest, a famous American toothbrush manufacturer, took Kubania to New York to make an advertisement." Some of them say, "When a rich French woman saw a photograph of the young man, she was captivated by his beauty and came to his residence and married him and took him to Paris."

I have also encountered people who told me the opposite story. This is the story these people told me.

“The young man was born into a strict family. The photo was taken without his family's permission. So one day when his father came to Tesanei, he found the city invaded by his son's photograph. At this the father got angry and went home and killed his son."

So everyone is throwing their own hypothesis. A person whose history is not well documented falls prey to such fabrications.

I learned from my research over the past few years that the young man was photographed by James Blair, a photojournalist working for the National Geographic Society. Blair took the photograph in 2011. In 1965, it was located near the town of Tesanei in what was then northwestern Ethiopia (in the western part of present-day Eritrea). The fact that the young man is a native of the Bani Amr tribe was described in the National Geographic magazine (also available on the website).

What is interesting is that when Blair took the picture, a great Ethiopian was with him. This Ethiopian is the beloved journalist, Getachew Gada, who we know for his voice, who has been reviewing in the German Voice Radio (Deutsche Welle) for twenty years. Lord Joy on July 20