Twenty-four years after escaping, Kemer Yousef is going back to perform in Ethiopia, where the Oromo singer is a symbol of unity to the country’s dozens of ethnic groups
Nov 20, 2008 04:30 AM
staff reporter
A Toronto man who once fled Ethiopia in terror is to return Saturday as the country’s No. 1 pop star.
Kemer Yousef, who escaped on foot with nothing 24 years ago, has scored an unprecedented video hit with Nabek, a seven-track DVD showing him singing from a yacht in Toronto Harbour and dancing on the steps of Casa Loma. Clamour for his return has become so great that the central government is helping to arrange a six-concert homecoming tour that opens Dec. 7 at the East African country’s largest indoor venue – Addis Ababa’s 20,000-seat Millennium Hall.
For Kemer (Yousef is his father’s name) the tour means seeing his family for the first time since he escaped across the desert to Somalia at the age of 20. His mother is in her 70s. His father is 103.
The tour also means singing to former enemies.
Kemer belongs to the Oromo ethnic majority, long oppressed by successive ruling minorities, who are now as swept up by the pop phenomenon as anybody else.
“Ethiopia has more than 70 ethnic groups and languages,” tour co-producer Bumiden Abdul Wahab explains by phone from the central city of Adama. “Normally people only listen to their own music, follow their own traditions.
“Kemer shook up the country,” he says. “He broke the barrier. Every time you turn on the radio – in whatever language – you hear his music.
“If you ask 10 people, at least nine have his CD.”
Kemer is a broad-shouldered man with a magnetic grin and a warm, tender way of expressing himself.
He grew up in an oral and singing culture in the village of Golu, near the town of Deder, in east-central Ethiopia. Villagers had enough to eat, he says. The famine regions lay elsewhere.
More on this story @ TheStar.
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