Lawyer turned freedom fighter to speak on global diversity on Nov. 8

Noted Eritrean author Alemseged Tesfai will deliver his talk "Global Diversity ... The More We Get Together" at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 8, in The Morgan Auditorium, Penn State Schuylkill. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Alemseged Tesfai is the most prominent writer in Eritrea, a country in the Horn of Africa that is bordered by Sudan, Djibouti and Ethiopia  His books include history, political analysis, novels, short stories, plays, criticism and tales for children. 

As an intellectual and a fighter himself, he played a critical role in shaping and sustaining Eritrean culture during the war, when he also authored a collection of short stories, "Wedi Hadera", and his most famous play, "The Other War," published together with "Two Weeks in the Trenches"  in the United States and Eritrea. 

In 2000, he translated and published Ngugi wa Thiongo's "I Will Marry When I Want (Ms Teberhani Emir'o)", which went on to be widely performed in a national tour of Eritrea. His "magnum opus" is a history of Eritrea's struggle for independence, in three volumes and over 2,000 pages written in Tigrinya. Tesfai is the head of the History Project in Eritrea's Research and Documentation Center.

Lawyer turned freedom fighter, Tesfai is a pre-eminent historian and dramatist. A quarter of a century ago, he abandoned a promising academic career at the University of Wisconsin to join the fledgling Eritrean Peoples Liberation Front to fight for Eritrea's freedom.