The Pen Behind the Pen Name: Dandew Serbello from Sidist Kilo

Girma Feyissa’s favourite Holiday was Mesqel. He drew his last breath on the early morning of September 28, 2019, as relatives were getting ready to celebrate this year’s Mesqel holiday. Perhaps it is a fitting way to go for a man who loved festivities and family gatherings.

His entire family always eagerly waited for his arrival every Saturday at lunch. He never missed it. And he never came empty-handed. He always brought his favourite meal with him – raw beef. He made sure everybody had some, and some more. Then came the jokes and his unmistakable laughter.

“Above all, he never missed an opportunity to laugh at jokes. We used to say ‘no waste of jokes.’ He enjoyed laughing even if he has heard the joke several times already,” said Bezaye Girma, his only daughter.

Nothing made him happier than these family gatherings. Those are large and quite boisterous affairs. He had three boys and a girl from Asselefech Desalegne, his wife of 56 years. There are also six grandchildren.

“He was a great dad. He loved his kids above all. He was quite modern in his way of thinking, and he believed in dialogue. He loved to take his children to the theatre,” added Bezaye.

Girma loved the theatre. He was an actor and playwright. One of his memorable roles was in a play written by the famous playwright Mengistu Lemma: "Dandew Chebudie". Girma wrote about this in one of his blogs, “Mengistu Lemma liked my part, Dandew, which I had played on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Ethiopian Board of Telecommunications, as it was then known.”

Girma took the name of this character he played as his pen name, which became famous among Ethiopian newspaper readers – Dandew Serbello. The second part of that is the name of an old man who was the guard at a compound surrounded by barbed wire near a small field where the neighbourhood boys used to play football. Their ball used to roll over into the compound sometimes, and their attempts to retrieve it used to irritate Serbello.

Girma was standing watching the older boys play one morning when Serbello called to him and asked him to pass him a stone through the barbed wire so he could use it to hammer a nail. Girma unsuspectingly did what he was told, but to his shock and surprise, Serbello grabbed his arm and rubbed it against the barbed wire until he bled. Serbello viewed this as punishment for all the boys that had ever entered the compound.

That injustice and the scar he carried on his hand was something he never forgot. He used it to make up part of his pen name. He had to use the pen name to avoid another injustice.

“I took it as a pen name for fear of being rounded up for my rather critical articles, which were published or read throughout the public media,” he wrote.