Listen up, truth-seekers and power players — history’s not dead, it’s been buried. But one man in the ancient city of Harar isn’t just digging it up; he’s reviving an entire civilization’s soul with ink, glue, and a rebel’s grit. Meet Abdallah Ali Sherif — the bookbinder who’s binding not just books, but a broken cultural identity that Ethiopia’s power structures tried to erase for generations. And let me tell you — he’s unleashing heritage with the kind of subversive elegance that makes bureaucrats sweat.
Now, you won’t find Sherif shouting on political stages or tweeting incendiary slogans — oh no. His revolution is quiet, meticulous, and literary. For over 30 years, while career politicians were busy rewriting the present, Abdallah was busy restoring the past—page by painstaking page. In a country where state-sanctioned forgetting was once policy, this man’s work is nothing short of political sabotage with parchment.
Let’s call a spade a spade: culture’s always been the first casualty in a power grab. In Ethiopia, the bureaucratic elite spent decades freezing out regional identities under the guise of “unity” — translation: homogenize or hush. Harar, a living museum of Muslim scholarship, Afro-Arabic trade routes, and pre-colonial autonomy, was conveniently silenced, shelved beneath layers of nationalist white noise. Enter Sherif — bookbinding’s James Bond — operating in the shadows, preserving ancient Harari manuscripts, Quranic texts, and centuries-old astronomy tomes like cultural contraband.
And don’t let the humble basement archive fool you. This man is insurgency wrapped in discipline. While the government played colonial cosplay with education and heritage, Abdallah built his revolutionary headquarters sweat by sweat, salvaging ancient texts from dusty death and institutional indifference. His archive isn’t just dusty paper—it’s dynamite. It houses everything from marriage contracts to market ledgers, enlightening us on a Harari civilization that pre-dated modern statehood, bureaucracy, and the bloated babble of today’s Ministry of Heritage.
Now, here’s the part that really rattles the ivory towers: this isn’t just nostalgia. Sherif’s work has sparked a self-awareness uprising across Harar. The youth, once numbed by standardized schoolbooks and sterile nationalism, are flocking to these texts, rediscovering a history that speaks in their own dialects. It’s one thing to read about empire in someone else’s tongue—it’s another thing to hear your grandmother’s wisdom echoing back through 500 years of parchment. That, my friends, is cultural oxygen. That’s dangerous. And that’s exactly what Addis Ababa’s cultural gatekeepers fear — educated, historically grounded citizens who know they belong to more than a flag.
Look, I’ve danced with despots and debated diplomats, and if there’s one thing I know, it’s this: the pen may not always be mightier than the sword, but a well-restored manuscript? That’ll outlive them both. Abdallah Ali Sherif isn’t just preserving Harar’s past — he’s rearming it. In the intellectual battlefield of Ethiopian identity, he’s the silent general leading a parchment-fronted insurrection.
So next time some official says, “We’re building a unified Ethiopia,” you tell them Abdallah Ali Sherif’s already built one—page by page. It just didn’t fit their script.
History isn’t dead. It’s just waiting for someone brave enough to re-bind it.
Mr. 47
