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Concept
Zerai Deres
Summary
Zerai Deres (Ge'ez: ዘርኣይ ደረስ; 1 March 1915 – 6 July 1945) was an Eritrean translator and patriotic revolutionary. In 1938, he engaged in an act of public devotion to an important symbol of his native country, the Monument to the Lion of Judah, at the time kept in Rome. When interrupted, he violently protested against Italian colonialism while brandishing a scimitar, which led to his arrest and internment in a psychiatric hospital for seven years, until his death. However, contemporary Italian historians doubt the claim that he was mentally unstable. Zerai's protest, lionized after the end of the Second World War, is considered by Eritrean and Ethiopian historiography as part of the movement against Italian occupation. To this day, Zerai is considered a legend and a folk hero of anticolonialism and antifascism both in Eritrea and Ethiopia.
Zerai Deres was born in the kebele of Adihiyis, in the province of Serae, in Italian Eritrea in 1915 (or 1908, according to the Ethiopian calendar). At the age of two, his father died and the family moved to Hazega, the village of his mother's origin.
Zerai was a member of the Tigrinya ethnic group. He converted to Catholicism and attended Italian colonial schools, including the seminary of the Capuchin friars in Segeneiti. For this reason, he spoke the Italian language fluently. Abandoning his studies in the seminary, Zerai became an interpreter in Rama, an Ethiopian town bordering present-day Eritrea.
On October 6, 1936, Zerai Deres sent a letter to the editor of the Italian newspaper Corriere Eritreo who had written an editorial in which he had asked for the abolition of any form of promiscuity with the "natives". Signing himself Un indigeno (Italian for "A native"), Zerai wrote:
The natives, whose presence causes so much disgust to you, often take pride in the fact that they are Italian subjects. In Libya, Somalia and in the recent war against their homeland, in foreign struggles, they have shielded you with their bodies, and sometimes paid with their lives.
Official source
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