Sophia Yilma Deressa, 1942–2026

The Ethiopian Herald’s first woman reporter, who carried a newsroom’s conscience through the Derg’s prisons and into a lifetime of opposition

By Endex · Chief Editor, The Ethiopian Tribune

She walked into the newsroom of the Ethiopian Herald in 1961, nineteen years old, and walked out of it a landmark. Sophia Yilma Deressa, who has died at the age of eighty-four, was the paper’s youngest reporter and its first woman and for a time its only one. Over the six decades that followed she was, in turn, a journalist, a prisoner of conscience, a public servant, an anti-poverty campaigner and an opposition politician. What held those lives together was a single instinct, formed early and never lost: that the dignity of ordinary people was a story worth telling, and worth telling plainly.

A lineage of firsts

She was born in Addis Ababa on 20 May 1942, the second of six children of Yilma Deressa and Elsabet Workeneh a family woven into the fabric of twentieth-century Ethiopia. Her father, of the Welega Oromo nobility, served as the country’s first ambassador to the United States between 1953 and 1957 and then as finance minister from 1957 to 1970, labouring to build a modern financial system for the empire. Her mother, Elsabet Workeneh, was a daughter of Hakim Workneh Eshete, known also by his English name, Dr Charles Martin, Ethiopia’s first Western-trained physician, later the country’s minister to London and a leading campaigner against slavery; by her family’s account she kept one of the largest private libraries owned by a woman in East Africa. Firsts, it seems, were the family trade, and books were its inheritance.

Her father’s posting to Washington shaped her childhood. She was schooled in the United States at Georgetown Day School, the Baldwin School for Girls, and Bryn Mawr in Pennsylvania, before returning home to complete her studies at what is today the Yekatit 12 School. She enrolled at Haile Selassie I University but left before finishing, having already decided what she wanted to be.

The plain style

A brief spell at Ethiopian Radio, alongside the pioneering broadcasters Romanework Kassahun and Ellene Mocria, taught her that the microphone was not her medium. Broadcasting, she would say, was not her cup of tea; she preferred to write for a press. The Herald took her on, and within a year she was editing its Women’s Page a section she filled not only with the professional women of the capital, its doctors and artists and designers, but with its daily labourers and street traders, the people whose difficulties and small triumphs rarely reached print. She wrote in a deliberately simple English, and took quiet pride that her readers thanked her for it.

A government scholarship sent her to West Berlin for two years to study journalism at the Free University, from which she returned with a diploma and a sharper craft. It was at the Herald that she met its editor, Tegegne Yeteshawork, a poet and a veteran of the student movement against the old feudal order, who became her husband. Marriage to the man who ran the newsroom made staying impossible, and she moved to the Ethiopian Telecommunications Corporation as a public relations officer, editing its bilingual house magazine, Telenegarit.

A woman’s place was wherever the work of the nation was being done — and she might do it first.

The Revolution’s toll

The 1974 revolution that toppled Haile Selassie fell on her family with particular savagery. Her husband, by then a vice-minister of information, was among the roughly sixty officials of the old regime executed en masse on 23 November 1974. Her father, spared the firing squad, was imprisoned nonetheless and would die behind bars some five years later of untreated stomach cancer. Her mother, too, was seized while carrying food to him. The terror scattered what remained of the family; several of her siblings were driven into exile abroad.

Sophia herself was arrested at her office in the wave of detentions that followed, and held without trial for seven months first in the crowded basement cells beneath the Menelik Palace, among imperial-era prisoners including Princess Tenagnework, and in the shadow of Kerchele, the prison Ethiopians called Alem Bekagn, “Farewell to the World.” She left an account of that time that has lost none of its force: the squalor, the shared bathroom and the vermin, the arbitrary cruelty, and the four-year-old son she had been forced to leave behind, cared for through her absence by her sister and cousins. It is a testimony that belongs in any honest record of what the Derg did to the country’s educated class.

Return, and reinvention

Released, she went back to Telecommunications and to public relations and customer service, staying as she liked to joke, rather longer than she had planned, until her retirement in 1997. Then came an unexpected second act. Recruited by her lifelong friend Sister Jember Teferra, she spent roughly a decade as a public relations officer for the Integrated Holistic Approach Urban Development Project, work that took her into the worst slums of Addis Ababa and, by her own account, made her see her own country for the first time. It was this immersion in the lives of the poor, she said, that turned her towards politics.

The opposition years

In 2005 she helped found the Ethiopian Democratic Action Group and soon joined the young Lidetu Ayalew’s Ethiopian Democratic Party, becoming its vice-president and entering the turbulent coalition politics of the Kinijit era. She stood for parliament in 2010 and lost, as the opposition lost across the board, but she stayed on to help rebuild the party from its foundations and counted among her proudest achievements securing its place in the African Liberal Network, travelling on its behalf to South Africa, to Kinshasa, to Birmingham. She was, for years, one of only a handful of women in the upper ranks of the Ethiopian opposition, and she wore the difficulty of that without complaint.

In her last years she kept largely out of public view, at her home on the outskirts of the capital.

A house of pioneers

She did not go first alone. From the same house of Workneh Eshete came a whole company of women who broke ground as she did, and two of them were of her own generation and her own trade. Ellene Mocria, the same young colleague, known professionally as Ellene Mocria, beside whom Sophia had taken her first uncertain steps at Ethiopian Radio was also her cousin, and went on to become the country’s first woman radio newscaster and then, when Ethiopian Television began transmitting in 1964, its first woman television journalist. Another cousin, Rahel Mekuria, pioneered broadcasting education, launching the first English-language schools programme on Ethiopian Television in 1965, rising to head the education broadcast service, and serving five years as board president of the Young Women’s Christian Association of Ethiopia. Both have gone before her now, Elenee in 2021, Rahel in 2025. And this summer the same house gave up another of its daughters. Hirut Befikadu-christened Hirute Silassie, served the Organisation of African Unity for thirty-four years, gave the young continental body its public voice as head of its Information Division, built its first Women’s Division, and carried Africa’s case from Addis Ababa to the Beijing women’s conference of 1995 and into the wartime districts of Sierra Leone. She died on 22 June. By an ordering that those of us who loved her will not easily consent to call coincidence, Sophia followed her on the twelfth of September, two days into the new Ethiopian year and only days after Hirut’s semanya, the eightieth-day remembrance, which had itself fallen on the eve of that new year, the last day of Pagumen. Two daughters of one house, parted by the turning of the calendar.

Set beside one another, these lives a newspaperwoman, two broadcasters, a continental diplomat trace the better part of a century of Ethiopian public service, and hold to a single stubborn proposition: that a woman’s place was wherever the work of the nation was being done, and that she might do it first. Journalism, broadcasting, diplomacy, the slow construction of institutions, each was a room these women entered before other women were thought to belong there, and each was a room they left more open than they found it. It was a family that brought forth such pioneers in every generation. Sophia Yilma Deressa was among its truest.

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In one of her last recorded reflections a family interview taped for the Afreeqa programme on ArtsTvWorld, conducted by her niece as an act of keeping the family’s history, she set out plainly what she hoped her long life amounted to: the passing on, to a younger generation, of the resilience and the memory of her own.

Sophia Yilma Deressa opened a door that had been shut, and she held it open. Generations of Ethiopian women in journalism and public life walked through it after her, most of them never knowing her name. That is the quiet arithmetic of a pioneer’s life: the debts owed are largest where they are least visible. She is survived by two sons and by a granddaughter the daughter of the firstborn son she had already lost, who had made her home with Sophia and was with her to the last.

I set these words down as her kinsman, of the same house. In the space of a single season it has lost first Hirut in June and now Sophia in September the second just as the new year turned two more of the women who taught a country that its daughters could go first. Those of us who remain will keep opening the doors they opened.

Rest now.

እግዚአብሔር ነፍሷን ይማር።

May her memory be a blessing and may the year newly begun carry her name.