Hirut Befikadu: The Woman Who Gave Africa Its Voice

She helped give the Organisation of African Unity its public voice, built the institution’s first Women’s Division, and carried Africa’s case from Addis Ababa to Beijing and into the shattered districts of wartime Sierra Leone. She was a mother of three — and a figure of quiet instruction to a great many more.

By Endex · Chief Editor, The Ethiopian Tribune · 22 June 2026

The Tribune’s Chief Editor writes of his mother.

She belonged to the small, formidable company of Ethiopians who did not merely live through the making of modern Africa but helped to assemble it — patiently, precisely, one briefing and one document at a time. For the better part of thirty-four years, Hirut Befikadu served the Organisation of African Unity, the body founded in Addis Ababa in 1963 to speak for a continent finding its own voice. It fell to her, more than to almost anyone, to make that voice intelligible to the world.

The Voice of a Young Continent

Hirut joined the OAU in its earliest, improvised days, having begun her working life at the newly established Ethiopian Tourism Organisation in 1963. Within a year she had moved to the fledgling continental secretariat, where the work was relentless and the stakes were continental. Assigned to the Information and Protocol Division, she rose to lead it, serving for seventeen years as Head of Information.

The task was unforgiving. A new organisation, charged with shaping Africa’s political, social and economic course, had to be explained — persuasively, accurately, and often under pressure — to journalists and researchers who gave her no rest. To answer them she first had to know, which meant a discipline of constant reading that never left her. She travelled the length and breadth of the continent, and there was scarcely a country she did not visit in the service of introducing the OAU to Africa and the wider world. In the veteran Ethiopian journalist Gedamu Abraha she found a mentor who helped her master the craft.

The Platform at Beijing

If the Information Division made her name, it was the Women’s Division that became her legacy. Hirut was charged not only with establishing the OAU’s Women’s Division but with leading it. When Africa prepared its case for the United Nations’ Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, it was Hirut who coordinated the drafting of the “African Platform for Action”, distilling the views of women gathered from across the continent, and who helped organise the participation of nearly ten thousand African women delegates at the conference. It was, by any measure, one of the largest acts of continental coordination on behalf of African women in the organisation’s history.

Addis, Asmara and Florence

She had been formed for such work long before she chose it. Educated at the Sandford English School in Addis Ababa, at Haile Selassie Secondary School in Asmara, and at Kokebe Tsibah — where she was one of the first two young women to graduate — she went on to read social and political science at Haile Selassie I University, among its first graduates after it became a university, and took a master’s degree in international relations at the University of Florence.

Hers was a household steeped in the wider world. Her father, German-educated, served as a provincial governor, as chief of protocol at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and ultimately as Ethiopia’s ambassador to the United Kingdom; her mother, too, was educated in Europe. The eldest of six children, Hirut moved from city to city and country to country, and where she could not follow her parents she lived with an aunt rather than break her schooling.

Her ancestry ran the length of the country. She was descended from Hakim Workneh Eshete, the pioneering Ethiopian physician and statesman, and from Ras Gobena Dacche, the formidable nineteenth-century general — a lineage joining the north of Ethiopia to the south, as her own life and labour would. And hers was a family that seemed to bring forth remarkable women in every generation: the great educator Adey Befikadu; her sister Rosemary; the late journalist Elenee Mekuria; and the late Rachel Mekuria, who pioneered broadcasting education in Ethiopia, headed the Educational Television Production Division and served as board president of the Young Women’s Christian Association. Hirut belonged to that company, and enlarged it.

She came to believe there was something to learn from every person she met — a conviction earned, not inherited.

Two influences marked her above all. There was a meticulous, beautifully turned-out father who could not abide disorder, from whom she inherited an eye for elegance and an ear for language. And there was her maternal grandmother, Qetselawork Tulu, whose intelligence and resilience she revered — a woman who had married an England-educated doctor, moved to India, and worked at his side as a nurse. A shy child, Hirut taught herself courage through drama, public debate and the university debating club, until the girl who had once shunned attention made her living by commanding it.

Sierra Leone

Her continental service did not end with the OAU. For six years she served as spokesperson and policy adviser to the United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) — a charge entrusted to her by Kofi Annan, then Secretary-General of the United Nations, who knew her conviction and chose her for it. She carried her gift for clear, careful information into one of West Africa’s hardest conflicts, and into its most desperate hours. When hundreds of United Nations peacekeepers were seized and held hostage by rebel forces for seventy-five days, she was among those who laboured to win their release — and it was her voice, in the end, that carried the news of their freedom to the world. In the United Nations’ own record of those years she appears again and again, steadying the account through the mission’s most dangerous passages — the same discipline of fact she had practised in Addis Ababa, now exercised under fire.

A Mother, and a Mentor

In retirement she described herself simply as a community volunteer. It was characteristically modest. I write these lines not only as this newspaper’s editor but as her son — one of the three boys she raised, who like everyone who loved her called her Abaye — and so I may say what an obituary alone would not: that the rigour and grace she carried to a continent she carried first, and most fully, into her own home.

Her husband of a lifetime, the engineer Getachew Abebe, had gone before her; she leaves their three sons — Samuel, Daniel, and the one who writes these words. But the family she leaves is larger than that — the colleagues she trained, the women whose place at the table she helped to secure, and the many of us who took her, without hesitation and without blood, as a mother of our own.

She loved a difficult task and hated defeat. Africa was, for thirty-four years, her difficult task. She did not run from it. She faced it — and she gave it words.

When the family last gathered around her, in November 2024, she surprised us, as she always could. Late in a life that had never stopped facing forward, she took delivery of her first car — and chose an electric one, because the future, to her mind, was a thing to be embraced rather than feared. We were delighted, and we made her promises about the cleaner, braver world we meant to help build. It was entirely like her: the woman who had introduced a young continent to the world, still reaching, even then, toward what came next.

Samuel, her firstborn, reached her after her first surgery and was with her as she recovered. Daniel and I were to follow in July. We did not reach her in time. These last months had taken from her, one after another, others she loved; and in the end, it seems, she chose to go on to those who had gone ahead of her — her husband among them — rather than wait for us. We would have crossed any distance for that visit. We make it now, in these words.

Today the words are mine, and they are not enough. Rest now, Abaye. We were proud beyond saying to be yours.

In the faith that shaped the whole of her life, she was christened Hirute Silassie. We ask all who knew her, and all who did not, to hold her in their prayers — that by the grace and the glory of God she be granted rest, and life everlasting.

እግዚአብሔር ነፍሷን ይማር።

May God remember His servant Hirute Silassie, and grant her soul eternal peace.