By LJDemissie
February 15, 2017
“I want to write so that the reader… can say, ‘You know, that’s the truth. I wasn’t there, and …but that’s the truth.’”, Maya Angelou
Critic’s note: The critical analysis contains “competing nouns”. Thus, for clarity and specificity, I used a person or a thing name repeatedly instead of a pronoun. The images in this analysis were adapted from Google Images.
Reading Ato Nesibu Sebhat’s book titled “ፍጹም ነው እምነቴ” bugged me so much because its stories are incoherent with his situation that he was a detainee, and some of his dishonestly presented stories are personal to me. Hence, I objectively and critically analyzed his assertions concerning the Higher-15’s detention camp’s reign of terror in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
I aim to prove whether his description of the Red Terror he claimed to be his experiences are retold, imagined, speculated or fabricated stories. Thus, I will evaluate and compare only one aspect of his stories which is the setting’s location. I will demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that Sebhat wrote something he never experienced and try to pass of as the truth and so by extension it means that he is dishonest. In other words, I will lay bare beyond doubt that Sebhat retold, he speculated, he imagined, or he fabricated the stories and dishonestly marked them as an honest account of his experiences.
To persuade an audience, Sebhat made an appeal to irrelevant authority, among others, known professors who don’t have any knowledge about the detention camp. Although his stories just didn’t add up, his endorsers made an appeal to emotion and praised the book without factchecking and providing objective reason. They stood behind the book and asserted that it was a true story so that you, the reader, should also read and believe it too. And they endorsed it.
Since the book’s plots are riddled with “serial lies” and it is dishonestly labeled as true story, its narration cannot be corrected. It has to be rewritten. Therefore, I ask the book’s endorsers to consider withdrawing their endorsements, namely: Prof. Ghelawdewos Araia (pp. 381), Prof. Getachew Begashaw (pp. 382-383), Fantahun Tiruneh (pp. 384), Kiflu Ketema (pp. 385), Million Alemayehu (386), Girma Degefa (pp. 388), Konjit Berhane (pp. 389) and Tesfaye