Total Liberation of Africa

The most politically charged work of Afewerk Tekle's career — and one of the largest stained glass installations produced in the twentieth century. Three vast windows, each over fifteen metres tall, face the entrance hall of Africa Hall in Addis Ababa. Thirty-two figures — one for each African nation then seeking or having achieved independence — swirl in a vortex of liberation. The composition borrows from Ethiopian icon painting: the figures flatten, stylise, and burn with symbolic colour. At the centre, a woman holds a torch aloft. She has a specific face: the face of a continent waking.

On the work

The windows were commissioned in 1959 and installed in 1961, the same year Afewerk Tekle represented Ethiopia at the Venice Biennale. He worked for three years on studies, filling notebooks with faces drawn from photographs of independence leaders, ordinary men and women from across the continent, and from memory. The glass was fabricated over three years at Studio Atelier Thomas Vitraux in Valence, France — Afewerk travelling there repeatedly to supervise production and develop the colour palette with the master glaziers. Over forty distinct colours were created for this commission, including several shades developed specifically to capture the Ethiopian landscape.

Scholars have noted the formal debt to Byzantine mosaics, which Afewerk had studied extensively in Ravenna in 1958. The compression of space, the hierarchy of scale, the gold ground that glimmers through the glass — all speak to that influence. But the emotional register is entirely African: ecstatic, communal, and shot through with a grief that joy cannot entirely extinguish.