Abdullahi Ali Sherif is the founder of Sherif Private Museum, the first private museum in Ethiopia and a holder of an honorary Doctorate from Haramaya University for his contribution on the development and conservation of cultural heritages. Abudullahi Sharif, a father of five who considers the museum his sixth child. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from Haramaya University on March 13, 2021 and at age 70, he wants to do more to preserve indigenous heritage. Addis Standard’s Etenesh Abera visited his museum on March 21, 2021 and sat down with him for an interview to discuss the process of establishing the first private museum, culture and heritage and more.
Excerpts:
Addis Standard: Thanks for sitting with us, can we first give a brief introduction for those who follow your work and can you tell us more about your journey to establish the first private museum in the country?
Abdullahi Ali: I was born and raised here in Harar. During my highschool years, I had unanswered questions that led me on search for my identity and culture. Being a Harari, I started asking our elders about our culture and heritage, the answer I got was “We don’t have anything,” sank me into a crisis of identity. To my luck 25 years later, there was this Harari traditional Music band named Hayewan Mugad and they wanted to celebrate their 25 years anniversary and I started working on the preparation of this event collecting audios and other mediums. During preparation elders started to bring me mediums and artifacts that recorded our traditional and religious heritages. I was upset because years back when I was on the journey to find out about our history, I asked them why they refused back years to give me these materials and the replyvis was more upsetting, they said, “We feared for our lives because during that era all people had to sing of one culture, one country and one religion.”
We released some 125 songs in the Harari language along with a biography of the band. After that I continued to collect the Harari artifacts from our elders and different individuals in the community.
AS: How would you describe the process of collecting the artifacts ?
Abdullahi: Hard but as I told you earlier once I started collecting artifacts, the Harari community will bring to me most of them for free and to your knowledge my collection is not complete as I am still in the process of collecting them. I do have collections of pre Menelik era coins, manuscripts, religious books, different cultural clothes medals and so on.
Before I moved to this house which belonged to Teferi Mekonnen or as he is widely known Haile Selassie I, I used my own small family room as a museum for more than 17 years. Using my own house as a base for my museum caused a lot of stress to my family and had its mental and physical toll on us. I moved to this house. July 26,2007 right before the start of the new Ethiopian millenia. I have been renovating it for 13 years and it still needs a lot of renovation. In this humble setting, I have five exhibition rooms that display 13,000 artifacts. This number is an improvement to the 6,000 artifacts I had when I started.
“in our museums we do not only work on preserving only Harari artifacts and present Harari culture but we are also working to preserve and help other culturally specific museums…”
