"Not Even a Line": A Son's Fifty-Year Search for His Father

In Dime, Tadesse married. His wife, Fanaye Lakew Gezahagn, was soon expecting their first child.

Then came 1974. Ethiopia's government was falling; the country was entering the turmoil of transition. The research team left Dime — and Tadesse left with them, promising Fanaye he would return when the situation improved.

"But the promise," his son writes, "turned into an unfulfilled promise."

Tarekegn was born after his father's departure. They have never met.

Fifty years of searching

Tarekegn grew up, married, raised four children — and never stopped looking. "Even though I endured much suffering throughout my life to find out where he was and who his family was," he writes, "I haven't been able to do it thus far."

He did what a searcher with almost nothing to hold does. He tried social media. He held live conversations with anyone who might know something. And he went looking for his father in the one place those two years should have left a trace: the academic record.

He found Dr. Todd's PhD dissertation at the Institute of Ethiopian Studies at Addis Ababa University. He read it looking for his father's name. It was not there — not even in the acknowledgements. He contacted the University of Kent, where Dr. Todd had been based. Nothing.

"Staying together for two years truly creates wonderful memories and a friendship," Tarekegn writes. "But how come there isn't even a line of evidence about Tadesse?"

It is a question about one man, and about something larger. In the rural Ethiopia of the 1970s, there were no cameras in most households, no documents, no habit of recording. A man could work at the centre of a famous research project and leave no trace in it. The research was preserved. The researcher was cited for fifty years. The assistant vanished from the record as completely as he vanished from Dime.

No photograph of Tadesse Gemeda is known to exist.

The mother who kept his name

What survived instead was carried by people. By Tadesse's close friend, Masresha Ayele Turulo, who passed to Tarekegn the facts he now holds like coordinates:

• Wellega
• Nejo
• A grandfather named Oda
• Spoke English
• Could drive

And by his mother. Through everything — including a stepfather who wished to give Tarekegn his own name — Fanaye "loved and kept my father's legacy," refusing to let her son's true parentage be rewritten.

A name, protected for fifty years, by memory alone.

The record that exists now

On 3 August 2026, Tadesse Gemeda's name was entered into the Missing From Ethiopia registry — a permanent, public, searchable record, in five languages: Amharic, Afaan Oromo, Tigrinya, Arabic, and English.

It is, as far as his family knows, the first document in fifty years to carry his name.

The photograph on the record is his son's — offered in the hope that a father's face might be found in it. "I am now in my early 50s, married, and have four kids," Tarekegn writes. "Praise be to God! The hunt is still ongoing."

Somewhere, there may be a family in Nejo that remembers a son who went south with foreign researchers and never came home. Somewhere there may be a photograph in a fieldwork archive, a name in a field diary, a member of Dr. Todd's circle who remembers the English-speaking driver from Wellega.

If you are from Nejo, if you know the family of Oda, if you remember the research team that worked in Dime between 1972 and 1974 — or if you simply want to help — share this story. After fifty years, a line of evidence about Tadesse finally exists. Help it be found.