Getatchew Haile was an Ethiopian-American foremost scholar of the Ge’ez language. He was acknowledged for his contributions to the field with a MacArthur Fellows Program “genius” award and the Edward Ullendorff Medal from the Council of the British Academy. He was the first Ethiopian and the first African to win the award. As a boy, he attended Ethiopian Orthodox church school, where he learned Ge’ez and “devoted his energies to reading and understanding the texts.” From 1945 to 1951 he attended Trinity School in Addis Ababa. Haile graduated from the Coptic Theological College, Cairo, Egypt with a B.D.
In 1974, Haile became a member of the transitional Ethiopian Parliament from Shoa province. Due to his opposition to the Derg junta, government soldiers came to his home to arrest him in 1975 during which time he was shot. After the BBC World Service and Voice of America reported his arrest, the government released him. Through the intervention of friends, Haile was allowed to travel to London for medical treatment. However, he became paraplegic due to severe damage to his spinal cord and needed to use a wheelchair.
Haile was associate professor in the Department of Ethiopian Languages and Literature, Haile Selassie I University (now Addis Ababa University), from 1962 to 1969, and 1971 to 1974, where he taught Amharic Grammar, Amharic Literature, Ge’ez Grammar, Ge’ez Literature, Arabic Grammar, and Semitic Linguistics. After arriving in the U.S. in 1976, Haile joined Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. He eventually became a Regents Professor Emeritus of Medieval Studies and Curator Emeritus of the Ethiopian Study Center at the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library. At HMML, he prepared catalogues of more than five thousand Ethiopian manuscripts and trained Ethiopic manuscript cataloguers in palaeography, dating, and other skills.
In addition to his writing and translations of a variety of documents/books on Ethiopia and the Orthodox church, he produced two two-volume books on the history and beliefs of Abba Estifanos of Gwendagwende. The languages in which he worked were Amharic, Ge’ez, Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, Greek, German, and Coptic.
