Background
Tesfaye Gebre Egzy was born in July 1935, in Arada, Addis Ababa.
Tesfaye Gebre Egzy was born in July 1935, in Arada, Addis Ababa.
Educated in Ethiopia, Lebanon (at the American University, Beirut) and in the United States (at Stanford University, California, and the Fletcher School of International Law and Diplomacy, where he gained a doctorate in public international law).
He started his government career at 31, in 1955, as an assistant in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and spent most of the rest of his career in the same ministry.
In 1958 he was co-secretary-general of the first All African States conference called by Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana. This conference did not lead to any permanent organisation, but when Haile Selassie called the African states to Addis Ababa in 1963, Gebre Egzy was his chief lieutenant, playing a major part in establishing the Organisation for African Unity. He was then retained as its provisional Secretary-General until the appointment of Diallo Telli in August 1964.
Ethiopia's Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the United Nations in New York from 1960 to 1966, he returned home to become Minister of State for Foreign Affairs from 1966 to 1971, when he was appointed Minister of Information.