By Hayyuu Oromia|
February 12, 2026

Finfinne, Oromia — They have never shared a stage. They have never recorded together. They have never, by any public record, even met.

Yet Helen Pawlos of Eritrea and Helen Berhe of Ethiopia sing the same song.

It is a melody not written in musical notation but etched in the shared cultural fabric of the Horn of Africa—a region where borders shift but kinship endures, where politicians trade accusations and artists trade influences, where two women carrying the same name have become, however unwittingly, twin pillars of a quiet resistance against division.

This is their story.

The Eritrean Helen: Crossing When Crossing Meant Everything

ASMARA/ADDIS ABABA — The year was approximately 1998. As Ethiopian and Eritrean forces mobilized along a disputed border, preparing for a war that would claim some 80,000 lives, a fifteen-year-old girl crossed from Asmara to Addis Ababa.

She carried no diplomatic passport. She bore no peace proposal. Helen Pawlos carried only a koboro drum and a voice that would one day silence artillery.

What happened next defies the official record of those years.

While state media of both countries traded accusations of aggression and territorial violation, Ethiopian artists did something the history books rarely record. They embraced her. Haile Tadesse, Aregahegn Worash, Minalush Reta, Buzuayehu Demsse, Gossaye Tesfaye, Abnet Agonafir—legends of Ethiopia’s golden age of music—took a teenage Eritrean girl into their fold. They taught her. They performed with her. They made her their own.

“She came as a stranger but left as a sister,” recalls a veteran sound engineer who worked at Hager Fiker Theatre during those years, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Nobody asked where she was from. We only heard what she could do.”

What Helen Pawlos could do proved extraordinary. She would go on to become the “Queen of the Stage,” a polyglot vocalist fluent in Tigrigna, Arabic, Amharic, Tigre, Oromigna, and Guragigna. She recorded albums that topped charts in both countries. She performed before audiences who forgot—or simply didn’t care—that she was, technically, a foreign national.

Today, Helen Pawlos resides in Sweden. But she never stopped singing in the languages of both her homelands.

The Ethiopian Helen: From Classroom to Global Stage

ADDIS ABABA — At Menen High School, Helen Berhe was known as the girl who kept disappearing.

Her truancy had nothing to do with rebellion and everything to do with vocation. While classmates studied mathematics and biology, Berhe slipped away to Hager Fiker Theatre, pressing her face against windows, absorbing every rehearsal she could witness.

“A trainer heard me humming,” Berhe recalled in a 2019 interview with Addis Maleda. “He said, ‘Your sound should be tamed.’ Not silenced. Tamed. Those words changed my life.”

At eighteen, Berhe left Ethiopia—first for Bahrain, then Dubai. And there, in the improbable setting of Gulf hotel lounges, her Eritrean-Ethiopian story began to write itself.

She heard a Sudanese singer named Nada Algesa perform “Uzaza Allina” at the Sheraton Dubai. The melody arrested her. She approached Algesa, an artist she had never met, and asked permission to translate the song into Amharic.

Algesa said yes.

The resulting cover became Berhe’s breakthrough hit. It also became something else: a quiet testament to the cultural fluidity that predates and transcends the borders of the Horn. A Sudanese melody, reimagined by an Ethiopian vocalist, echoing harmonies that have traveled camel caravan routes for centuries—routes that do not recognize the checkpoints now bleeding into the sand.

When Berhe returned to Addis to record her 2010 album Tasfelegnaleh, she collaborated with Abegaz Kibrework and Wondimeneh Assefa, among Ethiopia’s most celebrated composers. She became a star. And somewhere in Sweden, another Helen continued singing songs in Amharic.

The Art That Precedes Politics

ADDIS ABABA/ASMARA — Cultural historians note a striking pattern: Ethiopian and Eritrean artists have repeatedly forged connections long before diplomatic normalization made such contact officially acceptable.

In 2019, at the height of the brief “medemer” rapprochement following Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s Nobel Peace Prize, Ethiopian painter Brihan Beyene and Eritrean painter Nebay Abraha mounted a joint exhibition at Fendeka Cultural Center in Addis Ababa. Their canvases depicted shared traditions: dressing styles, traditional dishes, coffee ceremonies, wedding songs.

“People of the two countries are just like two sides of the same coin,” Nebay told AFP at the time. “You live by sharing ideas. You live by preaching the peace. You live by preaching the love.”

Nebay had entered Ethiopia through Zalambessa when the border briefly opened—a window of movement that has since, like so much else, closed without explanation. He found Ethiopian artists who helped him exhibit, who treated him not as a foreigner but as a colleague.

“If there was no peace I wouldn’t have this chance,” Nebay said. “I would be forced to stay and protect Eritrea. So peace is the most important thing in my opinion.”

That peace, so hard-won and so celebrated, has since proven agonizingly fragile.

February 2026: Art in the Time of Renewed Tension

ADDIS ABABA — As this newspaper reports, the headlines have darkened.

“Ethiopia and Eritrea Trade Accusations as Tensions Rise.” “Eritrea Rejects Addis Claims of Troops Inside Ethiopian Territory.” The language is familiar to anyone who lived through the 1998-2000 war: false accusations, fabricated claims, acts of aggression, withdraw your troops.

Border crossings that briefly opened have been closed again, with no official explanation. Eritrean soldiers remain in Ethiopia’s Tigray region despite the Pretoria Agreement’s call for foreign troop withdrawal. The diplomatic thaw has curdled into fresh suspicion.

Yet in this poisoned atmosphere, the artists continue their work.

Helen Berhe performs regularly in Addis Ababa, her repertoire unchanged—still including Sudanese melodies, still sung with the voice that refuses to recognize cultural borders. Helen Pawlos, though based in Sweden, maintains active connections with Ethiopian musicians and producers.

Neither woman has commented publicly on the recent deterioration in bilateral relations. Neither has issued statements about troop movements or diplomatic protests.

They simply continue to create.

What the Politicians Miss

ANALYSIS — Political scientist Dr. Mahlet Shiferaw of Addis Ababa University suggests that official discourse consistently misunderstands the relationship between ordinary Ethiopians and Eritreans.

“Politicians speak of sovereignty and territorial integrity,” Dr. Mahlet said. “Artists speak of something else entirely. They speak of shared childhood memories, of grandmothers who told the same stories on both sides of the border, of music that cannot be assigned a single nationality.”

Helen Pawlos sings in Oromigna and Guragigna not because it serves an Ethiopian government agenda, but because she learned those languages from Ethiopian colleagues who became her second family. Helen Berhe covers Sudanese songs not because she seeks to make a political statement about regional integration, but because the melody moved her.

This distinction—between politically motivated unity and organically cultivated kinship—may be the most important difference neither government seems to grasp.

Diaspora Dialogues: The California Connection

OAKLAND, California — In 2014, a decade before the current tensions, a remarkable experiment unfolded nearly 8,000 miles from the Horn.

Ethiopian American singer Meklit Hadero and Eritrean American filmmaker Sephora Woldu collaborated on a multimedia installation called “Home [away from] Home.” They constructed a traditional gojo/adjo—a circular hut with a conical roof, common to both Ethiopian and Eritrean architectural heritage—and filled it with interviews, photographs, and soundscapes documenting the lives of Horn of Africa immigrants in the San Francisco Bay Area.

They interviewed taxi drivers. Mostly Eritrean, mostly men who had fled indefinite military conscription, they drove through the foggy streets of San Francisco and Oakland, carrying passengers whose stories they never told.

“Everybody has a family member who is a taxi driver,” Hadero said during the project’s launch. “It’s an incredible metaphor of moving in general, moving through the city, being the eyes and ears of the city.”

Woldu added: “Our people are pretty private. They don’t easily share their histories. But their stories are woven into so much of the art they create, the food they cook, the way they raise their children.”

Our people. Not their people. Our people.

The phrase hung in the California air, unremarked upon, unquestioned.

The Unfinished Duet

ADDIS ABABA/STOCKHOLM — It remains unknown whether Helen Pawlos and Helen Berhe have ever met.

Neither artist responded to interview requests for this feature. Representatives for both women declined to comment on their relationship or lack thereof. Searches of concert archives, recording credits, and photographic records reveal no documented encounter.

But the imagination supplies what documentation withholds.

“We dream of a concert,” confided a young Ethiopian musician who requested anonymity, fearing professional repercussions for speaking about Eritrea during this sensitive period. “Two Helens. One stage. One microphone between them. Can you imagine?”

She paused.

“When governments fail, artists remember how to talk to each other. It’s always been this way. It will always be this way.”

What Endures

CODA — Nebay Abraha’s 2019 words return like a refrain: You live by preaching the peace. You live by preaching the love.

The two Helens have preached this sermon for decades. Not from pulpits, but from stages. Not in diplomatic communiqués, but in the spaces between notes. Not by demanding unity, but by embodying it so naturally that audiences forget to ask where the singer was born.

This is the work that continues when treaties fail and borders close. This is the song that refuses to stop, even when checkpoints multiply and accusations fly. This is the truth that politicians cannot legislate away: that Ethiopians and Eritreans were family long before they were citizens of separate states, and they will remain family long after the current tensions recede into memory.

The Ethiopian Helen. The Eritrean Helen.

Two women. One name. One region. One heartbeat.

They have never shared a stage. But they have always shared a song.

And that song, unheard but undeniable, continues to play.

This feature was reported and written against the backdrop of renewed Ethiopia-Eritrea tensions in February 2026. The Ethiopian Herald made multiple attempts to reach Helen Pawlos and Helen Berhe for comment; neither responded by press time. The artists’ non-response should not be interpreted as endorsement or rejection of this article’s thesis.