Pianist and composer Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou was born under the name Yéwédbar Guébrou on December 12, 1923 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Her father was the prominent Ethiopian intellectual Kentiba Gébrou Désta (I should probably mention at this point that the English spelling of Ethiopian names and locations varies between sources). She received some of her musical education in Switzerland, where she studied violin and piano, and then continued to study music in Ethiopia in 1933. Her family was deported to the island of Asinara in 1937 and then to Mercogliano during the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. Her family later returned to heir homeland and became part of the country's high society, and she was able to study music in Cairo. However, her ambition of studying piano in England was crushed when Emperor Haile Selassie nixed a plan by one of his sons to sponsor her studies.
She entered the Guishen Maryam monastery in 1948 and became a Christian nun, taking the name Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou. She left the monastery after two years because of health problems and taught in an Addis orphanage. She composed and recorded haunting, contemplative solo piano music, often characterized by rolling left-hand arpeggios, simple melodies and modulations on the right hand, and the use of 3/3 meter that reportedly reflects the influence of Ethiopian music. Indeed, Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou was influenced by early Ethiopian church music and Ethiopian pop, although her primary influences were European classical composers; her music also sounds a bit like early American jazz piano at times.
She released several LPs, including at least three recorded in Germany, and donated the proceeds to charity. She returned permanently to the monastery in 1984 and moved to Jerusalem, where she currently resides (to the best of my knowledge). Her sixth recording, a collection of her solo piano music titled Ethiopiques Volume 21: Ethiopia Song, Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, was released as part of of the Ethiopiques music series on the France-based record label Buda Musqiue in 2006. I must credit Francis Falceto's liner notes to that CD as the source of most of the information provided here (much of which is also printed on the website for the Emahoy Tsege Mariam Music Foundation, "a non-profit organization registered in the state of Virginia to teach classical and jazz music to children in Africa and assist American children to study music in Africa.) Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou was also interviewed by the Voice America, but that was not a particularly useful source of information for me since the interview was conducted in Amharic.
If you'd like to listen to her music, here's "Mother's Love"
and "The Homeless Wanderer":