Eritrea- How history can help to forge a national character

By the Economist

Jan 22, 2005 — Michela Wrong’s first book, which came out in 2000, took the reader on an absurd journey through the Congo under General Mobutu Sese Seko. As sad as it was hilarious, “In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz” set a new standard for journalistic narrative about Africa, and it richly deserved the PEN prize for non-fiction.

Such glittering beginnings are all too often followed by less successful efforts. But Ms Wrong’s second book, about the little known nation of Eritrea, is, if anything, better than her first. Her original research is more illuminating, her eye more observant, her writing far more wry and witty.

Dry, inhospitable and hotter than anyone can imagine, craggy mountainous Eritrea, clinging to the Horn of Africa, seems to offer nothing to speak of. But it has history; and what a history. “In fact,” as one Eritrean academic says, “that’s all it has.”

In the 1930s, Benito Mussolini’s architects built an Art Deco city in Asmara, Eritrea’s capital and the centre of Italy’s short-lived “place in the sun”, its second Roman Empire. During the second world war, Britain invaded the Horn of Africa, seized much of the Italian investment in Eritrea’s ports and industry, and sold it off (without paying any compensation) to help finance its own war efforts farther north. Then the UN, which administered the territory after the war, allowed itself to be persuaded by Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, Eritrea’s western neighbour, that Eritrea had no rights of its own and should come under his imperial flag.

Haile Selassie’s flirtation with America took on an added glow at the height of the cold war after it was discovered that Eritrea’s topography made it the best place on earth to receive and transmit radio signals, and that it was particularly well suited to allow America to monitor traffic to and from Russia, Israel, Egypt, Libya and the rest of the Middle East. America took out a 25-year lease on a site on top of the Hamasien plateau and built Kagnew, its biggest eavesdropping installation anywhere, for which it eventually paid Ethiopia more than $360m in military aid as rent.

After the emperor was overthrown, the new Ethiopian regime hightailed it over to the Soviet side from which it extricated nearly $9 billion more in military hardware, much of which it used to try to crush the Eritrean rebel movement that had been growing stronger with every passing year. Only when the cold war came to an end did Ethiopia and Eritrea make a peace (of sorts) that would allow Eritrea to forge its way to independence. By then, 60,000 Eritreans had been killed fighting its neighbour, one in 50 of its people (a later senseless border war killed another 70,000).

To crush an army four times its size Eritrea’s rag-bag rebel movement pledged lives to the cause. In the mountainous outback the rebels created a flourishing cultural life in which education was compulsory. Suffering and fortitude gave Eritrea its strength and the rebels’ commitment drew admiring visitors from all over the world. When independence came after 1991, it was widely believed that this was the one country that would not succumb to corruption, bigotry or Big-Manism, Africa’s common malaises. But after just five years the dream had begun to darken.

That the full story of Eritrea has never been told before is in part because the country has always been a small square of a much bigger canvas, but also perhaps because the countries that involved themselves in its affairs seem always to have behaved in such an appalling way. Eritrea’s fate at the hands of others is an example of how grudges that are not dealt with take on a momentum of their own and how small conflicts left to fester long enough can bring down empires.

It also demonstrates, and this is where Ms Wrong’s book shines most strongly, how history can help to forge a national character. As Eritrea faces the challenges of making a nation out of a national movement, it is still to be seen whether its mulish and self-reliant people can rediscover the extraordinary inner strength they demonstrated as a fighting rebel army.

– I Didn’t Do It For You: How the World Betrayed a Small African Nation.
– By Michela Wrong.
– Fourth Estate; 342 pages; £16.99. To be published in America by HarperCollins in June