A mile and a half above the Red Sea, where the Rift Valley plunges from the East African escarpment, sits a city above the clouds, clinging to the continent’s edge. A landing in Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, takes the breath away: not just from the city’s altitude, inducing Everest-tourist gasps, but from the approach, as your pilot flies uphill from the coast before shooting the plateau and turning sharply, and bumpily, onto the battered runway. Asmara itself is breathtaking, thanks to its Italian colonial legacy, a million miles from the chaotic-African-metropolis stereotype.
Instead, it feels like Napier. Largely built as the jewel in the crown of Mussolini’s new Roman empire during the 1930s, Asmara is a futurist time-capsule, with technology fetishised everywhere: a petrol station is designed as an aircraft in flight, factories are ocean-liners, complete with portholes and gangways. It’s easy to picture Il Duce, sawing the air and declaiming from the town hall balcony. Faded ice-cream tones and creeping bougainvillaea soften the severe lines of a deco-spotter’s dream.
Asmarinos themselves have the same flavour: dapper gents in Borsalino hats take tiny espressos in Cafe Vittoria, Pasticeria Moderna or the foyer of the crimson-hued Impero picture palace. Ancient Fiat 500s trundle the palm-lined avenues of the centro’s grid. Lycra-clad racing cyclists shoot past: the colonialists’ favourite sport survives. The city’s preservation is a small miracle in the globalised age.
But behind the beauty lurks darkness. The evening passeggiata steps aside for a clunky motorised tricycle, the rider’s limb severed by landmine or artillery. The Fiat cavalcade is broken by the sleek four-wheel-drives of United Nations peacekeepers and hangers-on. Stroll to the outskirts and tumble across an ordnance cemetery: a wasteland of rusting tanks and spent weaponry amid grand imperial villas.
You can be forgiven if Eritrea’s existence is news to you. But refugees from the tiny Horn of Africa state, population 4.4 million, have been arriving in New Zealand for the past few years – in 2003-04 they ranked third for refugee intake, after Afghanistan and Iraq, and their number stood at 208 by mid-2005. It’s also where Fred Hollows, the New Zealand eye surgeon Australians called their own, set up an intraocular contact-lens factory as part of a long personal campaign against poverty-based eye disease.
After the UN pushed Eritrea into a post-colonial shotgun marriage with Ethiopia, Eritreans, brutalised in turn by Haile Selassie’s empire and the American-, then Soviet-backed Derg regime, fought a 30-year war of independence almost totally unaided, from which they finally emerged victorious in 1991. Along the way, the Derg regime was overthrown.
The Cold War over, Bill Clinton hailed both Eritrea and Ethiopia as beacons for Africa’s future. But Eritrea’s leadership, rendered unforgiving by the long lonely struggle, turned its back on the world, applying a Stalinist touch at home. In 1998, the neighbours went back to war after a trivial border dispute escalated. By 2001, when stalemate was reached, 80,000 had died on both sides, in a conflict fought with the tactics of the Somme. With the UN-demarcated border negotiations frozen, the tinder remains dry.
Somewhere along the way, the world forgot Eritrea. Why? British journalist Michela Wrong, a veteran Africa hand (for Reuters, the BBC and the Financial Times), decided to find out. Her second book, I Didn’t Do It For You, undertakes in its subtitle to explain How the World Used and Abused a Small African Nation.
Wrong’s first work, In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz (which won the PEN non-fiction prize in 2000), was a rollicking ride through the rise and fall of Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, a despot’s despot, who took the former Belgian Congo, already a byword for the worst excesses of colonialism, to new levels of grotesqueness. Her analysis of Eritrea is both subtler and far spikier: with its hindsight advantage, it breaks from the worthiness of previous works on the subject – a scant collection understandably mesmerised by Eritrean determination, such as Dan Connell’s Against All Odds, a loving account of the liberation struggle, or John Pilger’s chapter in Heroes, his 1980s paean to forgotten battlers. Even Thomas Keneally had a go with To Asmara, a liberation-struggle love story redolent of socialist realism.
Wrong’s book, four years in the writing, does not aim to be a definitive history. But she gives clarity to a twisting saga by taking her scope well beyond Eritrea and seeing what happened there as a metaphor for the sins of the modern world’s power-players, from the “great game” of imperialism through its collapse and the Cold War’s self-serving realpolitik to the equally cynical disengagement of the aftermath of that.
We learn, for example, of the 70-year colonial misadventure behind Asmara’s architectural treasure-trove. Late 19th-century Italy, newly unified and keen to foot it with the big boys, founded the colony named for the “Erythraeum Mare” – Latin for “Red Sea” – and swiftly emulated the Belgians in the Congo: local leaders were murdered, land and women grabbed. Under Mussolini, Italy imposed Africa’s first apartheid regime. Still, Wrong (herself half-Italian) finds an ambiguous legacy: Italian expansionism fed infrastructure development, including two marvels of engineering: a winding rail network up the escarpment that puts the Raurimu Spiral to shame, and a 70km freight cableway from the ancient port of Massawa to Asmara, the longest and highest such structure in the world.
The British ejected Italy from Eritrea in the epic, forgotten Battle of Keren in 1941. The chapter on the clash is one of the book’s strongest, a triumph of forensic military analysis that shows Wrong’s eye for detail (an incident from this time gives the book its title – allegedly the response of a British officer to a local, upon being thanked for defeating the Italians).
Although less brutal, the British, in Wrong’s portrait, come across as more contemptible than the Italians. First they robbed Eritrea of the tools of statehood by strip-mining its infrastructure (including the cableway, dismantled in an act of mind-boggling pettiness), and then they contrived, along with the US, to ensure that the United Nations (rarely has the UN looked so impotent as it did in this case) handed coastal Eritrea over to Haile Selassie’s landlocked Ethiopia, thus guaranteeing (at first anyway) an African ally against the Soviet threat.
Unavoidably, Eritrea’s story is also Ethiopia’s story. We learn that Ethiopia, a country with the image of being the cradle of ancient African civilisation, is an artificial federation of rival ethnicities, forged by one warlord with the help of Western weaponry. The persecution of Eritrea by Haile Selassie and Mengistu Haile Mariam, the dictator who overthrew him, was only the final manifestation of this tendency.
Wrong keeps her material from collapsing under its own weight with a structure that maximises individuals’ stories. It’s an unexpected cast at times. Who knew, for example, that Sylvia Pankhurst, long after the campaign for women’s suffrage, became a champion of Ethiopian statehood, even to the extent of spending her last years there? Another chapter, hilarious and tragic by turn, outlines the story of the GIs of Kagnew Station, the electronic eavesdropping post from which the US (thanks to Asmara’s altitude) kept tabs on the entire Middle East. While US-trained Ethiopian troops were massacring Eritreans outside, these young men performed their duties in a hermetically sealed world, venturing out only for whoring and boozing. Wrong has elicited some remarkably frank accounts (and is frank in her own courting of the American market here): small wonder modern Eritrea keeps the world at arm’s length.
At the end of it, however, it is the Eritreans that star, and we meet some fascinating individuals, such as a former freedom-fighter, now a London mechanic; members of sleeper cells during the occupation; Massawa’s last Italian, rotting away in a junkyard of misanthropy; and the freedom fighters themselves, in the mountainous redoubt that became a state-in-waiting for many years, where with logic-defying levels of patience and self-sacrifice they regrouped before emerging to grind down the oppressor.
Wrong also speaks of the “true believers”, Eritrea’s foreign cheer-leaders who, enamoured by the country’s pluck, placed it on a pedestal so high that the only way was down. Inevitably, on first arrival in 1996, she caught a little of the faith herself.
Today, the iconography of the struggle may be seen in its ultimate form: statues memorialising pairs of Kongos, the black plastic sandals worn by the freedom fighters. Yet Eritrea’s history is tragic in its circularity. Under Isaias Afewerki, the President-for-life who personified the independence struggle’s ruthless determination, Eritrea has become a vicious one-party state, intolerant of dissent, spurning outside agency. Its war with the Ethiopian ex-freedom fighters of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, with whom it once united to usurp the Derg, is the doing of two stubborn former revolutionaries, congenitally unable to blink first, an implacable family feud.
Although the Eritreans’ unity in the face of adversity remains intact, we are left with a sense of a people without hope, in a maw of endless poverty and gloom.
If this fascinating insight into a neglected nation has a weakness, it is the tendency to treat Eritreans as a homogeneous culture. Although half of them are Christian (mostly Coptic Eastern Orthodox), another almost-half are Muslim: Eritrea’s first independence movement (before being usurped by Isaias and his Christian cohorts) was Muslim-led. Much to the horror of Eritrea’s diaspora, one of the suspects arrested for the attempted bombings on London’s transport network on July 21 is an Eritrean-born Muslim, with the others being Muslims from Eritrea’s neighbours. With hindsight, some insight into this aspect of Eritrea’s make-up would have been useful.
Still, books about events have a tendency to be overtaken by them. Wrong fulfils the promise of her subtitle, at a time when Africa’s huge predicament is the geo-political preoccupation of the moment. The mulish modern Eritrea that she describes can probably contribute little to the debate beyond its own tragic history (ironically, Ethiopia is championed by Tony Blair’s Africa Commission as a model of governance, despite its refusal to recognise the UN’s border demarcation that was supposed to end the 1998-2000 conflict).
But Wrong ends with an image both hopeful and absurd: a seven-hour, 32km journey along the winding railway between Massawa and Asmara, painstakingly restored since independence, complete with colonial Italian rolling-stock and the original ancient drivers and engineers. It’s a fitting symbol for Wrong’s Eritrea: stubborn, magnificent, soldiering on.
I DIDN’T DO IT FOR YOU: How the World Used and Abused a Small African Nation, by Michela Wrong (HarperCollins, $26).