The Best American Travel Writing 2017

by Lauren Collins

  When Arefaine and his teammates landed in Nairobi for a layover, the foreign-based players wandered through the terminal, shopping and eating. The local athletes sat at their gate in hard blue plastic seats, uncomfortably eyeing one another, while their coaches and the president of the Eritrean National Football Federation sat behind them, holding their passports. The players felt like hostages. “The others can do anything they want, but you just sit and wait,” Henok Semere, a striker, said. Then a representative from the Eritrean embassy in Kenya arrived at the gate and began talking with the officials. While they were distracted, Arefaine turned to Alex Russom, a baby-faced left back, sitting next to him, and told him that he wanted to escape. “He asked if I want to join him,” Russom recalled. “I said, ‘How did you know I was also thinking that?’”

  Arefaine had been contemplating escape for years. He had kept in touch with several players who defected in Uganda, and after they resettled, in Holland, he had asked them for advice on how to get asylum. The most important thing, they told him, was to persuade the entire team to go with him. Any one of his teammates who refused to go could betray him.

  It was hard to know whom to trust. Some of his teammates later confessed that Eritrean security officials had asked them to inform on the others in case of an escape plot. “There was no closeness among the ten of us—we were not friends,” Arefaine said. “I just took the risk.” It turned out that many of his teammates were interested. But Nairobi wasn’t a good place to defect: there was nowhere to run at the airport, and they had only two hours before their next flight. Besides, his friends in Holland had given him a second piece of advice: don’t escape until after the game. “If you escape without playing, no one will notice you, because you are not on the media,” they explained. “You need radio, television.”

  After landing in Francistown, the sleepy city in Botswana where the match was being held, the team members took a nap, had practice, and went to dinner. Then Arefaine gathered the local players in a hotel room, to determine who wanted to join the escape. Everyone enthusiastically agreed, except Semere, the striker. He had another way out: as the only college graduate and the only one fluent in English, he could apply for graduate programs abroad. The idea of leaving his family and friends made him nervous, and he knew that his father, a successful farmer, would not approve. “Henok was scared at first,” Arefaine said. But he was also afraid of going back. What if he didn’t get accepted at a foreign university, or the government didn’t allow him to go? The other option—crossing through the desert to Sudan, Libya, or Ethiopia—was too dangerous. Finally, he agreed to join. In the hotel lobby, Arefaine helped the others purchase SIM cards and exchange their money for pula, the local currency. He asked the manager to arrange for a taxi to pick them up at 4:00 a.m., explaining that they wanted to go on vacation after the match.

  They lost the game that evening. “Our minds were elsewhere,” Arefaine said. Back in their rooms, the team’s captain, a Swedish-Eritrean, turned on some music to help everyone relax, but the mood remained tense. Eventually, one of the dual-nationality players asked what was wrong, and Arefaine revealed the escape plan. The player gave Arefaine 200 pounds, and some of the other foreign-based teammates contributed dollars and euros.

  At 4:00 a.m., Arefaine and the others assembled in the hall and packed their belongings into a single bag. They moved quietly; a Botswana policeman who was escorting the team was asleep in an adjacent room. Arefaine was in a fog. He had brought T-shirts, shorts, sandals, and track pants but had forgotten his phone. “We left the hotel in a rush—we didn’t want to waste time,” he said.

  When they got to the lobby, there was no taxi on the street. They paused, wondering if they should wait for one. A few of the players went to the reception desk and asked where they could find the U.S. embassy or the Red Cross. The hotel staff wasn’t sure, but told them that they could catch a minibus into the center of town. The players decided to try to find the offices on foot. As they walked out of the lobby, security guards watched with surprise. “We told them we were just going on a walk, relaxing,” Arefaine said. “When we went out, there was nothing. It was dark, dark. We didn’t know where to go.”

  Eritreans think of their sovereignty as hard-won, and with good reason. The country’s modern borders were set in the late nineteenth century, when Italy invaded a funnel-shaped area of highlands and arid plains on Africa’s northeastern coast and named it Eritrea, from the Latin phrase Erythraeum Mare, or Red Sea. The colonists could not have picked a more inhospitable environment: erratic rainfall, a desertlike coast, dry riverbeds, mangrove swamps, and valleys sunk below sea level. Their policies segregated Eritreans from Italians, in a precursor to South African apartheid, and forbade them to attend secondary school, even as they were drafted to fight Italy’s wars. When Italy lost the colony to Britain, in 1941, the new administrators stripped Eritrea of much of its naval, rail, and industrial infrastructure, and then, with little use left for the colony, turned it over to the United Nations.

  At the time, Eritreans had high hopes that they would finally be able to govern themselves. Instead, their neighbor Ethiopia intervened. The two countries share common ethnic groups, languages, customs, and historical origins, in the ancient Christian empires of the Horn of Africa. They also share a border, and, for centuries, Ethiopians looking across the frontier have coveted the territory, which offers both fertile farmland and a pathway to the sea. Emperor Haile Selassie, who believed that the land was his by right, lobbied the UN, and Eritrea was designated an autonomous territory under the Ethiopian crown. In the coming years, Selassie replaced Eritrea’s flag with Ethiopia’s, supplanted the national languages of Tigrinya and Arabic with Amharic, and finally abolished the federation, erasing the Eritrean state.

  “Eritreans who were living under the Ethiopian occupation never felt at ease,” Abraham Zere, an Eritrean journalist who lives in exile in the United States, told me. “It has always been ‘us’ and ‘them.’” When resistance movements formed, in the north of Eritrea, the crown’s Army punished their supporters, killing villagers, burning homes, and slaughtering livestock. By 1961, Eritrean fighters had gathered in the mountains near the Ethiopian border, in a maze of underground bunkers that contained hospitals, a school, and living quarters. It was an uneven fight: Ethiopia’s population was more than ten times that of Eritrea. Ethiopia had arms and equipment from the Soviet Union and the United States, while the Eritreans were forced to capture munitions from their enemies. The war affected everyone, Zere said. “My family was often hiding from the continuous bombings.”

  In 1991, the Eritreans, with the help of a rebel group in Ethiopia, finally defeated the occupiers. After thirty years of fighting, Eritrea had lost as many as 65,000 people in combat, and 200,000 more to famine and the effects of war. But, with almost no support or recognition from abroad, the Eritreans had won, and they emerged proud and defiant. When I visited Asmara recently, a national festival was celebrating twenty-five years of independence. On the sprawling Expo Grounds, among food vendors and historical displays, the government has preserved the fuselage of an airliner, which an Ethiopian fighter pilot had strafed on the runway. Across town, in a vast place called the Tank Graveyard, the rusting remains of Ethiopian tanks stand as a monument to the war.

  After the victory, Isaias Afewerki, a hero of the struggle, became Eritrea’s leader, and his party, the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice, or PFDJ, promised to lead the country toward a constitution and democratic elections. Two years later, though, another dispute erupted between Ethiopia and Eritrea, over a border town called Badme. Both sides quickly escalated the conflict; Ethiopia cut off trade, and Eritrea’s economy stagnated. When Afewerki decided to go into battle, Eritreans, accustomed to war to preserve their homeland, enlisted to fight. One of Arefaine’s older brothers went, and was killed—one of an estimated 19,000 Eritreans who died in two years.

  In 2002, a commission in The Hague ruled that Eritrea had legal r
ights to the disputed territory, but Ethiopia has continued its occupation. As the war dragged on, people around Afewerki began describing him as severe and brutish, given to autocratic tendencies. “The PFDJ is Eritrea, and I am the PFDJ,” he proclaimed. After members of the Party’s central council questioned his handling of the war—had there been no diplomatic alternative to the huge loss of life and the economic devastation?—Afewerki had eleven of them thrown in prison. He also shut down independent media, jailing editors. In 2010, after an Al Jazeera interviewer challenged him, he called her questions “a pack of lies.” Then, according to Zere’s reporting, he returned to his office and slapped Ali Abdu, the information minister, while his staff looked on. Two years later, Abdu defected while on a trip to Australia. Afterward, his fifteen-year-old daughter, his brother, and his elderly father were put in prison.

  Afewerki has used the threat, real or imagined, of renewed war with Ethiopia to keep his citizens in a precarious state that they describe as “no war, no peace.” Now, Eritreans say, they can be detained for crimes as slight as harboring ill will toward the government. There is usually no trial; detainees are often not told the offense, or for how long they will be held. Zerit Yohhanes, a midfielder on the national soccer team, told me that his father has been in prison for more than twenty-five years. The family has no idea why. Maybe he was detained by mistake.

  Asmara, where Arefaine grew up, is a serene city of half a million people, set on a plateau at almost 8,000 feet. There are broad streets with peach-toned Art Deco buildings; on Harnet Avenue, lined with palm trees, people stroll past cafés, bars, bakeries, and cinemas. In the middle of the street stands a red brick cathedral, where, during my visit, teenagers sat flirting on the steps. The city is slow-paced, and crime is low. Western diplomats say, with evident relief, that Asmara is “not like an African city.”

  Because the government restricts permits for new construction, there is a housing shortage in the city, and people build homes in unregulated settlements on the edge of Asmara. Arefaine grew up in one of these quarters, named Godaif; a paved main street gives way to dirt roads into the neighborhood, where the homes range from pastel-painted brick houses to lean-tos with laundry hanging outside. His father, a judge, owned land there, and so he built an orange house with four bedrooms for the family—four boys and four girls. Arefaine’s mother didn’t go to school, dedicating herself to caring for their children. Arefaine still sometimes cries when he talks about her. “My mom is the sweetest person, because she devoted her life to us,” he told me.

  Arefaine’s neighborhood was known for producing skilled, if rowdy, athletes. He described the local pastimes as playing soccer, fighting, and drinking suwa, a kind of beer made from sorghum. Arefaine wanted to be a professional soccer player from the time he could stretch his legs. His father, who was strict and controlling, pressured him to excel in school, and they argued. Arefaine wasn’t serious enough, he said. He preferred the cinema and nightclubs to school, and he was always the first one on the dance floor at weddings. But his talent for soccer was evident. As early as high school, scouts began inquiring about him. He joined a club team called Tesfa, and sneaked out of the house to play matches.

  School wasn’t that interesting, anyway. In history classes, his teachers spent most of the time on the country’s perpetual struggle against Ethiopia. In geography, Arefaine learned the names of the other countries in Africa, but that was about it. “Our knowledge about the outside world until we finish high school is very limited,” he said.

  Arefaine grew up surrounded by support for the Afewerki regime. During the liberation struggle, his father had spied on the Ethiopian occupiers, and then been caught and imprisoned for seven months; he never relinquished the revolutionary spirit. In Arefaine’s classes, Afewerki was described as a modest, nearly omniscient man, focused on his people’s well-being. On state-run media, he gives hours-long lectures, in which he spins connections among far-flung episodes in world history and politics; local channels feature him in multipart epics about the independence struggle.

  At Santa Ana Secondary School, where Arefaine studied, Eritrea’s national anthem is printed on a bulletin board at the entrance: “The pride of her oppressed people proved that truth prevails.” But Arefaine began to see soldiers violently round up people who had been caught without identification papers. In his second year at Santa Ana, soldiers came to take the oldest students in each grade, saying that they were going to a vocational school. Instead, they were sent to military training camps.

  Afewerki had instituted the camps in the mid-1990s, as part of a national program of mandatory military service. The term of service, beginning after the third year of high school, was originally eighteen months. It is now indefinite, and the program has become the country’s dominant employer, shuttling recruits from camps into a wide range of occupations. A fortunate few, like children of government officials and generals, can get civil-service positions or white-collar jobs—though even they have to attend drills and guard government buildings. The rest are in a standing military of some 300,000, who work on government projects in construction, farming, and mining, or are deployed to the border with Ethiopia. Most are paid roughly 400 nakfa, or $30, a month. Everyone has a gun at home.

  A trainee’s experience is determined by his unit and location: generally, the more remote your station, the worse the conditions. “The one thing that is constant is the abuse,” Yohannes Woldemariam, an Eritrean who taught international relations for a decade at Fort Lewis College, in Colorado, said. Arefaine’s older siblings came home complaining about the camps; their parents told them to be patient, that everyone went through it. But Arefaine saw people he knew, students and teachers, fleeing Eritrea. Some walked to refugee camps in Ethiopia and Sudan, braving gunfire from border guards. Others paid smugglers thousands of dollars to lead them through the Sahara to Libya and then Europe. In 2012, Eritrean Air Force pilots flew a government plane to Saudi Arabia to seek asylum.

  As people left the country, the regime began a more aggressive campaign of surveillance; in some cases, Eritreans told me, you could be detained for “thinking about escaping.” In Arefaine’s neighborhood, a woman named Saada reported evaders to the authorities, and boys avoided walking by her house. “I started being cautious whenever I talk about the government, about other things, with friends, because someone could report me,” Arefaine said. Zerit Yohhanes, the midfielder, told me that, when he dropped out of school to avoid the camps, a friend’s mother reported him. She even delivered the letter recalling him for duty. Yohhanes was baffled; the woman’s own son had fled to Sudan in order to dodge service. “I told her, ‘Your son is somewhere else. Why are you doing this to me?’” he said. She replied, “I’m just the messenger.” Suspicion is so widespread that even long-acquainted neighbors can be wary of one another. “The system has created an atmosphere of mistrust among Eritreans,” Ghebremeskel, of the Eritrean Movement for Democracy and Human Rights, told me. “You can’t trust your own brother.”

  In 2004, Arefaine’s older brother fled through the desert to Sudan, eventually making his way to England. “He was angry because of the national service,” Arefaine recalled. “That’s why he left.” Still, their father encouraged the other children to volunteer for service. It was their duty, he said. The government told them that the service and the roundups were necessary, because of the threat from Ethiopia, and they believed it.

  As Arefaine finished his third year of high school, he wondered which camp he would be sent to. Many of his classmates would spend their last year of high school at Sawa, an enormous military complex about 170 miles northwest of Asmara. Children of the well connected were often allowed to attend Sawa because of its proximity to Asmara. If you managed to find the time amid your duties to study there, you could gain entrance to a college.

  Arefaine’s teammate Semere, the son of the prosperous farmer, had lived in one of the hot, poorly ventilated hangars that function as dormitories for Sawa�
��s thousands of trainees. In the mornings, he attended a school nearby, and then supervisors took him and the other recruits to do hard labor at commercial farms, digging and plowing for no pay. “You think, I don’t deserve this at this age,” he said. “You come just as a child. That’s why they take you at that age—you don’t know anything, and you just follow them. You are terrified.”

  Men and women trained together; during the independence struggle, an idea had taken hold that women should be equally involved in all national activities. But Asia Abdulkadir, an Eritrean-German gender consultant for the UN, told me that the women were often abused. “The senior commander would always choose the best-looking girl and bring her to his unit to wash his clothes, cook his food, make sure his house is always clean,” she said. “And there is a pressure for the girls to offer sexual services.” At Sawa, Semere knew girls who had been impregnated by commanders.

  The base was close to the border with Sudan, and thirty of Semere’s hall mates eventually escaped. He stayed, and studied as much as he could, poring over math and physics textbooks in the hours before a 4:00 a.m. wake-up call. If trainees failed college-entrance exams, they would be immediately drafted back into service. “So you end up in the military for the rest of your life,” Arefaine said. Eritrea has only seven colleges, and there is a shortage of qualified teachers, according to Tadesse Mehari, who heads the National Commission for Higher Education. The government spends $5 million a year to hire expatriate faculty, mostly Indians. It has sent students abroad for advanced degrees, in the hope that they would return to teach. But, Mehari said, “that’s not faring very well, because many of the youngsters this time do not want to come back.”