I Didn't Do It for You

by Michela Wrong

  In the Field, the EPLF had eschewed ranks, and the personality cults that were de rigueur elsewhere in Africa were regarded with fastidious disapproval. What a relief, after seeing portraits of Moi and Mobutu above every shop counter, to hear an Eritrean, driving past a window displaying a rare photograph of Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki, ‘tsk’ disapprovingly and say: ‘I really don’t like that.’ Rather than building a palace, Isaias still lived in a modest Asmara home donated by the government. He wore simple safari suits, not Parisian couture. Visiting journalists were granted interviews within a day of arrival (in my years of visiting I had four); here was none of the scripted inaccessibility of the leader hiding behind his fawning courtiers. As for the blaring motorcades favoured by his contemporaries, shoppers on Liberation Avenue would sometimes register with a start that the man they had just passed, walking quietly along on his own, was their head of state. Isaias was in the habit of rising from the table at the end of official receptions and–to the horror of scrambling bodyguards–asking guest presidents to join him on one of his unscheduled strolls around Asmara. While foreign investors raved about the absence of official corruption, the stiff-backed integrity of those in government, Western capitals hailed Isaias and his freshly-instated friend across the border, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, as forming the core of a new group of principled leaders spearheading a much-needed African Renaissance. The two men had worked together as rebel leaders–they were rumoured to be distantly related–and future cooperation seemed assured. With this visionary duo at the helm, what could go wrong? The Horn seemed destined for an unprecedented era of stability and prosperity.

  The country was awash with Soviet and American weaponry, yet crime was almost unknown. The most dangerous thing that could happen to you in Asmara after dark was to stumble on a piece of broken paving. Ironically, a capital that had witnessed so much violence was blessed with an extraordinary tranquillity, it breathed peace in time with the cicada’s rhythmic rasp. Asmara was certainly the only African city in which not only was I regularly offered lifts by strangers, but I accepted them without hesitation. I joined diners who gestured me over to their tables in restaurants and cleared a seat for customers who decided, off their own bat, that they fancied sharing a coffee. As for begging, it was regarded as below Eritrean dignity. I saw a persistent beggar boy being given a reproving cuff round the ear from an ex-Fighter mortified by the impression he was making on a visitor. One’s expectations were always being turned on their head. ‘Have you got any local money?’ a handsome Eritrean student who had shared my flight asked as we were about to leave the airport terminal. Before I had time to mutter a refusal, he had extracted a banknote from his wallet: ‘Here, take this for the taxi. You can pay me back later.’ It was a typically Eritrean moment: in one of the world’s poorest nations, I had just become the scrounger.

  Journalists are mocked for using their taxi drivers as political barometers. But the conversation between airport terminal and city centre can prove more insightful than any diplomatic briefing. I was accustomed to the standard African taxi man’s dirge. It started with a whinge about economic hardship, moved to a caustic assessment of both the president and opposition’s shortcomings, and climaxed in a prediction–usually horribly prescient–of just how awful things were about to get. In Eritrea, the first taxi driver I met turned out to be one of Eritrea’s longest-serving ex-Fighters. Ministers booked for interview strode past me in reception to knock shoulders with him and pat him on the back. He not only thought the president was a hero, he knew exactly what needed to be done to rebuild a war-shattered country. But then, so did every Eritrean I met. In truth, conducting a range of interviews began to feel like an exercise in futility. Whether minister, businessman, waiter or farmer, everyone seemed to think along identical lines. But this didn’t sound like regurgitated propaganda. The need for self-reliance, the miracles that could be worked through discipline and hard work, the importance of learning from Africa’s mistakes: such beliefs had been hammered out during committee meetings and village debates, for the EPLF was passionately committed to grassroots discussion. I had the uncanny feeling that I was speaking to the many mouths of one single, Hydra-headed creature: the Eritrean soul.

  By God, they were impressive, though it has to be said that one rarely experienced a fit of uncontrollable giggles. The self-deprecating, surreal hilarity I had come to appreciate in central Africa as the saving grace of lives lived in grotesque disorder was absent here: Eritreans did dour intensity better than they did humour. Their wiry physiques–the result of not years, but generations of going without–spoke of iron control. Their personalities were as starkly defined as the climate itself, stripped of fuzzy edges. If you made the mistake of flippantly challenging one of their black-and-white certainties, you could feel the shutters coming down, as they withdrew into prickly, how-could-you-expect-to-understand-us censoriousness.

  A refrain kept running through my head, a catchphrase from a British sitcom of the 1970s. ‘I didn’t get where I am today…’ a beetle-browed magnate would intone at the start of every sweeping pronouncement. Eritrea, it seemed to me, had its own, unarticulated version of the uncompromising mantra. ‘I didn’t spend 10/20/30 years at the Front to be patronized by a foreigner/kept waiting by a bureaucrat/messed around by a traffic cop,’ it ran. Extraordinary suffering brought with it, I guessed, a sense of extraordinary entitlement that easily tipped over into chippiness. ‘Why are Eritreans so bad at saying “thank you”?’ I once asked an ex-Fighter friend. I was feeling slightly irritated at receiving the classic Eritrean reaction to a gift chosen with some care: an expressionless grunt, followed by the quick concealment of the unopened present, never to be mentioned again. ‘I bet it’s because they feel it’s below their dignity.’ My friend launched into a long explanation as to how, in rural communities, a peasant was expected automatically to share anything he received with the village. This democratic practice had been maintained at the Front, he said, so gifts had little meaning. In any case, showing emotion–whether happiness or grief–was regarded as a sign of weakness, simply not done. Even saying ‘please’ seemed unnecessarily effusive. The explanation continued, various theories were explored, until finally my friend paused and added, almost as an afterthought, ‘Anyway, there’s a feeling that we fought for 30 years and no one helped us, so why should we thank anyone? We don’t owe thanks to anyone.’

  Even that small admission felt like a major insight, because Eritreans, famous for their reserve, do not like to talk about themselves. Whether they spoke in Italian–the Western language of the older generation–or English, taught to the young, it was always a struggle persuading an Eritrean to drop the collective ‘We’ and experiment with a self-indulgent, egotistical ‘I’. The flow of words would slow to a dribble and dry up. For the tegadelti, in particular, it went against every lesson of community effort and shared sacrifice learnt at the Front. A curious monument taking shape on one of Asmara’s main roundabouts captured those values. Celebrating its victory, any other new government would have ordered either a statue of its leader, a tableau of freedom fighters depicted in glorious action, or a symbolic flaming torch. The Eritreans chose instead an outsize black metal sandal, a giant version of the plastic shidda worn by hundreds of thousands of Eritreans who could afford neither leather nor polish. Ridiculously cheap, washable, long-lasting, the Kongo sandal–as it was known–was the poor man’s boot, perfect symbol for an egalitarian movement. It must be the world’s only public monument to an item of footwear.

  My survey done, I took the image of Eritrea away with me, a memory to be treasured and coddled, summoned when bleakness loomed. I was not alone in finding that with Eritrea as an example, Africa seemed a little less despairing, a touch more hopeful. If Eritrea, with its devastating history, could pull it off, surely other nations might too?

  Then True Believerdom took a tumble. In May 1998, to general astonishment, Eritrea and Ethiopia went back to war, after a min
or dispute over a dusty border village escalated into mass mobilization on both sides. The much-trumpeted friendship between Isaias and Meles had counted for little: the two leaders were no longer talking. Ethiopia accused Isaias of being a megalomaniac, Eritrea regarded the new war as proof that Ethiopia had never digested the loss of its coast and was bent on reconquest. Defying an Ethiopian flight ban, I flew to Asmara with a group of journalists, our chartered Kenyan plane taking a looping route via Djibouti and over the waters of the Red Sea to lessen the chances of being shot down. At the end of a buttock-clenching trip, we landed to find Eritrean helicopters crouched on the tarmac of an airport that had just been bombed by Ethiopian jets. Foreign embassies were scrambling to evacuate their nationals, the BBC’s World Service was telling British citizens to leave while they still could.

  The mood in town was bewildering: every Asmarino I met was convinced they would win this new war, albeit at the highest of prices, every foreign journalist believed they must lose. The Eritreans’ unshakeable certainty was exasperating, a positive handicap during a crisis that might require for its solution the murky skills of diplomacy, an ability to conceive of shades of grey. As ever, the community stood grimly united. ‘Eritrea is not made of people who cry,’ said an old businessman who had just waved goodbye to a son going off to fight. ‘We did not want this, but once it comes we will do whatever our country requires.’ The Eritrean capacity for speaking with one voice was beginning to sound a little creepy to my ears, as depressing as the belligerent warmongering blasting from television screens in Addis Ababa. In its chiming uniformity, it had a touch of The Stepford Wives.

  Two years later, after at least 80,000 soldiers from both sides of the border had died, the doubters were proved correct. With Ethiopian forces occupying Eritrea’s most fertile lands to the west and a third of Eritrea’s population living under UNHCR plastic sheeting, a peace deal was signed and a UN force moved in to separate the two sides. The war had been a disaster for Eritrea. But True Believers, already seriously questioning their assumptions, were about to be dealt a final, killer blow. In September 2001, President Isaias arrested colleagues who had dared challenge his handling of the war–including the ex-Fighters who had been closest to him during the Struggle–and shut down Eritrea’s independent media, a step even the likes of Mugabe, Mobutu and Moi had never dared, or bothered, to take. So much for Africa’s Renaissance. Many of the ministers whose independent musings had so impressed me were now in jail, denied access to lawyers. Plans to introduce a multiparty constitution and stage elections were put on indefinite hold, bolshie students sent for military training in the desert where no one could hear their views. Aloof and surrounded by sycophants, Isaias clearly had no intention of stepping down. As it gradually became clear that this was no temporary policy change, Eritrean ambassadors stationed abroad began applying for political asylum, members of the Eritrean diaspora postponed long-planned returns. As for the economy, who was going to invest now that the country’s skilled workers were all in uniform, the president had fallen out with Western governments, and relations with Ethiopia, Eritrea’s main market, were decidedly dodgy? No one cuffed the beggars on Liberation Avenue any more, because the beggars were not chirpy urchins but the old, left destitute by their children’s departure for the front.

  Far from learning from the continent’s mistakes, Eritrea had turned into the stalest, most predictable of African clichés. What was striking was how far the waves of despair and outrage at this presidential crackdown travelled. For the journalists, diplomats, academics and aid workers who followed Africa, this felt like a personal betrayal, because it had destroyed the last of their hopes for the continent. Had this happened in Zambia or Ivory Coast, we would have shaken our heads and shrugged. Because it had taken place in Eritrea, special, perverse, inspiring Eritrea, we raged. ‘How could they, oh, how could they?’ I remember an Israeli cameraman friend moaning over lunch in London’s Soho. This from a man who could not have spent more than a fortnight in Eritrea in his life.

  Somewhere along the line, it wasn’t yet clear where, the True Believers must have missed the point. They had failed to register important clues, drawn naive conclusions, misinterpreted key events. The qualities we had all so admired obviously came with a sinister reverse side. Had we mistaken arrogant pigheadedness for moral certainty, dangerous bloody-mindedness for focused determination? I had become intrigued by the Eritrean character, I realized, without digging very far into the circumstances in which it had been forged. ‘They carry their history around with them like an albatross,’ a British aid worker who had spent years with the EPLF had once warned me, but at the time I had not grasped her meaning. What was it in the country’s past, I wondered, that had given rise to such stubborn intensity, so invigorating in some circumstances, so destructive in others? What had made the Eritreans what they were today, with all their extraordinary strengths and fatal weaknesses?

  Even the most determined optimist has his moment of reckoning. An instant when he is forced to admit the society he sanctified is far darker, more convoluted, yes, on occasions downright nasty–than he was ready to admit. Increasingly, I found my mind wandering back to an incident I had once witnessed on Knowledge Street, round the corner from the sandal monument. Walking past a moving bus, I had noticed that the passengers were in uproar. At the heart of the storm of gesticulation sat a wizened old grandmother. The bus drove by and I heard it brake suddenly behind me, the doors open, the sound of an object hitting the pavement, the doors close, and then the bus disappeared into the night. Turning, I was astonished to see that the old woman, whom I guessed to be in her seventies, had been hurled horizontally out of the door–probably by the other passengers. Certainly, no one had interceded on her behalf. Maybe she had been very rude to the conductor, maybe she was a well-known fare dodger. Tempers, I knew, frayed fast in Eritrea. But I was astonished to witness an incident of this kind in Africa, where respect for old age runs so deep. That collective ejection was the kind of unsettling event that made you wonder if you had ever understood anything at all.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Last Italian

  ‘When the white snake has bitten you, you will search in vain for a remedy.’

  Eritrean rebel leader Bahta Hagos warns

  fellow chiefs against the Italians

  The old man lunged for his wooden cane and began flailing about around our feet. A moment earlier, the yard had seemed at peace, its occupants lulled to near coma in the heat, which lay upon us with the weight of a winter blanket. Now a deafening cacophony of clucks, squawks and screeches was coming from under the trestle bed on which Filippo Cicoria perched. From where I sat, I could see a blur of scuffling wings, stabbing beaks and orange claws. Two of his pet ducks were battling for supremacy. This was a cartoon fight, individual heads and wings suddenly jutting from the whirlwind at improbable angles. I kicked feebly in the ducks’ direction. ‘No, no,’ grunted Cicoria, jabbing rhythmically with his cane. ‘You have [jab] to hit them [jab, jab] on the head [jab].’ The squawks were rising in hysteria, but his broken leg, pinned and swollen, was making it difficult to manoeuvre into a position where he could deliver a knock-out blow. ‘That’s enough, you stupid bastards…THAT’S ENOUGH.’ There were two loud shrieks as the cane finally hit home and the duo fled for safety, leaving a small deposit of feathers behind.

  Feathers, I now saw, lay everywhere. A breeze from the sea, a narrow strip of turquoise behind him, lifted a thin layer of white down deposited by the pullets cheeping softly in the hutches above his bed. A dozen muscovy ducks dozed in the shade, their gnarled red beaks tucked under wings, while at the gates grazed a gaggle of geese. The air was rich with the acid stink of chicken droppings. The man, it was clear, liked his fowls. But not half as much as he liked old appliances. Cicoria’s scrapyard, perched on the last in the chain of islands that forms the Massawa peninsula, held what had to be the biggest collection of obsolete fridges and broken-down air-conditioning units in the wh
ole of Africa. Testimony to man’s losing contest with an unbearable climate, the boxes were stacked in their scores, white panels turning brown in the warm salt air. They lay alongside piled sheets of corrugated iron, abandoned car parts, ripped-up water fountains, discarded barbecues and ageing fuel drums. Chains and crankshafts, girders and gas cylinders, tubes and twists of wire, all came in the same rich shade of ochre. The entire junkyard was a tribute to the miraculous powers of oxidization. Once, Cicoria had been Mr Fix-It, the only man in Massawa who knew how to repair a hospital ice-maker, tinker with a yacht’s broken engine or get a hotel’s air conditioning running. Now, hobbled by a fall and slowed by emphysema, he was just Mr Keep-It, struggling for breath inside a man-made mountain of rust.

  I had telephoned from Asmara, keen to meet a man who I had been told personified a closing chapter of colonial history. ‘He’s the last one in Massawa,’ an elderly Italian friend in the capital had said. ‘When all the other Italians left, he stayed, through all the wars. He can’t come up to Asmara now, the air’s too thin for him.’ When Cicoria lifted the receiver, I heard a farmyard chorus of honks and clucks, so loud I could barely make out his words. He had sounded ratty, but not openly hostile. ‘Is there anything you’d like me to take him, since you haven’t seen him for a while?’ I asked my friend. ‘Errr…No.’ ‘Well, I’ll just pass on your best wishes, shall I?’ I suggested. ‘Yes, hmmm, that would be nice.’ The reticence was puzzling.

  The Italians have a word for those who fall in love with Africa’s desert wastes, putting down roots which reach so deep, they can never be wrenched up again. We say ‘gone to seed’, or ‘gone native’. The Italians call them the insabbiati–those who are buried in the sand–‘people’, as Cicoria pronounced with lip-smacking relish, ‘completely immersed in the mire’. At 77, Cicoria was happy to count himself amongst their ranks and indeed, when I’d arrived for my appointment with Massawa’s last Italian, my gaze had initially flitted to him and skated on, looking vainly for a white face. Cicoria was as dark as a local, evidence of a lifetime spent working in the sun and the squirt of Eritrean blood that ran in his veins, inheritance of an Eritrean grandparent. A skinny wreck of a man, wearing a T-shirt that drooped to reveal his nipples, he sat hunched on the bed he had ordered to be carried out of his house and deposited in the centre of his metalwork collection. ‘In there, I felt like a beast in a cage, out here, at least I can swear at my animals.’ They say men’s ears keep growing when everything else has stopped, and in Cicoria’s case it seemed to be true. The onslaught of the years had turned his face into a gargoyle of ears, nose and missing teeth. Shrunken by time, this once-active man had gathered on the table before him what he clearly regarded as the bare necessities of human existence: two telephones, a roll of toilet paper and a slingshot.