I Didn't Do It for You

by Michela Wrong

  It would be refreshing to think officials in the State Department, the Kremlin, Whitehall or the UN occasionally remember the parable that is the Eritrean story, but it would be illusory. As with so many former colonies, Eritrea highlights the one-sided nature of memory in an unequal partnership. She is like a girlfriend who remembers every line on the face of the man who abandoned her, nursing each hurtful word of their raging arguments, honing her responses. When, years later, the two meet again, he delivers his most wounding insult yet. While the abuse has scarred her forever, he can barely recall the relationship. Eritrea is now being dealt the final insult: she is being forgotten by the powers that once used her.

  The country I once liked to think of as Shangri La has become an unhappy land, but it is also a far more interesting, nuanced place. Once, talking to Eritreans, I had the impression of speaking to a many-headed monster, each of whose mouths chanted the same refrain. Now the Hydra’s heads often speak in whispers, but they wear different expressions and none of the opinions they voice are the same. Some believe the government is wrong, but now is not the time to press the point. Some regard Isaias as misunderstood national saviour, some loathe him as the Great Betrayer. Eritreans are becoming rounded individuals, their community a more complex, conflicted society. That is no bad thing.

  Writing this book, I used to marvel over the chasm between the stark experiences of the Eritreans I had come to know and the foreigners–often direct contemporaries–who impacted so heavily on their lives. Which life, given the choice, would I pick? A member of the Gross Guys–binge-drinking to obliterate the boredom, uneasily aware that in shirking Vietnam I had balked my generation’s ultimate test, certain of tranquil retirement in middle America? Or a Fighter in my too-short shorts, listening to a piano recital under a thorn tree, aware the odds were against me making it through the war? ‘We were unique,’ Zazz the GI once surprised me by boasting, in a mood of bleary self-congratulation. The adjective seemed rather better applied to the earnest ‘shifties’ Kagnew’s commanders warned their boys against. Give me the Sahel any day, because the choice between blandness and passion seems no choice at all.

  Yet Eritrea’s story highlights the dangers inherent in that intoxicating, beguiling thing: a sense of purpose. ‘For years we felt superior, not just because we won the war but because we had idealism, we had a grand vision,’ says Paulos. ‘Look at the ex-Fighters. It is only now that they are coming down to the ground and becoming ordinary human beings again.’ The last few, chastening years have brought Eritreans earthwards with a vengeance, and even those in government recognize an element of hubris. ‘It’s good to be normal,’ ruefully acknowledges a government minister in Asmara. ‘We have gone from thinking we were unique, a people chosen by God like the Israelis, to realizing we too have our faults, we are not so special after all. It’s called growing up.’ Humility seems unlikely, but Eritreans no longer take it for granted they are a breed apart, no longer assume they know the answers to Africa’s problems. As their present becomes murkier, they are losing the black-and-white certainties of the past.

  As Isaias accurately predicted, today’s Eritrea is no society of angels. The image of a Utopia built up in Fighters’ minds has evaporated like the morning mist. Yet I can’t write it off as just another numbing Third World disappointment.

  If the curse of so many African states has been low expectations, passed from one generation to another like a genetic disease, a generation of Eritreans stands immune. The EPLF spent decades teaching its followers that every man and woman, Moslem and Christian, peasant and urban dweller, was equally valuable. It set up popularly-elected assemblies in the villages, it championed women’s organizations, it relentlessly trumpeted the merits of grassroots democracy. That work cannot now be easily undone. Aspirations were created, and the fact that they have been frustrated will not pass unnoticed. The notion of accountability has seeped into a people’s psychology, as impossible to uproot as the dream of shady groves and green pastures ex-Fighters regard as the real Eritrea. ‘We had this idea of equality at the Front, and now it is fixed forever in our minds,’ a friend ruminated. Amongst the older generation inside Eritrea, the unarticulated refrain–‘I didn’t spend 15/20/30 years at the Front for this’–spools through daily life like the subtitles showing under films at Asmara’s Cinema Roma. As for the diaspora, its Western-educated, foreign-passport-holding youngsters are coolly appraising, their expectations serving notice to a leadership that has lost its way. ‘Do you remember what John Kennedy said? “Ask not what your country can do for you–ask what you can do for your country.” Well, I feel precisely the opposite,’ a young Eritrean told me on a flight to Asmara. He was returning to teach at secondary school, but his degree from a German business college meant there was no shortage of tempting alternatives if the experience proved frustrating. ‘Of course I’m a patriot. Of course I want to do my bit. But not at any price. This has to be a two-way relationship.’

  The bumptiousness of such youngsters, like the unforgiving self-examination of older men like Paulos, is a great source of hope. The stroppier they get, the better. Surveying Eritrea’s future, I feel nothing like the bleak despair that descends when I try to guess whether Congo will survive as a nation-state, or Sierra Leone’s democracy will last the year. Eritreans have already achieved too much, against too many odds, for the country to fail.

  Whenever pessimism threatens to set in, I’m always brought up short by the memory of a group of overall-wearing 80-and 90-year-olds, working happily in an abandoned hangar on the edge of town.

  I came across them on my first visit to Eritrea, when I drove out to Asmara’s grassed-over railway station at the suggestion of the transport minister of the day. With only one winding road linking the capital to Massawa, the government, he said, wanted to rebuild the old Italian railway. It had put the job out to tender, but the estimates offered by Western construction companies were more than an administration allergic to debt could swallow. Eritreans would do it themselves, the government decided. With hard work and application–the qualities on which the EPLF had always depended–the task could be completed on a shoe-string budget. Turn-of-the-century charts showing where the track once ran were dusted off, cannibalized sleepers collected into neat piles. The labourers who had worked as apprentices under the Italians were summoned out of retirement and told to train a new generation of railwaymen. ‘It’s good to be working again,’ one told me. ‘When you retire, both mentally and physically, things begin to slip.’

  It became something of a showcase project, a picturesque expression of a national fixation with self-reliance. Visiting camera crews adored it. Their lenses lingered over the grizzled labourers as they lovingly oiled down the chuffing black Ansaldo and Breda steam engines, curved rails painstakingly by hand and fired up the disused Italian foundries. Trainspotters around the world, raving over ‘the steam story of the 1990s’, tracked every development on their websites.

  Domestic critics rolled their eyes to heaven. This was self-indulgent folly, they complained, an indication of how the PFDJ was mismanaging the transition from rebel organization to modern government. The Massawa–Asmara line would probably never be reconstituted and even if it were, the locomotives would carry too little cargo to make a difference. When the war in Badme blew up, their scepticism seemed confirmed. With the young apprentices away at the Front, only the veterans were left, and progress slowed to a snail’s pace.

  Yet every time I visited, I noticed that the brown ribbon of track had edged a little further towards the capital, the white scar that snaked its way around the mountain was that much shorter. Just as their predecessors had done a century before, the Eritrean railwaymen paused before tackling the gravity-defying final climb up to Asmara, gave one last heave, and scaled the plateau. The railway between Asmara and Massawa, the engineering feat Martini had regarded as his life’s greatest achievement–now reborn as a symbol of gritty Eritrean nationhood–is a reality once again.

&
nbsp; On one of my last trips to Asmara, I took a ride on the lowland section, watching as a wizened railwayman, who still spoke functional Italian, expertly spun and loosened the brakes on the railcar. The diesel locomotive whistled through tunnels and rattled round bends. As it stopped repeatedly to let farmers load grain sacks onto waiting camels and take aboard women carrying bouquets of upended chickens, the sun slowly sank over the thorn trees. Lights were a luxury the old network did not run to, and a dark, starlit peace descended upon us. A confused bat landed in my lap, wriggled in brief panic, then flew off. Someone turned on a radio and jangling Eritrean music filled the carriage. By the time I stumbled off the train, my hair permeated by the smoky aroma of home-cured leather, the moon was out. Seven hours to travel 32 km, pause and return: it had undoubtedly been the slowest train ride of my life. But parts of Eritrea that had been cut off for decades were trading again, farmers were tending long-neglected plots in the knowledge they would be able to get their vegetables to market. The Eritreans had done it their way–the dogged, counter-intuitive, hardest way–but they had pulled it off.

  The following day, my bags packed, notebooks stowed, I was blessed with one of those moments of serendipity which always seem to take place in Eritrea.

  We bumped into each other in a snack bar opposite the red-brick cathedral. It was just after lunch, a time of day when most of Asmara, true to its Italian ancestry, pulls down the metal shutters and takes a nap. Outside, the sun slammed down on Liberation Avenue, as relentless as gravity itself. Inside, the blue-veined marble floor was cool. I went to place my order and found my words being echoed by a middle-aged man standing next to the cashier, who had decided–notwithstanding the fact that all three of us were speaking in English–to act as interpreter.

  Me to cashier: ‘I’ll have a macchiato.’

  Him to cashier: ‘She says she’ll have a macchiato.’

  Me to cashier: ‘And a doughnut.’

  Him to cashier: ‘Give her a doughnut too.’

  Cashier to me: ‘Four nakfa.’

  Him to me: ‘That will be four nakfa.’

  ‘So,’ he said, having established with this friendly, if super-fluous, service, a certain bond: ‘Who are you? What are you doing in Asmara?’ ‘I’m a journalist. From England. I’m doing research.’ ‘A British journalist? BBC?’ He positively beamed. His face was as plump as a cherry and when he smiled, it radiated pure bonhomie. ‘Can you help me? You see, I’d like to see some footage the BBC filmed of me when I was a young man. Also, there are two Americans, two old friends of mine, I would very much like to get back in touch with them.’

  ‘A BBC film? Well, they have archives, of course. In London. But I’d need the details to track it down. When was this?’

  ‘It was in 1975. Tom Boudhoud’–he stumbled over an awkward name–‘and David Strickland. They had been working at Kagnew Station and were taken hostage by the ELF. The BBC did an interview when they were under guard.’

  There was something about this story, I sensed, I was failing to grasp. Had this man worked at Kagnew Station? Had he been held hostage alongside the two Americans? What was the connection?

  ‘You say you were their friend?’

  ‘Yes, yes, we became very close. I am curious to know what I was like then, to see myself in my twenties. It’s history now, for them and for me.’

  Suddenly, the pieces clicked together to form an explanation so magnificently surreal I gave an incredulous laugh. ‘You’re the one who took them hostage. You were the ELF kidnapper.’

  He gently remonstrated with me. ‘I was head of the ELF unit. But I think of myself as their friend.’ That piercingly-sweet smile again. ‘You see, I was simply doing my duty. We were fighting for independence. We were all soldiers together, both the Americans and us, and the Americans were supporting our enemy.’2

  ‘Why on earth do you want to get back in touch with them? Do you want to apologize?’

  He ignored the question: it really was a bit crass. ‘That was a very special time for me and for them. It was the first time, for both of us. We only kept them for a week, in a little house in the mountains, before the ELF came to take them to Gash Barka, but it felt more like seven years together. At first, they thought we were just villagers who were going to kill them. In fact, I come from one of Asmara’s most established families. I’ve never forgotten Tom and David. We were happy at that time, because we thought we were heroes.’

  In a case of reverse Stockholm syndrome, the kidnapper had, it seemed, fallen half in love with his hostages. Here was all the nostalgia of a 50-year-old attending a high school reunion, pining for his lost youth while desiring ‘closure’, but with the added piquancy lent by the AK-47, the ransom note and the comradeship of camouflage.

  We sat together at one of the green banquettes and surveyed the sun-dazed street. He was only passing through. The Communist revolutionary had long since turned respectable businessman and now lived in Sweden, where he worked for a trading company. There were things he urgently wanted to explain, but his Swedish was better than his English and the words were coming with difficulty. He stumbled on, illustrating his argument with rough sketches on a paper napkin.

  ‘In Eritrea, we love the West. But the West has decided to treat us as some kind of enemy. It criticizes our government, its journalists take Ethiopia’s side in the war. It is true, we make mistakes, and we will make many more. But what you have to understand is that we are a very young country. We have only been independent for a few years. We are like a child, going for the first time to the…the…what do you call it?’

  ‘The kindergarten?’

  ‘Yes, a child going to the kindergarten. At the start, his mother has to stay with him. The West must stay with us now. It has to be patient, not beat us like a teacher in a Third World school. Instead of slapping our government and saying: “You did a stupid thing”, it should be saying: “He will learn.”’ He pointed to the cathedral across the way. ‘Look at that Italian cathedral. Look at these bars and these cinemas. Look at the way these girls walk around in T-shirts. In Saudi Arabia they would have to cover up, here they are free.’

  He searched again for the right words, and found them. ‘Our history makes us close. We have an affinity. Do not push us away.’

  Chronology

  1869 Suez Canal opens. Italian priest Giuseppe Sapeto buys Assab from local sultan.

  1870 After decades of conflict, Italy becomes a united nation, with Rome as capital.

  1884–5 Europe’s colonial powers divide Africa up at Berlin conference. British invite Italians to seize Massawa.

  1887 Italian column advancing into Eritrean highlands wiped out by forces of Ras Alula at Dogali.

  1889 Abyssinian Emperor Yohannes IV slain in battle against Mahdis. King of Shewa anointed Emperor Menelik II, who signs Treaty of Uccialli with Italians.

  1890 Italian King Umberto declares colony of Eritrea, with Massawa as capital.

  1891 Ferdinando Martini makes first trip to Eritrea as part of royal inquiry.

  1896 Italian attempt to advance into Abyssinia repelled by Emperor Menelik at Adua.

  1897 Martini returns to Eritrea as its first civilian governor, moves capital to Asmara.

  1911–12 Italy seizes Libya’s Tripolitania and Cyrenaica after defeating Turkish forces. 1913 Emperor Menelik dies.

  1914 First World War breaks out, Italy enters war on Allied side the following year.

  1922 Benito Mussolini becomes Italy’s prime minister after March on Rome.

  1930 Ras Tafari crowned Emperor Haile Selassie.

  1931 Libyan resistance movement brutally crushed by Italians.

  1935 Mussolini invades Abyssinia from Eritrea, using chemical weapons.

  1936 Haile Selassie flees into exile and Italian troops enter Addis. Mussolini announces creation of Italian East Africa.

  1940 Mussolini enters Second World War on Hitler’s side. Italian army ejects British from Somaliland.

  1941 British for
ces defeat Italians at Keren and take over administration of Eritrea, Libya and Italian Somaliland. Haile Selassie reinstated.

  1945 End of World War Two. Mussolini and his mistress lynched by Italian partisans. United Nations established in New York.

  1946 Italy formally renounces all claim to its African colonies.

  1948 Four Powers Commission fails to agree Eritrea’s future.

  1949 UN Commission of Inquiry sent to decide Eritrea’s fate.

  1950 Korean war breaks out.

  1952 Eritrea federated with Ethiopia under UN-brokered deal.

  1953 US signs 25-year rights agreement for Kagnew Station.

  1960 Haile Selassie survives military coup. Eritrean exiles in Cairo establish Eritrean Liberation Front. Sylvia Pankhurst dies in Addis Ababa.

  1962 Eritrean parliament dissolved. Ethiopia formally annexes Eritrea.

  1963 First US combat troops arrive in Vietnam. Organization of African Unity sets up permanent headquarters in Addis.

  1972–4 Famine sweeps Tigray and Welo.

  1974 Emperor Haile Selassie overthrown by the Derg.

  1975 Derg announces death of Haile Selassie, aged 84. ELF and EPLF, breakaway Eritrean rebel faction, reach outskirts of Asmara.

  1977 Somalia invades eastern Ethiopia. As Red Terror killings start, Derg breaks off relations with US, closes Kagnew Station and joins Communist bloc.

  1978 With massive Soviet military backing, Ethiopia pushes back Somali forces and wins upper hand in Eritrea. EPLF forced to retreat into Sahel.