I Didn't Do It for You (3 page)

Which is not to suggest that this liaison is a source of simple congratulation. Quite the opposite. Eritreans flare up
like matches when they talk about the abuses perpetrated during the Fascist years, when they were expected to step into the gutter rather than sully a pavement on which a white man walked. ‘If you did the slightest thing wrong, an Italian would give you a good kicking,' one of the white-haired Borsalino-wearers recalls, his eyes alight with remembered fury. But this is the most ambivalent of hostilities. Eritreans remember the racism of the Italians. But they know that what makes their country different from Ethiopia, their one-time master to the south, what made it impossible for Eritrea to accept her allotted role as just another Ethiopian province, is rooted in that colonial occupation which changed everything, forever. The Italian years are, simultaneously and confusingly, both an object of complacent pride and deep, righteous anger. ‘Italy left us with the best industrial infrastructure in the world. Our workers were so well-educated and advanced, they ran everything down in Ethiopia,' Eritreans will boast, only to complain, in the next breath, that Fascism's educational policies kept them ignorant and backward, stripped of dignity. ‘Fourth grade, fourth grade. Our fathers were only allowed four years of education!' So central is the Italian experience to both Eritrea and Ethiopia's sense of identity, to how each nation measures itself against the other, that during the war of independence the mere act of eating pasta, Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki once revealed, became a cause of friction between his rebel fighters and their guerrilla allies in northern Ethiopia, a dietary choice laden with politically-incendiary perceptions of superiority and inferiority.
²

But the history that obsesses Eritrea is rather more recent. Once, on a visit to Cuba, I was fascinated to see, displayed at the national museum with a reverence usually reserved for religious icons, Che Guevara's asthma inhaler and a pizza truck that had been raked with bullets during a clash between
Castro's men and government troops. Before my eyes, mundane objects were becoming sanctified, events from the still-recent past spun into the stuff of timeless legend. I had never visited a country that seemed so in thrall to its own foundation story. But then, that was before I went to Eritrea.

Arriving in 1996 to write a country survey for the
Financial Times
, I became intrigued by the extent to which Eritrea's war of independence had been woven into the fabric of thought and language. The underdog had won in Eritrea, confounding the smug predictions of political analysts in both the capitalist West and communist East, and the vocabulary itself provided a clue as to why outsiders had got it so wrong. A lot of concepts here came with huge, if invisible, capital letters. There was the Armed Struggle, as the 30-year guerrilla campaign launched in the early 1960s against Ethiopian rule was universally known. There was the Front or the Movement, both ways of referring to the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF), the rebel group that eventually emerged as main challenger. There was the Field, or the Sahel–the sun-blasted region bordering Sudan where the EPLF turned soft civilians into hard warriors. There were the Fighters or
tegadelti
, the men and women who fought for the Movement, and the Martyrs, Fighters who did not live long enough to witness victory. There was the Strategic Withdrawal, not to be confused with retreat (Eritreans
never
retreat)–that testing moment in 1977 when the EPLF, facing a crushing onslaught by a Soviet-backed Ethiopian army, pulled back into the mountains. Above all, there was the Liberation and its conjugations (‘I was Liberated', ‘We Liberated Asmara', ‘This hotel was Liberated'), the glorious day in 1991 when Ethiopian troops rolled out and Eritrea finally became master of its fate. The street names being introduced by the new government: Liberation Avenue, Martyrs Avenue, Eritrea Square were part of the same phenomenon. The
language itself left precious little room for a critical distance between speaker and subject, no gap where scepticism could crystallize.

The bright murals painted on Asmara's main thoroughfares were the equivalent of the Bayeux tapestry, commemorating a time of heroes that still spread its glow. They showed young men and women sporting no-fuss Afros, thigh-length shorts and cheap black sandals, the pauper's military kit. They crouched in the mountains, shooting at silvery MiG jets, or danced in celebration around camp fires. The murals' original models strolled below, older now, weighed down by the more pedestrian, if equally tricky challenges posed by building a new nation-state. Meeting in the street, two male friends would clasp hands, then lean towards each other until right shoulder banged into right shoulder, body bounced rhythmically off body. When vigorous young men did it, they looked like jousting stags, when old comrades did it, they closed their eyes in pleasure, burrowing their heads into the crook of each other's necks. Peculiar to Eritrea, the shoulder-knocking greeting originated in the rural areas but became a Fighter trademark, and it usually indicated shared experiences rarely spoken about, never to be forgotten. The women Fighters–for women accounted for more than a third of the Movement–were also easily spotted. Instead of white shawls, they wore cardigans. Their hair was tied in practical ponytails, rather than intricately braided in the traditional highlands style. They looked tough, weathered, quietly formidable.

‘Eritrea's a great place, if you have a penchant for tragedy,' a British doctor on loan to one of the government ministries quipped. The titles of the standard works on Eritrea, displayed in the windows of every bookshop, told you everything about a national familiarity with suffering, a proud community's capacity for teeth-gritting:
Never Kneel Down
,
Against All Odds,
Even the Stones are Burning
,
A Painful Season and a Stubborn Hope
. Reminders of loss were everywhere. Over the age of about 40, most Westerners become familiar with the sensation of carrying around with them a bevy of friendly ghosts, the spirits of dead relatives and lost comrades who whisper in their ears and crack the occasional joke. In Eritrea, the wraiths crowded around in their multitudes, threatening to engulf the living. During the Armed Struggle, which claimed the unenviable title of Africa's longest war, Eritrea probably lost between 150,000 and 200,000 to conflict and famine. Some 65,000 Fighters died before the regime in Addis Ababa, toppled by a domestic rebel movement in league with the EPLF, agreed to surrender its treasured coastline. Given Eritrea's tiny population, this amounted to 1 in 50. Visiting Eritrean homes, one came to anticipate the sideboard on which a blue-fringed ‘Martyr's Certificate', issued in recognition of a family that paid the ultimate sacrifice, held pride of place; the framed degree papers and graduation photographs testifying to skills a serious-looking son or daughter would now never put to the test. The Struggle had affected every family, it could not be escaped. Perhaps this explained why the Martyrs' Cemeteries scattered around the country were usually, behind the defiant paintings of Kalashnikov-toting warriors, neglected and overgrown. Who needed to tend graves, when the memory of the dead was so very present?

This was a nation of citizens with bits missing. Often, at the end of a conversation, I would rise to my feet only to register, as the man I had been talking to escorted me to the door, that he walked with the lunging awkwardness of someone with an artificial leg. The hand I was shaking, I'd realize, was short of a finger or two, the eye that had failed to follow my movements, or was watering painfully, was probably made of glass. The capital was full of young men and women on crutches, one
empty trouser leg flapping in the breeze. If they were lucky, they sat at the controls of motorized wheelchairs, provided by a government mindful of the debt it owed its
tegadelti
. Of an evening in Asmara, you could sometimes spot a lone amputee whizzing down Martyrs' Avenue at breakneck speed, determinedly propelling his wheelchair towards Asmara's nightspots with two flailing sticks; an African skier without snow.

It was difficult not to be moved. It was difficult not to be admiring. My reaction was far from unique. When it came to falling for Africa's 53rd and newest state, hundreds of well-intentioned Westerners had already beaten me to it.

There is a breed of expatriate that seems particular to the Horn of Africa. Foreigners who, quite early in their travels, discovered Ethiopia or Eritrea and fell in love, with all the swooning, uncritical absolutism of youth. Perhaps they had ventured elsewhere in Africa and didn't like what they found: the inferiority complexes left by an oppressive colonial past, menacing hints of potential anarchy, the everyday sleaze of failing states. Then they came to the Horn and were swept away by the uniqueness of the region's history, the sophistication of their Ethiopian and Eritrean friends. They marvelled at the dedication of puritanical leaderships trying to do something more creative than fill Swiss bank accounts, and became True Believers. ‘Ah yes, so-and-so. He has always been a Friend of Ethiopia,' you would often hear officials in Asmara and Addis say. ‘Have you read so-and-so's book? She's a true Friend of Eritrea.' The rebels-turned-ministers had grasped a vital truth. True Believers are worth a hundred spokesmen to guerrilla organizations and the cash-strapped governments they go on to form. Sharing the religious convert's belligerent frustration with those who have not seen the light, quicker than the locals to detect a slight, they are tireless in defending the cause. During their time in the bush, both the EPLF and Ethiopia's
Tigrayan People's Liberation Front (TPLF) had acquired a coterie of them: hard-working Swedish aid workers, idealistic human rights activists, self-funded journalists and left-wing European parliamentarians. They had remained loyal during the hard times and now revelled in the sight of their old friends, once regarded as tiresome nuisances by Western governments, holding executive power on both sides of the border.

By the time I left Asmara, I was well on the way to joining their ranks. Looking back, I know I would have been less susceptible to Eritrea's tragic charms had I spent less time reporting on the horrors of central Africa. Having gorged on gloomy headlines, I was hungry for what seemed increasingly impossible: an African good news story. I was used to guerrilla groups who raped, pillaged, even–occasionally–ate their victims, whose gunmen were despised by the communities they claimed to represent. In Eritrea you could hear the hushed awe in civilians' voices when they talked about the demobilized Fighters who had won them independence and were now trying to build a society freed from the stifling constraints of tribe, religion and gender. As a white woman, I was used to being shooed to the front of queues, paid the exaggerated respect that spoke of generations of colonial browbeating. It gave me a perverse thrill to hear an Eritrean student confess that he and his fellow citizens suffered from a superiority complex towards outsiders. In other African nations, I was accustomed to being refused interviews by government ministers terrified by the possibility that they might show some spark of individual intelligence that could later be judged to have undermined the omniscient Big Man. Here ministers not only spoke to me, they strayed with confidence outside their official briefs and showed a disconcerting habit of wanting to discuss Samuel Pepys and Charles Darwin. I was used to writing about supplicant African governments moaning over conditions placed on
aid by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, dependent on Western approval for every policy change. These men told me, in tones that brooked no dissent, that having won independence on its own, Eritrea would decide its development programme for itself. The advice of strangers was neither wanted nor needed: self-reliance was the watchword.

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.