I Didn't Do It for You

by Michela Wrong

  These days, the vigorous designs have lost their clean-cut certainty. The pastel-coloured buildings, painted in the soft apricot, pink and pistachio tones of melting Neapolitan ice cream, are shabby, plaster peeling in great scabs from their exteriors. Red-eyed pigeons coo above broken water pipes and the rusted persiane shutters hang akilter in their grooves. Nonetheless, draped in billowing blankets of bougainvillea, scattered with red-blossomed flamboyants, doused in the purple petals of the jacaranda, Asmara is undoubtedly the most beautiful capital on the continent.

  Its beauty has a sombre tinge, for it has been premised on tragedy. No enlightened conservationist ever set out to preserve Asmara from the over-excited developers who spoiled downtown Nairobi or turned Lagos into a tangled mess of motorways and bridges in the 1970s. Conflict kept Asmara locked in time, creating in the process an accidental architectural treasure. While entrepreneurs with more money than sense ripped the hearts out of other colonial African cities, the economic stagnation that came with Eritrea’s long war of secession against Ethiopia proved more effective than any neighbourhood campaign ever could at preserving Asmara’s pure lines.

  Such stultification has bestowed a Toy Town dinkiness upon the capital, the city that time forgot. On my first visit, I felt as though I had walked into a world in which my Italian grandfather would have felt completely at home, an Italy I had only ever glimpsed in family photo albums, because it has ceased to exist in Europe. Perhaps the nostalgia of that borrowed memory went some way to explaining the sudden happiness that gripped me whenever I returned, as tangible as the aroma of berbere spices permeating the streets. The Fiat 500 bubble car, known affectionately as the Topolino, might have disappeared from Rome’s streets, but it still bowled valiantly–if rather slowly–along Asmara’s avenues. Asmarinos drove museum pieces not because they were admirers of classic cars but because, for decades, no new cars were imported. Every Asmara café served the same stubby brown bottles of unlabelled beer. Since expensive foreign lagers rarely reached these parts, why bother identifying the only brand in town? In the little barber shops old men wearing the same pinched Borsalino hats and woollen waistcoats that once hung in my grandfather’s closet exposed their jugulars to cut-throat razors, while their friends perched gossiping behind them. The term ‘blue-collar’ has become such an intellectual abstraction in the West, it gave me a jolt to see that workmen in Eritrea actually wore blue overalls. As for the white-collar business suits displayed in tailors’ dusty windows, they were as quaintly old-fashioned as the hand-painted shop signs, with their approximate, impressionistic English: ‘Fruit and Vagatables’, ‘Pinut Butter’, ‘Lubricunt’, ‘Draiving School’, ‘Computer Crush Course’.

  Those who travel around Africa will be familiar with the mental game of ‘Spot the Colonial Inheritance’. Is that Angolan secretary’s failure to process your paperwork the result of Mediterranean inertia, fostered by the Portuguese, or a symptom of the bureaucratic obfuscation cultivated by a Marxist government? Is the bombast of a West African leader a legacy of a French love of words, or a modern version of the traditional African village palaver? Which colonial master left the deeper psychological mark: Britain, France, Portugal or Belgium? There are places where the colonial past seems to have left only the most cosmetic of traces on a resilient local culture, and places where the wounds inflicted seem beyond repair. In the river city of Kisangani, where I saw destitute Congolese camping in the mouldering villa built for the ruthless explorer Henry Stanley, rooms intended for pianos and chandeliers holding scores of families who washed out of buckets, I had a sense of a host body rejecting a badly-applied graft. White man’s culture had been imposed with such bullying force, its buildings had never appeared to uncomprehending locals more than meaningless hulks, as surreal and totemic as the motorbike helmet Che Guevara once saw being proudly sported by a tribal chieftain in the equatorial forest. In Eritrea, the opposite seems the case: the graft has taken–so well, indeed, that the new skin has acquired a lustre all its own. ‘So you’re half Italian, are you?’ Eritreans say when I mention my parentage. ‘Then half of you belongs here.’ At weekends, the plains around Asmara are dotted with groups of cyclists in indecently tight shorts who whiz past grazing goats: the Italians left behind one of their favourite sports. The twittering swallows dive-bombing the steps of the Catholic church of Our Lady of the Rosary, whose bells compete for attention with the muezzin’s call and prayers from the Orthodox cathedral, would not look out of place swooping over a honey-coloured Tuscan piazza. When school-girls tumble out of school they wear grembiulini, the coloured aprons once ubiquitous in Italian playgrounds. At the marble-countered bars, where bottles of Eritrean versions of Campari, Fernet Branca, Martini and Pernod form a stained-glass display, hissing Gaggia machines pour out cappuccinos and espressos so strong they are little more than a brown dab at the bottom of a doll’s cup. ‘Come stai?’ one coffee-drinker asks another, ‘Andiamo, andiamo,’ call the ticket touts at the bus station, ‘Va bene, dopo,’ shrugs the unsuccessful beggar (‘All right, later’) and little children scream ‘’Tilian, tilian’ (‘Italian’)–followed by a hopeful ‘bishcotti’ (‘bishcuits’)–at the sight of an unfamiliar face, whether Japanese, Indian or American.

  Whether one is watching the evening passeggiata along Asmara’s Liberation Avenue, when hundreds of dark-haired youths stroll arm-in-arm past gaggles of marriageable girls, eyes meeting flirtatiously across the gender divide; or observing the Sunday ritual in which bourgeois Eritrean families, bearing little cakes and little girls–each fantastically ribboned and ruched–pay each other formal visits, it’s impossible to view these as alien colonial rituals. Maybe it was the similarity between the Eritrean mountains and the rugged landscape of the mezzogiorno, or maybe the fact that so many southern Italians, Arab blood coursing through their veins, are actually as dark as Eritreans. But the colony never felt quite as unremittingly foreign to the Italians as Nigeria did to the British, Mali to the French or Namibia to the Germans. Something here gelled, and the number of light-skinned meticci (half-castes) left behind by the Italians is abiding evidence of that affinity.

  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 a
nd 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 ra
ped, 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.