In such broad terms, Eritrea might sound like many other African countries, with their miserable colonial periods and appalling post-colonial wars. But Eritreans, and especially the extraordinary freedom fighters, were different. Their supreme organisation and devotion to the cause were legendary. In the struggle’s early years, strict chastity was enforced between male and female fighters. When the rule was relaxed, any resultant offspring were brought up in revolutionary creches, dug deep underground to escape Ethiopia’s bombers. In a remarkable interview with one of these former ‘Red Flowers’, Michela Wrong is told that when the children’s fathers came visiting from the front, their offspring would run away for shame. ‘Why was he there, you wondered, rather than away fighting? Maybe he was a coward.’
Against these Spartans, Ethiopia brought the might of both the super- powers. For a decade, it was the biggest recipient of American military aid in Africa. Then Mengistu Haile Mariam, Selassie’s killer and pseudo-Marxist successor, changed patrons, winning $12 billion of Soviet, mostly military, aid for the next murderous decade. In a final act of infamy, as Mengistu’s regime teetered towards collapse, Israel and America gave him more millions to evacuate a few thousand Ethiopian Jews, prolonging the slaughter further.
Saddled now with its own tyrant, Isaias Afwerki, Eritrea is finding fledgling independence painful. Dissidents, including many heroes of the liberation struggle, have disappeared, while the foreign powers who played such a role in the country’s history seem hardly to care. A lesser analyst than Wrong might despair for its future. But in myriad perfectly observed details, and above all in the spirit of Eritrea’s cussed people, she finds cause for hope. Eritrea, Michela Wrong writes, movingly, skilfully, remains different: ‘Erit- reans have already achieved too much, against too many odds, for the country to fail.’
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