LITMIR.BIZ

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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 schoolgirls 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 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, Heroes Street, Revolution Avenue, Knowledge Street 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

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