Ayomide
I was afraid that I might not make this trip afterall. I had submitted an application to renew my British visa and it was taking like forever to come out. In the meantime, the date for the trip to Eritrea had been set earlier; I was receiving regular telephone calls from Asmara, the Eritrean capital, to find out if I had collected a visa for the trip. In the end, I got the British visa sorted out and in a twenty four hour period, I got the Eritrean, unknotted the problem of travel and last Thursday, left Abuja to stay the night in Lagos, because my trip on Egypt airways was for early Friday morning. In about five and a half hours, I was in Cairo which I last visited in August-September, 2007. African destinations can often be a night mare, as the regular continental traveler knows. According to the schedule I had for my trip, I was to be in Cairo till Sunday, but luckily for me, there was aflight to Asmara, early the next day. I was booked on the flight and had to endure eleven hours of cold in the airport.
I have always been curious about Eritrea and had followed very keenly; its very stubborn struggle for independence. As every Nigerian and African, socialist will testify, Eritrea’s struggle was one of the most misunderstood struggles of the nineteen seventies and eighties. It was hotly debated wihin the Nigerian socialist movement in the eighties, and the highlight of the period, was a trip which Dipo Fashina, former ASUU president made, in company of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) to its liberated areas. He came with a most interesting story, which was published by SUNDAY PUNCH; and that included an account of a Nigerian who was captured in the war. It was quite bizarre really. While Dipo’s account was very usful, in understanding the Eritreans, the truth was that the suspicion remained that iw as just a secessionist project.
The suspicion must be put into a context. In the post-independence period. African countries took a decision to preserve often artificial and absurd colonial boundaries. A Nigerian socialist of my generation had grown up against the back drop fo the Biafran secession bid and the trauma of the loss of millions of lives in our country. While it was also true, that feudal Ethiopia had annexed Eritrea, the Ethiopian Revolution of 1974, had been welcomed as a genuinely progressive development, especially after Cuban troops had helped to expel a Somali invasion of the Ogaden region of Ethiopia. It seemed as if Ethiopia’s revolutionary process had its hands full, fighting different efforts to dismember the country and halt the changes that most lefwing activists on the African continent felt were being achieved. This background therefore affected the attitude of most progressive activists towards the Eritrean struggle, even when it was grudgingly accepted that the Eritrean comrades were genuine revolutionaries as well.
As it turned out, the Eritreans chose to stubbornly persist in their struggle and proved to be very effective as fighters and organizers of their people. By 1991, they had helped the TPLF to defeat the Ethiopian regime and on the turrets of EPLT tanks, the Tigreyans rode into Addis Ababa and Mengistu Haile Mairam fled to Zimbabwe.
After a struggle that lasted for about three decades, Eritrea was liberated. It was one of the most decisive struggles ever seen in Africa and one which turned upside down, assumptions about African post-colonial state structures. Eritrea haunts Africa’s political elite, because they looked the other way, as it was pulled through tremendous suffering by its Ethiopian occupiers. The appearance of Eritrean leaders in African forums contimues to embarrass the neo-colonial ruling classes, because tiny Eritrea always seemed to be excessively assured about its view point, where bigger countries, run to the imperialist powers for solutions to problems.
Asmara, the Eritrean capital is a very small city of less than 600,000 people. It was build between 1890 and 1940 by Italian colonialists and one gets a feel of being in a small version of an Italian city, with its neo-classical/art deco architectural design. It is a very neat and well-ladi out city, with palm tree-lined avenues at a location of 2,400 meters above sea level. At that rarefied elevation, the air is very clean but also thin, which can make breathing difficult for a visitor from Nigeria. One of my minders described the palm tress as the “eye lashes” of Asmara, and I thought that was a very beautiful description. I have arrived on the eve of the 18th independence anniversary and tht is everywhere in the air for all to see. There are decorations on streets and of buildings; and every night, there are cultural displays on the streets with the population taking part.
Eritrea must be one ot the most mobilized countries in the world! There is memory of ahundred years of colonization: the Otto-man, the Italian, the British, Ethiopia under Haile Selassie and Mengistu Haile Mariam. And if one thought it could not get worse, there was a terrible two-year war with Ethiopia, between 1998 and 2000,w hich was described as replicating the trench warfare of the First World War. Both countries lost over 70,000 people over an obscure border problem. A state of no-war, no-peace exists between the two countries today, and one gets the impression that war and mobilization for more sacrifices, run through this small country as a domineering motif. Young people undergo a compulsory military training and the veterans of it long war of liberation occupy a central place in socirty. My driver is a 39 year old mother of four; she joined the EPLF at the age of 12 as a fighter, after Ethipian troops had killed her parents and brother.
There are many issues of interest that I want to explore in the few days I will state her, including an intriguing story of a Nigerian community that has become Eritrean after generations of residency here. And Nigerians had better taken our football more seriously because our players are adored here! They ALWAYS suppor Nigeria and feel very sad each time the Super Eagles lose! So when we play well, we also do so for Eritrea and its truly beautiful and friendly people.
