In this ambitious work, Reid addresses a subject that has received wide coverage since the 1980s: the enduring violence in the Horn of Africa, which he conceptualizes as ‘a mosaic of fault lines and frontier zones’ (p. 23). Central to the study is not state continuity, but rather the ‘continuous state of violence’ that he argues is foundational to the modern polities of Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, and Sudan (p. 20). It is an unusual, if contentious, approach to understanding a brutally contested corner of Africa with fluid frontiers and permeable ethnicities. The author pulls together the essential elements of his theme into a seamless, impressively fluent, and highly accessible synthesis.
Geographically and temporally, the book's focus is broad. Spatially, although it incorporates Ethiopia and its immediate neighbors, its ‘zone of violence’ mainly consists of the northern highlands of the Tigriniya speakers, the central region of the Amhara, and the southern and eastern areas of the Oromo and Somali. The Eritrean-Ethiopian frontier is seen as the epicenter of the perennial violence. Unsurprisingly, the bulk of the book is devoted to the two countries, Eritrea claiming nearly a third of it. Much of the ‘institutionalized and cyclical social and political violence’ (p. 50) is attributed to geographical or environmental variation. In the persistently contested areas adjoining the highlands and lowlands from the Gibe in the south to the Red Sea in the north, trading, slaving, hunting, and banditry converged with competitive local and inter-regional politics to generate incessant conflicts, which too often had devastating repercussions on the productive communities of cultivators and nomadic-pastoralists.
The time depth of the study stretches back to the eighteenth century. The last three centuries have ‘been characterized by markedly intense, cyclical, and increasingly institutionalized violence, and systematic persecution and/or marginalization of particular population groups’ (pp. 4–5). Violence was driven not only by the predatory pursuit for land, livestock, and labor, but also by shifting ethnic, cultural, regional, and religious identities and ambiguous loyalties. Reid sees the Zemene Mesafint or Era of the Princes as the culmination of the primacy of armed violence. Emperor Tewodros II, who brought that era to an end, is cast as the quintessence of the violent political culture. Paradoxically, Tewodros escalated and ‘institutionalized’ the destructive violence. Kassa the shifta (bandit), who fought his way from the Qwara lowlands to seize the throne (center) in 1855 as Tewodros, was the precursor of the revolutionary ‘liberation’ fighters who marched from the periphery to the citadels of power, Addis Ababa and Asmara, respectively, in 1991. The violent process that commenced in the mid-eighteenth century has not abated.
Reid's fluent analysis invites us to rethink the Horn's conflicted history, and he frequently offers fascinating revelations. Nevertheless this reviewer remains skeptical of the plausibility of the analytical primacy of armed contestation. Reid glosses over such fundamental issues as factors of production, social relations, class conflicts, state formation, and social transformation. The peasantry, whose labor and produce were the primary objects of the rapacious feudal polity, is generally invisible; when visible, it is portrayed as placid, incapable of negotiating its subordination. Consent is not always coerced.
The coverage of the twentieth century is the most disappointing part of the study. This is true of both Ethiopia and Eritrea. Modern Ethiopia, we are assured, ‘was the product of a restless, cumulative militarism’ (p. 90), not of the twin processes of class and state formation roughly analogous to the European and Japanese experiences. The two most acute contradictions – agrarian and national – which brought about the dissolution of the dynastic state, the leading role the radical intelligentsia played in the revolution and the ideas and ideology that guided it, are all obscured or omitted. His discussion of the origins and evaluation of Eritrean anti-colonial nationalism borders on the fanciful. Reid is, of course, keenly aware of the socioeconomic changes that Italian colonialism endangered: industrial and urban growth, which gave rise to a tiny but robust middle-class, a labor force, and ‘a vibrant press’ without which national consciousness was improbable. Yet he dismisses the transformation as ‘superficial modernity’, boldly asserting that Eritrean nationalism was ‘the product of a series of conflicts and tensions which had their roots in the nineteenth century, and arguably earlier’ (pp. 99–100), and that actually the Italians were inadvertently co-opted into the vortex of frontier politics.
Even more puzzling, Reid alleges that the northern revolutionary guerrillas were merely the modern version of the frontier bandit. The coupling of nebulous banditry and purposeful social movements strikes me as bizarre. A comparative assessment of how the ‘liberation’ movements were organized and managed and what it entailed to harness the rural masses without whom they could not possibly have won would have been more fruitful. Also, a cursory reference to how new identities and loyalties born out of the revolution continue to compete with old and entrenched local identities would have been in order. Reid's contention that the antagonism between the Eritrean and Tigriyan fronts was irreconcilable is disputable, and his interpretation of Ethio-Eritrean war of 1998–2000 that the new leaders so clumsily triggered seem overtly deterministic.
Reid has written an erudite and provocative, though not necessarily convincing, book. By abjuring a comparative analysis, he undercut the merits of his work. In frequently resorting to fuzzy generalizations and dubious assertions, he diminishes the more compelling discussions of what would have been a singular achievement.
