Combining the author’s immense skills as a lawyer, historian and playwright, An African People’s Quest for Freedom and Justice meticulously documents the twists and turns of mid-twentieth-century Eritrean politics in thrilling and agonizing style. It is a television mini-series – of international conceit, fraternal betrayal and steadfast resistance – waiting to be made. Even as someone relatively familiar with the history of Eritrea’s federation and annexation, and the enormous and tormenting challenges faced by those living through it, I was gripped by the scenes of tension that Alemseged so vividly recreates, particularly as the book crescendos to the painful annulment of Eritrea’s federation with Ethiopia in November 1962. We are systematically guided first through the arrogance of the British administrators, who disrupted nascent pan-Eritrean political movements in favour of their broader geopolitical ambitions, and then through Ethiopia tightening its grip over Eritrean affairs, as it sought to foreclose opportunities for independent political alternatives to emerge.
Most importantly, though, Alemseged shows the failure of Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie and the unionists in this task. We are introduced to resistance movements including the Eritrean Federalist Youth Association (the Federalisti), the Eritrean Association of Free Trade Unions, and Haraka, and the many imperfect – and frequently bickering – figures within them. Most of these movements were disbanded or had disintegrated by 1962 and did not ultimately thwart annexation. Alemseged nonetheless expertly details their key, and often sidelined, role in paving the way for Eritrea’s long and hard-fought liberation struggle, which more often than not takes the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) as its starting point. This book instead shows how the ELF’s numerous and sometimes unrelated predecessors played critical roles in consolidating and spreading nationalist sentiments through Eritreans of all geographies, religions, classes and ages.
Here, the author is determined to re-insert Eritreans’ experiences into the country’s early history. As he rightly argues, too often the focus on this period has been on what was done to the country and not on how Eritreans responded. He does this through extensive archival research and decades of his own interviews, including, fascinatingly, with those Eritreans who were seen as having dealt the deathblow to the country’s independence. In this regard, it aligns with another of the author’s recent projects, which involved translating the masterful and almost unbearably harrowing The Nurenebi File (by Tesfaye Gebreab) into English. Read together, these volumes testify to the exhausting and relentless physical and epistemic violence to which Eritreans have been exposed over generations of colonization and repression. Alemseged himself states that Eritrea’s current ruling elite cannot be understood without this history, given the type of politics it necessitated. The book references, for example, a pamphlet produced by the opposition to Ethiopia’s impending annexation. It reads: ‘If a person is not ready to die for his country, his declarations of love will remain meaningless’ (p. 405). Although printed in 1962, it would not look out of place in the Eritrea Profile today.
Given the opportunity to sit down with the author, however, I would love a further discussion on the following. For one, where are all – really, any – Eritrean women? Eritreans are immensely proud of the country’s self-confessed track record in terms of gender equality, and the author himself has centred many of his literary works on nuanced female characters. Volume after volume of Eritrean political history nonetheless fails to show that they were invested with any substantive political power or respect. Second, I would have benefited from more clarity on when Alemseged is drawing on new sources to issue his historical collective, versus when he is interpreting old sources but arriving at different conclusions. Further details on why his alternative perspective should be vested with authority would be helpful. To give one example, the author makes the point that ‘the idea of union with Ethiopia … entered Eritrea from Ethiopia’, contrary to what is ‘often alleged’ about it being a homegrown sentiment (p. 45). This argument might have been made more persuasively through a clearer statement on what others have wrongly interpreted or missed.
The book is hence largely a testimony to the context, conditions and characters of this early resistance, written with an eye to contemporary geopolitics in the Horn of Africa. Generic ‘Ethiopian scholars’ and certain namechecked academics are cautioned for perpetuating historically inaccurate and polemical accounts of when and why Eritrean nationalism emerged. The author wishes to definitively show that Eritrean armed resistance was initially a response to the unfinished process of decolonization in Africa, whereby Eritrea was not granted any right to self-determination. It was not, he argues, solely a response to the country’s federation and subsequent annexation by Ethiopia. Given the ongoing nature of relations between the two countries, this reads as a compelling and captivating attempt to historicize the position that there has never been a satisfactory level of Ethiopian control over Eritrea.
