People & Culture

The Red Sea decides almost everything else in this story. Eritrea's coastline, and the Dahlak Islands scattered off Massawa, sat directly on the route that carried incense, ivory, gold, pearls and tortoiseshell between Africa, Arabia and the wider world, and that position pulled outside powers toward this shore for two thousand years before anyone called it Eritrea. Traders were passing through the Dahlak archipelago by around the first century BC, and the islands kept functioning as a waystation and a meeting point, sometimes peaceful and sometimes contested, right through the Aksumite and Islamic periods that followed. Inland and centuries earlier, the plateau around Qohaito and Metera had already produced one of the region's first organised polities. Qohaito, more than two and a half thousand metres up on the edge of the Rift Valley, is generally identified with the town the Greek merchant's manual known as the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea called Koloe, and its temple ruins, dam and tombs cover more than thirty square kilometres, among the largest ancient landscapes preserved anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa. Metera, to the south, carries an even older marker, an obelisk inscribed in early Ge'ez, one of the oldest surviving examples of the script. Both sites sat within the kingdom of D'mt, which historians place from roughly the eighth century BC and generally agree was the first state-level society in the northern Horn. What they do not agree on is how much of it came from South Arabia. Some scholars read D'mt as an indigenous civilisation that traded and intermarried with Sabaean merchants from across the Red Sea, others see a more thorough Sabaean settlement layered onto a local population, and newer linguistic work has pushed against both readings by showing that Ge'ez itself did not derive from Sabaean at all. A visitor standing at Qohaito is standing in the middle of an argument that is still running. D'mt's territory fed into Aksum, and Aksum's fortune depended on Adulis, the port that lay near modern Zula, well within Eritrea's coastal plain. From roughly the first to the seventh century AD, grain, ivory and slaves moved out through Adulis and glass, wine and metalwork moved in, tying the Aksumite kingdom into trade networks that reached Rome, Arabia and India. Aksum minted its own coinage, among the earliest in sub-Saharan Africa, first in Greek and later in Ge'ez, and raised the carved granite stelae that still stand at the city itself. This is worth being precise about, because the politics of the region make it easy to get wrong in either direction: Aksum's core and its stelae field sit in what is now Ethiopia's Tigray region, while its principal port sits in Eritrea, and the kingdom governed both before either country existed. It was one inheritance rather than two, and modern national framing on either side of the border tends to claim more of it than the archaeology alone supports. Aksum adopted Christianity in the fourth century, and the Eritrean and Ethiopian highland churches trace their roots to that same conversion. Islam reached the coast within a generation of the Prophet Muhammad's death, carried by traders and, tradition holds, by a small group of his followers who took refuge on the Eritrean shore, and it took firmer institutional shape from the eighth century onward on Dahlak Kebir, the largest of the islands. By the eleventh century a local sultanate ruled from Dahlak, profiting from its position between Yemen, Egypt and India and leaving behind one of the richest collections of early Islamic inscriptions anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa, while the Christian kingdom in the highlands held its own ground. Neither faith displaced the other. The coast and the plateau developed in parallel, and that pattern of a Muslim coast and a Christian, later mixed, interior has held in some form ever since. The sultanate never recovered from a sacking in 1513, and the Ottomans absorbed the islands and Massawa in 1557, ruling the coast loosely through local intermediaries for three centuries while the inland kingdom of Medri Bahri, governed by a ruler titled the Bahr Negash, kept its own uneasy footing between the Ottoman coast and the Ethiopian highlands to its south. Egypt took Massawa from a weakening Ottoman administration in 1865 and pushed toward the plateau, until an Egyptian column was destroyed by Ethiopian forces near the Mereb river in 1875, a defeat that stopped Cairo's advance and left the coastal strip open to the next claimant. That claimant was Italy, which had bought a foothold at Assab in 1869 and took Massawa in 1885 with British encouragement. On 1 January 1890 Rome formally proclaimed the colony of Eritrea, drawing on the ancient Greek name for the Red Sea and giving this stretch of coast and highland a single administrative identity for the first time. The Italians built a railway inland from Massawa, reaching Asmara in 1911, and from 1935, once Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia turned Eritrea into a rear base and staging ground, they rebuilt the capital almost entirely, filling it with cinemas, garages, churches and government buildings in a confident rationalist and Art Deco idiom. The building programme was never separate from the colonial project it served: from 1933 Italy criminalised marriage between Italians and Eritreans, and after 1937 formal racial laws barred cohabitation, segregated housing and public space, and pushed Eritreans out of skilled work, a system contemporaries and later historians have compared in scope to South African apartheid. British forces took Asmara in April 1941 and administered Eritrea, first militarily and then civilly, for over a decade, dismantling much of the Italian industrial base as war reparations while the powers argued over what should become of the territory: partition, trusteeship, union with Ethiopia, or independence. The United Nations settled it in 1950 with a resolution that took effect in 1952 and federated Eritrea with Ethiopia under the Emperor, leaving Eritrea its own parliament, flag and control of internal affairs. The arrangement lasted ten years. In November 1962 Haile Selassie dissolved the Eritrean parliament and annexed the territory as a province of Ethiopia, ending a federation Eritreans had never been asked to ratify in the first place. Armed resistance had already begun by then, and it hardened into a thirty-year war fought first by the Eritrean Liberation Front and then, from the 1970s, increasingly by the Eritrean People's Liberation Front, which outmanoeuvred its rival and carried the war through the imperial Ethiopian state and into the Mengistu dictatorship that followed it. Estimates of the toll vary sharply depending on who is counting and what is counted, with figures for Eritrean dead alone running from around sixty thousand to closer to ninety thousand, comparable or in some counts considerably higher losses on the Ethiopian side, and hundreds of thousands more displaced as refugees, mostly into Sudan. The EPLF took Asmara in May 1991 as the Mengistu government collapsed, and a referendum held under international observation in April 1993 returned a vote of 99.83 percent for independence on a turnout above 93 percent. Eritrea joined the United Nations that same May. Independence did not settle the border. A dispute over the town of Badme and the line separating the two countries erupted into full war in May 1998, and two years of trench fighting killed an estimated eighty thousand people before the Algiers Agreement of December 2000 ended the shooting and handed the boundary question to an independent commission. That commission awarded Badme to Eritrea in 2002, but Ethiopia accepted the ruling only in principle and declined to withdraw, producing an eighteen-year standoff Eritreans still call, without much irony, no war and no peace. It did not formally end until 2018, when a change of government in Addis Ababa led to a joint declaration closing the conflict, though physical demarcation of the border on the ground has still not been completed since. The mobilisation of 1998 is the detail that follows a visitor around the country, because Eritrea never stood its army down afterward. National service, introduced at independence with an announced eighteen-month term, was extended indefinitely once the border war began and has stayed that way. Human Rights Watch, the United Nations special rapporteur on Eritrea and successive UN commissions of inquiry have documented conscripts serving indefinitely, often for a decade or more, in conditions the UN inquiry characterised as amounting to forced labour, with punitive measures extended to the families of those who flee. It is the single largest driver of Eritrean emigration, since several hundred thousand Eritreans, a significant share of the country's population, have left as refugees or asylum seekers over the past two decades, and the empty houses, the age gap in the villages and the conversations that steer carefully away from the subject are things a visitor notices before very long. What is left to see sits close together for a country this size. Asmara, inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2017 for the modernist city Italy built between 1935 and 1941, keeps roughly ninety percent of its historic fabric intact and still functions much as its Art Deco cinemas and streamlined garages first suggest a city should. Massawa's old town, a mix of Ottoman, Egyptian and Italian coral-stone building that includes what is claimed as one of the oldest Islamic shrines anywhere, was reduced to a fraction of its former self by Ethiopian aerial bombardment during the EPLF offensive of 1990, and restoration since then has been partial. The Dahlak archipelago beyond it still shows Ottoman-era ruins on Dahlak Kebir and cisterns cut for a garrison long gone. The Asmara to Massawa railway, an Italian engineering feat that drops from the highland plateau to the coast through a long series of switchbacks and tunnels, was restored by hand after independence and now runs, when it runs at all, as an excursion behind rebuilt steam locomotives rather than as a working line. Qohaito, half a day from Asmara, remains largely unexcavated. None of it is casually accessible, and treating it as though it were is the fastest way to turn a trip into a problem for the people around you. Foreign visitors need a permit to travel beyond Asmara's immediate province, permits are checked, and being caught without one does not end with an apology. Photographing anything that looks military, anything governmental, and in practice a fair amount of ordinary infrastructure such as bridges and airports, is a prosecutable offence rather than a foreigner's misunderstanding to be waved off. The more important restraint is verbal. Asking an Eritrean directly about national service, the border war or the government puts that person at real risk in a way it does not put you at risk, so keep those questions for guides and officials, phrased in general terms if you ask them at all, and read what stands in front of you, the coral stone, the rationalist facades, the rail line up the escarpment, as the record of what this place has already lived through rather than as an invitation to make someone explain it to you in person.