I Didn’t Do It For You: How the World Used and Abused a Small African Nation. Michela Wrong

lawyer expostulating at his failure to step into the gutter as he passed. ‘He said “Hey, can’t you see that a white man is coming?”,’ he chuckled. ‘It was his way of saying “Get off the pavement”.’

      For Italy, the conquest of Abyssinia and racial subjugation of Eritrea would prove Pyrrhic victories. Resistance by Haile Selassie’s followers meant much of the Abyssinian countryside remained unsafe, and the number of settlers never rose above the disappointing. The extravagantly-funded war plunged Rome into debt and while other European powers milked fortunes from their territories abroad, Italy, embarrassingly, never managed to make colonialism work for her financially. Pouring investment into both Eritrea and Ethiopia, her empire cost her more than she gained and the government was juggling ballooning budget deficits when the Second World War began. Thanks to the predictably easy victory in Abyssinia, Italians would enter that campaign with a dangerously unrealistic belief in their military might, a confidence which shattered at huge national cost. And while the European powers agreed temporarily to turn a blind eye to Mussolini’s bullying, the Abyssinian campaign also marked the moment when Il Duce’s eventual destiny as Hitler’s patsy began to take shape. Having thoroughly alienated the liberal democracies with his behaviour towards Abyssinia, Mussolini’s natural place, increasingly, would seem alongside the Nazi leader.

      The war’s most dramatic long-term outcome was to effectively kill off Italian colonialism. Crude and invasive, often loathed by Italian settlers whose presence in Eritrea predated Fascism, the racial legislation made daily life so ghastly for Eritreans that when history finally granted Italy’s African subjects an opportunity to decide their fate, they would turn and spit in the face of their former masters.

      Looking back, many Eritrean intellectuals view the 1930s as the period in which the characteristics now regarded as quintessentially Eritrean began to take recognizable form. Every country which experiences colonialism is defined by how it digests humiliation. In many African states, the experience corroded a community’s sense of self-worth, dripping through the generations like acid. But in Eritrea’s disciplined, tightknit communities, sure in the knowledge of their ancient traditions and religious faith, subjugation ate into the soul in a different way. In the kebessa, families had always prided themselves on settling their disputes without recourse to outsiders. Nothing was considered more undignified than being seen to lose control, to let go. The brutality of the racial laws was met with tight-lipped self-restraint. Turning inwards, the Eritreans bottled up their emotions and waited to see what the future would bring. ‘Whatever sun rises in the morning is our sun, and whichever king sits on the throne is our king,’ runs a Tigrinya proverb which summarizes the bittersweet philosophy of a people accustomed to having things done to them. Since there was no point standing up to a mightier adversary, silence seemed the only way of salvaging self-respect. ‘You knew what the consequences would be if you openly revolted, so you were advised to bide your time, to be patient. That was the advice my father always gave me when I was growing up: “just be patient”,’ says Dawit Mesfin, an Eritrean intellectual living in London.³⁷ He calls this preternatural calm, the apparent passivity cultivated in that era, ‘quietism’. Like all superficial passivity, it was a lid on a pressure cooker, clamped over a storm of hurt pride and a longing for retribution.

       CHAPTER 4 This Horrible Escarpment

      â€˜It was contrary to every book that had ever been written, but it came off.’

       Lieutenant-General Sir William Platt

      If you drive two hours north-west of Asmara, on what was once Mussolini’s Imperial Way, you eventually reach the town of Keren. The road takes you through eucalyptus groves, whose leaves, in the early morning, give off a heady medicinal perfume, before crossing a plateau of almost unimaginable bleakness. When it came to power in 1993, Eritrea’s new government launched an ambitious reforestation campaign and brave green saplings, their bark protected from nibbling goats by little iron wigwams, have been planted at neatly-spaced intervals along the way. But it will be decades before their handkerchiefs of shade make any impression on this glaring, denuded landscape. Much of the Hamasien highlands looks as though it was scooped up at a quarry and deposited from the tailend of a dumper-truck. With so little standing in its path, the wind is free to harry the cappuccino-coloured dust, so soft it could have been poured from a lady’s powder compact, so fine a trailing fingertip registers no contact at all. Donkeys stand motionless in the middle of the road, as though stunned into imbecility by the heat and sheer unfairness of being expected to graze off an expanse of rubble.

      Keren itself is a bustling crossroads of a town, a natural meeting point for Eritrea’s various tribes. White-robed nomads bring their animals to the weekly livestock market, a moaning, bleating, piebald medley of camels, sheep and goats. City dwellers make weekend jaunts to a Holy Shrine hidden in the womb of an ancient baobab and stroll along the colonnaded street where silversmiths crouch over bracelets and rings. But Keren only makes historical sense if you keep going, through the centre and out the other side. On the edge of town, by the side of the road that points towards the border with Sudan, lies a British cemetery from the Second World War. Jump over the low wall – visitors here are too occasional for anyone to man the gates permanently – and you can pace the rows of neat white British graves, each with its own crinkly bush of red geranium. The birthday-card triteness of the mottoes carved into the stones betrays a terrible anguish for young lives abruptly ended. ‘He gave his life, forget him never, for in giving he lives for ever,’ plead the relatives of 22-year-old W Hollings, who served with the West Yorkshire Regiment. ‘With many sad regrets, we shall remember when the rest of the world forgets,’ promises the family of PFC Mapes, 26. ‘In memory’s garden, we meet every day,’ is the only consolation the mother of AV Simmons, just 18 when his life came to a sudden stop, can offer herself.

      Further on, by the wayside, a grieving Madonna inclines her head in an expression of infinite tenderness. Her location is not accidental. A moment later, the road plunges, weaving and winding its tortured way through a ragged gash in the mountains which the British, mangling the local name, dubbed Dongolaas Gorge. Cliffs of bulbous brown rock crowd in on all sides, blocking out the sun, while the sheer slopes below are scattered with the rusting debris of vehicles that missed the curves. There is something oppressive about this pass, and it is a relief to emerge finally in the valley, a scrubby floodplain so dry it seems impossible water should ever run across these yellow sands. It is only when you hit the bottom and look back to where you came, that Keren’s geography suddenly becomes clear. Between you and the town a knobbly range of barren peaks now stretches, a giant amphitheatre coddling Keren in its lap. With Dongolaas Gorge offering the only easy access route across this rock wall, Keren is one of the most formidable fortresses ever thrown up by nature.

      This was the sight that met a force of around 30,000 British troops as it chased Italy’s retreating army from Kassala, on the Sudanese border, east across Eritrea. It was February 2, 1941 and the first dents were being knocked into what had until then seemed like an unstoppable Nazi and Fascist war machine. In the preceding two years, Hitler had swallowed up Czechoslovakia and Poland, invaded Norway and Denmark, toppled the French government and forced the humiliating evacuation of British forces from continental Europe. Hanging on to the German dictator’s coat-tails, Mussolini had invaded Albania and Greece and used his colonies in north and east Africa to attack Egypt and eject the British from Somaliland. Afraid of losing control of the vital supply route through the Suez Canal to the Indian Ocean, Britain was hitting back. It had trounced Italian forces in Libyan Cyrenaica and was now sending three separate forces – one bearing with it the deposed Haile Selassie – in a vast pincer movement aimed at squeezing the life out of the marooned Italian administration in the Horn. Before the Red Sea could be made safe for Allied shipping, both Asmara and Massawa had to be captured. But between the advancing British forces and their target lay Keren.

      No one remembers the battle of Keren now, except the men who fought there. Perhaps