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

questioning their assumptions, were about to be dealt a final, killer blow. In September 2001, President Isaias arrested colleagues who had dared challenge his handling of the war – including the ex-Fighters who had been closest to him during the Struggle – and shut down Eritrea’s independent media, a step even the likes of Mugabe, Mobutu and Moi had never dared, or bothered, to take. So much for Africa’s Renaissance. Many of the ministers whose independent musings had so impressed me were now in jail, denied access to lawyers. Plans to introduce a multiparty constitution and stage elections were put on indefinite hold, bolshie students sent for military training in the desert where no one could hear their views. Aloof and surrounded by sycophants, Isaias clearly had no intention of stepping down. As it gradually became clear that this was no temporary policy change, Eritrean ambassadors stationed abroad began applying for political asylum, members of the Eritrean diaspora postponed long-planned returns. As for the economy, who was going to invest now that the country’s skilled workers were all in uniform, the president had fallen out with Western governments, and relations with Ethiopia, Eritrea’s main market, were decidedly dodgy? No one cuffed the beggars on Liberation Avenue any more, because the beggars were not chirpy urchins but the old, left destitute by their children’s departure for the front.

      Far from learning from the continent’s mistakes, Eritrea had turned into the stalest, most predictable of African clichés. What was striking was how far the waves of despair and outrage at this presidential crackdown travelled. For the journalists, diplomats, academics and aid workers who followed Africa, this felt like a personal betrayal, because it had destroyed the last of their hopes for the continent. Had this happened in Zambia or Ivory Coast, we would have shaken our heads and shrugged. Because it had taken place in Eritrea, special, perverse, inspiring Eritrea, we raged. ‘How could they, oh, how could they?’ I remember an Israeli cameraman friend moaning over lunch in London’s Soho. This from a man who could not have spent more than a fortnight in Eritrea in his life.

      Somewhere along the line, it wasn’t yet clear where, the True Believers must have missed the point. They had failed to register important clues, drawn naive conclusions, misinterpreted key events. The qualities we had all so admired obviously came with a sinister reverse side. Had we mistaken arrogant pig-headedness for moral certainty, dangerous bloody-mindedness for focused determination? I had become intrigued by the Eritrean character, I realized, without digging very far into the circumstances in which it had been forged. ‘They carry their history around with them like an albatross,’ a British aid worker who had spent years with the EPLF had once warned me, but at the time I had not grasped her meaning. What was it in the country’s past, I wondered, that had given rise to such stubborn intensity, so invigorating in some circumstances, so destructive in others? What had made the Eritreans what they were today, with all their extraordinary strengths and fatal weaknesses?

      Even the most determined optimist has his moment of reckoning. An instant when he is forced to admit the society he sanctified is far darker, more convoluted, yes, on occasions downright nasty – than he was ready to admit. Increasingly, I found my mind wandering back to an incident I had once witnessed on Knowledge Street, round the corner from the sandal monument. Walking past a moving bus, I had noticed that the passengers were in uproar. At the heart of the storm of gesticulation sat a wizened old grandmother. The bus drove by and I heard it brake suddenly behind me, the doors open, the sound of an object hitting the pavement, the doors close, and then the bus disappeared into the night. Turning, I was astonished to see that the old woman, whom I guessed to be in her seventies, had been hurled horizontally out of the door – probably by the other passengers. Certainly, no one had interceded on her behalf. Maybe she had been very rude to the conductor, maybe she was a well-known fare dodger. Tempers, I knew, frayed fast in Eritrea. But I was astonished to witness an incident of this kind in Africa, where respect for old age runs so deep. That collective ejection was the kind of unsettling event that made you wonder if you had ever understood anything at all.

       CHAPTER 2 The Last Italian

      â€˜When the white snake has bitten you, you will search in vain for a remedy.’

       A 19th-century rebel leader warns Eritrean

       chiefs against the Italians

      The old man lunged for his wooden cane and began flailing about around our feet. A moment earlier, the yard had seemed at peace, its occupants lulled to near coma in the heat, which lay upon us with the weight of a winter blanket. Now a deafening cacophony of clucks, squawks and screeches was coming from under the trestle bed on which Filippo Cicoria perched. From where I sat, I could see a blur of scuffling wings, stabbing beaks and orange claws. Two of his pet ducks were battling for supremacy. This was a cartoon fight, individual heads and wings suddenly jutting from the whirlwind at improbable angles. I kicked feebly in the ducks’ direction. ‘No, no,’ grunted Cicoria, jabbing rhythmically with his cane. ‘You have [jab] to hit them [jab, jab] on the head [jab].’ The squawks were rising in hysteria, but his broken leg, pinned and swollen, was making it difficult to manoeuvre into a position where he could deliver a knock-out blow. ‘That’s enough, you stupid bastards … THAT’S ENOUGH.’ There were two loud shrieks as the cane finally hit home and the duo fled for safety, leaving a small deposit of feathers behind.

      Feathers, I now saw, lay everywhere. A breeze from the sea, a narrow strip of turquoise behind him, lifted a thin layer of white down deposited by the pullets cheeping softly in the hutches above his bed. A dozen muscovy ducks dozed in the shade, their gnarled red beaks tucked under wings, while at the gates grazed a gaggle of geese. The air was rich with the acid stink of chicken droppings. The man, it was clear, liked his fowls. But not half as much as he liked old appliances. Cicoria’s scrapyard, perched on the last in the chain of islands that forms the Massawa peninsula, held what had to be the biggest collection of obsolete fridges and broken-down air-conditioning units in the whole of Africa. Testimony to man’s losing contest with an unbearable climate, the boxes were stacked in their scores, white panels turning brown in the warm salt air. They lay alongside piled sheets of corrugated iron, abandoned car parts, ripped-up water fountains, discarded barbecues and ageing fuel drums. Chains and crankshafts, girders and gas cylinders, tubes and twists of wire, all came in the same rich shade of ochre. The entire junkyard was a tribute to the miraculous powers of oxidization. Once, Cicoria had been Mr Fix-It, the only man in Massawa who knew how to repair a hospital ice-maker, tinker with a yacht’s broken engine or get a hotel’s air conditioning running. Now, hobbled by a fall and slowed by emphysema, he was just Mr Keep-It, struggling for breath inside a man-made mountain of rust.

      I had telephoned from Asmara, keen to meet a man who I had been told personified a closing chapter of colonial history. ‘He’s the last one in Massawa,’ an elderly Italian friend in the capital had said. ‘When all the other Italians left, he stayed, through all the wars. He can’t come up to Asmara now, the air’s too thin for him.’ When Cicoria lifted the receiver, I heard a farmyard chorus of honks and clucks, so loud I could barely make out his words. He had sounded ratty, but not openly hostile. ‘Is there anything you’d like me to take him, since you haven’t seen him for a while?’ I asked my friend. ‘Errr … No.’ ‘Well, I’ll just pass on your best wishes, shall I?’ I suggested. ‘Yes, hmmm, that would be nice.’ The reticence was puzzling.

      The Italians have a word for those who fall in love with Africa’s desert wastes, putting down roots which reach so deep, they can never be wrenched up again. We say ‘gone to seed’, or ‘gone native’. The Italians call them the insabbiati – those who are buried in the sand – ‘people’, as Cicoria pronounced with lip-smacking relish, ‘completely immersed in the mire’. At 77, Cicoria was happy to count himself amongst their ranks and indeed, when I’d arrived for my appointment with Massawa’s last Italian, my gaze had initially flitted to him and skated on, looking vainly for a white face. Cicoria was as dark as a local, evidence of a lifetime