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In the
autumn of 1989 a profound tremor upset the world. The epicentre was
definitely located in Russia, west of the Urals; but the shock waves
were much more keenly felt in mainland Europe. In all the countries
of the world, people gathered around their TV sets and followed
their daily news. The Berlin Wall crumbled, Stalinist hard-liners
walked as free men out of Prague Castle, while in Romania, President
Ceaucescu and his wife were arrested and blindfolded and put on
trial.
Ceaucescu
took his wife by the arm and felt his way into the brickyard,
presidential toe leading. He stood up against the wall, his
servants lined up opposite him, loaded their rifles and shot him
dead. The guns were loud in the bare brick yard. His red shadow
dripped down the wall as his wife filled his place. For a second
time the guns aimed and fired in chorus.
Both their
bodies were hauled away; their shades were washed from the red brick
wall; the cameras were turned off; the video released for the
Christmas Day news.
In Africa
there were massacres, civil wars and optimistic peace treaties.
Behind the colonial facades they had inherited, Presidents For Life
sweated in their sleep and woke to the sound of angry murmurs of
popular discontent. Some of them lost their nerve and fled.
Others, like Ceaucescu, were not given the chance. As each post
colonial ruler fell, people gathered in their shanty towns, and
cheered. ‘Our Second Liberation!’
Their
African Renaissance.
The most
potent symbol of this blaze of change was the referendum held in
north-east Ethiopia on April 23rd-25th, 1993. The vote was to
provide ‘a legal and democratic conclusion’ to the long struggle for
independence of Eritrea; an ex Italian colony governed by Ethiopia
since 1950.
The
question, which was written in the Arabic and Ge’ez scripts read:
‘Do you want Eritrea to be an independent and sovereign country?’
For those
who could not read the government of freedom fighters had posters in
every street in the country. The choice before them was colour
coded for the illiterate.
‘No’ was
red. Ethiopian soldiers with armfuls of skulls patrolled the
perimeter of the poster. Their faces were fierce, their guns
dripped blood. They bit cigarettes in their grinning teeth, and
cast lustful eyes over the women. Continued life in Ethiopia would
be endless war - burnt villages, dismembered bodies.
‘Yes’ was
blue. It showed happy babies, fields of abundant wheat, and
Soviet-style images of peace and prosperity. The EPLF (Eritrean
People’s Liberation Front), who had led the people out of a thirty
year war, were showing them The Promised Land. It was a Free
Eritrea.
Illiterate
women left purdah for the first time in their lives to attach their
thumb prints to ballot papers they couldn’t read. Crooked walking
sticks took old men by the hand and led them to the place of
voting. Even the fierce and solitary shepherds came down off their
thorny mountainsides, with goats in tow. They had their long carved
combs in their black afros, tilted forward at aggressive angles.
Their dirty jallabias were the robes of kings, they ignored the long
queues and walked straight up to the clerk’s desk. Nobody dared
stop them.
On the day
the results were due to be announced there was a tense air of
expectation. Women sat on woven carpets, drinking syrupy-thick
coffee and tossing popcorn into their mouths. The men put on their
suits and went to slurp cappuccino in the old Italian cafés. All
listened as the UN observers declared the referendum ‘free and
fair.’ The turnout figure of eligible voters was 98.5%. There was
silence while the news-reader got around to announcing the result.
Even the cappuccino machines were turned off.
After a
long preamble, the moment everyone was waiting for arrived: The
announcer reported that the people of Eritrea had voted a resounding
99.81% in favour of independence from Ethiopia. It was the most
affirmative referendum in the history of mankind.
The
independence celebrations were universally covered by the world’s
media. Foreign correspondents relished the chance to feed the
people at home a sweet story of hope and reconstruction. The charm
of Eritrea was its quiet determination to build itself, not rely on
aid handouts.
This
independence came from the Eritreans’ long history of being ignored
by the rest of the world. The indifference and neglect they had
suffered had left them with a ferocious sense of individuality.
They were as uncompromising as their hard and stony mountains. They
had won the war unaided, they would rebuild their country too.
When the
government appealed for international help, they vetted the offers
of aid. ‘Aid’ linked to industrial or defence contracts, was
refused. ‘Aid’ which was linked to the right to prospect for oil or
gold was ignored. ‘Aid’ that was channelled back to the donating
country was spurned. ‘Aid’ organisations that spent most of their
money on expat salaries, not on the people they were supposed to
help, were denied permission to operate in Eritrea.
Eritrea’s
unconventionality in all things was exemplified by the Minister for
Transport, who was to be found with his jacket off helping in the
reconstruction, pausing to hold quick interviews, then returning
with his pick axe, to his place in the ranks of labourers.
The inside
pages of the international monthlies, Sunday supplements and glossy
magazines were full of eulogising copy. A country that had defeated
both the world’s super powers in the cruel and relentless
thirty-year war. A country liberated by an army of volunteer
freedom fighters, a third of whom were women.
Eritrea
suddenly found itself ‘a news story’.
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Passing
Under Heaven
The
Drink and Dream Teahouse
A
Bend in the Yellow River