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

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

‘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 spent working in the sun and the squirt of Eritrean blood that ran in his veins, inheritance of an Eritrean grandparent. A skinny wreck of a man, wearing a T-shirt that drooped to reveal his nipples, he sat hunched on the bed he had ordered to be carried out of his house and deposited in the centre of his metalwork collection. ‘In there, I felt like a beast in a cage, out here, at least I can swear at my animals.’ They say men’s ears keep growing when everything else has stopped, and in Cicoria’s case it seemed to be true. The onslaught of the years had turned his face into a gargoyle of ears, nose and missing teeth. Shrunken by time, this once-active man had gathered on the table before him what he clearly regarded as the bare necessities of human existence: two telephones, a roll of toilet paper and a slingshot.

He was as ravaged and pitted as the port itself. Massawa is a town with two faces. At the setting of the sun, when everyone heaves a sigh of relief, it becomes a place of hidden recesses and mysterious beauty, the lights playing softly over warm coral masonry. Tiny grocery shops, their walls neatly stacked with shiny metallic packets of tea and milk powder, soap and oil, glow from the darkness like coloured jewels. As the cafés under the Arabic arcades spring into life, naval officers in starched white uniforms sit and savour the cool evening air, watching trucks from the harbour chugging their way along the causeways, taking grain back to the mainland. Crouched in alleyways, young women sell hot tea and hardboiled eggs, the incense on their charcoal braziers blending with the pungent smell of ripe guava, the nutty aroma of roasting coffee and an occasional hot blast from an open sewer. But in the squinting glare of daytime, when only cawing crows and ibis venture out into the blinding sun, Massawa is just an ugly Red Sea town, scarred by too many sieges and earthquakes.

The town’s geographical layout – two large islands linked to the mainland by slim causeways built by the 19th-century Swiss adventurer Werner Munzinger – always meant it was an easy town to hold, a difficult place to conquer. In the Second World War, a defiant Italian colonial administration had to be bombed into submission by the British and the port was then crippled by German commanders who scuttled their ships in a final gesture of spite. When the EPLF guerrilla movement first tried to capture Massawa from the Ethiopians in the 1970s, its Fighters were mown down on the exposed salt flats. Thirteen years later, the rebels succeeded, but the town took a terrible hammering in the process. Pigeons roost in the shattered blue dome of the Imperial Palace, shrapnel has taken hungry bites out of mosques and archways, walls are pitted with acne scars. Near the port, a plinth that once carried a statue of the mounted Haile Selassie, pointing triumphantly to the sea he worked so hard to claim on Ethiopia’s behalf, stands decapitated. The Marxist Derg regime that ousted him tried to destroy the statue, the EPLF made a point of finishing the job. Occasionally, you’ll come across a building in the traditional Arab style, its intricately-carved wooden balcony slipping gradually earthwards. But some of Africa’s most grotesque modern buildings – pyramids of glass and cement – leave you wistful for what must have been, before the bombs and artillery did their work on the coral palazzi. The handwritten sign propped next to the till of a mini-market round the corner from Cicoria’s workshop captures what, in light of Massawa’s history, seems an understandable sense of foreboding. ‘Our trip – long. Our hope – far. Our trouble – many’ it reads.

Cicoria had lived through it all, surviving each military onslaught miraculously unscathed. ‘Once, they were shooting and one person dropped dead to the left of me, one was killed to the right and I was left standing in the middle. I’ve always had the devil’s own luck.’ He’d come to Massawa in the 1940s, a 15-year-old runaway escaping an unhappy Asmara home. ‘My mother had died and I never got on with my dad. I hated my father terribly. He was an ignorant peasant.’ His grandfather had been one of the area’s first settlers, a constructor dispatched by Rome to build roads and dams in an ultimately fruitless attempt to win the trust of Abyssinian Emperor Menelik II. ‘My family has a chapel in Asmara cemetery. You should visit it.’ Cicoria must have inherited from his grandfather some technical skill that drew him to the shipyards, where Italian prisoners-of-war and Russian, Maltese and British operators – ‘the ones who’d gone crazy in the war’ – were repairing damaged Allied battleships. After the machinists clocked off, the boy would sneak in and mimic their movements at the lathes. ‘I learnt how to make pressure gauges, spherical pistons and starter machines. No one ever taught me anything, I just watched and learnt. I can make anything, just so long as it’s black and greasy,’ he boasted.

This was the talent that had allowed him to play the inglorious role of Vicar of Bray, adapting smoothly to each of Eritrea’s successive administrations. When Massawa’s other Italians were evacuated, Cicoria’s skills meant he was too valuable to lose. Under the British, he worked on the warships, under the Ethiopians he was summoned to repair damaged artillery and broken domestic appliances. ‘All the Derg officers used to bring me their fridges to repair.’ When the Eritrean liberation movement started up, he claimed, he turned fifth columnist and joined an undercover unit, using his privileged access to sabotage the Ethiopian military machine. ‘I’m one of theirs. I’m Shabia, a guerrilla.’ But his eyes darted shiftily away when I pressed for details.

One quality his survival had certainly not relied upon was personal charm. As his Eritrean wife, a statuesque woman of luminous beauty, prepared lunch, I began to grasp what lay behind the hesitation in my Italian friend’s voice. Cicoria, it turned out, was good at hate. During a career in which I had interviewed many a ruthless politician and sleazy businessman, I had rarely met anyone, I realized, harder to warm to. His malevolence was democratically even-handed – he loathed just about everyone he came into contact with, the sole exception being the British officials who had recognized his skills all those decades ago. The American officers he had worked for had been ‘crass idiots’, the Ethiopians hateful occupiers. He despised his contemporaries in Asmara – my friend, it emerged, was a particular object of scorn – for not bothering to learn Tigrinya (‘a bunch of illiterates’). Modern-day Eritreans were useless, cack-handed when it came to anything technical. His life had been a series of fallings-out with workmates and relatives, most of whom were no longer on speaking terms. Perhaps they’d been alienated by Cicoria’s weakness for drink, or his habit of taking a new wife whenever he tired of an existing mate. ‘It’s not legal, but if you knew my life history, you’d understand.’ Leafing through a smudged photo collection he pointed to a first wife (‘as black as coal – can’t stand the sight of me’), a daughter (‘that bitch’), a brother (‘a real shit’) and a son (‘nothing in his head’). The 16-year-old son running errands around the yard scored little better. ‘Look at him. Strong as an ox,’ he shook his head pityingly. ‘But he’s got no brain, no brain at all.’ Even the muscovy ducks were viewed with jaundiced eyes. ‘My fondness for them only goes so far. Then I eat them.’ Only the latest of the many wives, whose face lit up with extraordinary tenderness when it rested upon him, won grudging praise. ‘She’s a good woman. Incredibly strong,’ he said, watching admiringly as she manoeuvred a fridge out of the house. ‘But she’s too old for me now. What I really need is a nice 19-year-old.’ Most depressing of all, Cicoria really did not seem to like himself – ‘I’ve always been a rascal, a pig when it comes to women, and I drink too much’ – while clearly finding it impossible to rein in a fury that kept the world at bay.

His view of Eritrea’s future was bleak. ‘This war is never ending. Believe me, these imbeciles will be fighting each other till the end of time.’ Ill-health had deprived him of his one pleasure – his joy at hearing the stalled and obsolete revving back into life – and gravity pinned him at sea level. With the loss of his beloved lathes, which lay exasperatingly out of reach, something had died. ‘I used to have high hopes,’ he muttered, ‘but this fall has been the last blow. Now I can’t see things improving.’ He had been to Italy for hospital treatment the year before and the trip, his first to the ancestral motherland, had been a revelation. He was now planning a permanent move there, he said, once he found a buyer for the scrapyard. I nodded, but found it impossible to imagine. The insabbiati do not travel well. Transposed, too late in life, to Europe’s retirement homes, they fade away, pale and diminished, smitten by the syndrome Italians call ‘mal d’Africa’. Far better to sit sweltering in this Red Sea cauldron, king of all he surveyed, compliant family at his beck and call.

Before saying goodbye, I put the question that had been niggling me. ‘What’s the slingshot for?’ His eyes lit up: ‘Any moment now, a crow will land on that telephone line. I’m a very good shot, but the bastards are canny. If you watch, as soon as my hand moves towards the slingshot, he’ll be off.’ We waited. On cue, a crow landed on the line. ‘Now watch.’ Cicoria’s hand travelled smoothly across the table to the slingshot. The crow cocked its head. With impressive speed, he lifted the weapon and fired. But the bird had already taken off, flapping its glossy black wings across the translucent waters of the Red Sea. Cicoria shook his head. ‘Bastard.’

A crabby geriatric, surrounded by the detritus of 20th century civilization, hating the world. With Cicoria, I felt, I had tasted the sour dregs of an overweeningly ambitious dream. The Italians who established their Eritrean capital in Massawa in 1890, the officials in Rome who fondly believed Africa’s original inhabitants were destined to wither away, ceding their land to a stronger, white-skinned race, could never have imagined that their bracing colonial adventure would splutter to this bad-tempered, seedy end.

They had come to the Horn with grandiose plans, buoyed by the bumptious belief – shared by all Europe’s expanding powers at that time – that Africa was an unclaimed continent, theirs not only for the taking but for the carving up and sharing out amongst friends. It was an assumption that held true nowhere in Africa, but least of all when applied to what was then known as Abyssinia, the ancient Ethiopian empire that lay hidden in the Horn’s hinterland, beyond a wall of mountain.

By the mid-19th century, Abyssinia had experienced 100 years of anarchy, its countryside devastated by roaming armies, its weak emperors challenged by power-hungry provincial warlords, or rases. Its shifting boundaries bore little relation to those of Ethiopia today. The empire had lost most of its coastline to the Turkish Ottomans in the 16th century, had been pushed from the south by Oromo migrations and was facing infiltrations from the west by the Egyptian army and the Mahdi’s Dervish followers in Sudan. But Abyssinian Emperor Yohannes IV, operating out of the northern province of Tigray, looked to a glorious ancestral past for inspiration. Steeped in legends of the vast Axumite kingdom which had stretched in ancient times from modern-day east Sudan to western Somaliland, he dreamt of rebuilding a great trading nation which would roll down from the highlands and spill into the sea, a Christian empire in a region of Islam. Blessed with a sense of historical and religious predestination, he was unimpressed by clumsy European attempts to muscle in on the region. ‘How could I ever agree to sign away the lands over which my royal ancestors governed?’ he once protested in a letter to the Italians. ‘Christ gave them to me.’

Italy first placed its uncertain mark on the Red Sea coastline in 1869, when Giuseppe Sapeto, a priest acting on behalf of the shipping company Rubattino – itself serving as proxy for a cautious government – bought the port of Assab from a local sultan. The trigger for the purchase was that year’s opening of the Suez Canal, which was set to transform the Red Sea into a vital access route linking Europe with the markets of the Far East. Bent on capitalizing on anticipated trade, Britain had already claimed Aden, the French had established a foothold in what is today Djibouti, while Egypt had bought Massawa from the Turks. As the European nation geographically closest to the Red Sea, as the birthplace of the great Roman and Venetian empires, Italy felt it could not stand idly by as its rivals scrambled to establish landing stations and trading posts along the waterway.

But commercial competition was never Italy’s sole motivation for planting its flag in what would one day be Eritrea. The 19th century had seen a bubbling up of scientific curiosity in Africa, with geographical societies sending a succession of expeditions to explore the highlands and establish contact with Abyssinia’s isolated monarchs. Many never returned, cut to pieces by hostile tribesmen. But those who did brought back wondrous tales of exotic wildlife and bizarre customs. Their reports fired the imaginations of Italy’s writers, parliamentarians and journalists, who talked up Rome’s ‘civilizing mission’, its duty to bring enlightenment and Catholicism to a region blighted by the slave trade and firmly in the clutches of the Orthodox Church. ‘Africa draws us invincibly towards it,’ declared one of the Italian Geographical Society’s patrons. ‘It lies just under our noses, yet up until now we remain exiled from it.’1

Beneath the idle intellectual curiosity lay some sobering economic realities. Italy had only succeeded in uniting under one national flag in 1870, having thrown off Bourbon and Austrian rule. A very young European nation was struggling to meet the aspirations created during the tumultuous Risorgimento. Italy had one of the highest birth rates in Europe. Emigration figures reveal how tricky Rome found feeding all these voracious new mouths. Between 1887 and 1891, to take one five-year example, 717,000 Italians left to start new lives abroad, most of them heading for Australia and the Americas. The number was to triple in the early 1900s. Italy, a growing number of politicians came to believe, needed a foreign colony to soak up its land-hungry. At worst, a territory in the Horn of Africa could serve as a penal colony, taking the pressure off Italy’s prisons. At best, it would provide Italian farmers with an alternative to the fertile, well-watered territories they sought at the time across the Atlantic.

No one who has visited Eritrea and northern Ethiopia today, no one who has experienced the punishing heat of the coastal plains and seen the dry river beds, would strike his hand to his forehead and exclaim: ‘Just the place for our poor and huddled masses!’ But then, Italy’s African misadventure was always based on an extraordinary amount of wishful thinking. The priest who bought Assab claimed the volcanic site, one of the bleakest spots on God’s earth, bore a striking resemblance to the north Italian harbour of La Spezia or Rio de Janeiro. Colonial campaigners conjured up visions of caravans trundling through Red Sea ports and new markets piled high with Italian manufactured goods, although explorers had already registered that the peasants of Abyssinia were virtually too poor to trade. (‘The Abyssinians go barefoot and it will be hard to persuade them to use shoes … A thousand metres of the richest fabrics would be more than enough to meet the Abyssinians’ annual needs,’ worried one.)2 Italian politicians who toured the highlands would rave about ‘truly empty’ lands lying ready for the taking,3 although more discerning colleagues noted that every plot, however seemingly neglected, had its nominal owner. Geographical precision was sacrificed in favour of the rhetorical flourish: ‘The keys to the Mediterranean’, one foreign minister famously, bafflingly, assured parliament, were to be found ‘in the Red Sea’.4 Ignorance sets the imagination free. When it came to their own internal affairs, Italy’s lawmakers were too well-versed in the gritty detail of domestic politics, too answerable to their constituencies, to indulge in flights of fancy. When it came to Africa, however – continent of doe-eyed beauties, noble warrior kings and peculiar creatures – even the pragmatists let their imaginations run free.

Assab proved something of a false start. After an initial flurry of excitement, it lay undeveloped and unused, as Italian politicians vacillated over the merits of a colonial project. Then, in 1885, British officials gave Italy’s foreign policy a kick, inviting the Italians to take Egyptian-controlled Massawa. The debt-ridden regime in Cairo was on the verge of collapse and the British, new masters in Egypt, were anxious not to see a power vacuum develop which could be filled by the French, their great rivals in the scramble for Africa. They helpfully explained to Italian naval commanders exactly where the Egyptian cannon were positioned, allowing the port to be captured without loss of life.