The Challenge Road

Women and the Eritrean Revolution

Amrit Wilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781032190426
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000534603
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book, first published in 1991, analyses the role of women in the Eritrean struggle for independence. Emerging from a semi-feudal world, these women – peasants and pastoralists, student activists and workers from the cities – participated fully in the Eritrean revolution. They have organized cells, gathered intelligence, carried out clandestine missions, set up and ran health and education systems and fought on the front line, and in transforming themselves they have transformed Eritrea.

1 Introduction

Remember the women who have been martyred fighting. Remember the women who gave birth while feeling from their homes, and those women who have been born and have grown up fighting for the liberation of our country. We are the EPLF as much as anyone . . . We fight for our rights as women, but the world outside our bodies, outside our identity as women, belongs to us too.

It was one of those unforgettable conversations so common in Eritrea through which people try in different ways to explain the meaning of the revolution. Maaza, a cadre from the women’s mass organization, expressed it this way. Others speak of particular battles in the anti-colonial struggle, or of changes in power structures, or of the love and support of their comrades. Each story elaborates and extends the same theme about how the people of Eritrea experience, create and pilot their struggle – how they made the Eritrean revolution and what the Eritrean revolution made them.

Eritrea lies like a long, wide dagger above the northern flank of Ethiopia, stretching from the entrance to the Red Sea to a point nearly half way along it. It is remarkable in many ways. What other country has confronted a colonizer backed first by the United States then the Soviet Union? Where can one see such immense diversity of culture united in such a powerful revolutionary nationalism? What other revolution in recent times has had such extensive liberated areas, and where, above all else, has the struggle for liberation been so long and so intense?

In Eritrea the struggle determines and illuminates everything. Every view of the land is drawn powerfully into focus by it: the green plateau and rich dark soil of the highlands where the densely populated villages have been bombed and burnt mercilessly by the Ethiopian forces; and the vast desert lowlands, the ideal guerrilla base, which hold within them all the pain, sacrifice and momentum of the struggle. Here in the lowlands the drone of an Ethiopian Antonov on a surveillance and bombing mission can still be heard every nightfall and dawn. Every encounter on the long road brings a new picture of a people’s resistance: nomads kneeling in prayer with Kalashnikovs strapped to their backs; a huge Soviet truck converted into a water-carrier sheltering under the foliage of trees until it is safe to move at night; or members of the people’s militia appearing suddenly out of the dark.

Twenty-nine years of struggle have had a major impact on the identity of the people. They have not only engendered an intense nationalism but have subtly and crucially altered it, giving it a revolutionary form. Perhaps as a result, particularly in the areas where the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) has had a long presence, we no longer see the sharp cutting dichotomy between the personal struggle of women and the broader politics of national struggle so common elsewhere in the world. Here, intense personal identities are drawn into a no-less intense collective identity, so no one speaks purely for her- or himself any more.

Yet in Eritrea there is no uniformity, and nor can there be any. Even among the women fighters of the EPLF there is a wide variety of backgrounds and communities. Their families may be city dwellers, traders, nomadic pastoralists or communal farmers. They may belong to anyone of Eritrea’s nine major ethnic “nationalities” – Tigrinya, Tigre, Beja, Kunama, Nara, Billen, Saho, Afar or Rashaida – each with its characteristic traditional culture and language. Together as Eritreans these different groups have in the last hundred years or so experienced a series of colonial oppressors – the Italians, the British and the Ethiopians.

But what was their experience in the period before Italian colonialism? The Ethiopians have claimed that they ruled Eritrea before the Italians, but this is a blatant fabrication, a typical colonial version of history.

In the third century AD the area of present-day Eritrea was the seat of the Aksumite Kingdom, a major commercial and trading power centred round a port of legendary fame at Adulis. When the Aksumite Kingdom declined the region became divided into a variety of kingdoms, until in the fourteenth century a major part of it was united again as the Medri-Bahri or “land of the sea”. It was divided from Ethiopia, or Abyssinia as it was then called, by the River Mareb, and ruled by an elected leader the Bahri Negassi. Local wars continued, however, and in the sixteenth century as the Ottoman Empire expanded into the area it was able to take Massawa, a major port on the Red Sea. Eritrea was now divided between the Turks and dynasties from Sudan.

With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the Egyptians joined the other military powers jockeying for control of the Horn of Africa. They occupied Massawa, Karen and south-central Eritrea and began to move into areas held by the Turks. They also tried to invade Abyssinia but were disastrously defeated in battles at Gura and Gundut, Eritrean towns near the Ethiopian border. Following this, parts of the Eritrean highlands were controlled by Ethiopia for 13 years until in 1889 Emperor Yohannes of Abyssinia was killed in a battle with Sudanese forces. By now Italy had gained a foothold in the region. It had managed to take Massawa from the Egyptians and was pushing into the interior of the region (which it called Eritrea or Red, after the sea), despite protests from the Turks and Egyptians. As Margery Perham wrote,¹ it is clear that “it was not from Ethiopia but from the collapsing Egyptian empire that the Italians took Massawa and that the Egyptians had themselves taken it over from the Turks”.

Beneath the successive waves of invasions by foreign forces which ranged from Ethiopian feudalism to European capitalism, Eritrea remained a land of many nationalities. These groups were fragmented into smaller entities ruled by various types of overlords – ra-ises, deglals, bahri-negasis and sultans. Their socio-economic development, as an EPLF document states, “to some degree varied from nationality to nationality and ranged from the lowest form of semi-primitive communal herding to the highest form of semi-feudal farming”.²

With the arrival of the Italians, colonial capitalism began to interact directly and indirectly with the modes of production of all these groups, giving rise to new contradictions which created new classes and released new social forces. These classes and social forces launched the struggle against colonialism which was to consolidate the modern Eritrean nation.

The contradictions created by colonialism will be discussed in detail later in this book; at this point I would like to emphasise only that they affected the whole country, although in very different ways in different areas. In the highlands, towns were established by the colonialists and capital was invested, as a result of which a working class emerged, largely from the peasantry of the surrounding areas. In the lowlands where large areas of land were appropriated by the Italians, mainly for plantations, and where conflicts between existing tribal entities were intense in the pre-colonial period, the impact of colonialism and the process of formation of new classes were more complex. For example, in the Western lowlands military protection was the obligation of dominant clans within a tribe of goat-and camel-herders. Here the pax Italiana imposed by colonialism, together with better veterinary services, led to a weakening in the relations of dominance and the formation of a new class of people freed from their former servitude.³

Another example is from Barka where two quite different nationalities, the animist Naras and the Muslim Tigre-speaking Beni-Amer, had lived in conflict for years. The pax Italiana led to a very different interaction there. Trade between the two groups began to flourish, and eventually the Naras converted to Islam and changed from a system of communal farming to a less egalitarian form where the elected leader was replaced by a hereditary official who now represented the interests of the Italians.⁴

The impact of colonialism on women’s lives was enormous. The women who migrated to the towns ended up in highly exploitative and often degrading employment, working for example as domestic servants, bar-women or low-paid factory workers. Even in areas with no migration there were major changes.⁴ In Barka, for example, Nara women who played (and still play) a vital and recognized economic role continued to be consulted over family decisions, but now they were expected to be veiled and quiet in the presence of men. In general, in every region and every nationality women’s oppression within the family was intensified by colonialism – because here, in contrast to the metropolitan countries, capitalism retained and sometimes extended feudal and semi-feudal relationships, modifying them as needed and incorporating them within its own exploitative framework.

Family structure continued to be more or less the same as before (although tensions between families increased), and with the exception of the more communally orientated and animist groups, families remained intensely patriarchal.

As in all patriarchal peasant societies, the woman’s main role was to produce sons: – in her womb lay the crucially important but uncontrollable and therefore mysterious ability to strengthen and propagate the patriarchal line. Her role was therefore perceived by society as being wholly tied to her “natural activities”: the production and rearing of children. Since these were not seen as work she was not regarded as a worker, despite her labour on her husband’s fields and pastures. This labour was hard and unremitting. Survival in a peasant society is always hard but in Eritrea’s agricultural and pastoral communities it is particularly so, because of the uncertainty of the weather and the shortage of land. As a male EPLF cadre who had once been a middle peasant told me: “a man who does not wake up early is ostracized”. For the woman the day is longer still. A woman from the highlands, now a fighter, told me about her mother’s day:

My mother would get up early before anyone else. She would do all the housework, the cleaning and the cooking which takes hours, and the fetching of water from a long distance. And then she would work in the fields doing jobs which are not considered heavy but are very tiring like weeding, cleaning, cutting and so on. When my father came back from the fields she would wash his feet in a bowl of warm water. She would be the last to go to bed. . . . There is a proverb which says that asking a woman to rest is like making a donkey your guest.

It is the same in the semi-nomadic communities in the lowlands. Here the hardest time of year is when the family leave their highland home and start their summer journey to the lowlands. As Fatma Omer from Rora Bagla told me:

The woman dismantles the tent which is in front of the house and loads it on to an ox or donkey. Then she gets the children ready and attends to the goats. The kitchen utensils are also packed on the donkey. Whenever they stop she has to set up the tent, prepare the food and look after the animals and children. The man comes and sleeps. She has to make porridge and coffee, then she feeds him. He eats alone or sometimes with the children. If he leaves anything she eats it. During the night they move again. It is the same process all over again. It takes ten days to reach the lowlands north or north-east of Hashkerbeb.

Here girls are sometimes engaged when they are still in their mother’s wombs and often before they reach puberty. As in other patriarchal peasant societies, pregnant women are looked after with care and affection but the sex of the child they produce is crucial. As a woman from the out skirts of Asmara told me:

The mother of a son is congratulated and given presents. There is ullulation and feasting. If a girl is born there is ullulation too but only three times, not seven as in the case of a boy. The neighbours who help with the birth do not congratulate the mother of a girl, instead they console her and she gets depressed. If a woman has only girls she is regarded as a failure. Then the man can justify marrying again – it is allowed among orthodox Christians and Muslims, otherwise they can secretly have another wife.

If the birth of a girl is seen in a negative light, her childhood reinforces it. She is prepared by her family and by her religion, Christian or Muslim, for her life as a married woman.

She is secluded to varying extents depending on her religion, and she is circumcised in an attempt to control her sexuality and sexual activities. She is taught to be withdrawn, obedient and passive, and to believe that she is inferior to men. At the same time she learns that she is the guardian of family honour which is highly sensitive to her behaviour and her chastity.

However, it is always difficult to generalize, in Eritrea partly because there is such a wide variety of cultures and partly because within each group there are always many exceptions. The above description broadly defines what tradition demands from women in patriarchal families, the norm for the majority of Muslim and Christian communities in Eritrea. The exceptions are the Kunama and to a lesser extent the Nara communal societies with their collective agriculture and women-centred families. Each kind of family structure originates from a particular stage of development and is further shaped by external influences and internal interactions. Within each group there are also the variations caused by class and by affluence or poverty. In Eritrea there are no acute inequalities – no big landlords on the scale of Asia or Latin America – but as in most other societies where feudal attitudes persist, affluence and family prestige make the woman even more of a possession of her husband’s family.

I have briefly described some of the varied contradictions engendered by the years of Italian colonialism. This phase was to end after Italy’s defeat early in the Second World War. Eritrea was then taken over by the British who ruthlessly exploited it for 11 years (see Chapter 2). By the time they finally left in 1952 they had dealt the country a serious economic blow by dismantling and selling off around $86 million worth of industrial equipment, some of which had been set up during the war. Eritrea was federated to Ethiopia by the United Nations in the face of massive protests and against all historical and legal considerations – the reason was that the West and particularly the United States wanted to retain control of the region through its client regime in Ethiopia.

Under Emperor Haile Selassie Ethiopia was an autocratic state, but it was also a neocolony of the type more commonly found in southern Asia than in Africa. It was a country where on the one hand foreign capital had been invited in and had ruthlessly exploited the people and on the other hand feudal values had been retained and re-created, sometimes reshaped in line with the needs of rulers, both indigenous and foreign. The result was a peculiarly violent power structure with all the arrogance, revenge and cruelty of feudalism but with none of its obligations. As we shall see in later chapters, as a colonizer such a country is an entirely and ruthlessly destructive force.

For Eritrea, federation with Ethiopia brought no federal rights but an army of occupation, followed after 11 years of savage repression by formal colonization through annexation. The change in the Ethiopian regime – the overthrow of Haile Selassie, the emergence of the Dergue (the ruling military junta) and the support which it received from the Soviet Union – made no change in the nature of Ethiopian colonialism although the degree of repression intensified.

However, even before Eritrea was annexed the armed struggle for liberation had started, and as the years passed the Eritrean people as a whole participated in it. The classes and contradictions created by colonialism pushed the struggle ahead. The workers made redundant when the Ethiopians destroyed and dismantled their factories; the bar-women and domestic servants who faced years of racist treatment and exploitation by the Italians, British and Ethiopians; the poor peasants and nomads living on the edge of starvation whose homes were burnt; and many other groups who made up the Eritrean nation.

In the course of these years the tensions within fami...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and Acronyms
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Mabrat’s Story
• 3. Laying the Foundations
• 4. Behind the Enemy Lines
• 5. Fighters
• 6. Land Reform
• 7. Marriage
• 8. Health
• 9. The Future
• Appendices
• References and Notes
• Index