A New Country

Visiting Eritrea in the first months of independence

April 2022: In recent UN votes Russia has been supported by a handful of nations: Belarus, Syria and North Korea were expected, but there has been one other, Eritrea. The latter’s participation in this elite club of criminal autocracies has surprised some. The country fought a long war of independence to break free of a larger and more powerful neighbour that was determined to hold on to it. Ukraine, you might think, should be an ally. However, President Isaias Afawerki is keenly anti-Western with a proposed Russian naval base on his mind. Aseb is a possible site for this key bit of infrastructure. This will combine with another proposed Russian base at Berbera in Somaliland to neatly sandwich Djibouti’s Chinese, American and French bases. Once again the Horn of Africa is hotting up and, of course, no politician involved gives a hoot about the people who actually live there. Afawerki is widely reported to be paranoid and secretive, his government guilty of gross human rights violations. Eritrean refugees are a significant part of those crossing the Med and the Channel. The UN estimated over 3,000 drowned last year.

In 1994 I come to Aseb in an attempt to reach Yemen by boat, flights being suspended because of the war. Isaias Afawerki has just been elected president. Bill Clinton is hailing him as a new kind of African leader, part of a renaissance. I don’t think Bill has visited Aseb.

This story follows on from last week’s…

Ottoman era ruins in the Yemeni port of Mokha

Dire Dowa airport is one of the nicest places in the town. The departure lounge is under the trees where the weaver birds are chattering. I sit on a bench made from an abandoned aircraft aerolon. Security search my bag and fail to find the 5-inch jack knife that I’d bought after the attempted robbery.

Back in Addis Ababa I head to the Tourist Information office, but the woman behind the desk seems surprised to see me. “Sorry,” she says, “We have no information.”

Likewise Ethiopian Airlines have no information, not about flights to Aseb. In a café I meet Gamar, a Sudanese engineer, who introduces me to the informal system of lodging houses which is much cheaper than staying in a hotel. “The best place to learn Amharic,” he says, “Is in bed. Do you know that Ethiopia has 83% of the world’s most beautiful women?”

“I thought it was 73%.”

This disconcerts him. “I will check… I don’t have the figures handy.”

I go out and sit under trees drinking tiny shots of coffee: black-bodied with a creamy head, like a miniature pint of Guinness. There are cakes too and pictures of ships which I take to be a hopeful sign. A boy tries to sell newspapers, but the customers merely flick through them and hand them back. There is no news.

Chatting to one coffee-drinker I mention Aseb. He knows the port. “A horrible place - always too hot, and it’s July… You’re crazy.” But he gives me a name, Belai, a local who will help me.

A few days later I head up to the airport at 5am. Ethiopian Airlines have finally admitted they do have a plane going to Aseb. By seven we are airborne, but it’s cloudy for the entire route until we start descending. Land appears: wrinkled brown ridges and smudges of yellow sand. We seem to be very high, but then I spot a lone bush and realise we are very low. The sea. An island. The port with ships. We land.

I have never been to an airport like Aseb in 1994, not before or since. All colour in the landscape has been hammered out by the heat. There are cones of volcanic ash, gravel pans and lava flows dotted with piles of twisted metal: bits of military helicoptors, planes, oil drums and broken masonry. The litter of war is everywhere. The control tower is a garden shed on stilts, the arrivals building has two tables and two chairs, but no doors. The sign reads, ‘Provisional Government of Eritrea.’

The official stares at my visa in disbelief. A tourist? But, SMACK, he stamps me in. I take a bus into town. The Hotel Nino is a peeling memory of something an Italian once built. There are white-washed archways and slatted wooden shutters over the windows. Pressed against the walls of the long colonnade are several emaciated cats, frozen by the solar inferno in heiroglyphic postures. The receptionist frowns at me. “Why have you come? People die here from the heat.” I lift my elbows off the counter and there are two small wet patches that evaporate while we are talking. In the room the shower is a tap at head height from which comes a thin salty dribble of warm water.

I walk straight to the port and find the office. Inside an old man in a sarong and sandals made from car tyres is being interrogated by the official who holds his passport. It contains no stamps although the man claims to be a sailor and has visited  Sudan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Djibouti. “No one told me about stamps,” he says innocently. My own request, about boats to Yemen, is waved away – just go in and ask. But there is no one around. I wander back into town and find the house of Belai, a two-room clapboard hut where the man himself is sitting under a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. He is wearing a blue-chequered sarong, a white vest and lots of gold jewellery. His manner is that of a secretary bird, stalking carefully around the room as if expecting to find a snake, but he invites me to a qat session in Little Aseb a few miles up the coast.

We drive with all the windows open, creating a welcome breeze the temperature of a hair dryer. Little Aseb is a lot better than its larger neighbour. There are blue, white and yellow houses, a fluff of palm trees and a beach covered in dessicated dog turds and fish heads. Belai’s friend, Mohamed, and his wife are qat traders who question me closely on the Yemeni system. They are thinking of importing the prestigious variety, Shami, to Aseb. Will the people like it? I tell them everyone likes it, but can they afford it?

Eritrean independence is welcome, but no one holds out much hope for peace. “This is the Third World,” Mohamed explains, “There is only one job: fighting. Now we have no fighting. What good is that?”

As the days pass I see what he means. Everyone here is loafing around. The only time anyone generates energy is when they stamp paperwork, like they are crushing an insect, a sudden darting gesture and SMACK. Belai spends his days drooped in an armchair, chewing qat and reading. One day I manage to sneak a look at the title of his book, An Introduction to Nuclear Engineering. He is not making a lot of progress. My own reading at the time is Ryszard Kapuscinski’s Shah of Shahs, an engrossing book that proved far too easy to devour at one sitting. The perfect travelling book-companion needs to be just good enough to keep you going when desperate, but not too interesting to finish quickly or divert you from your journey. In Warriors, Gerald Hanley’s powerful memoir about Somalia in WWII, he describes the horror of being caught out with only one book to read, Engineering Problems in Paraguay. I think Belai was in a similar fix.

One evening in town I spot that the cinema has opened and is showing Pirates of the Coast starring Lex Barker, a swashbuckling epic from 1960 that I reluctantly abandon halfway through because there’s no air-conditioning and I think I am about to die.

I spend more time loafing. Even the beggars can’t rouse themselves to any significant effort, whispering at me from the shadows, “Hey! Give me one birr.” The country is so new it hasn’t got its own currency yet.

I’m no longer sure I can tell the difference between sleep and wakefulness: the two states are sliding effortlessly together. Sometimes I lie down and seem to start dreaming before I’m asleep. I find Simon Le Bon hiding behind a sofa with a syringe full of heroin. I wake and drink a tinned pineapple juice in the market. Squirrels have taken over my childhood house which resembles Angkor Wat. I fall asleep and wake to find porcupine quills in my hands, then waking again, go out and drink tiny shots of coffee. Out at sea I can see big white-capped waves. When I return to the port, I talk to the young zealots of the EPLP who are now in charge. They are working without salaries for the good of the people. “The Ethiopians looted everything,” one tells me, “Eritrea has started with nothing.”

They are bright-eyed and hopeful for their new country, proud of a young president who lambasts other African leaders for their personality cults and overlong stays in power. Little do they know, but the 1993 election will be their last. They too are dreaming while awake.

I ask them what their politics are.

“We have no politics. We only wish to lift up the people.”

Idealists without ideology, all they have is pen-pushing clerical tasks like form-filling and... SMACK. I am stamped out of Eritrea.

“What!? Why did you do that?” I inspect my passport. The Provisional Government have issued an exit visa and validated it. I am no longer in the Provisional Territory of Eritrea. The Deputy to the Temporary Administrator has cast me out.

“You said you were going to Yemen.” A brilliant white smile. “Now you may go.”

If only it was so easy. If I don’t find a boat now, I will be in limbo. But then I meet Mohamed Salah, a jovial sea captain. He promises to take me across to Mokha and next morning, there he is, standing by his sturdy wooden boat. My name is put on a passenger list and SMACK, we leave.

booms, traditional wooden ships, in Djibouti harbour in 1996

My joy at departure is soon tempered by the realisation that Mohamed’s crew are completely inept. The boat wavers around, the engine has a coughing fit, Mohamed shouts a lot. Thirty feet ahead a whale spouts, then another. We pass a big boom, a wooden galleon, heading for Djibouti. Mohamed tells me how to find ambergris, but admits he has never actually seen it. A fin rolls out the water close to the boat, then a spout. Another boom goes past, this time flying a Pakistani flag. I feel like I have been transported back a few centuries, to a time before Lex Barker. I understand now why the old sailor was so innocently bemused by talk of visas and passport stamps. Borders and bureaucracy seem meaningless out here.

After some hours we spot the port of Mokha. This fabled entry point to Yemen is where European traders first came to buy a mysterious new product called coffee, thus ensuring that the name of the port would forever be linked to the drink, despite the fact that the trees themselves grow far away in the Arabian mountains. From a distance the old Ottoman-era buildings of the coffee merchants gleam invitingly, but getting closer they disintegrate into ruins.

There is the wreck of a ship in the harbour entrance and as we arrive a Landcruiser pulls up and soldiers leap out. We are allowed to tie up, but not disembark. My passport is taken away and half an hour later, it comes back. “Where is your exit visa?”

My heart sinks. When I left Yemen two months earlier, a country in the grip of war, there had been no one to stamp my passport. I had never officially left. In the space of a few hours I have gone from an excess of exit visas to a dangerous dearth.

The boat bobs. The sun beats. Mohamed gets bored. He wants to head back to Aseb. I spot a slightly more jolly-looking Yemeni official. “My brother! Why am I made to sit here? We are wasting good qat-chewing time.”

The officials start laughing. “Oh! The foreigner chews!”

Suddenly I am allowed ashore, even escorted into town, treated to lunch and allowed to buy qat. Then we all return to the port and chew together. Time passes gently. They tell me that the war is almost over, just a few skirmishes in the south.

As sunset arrives, they ask if I’d like to sleep in their office tonight. I say I would prefer to get to Ta’iz. This causes consternation. A soldier is summonsed and ordered to drive me to Ta’iz.

“And my passport?”

They find it under a cushion. SMACK. I am back in Yemen.

Eland publish this wonderful anti-colonial memoir. Definitely worth a read.