I Didnât Do It For You
How the World Used and Abused a Small African Nation
Michela Wrong

To Elena and Silvia Harty, as promised

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Maps

Foreword

CHAPTER 1 The City Above the Clouds

CHAPTER 2 The Last Italian

CHAPTER 3 The Steel Snake

CHAPTER 4 This Horrible Escarpment

CHAPTER 5 The Curse of the Queen of Sheba

CHAPTER 6 The Feminist Fuzzy-Wuzzy

CHAPTER 7 âWhat do the baboons want?â

CHAPTER 8 The Day of Mourning

CHAPTER 9 The Gold Cadillac Site

CHAPTER 10 Blow Jobs, Bugging and Beer

CHAPTER 11 Death of the Lion

CHAPTER 12 Of Bicycles and Thieves

CHAPTER 13 The End of the Affair

CHAPTER 14 The Green, Green Grass of Home

CHAPTER 15 Arms and the Man

CHAPTER 16 âWhere are our socks?â

CHAPTER 17 A Village of No Interest

CHAPTER 18 âItâs good to be normalâ

Chronology

P.S. Ideas, interviews & features â¦

Interview

About the book

Read on

Glossary and acronyms

Notes

Other sources

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Maps

EritreaâEthiopia border as defined by the International Boundary Commission on April 13, 2002

EritreaâEthiopia border as defined by the International Boundary Commission on April 13, 2002

Foreword

It was well past midnight, and in Cairo airportâs transit lounge it was clear most passengers had already entered the trance-like state of passivity that accompanies long-distance travel. Outside, in the fluorescent glare of the hallway, a trio of stranded Senegalese women traders, majestic in their colourful boubous, were shouting, with operatic volume, at the Egyptian airport staff behind the counter, who were responding with an icy silence that said more about Arab attitudes towards black Africa than direct insults ever could. But here in transit, eyes had glazed over, the energy had leached from the air. A group of Nigerian youths, whose clothes gave off the nose-tickling aroma of dried fish, lay slumped in the plastic orange scoop seats, spines turned to jelly. They were being messed around by EgyptAir staff, who couldnât be bothered to check them in to the airport hotel their tickets entitled them to. They seemed past caring, anger had long since given way to exhaustion.

A few seats away, a middle-aged Pakistani businessman was fighting the prevailing mood of stupefied indifference. Visiting cards at the ready, he was in defiantly chatty mode, and was taking the fact that the airline had mislaid his luggage in his stride. (âEgyptAir no good,â he confided. âHmm, yes, I know.â) He worked for a company that manufactured soap powder, he said, and constantly travelled the African continent and the Middle East, sizing up possible markets for his multinational.

âAnd you, what do you do?â

âIâm a journalist. Iâm writing a book about Eritrea. Thatâs where Iâm going now.â

His brow furrowed, he must have misheard. âYou are writing a book about Algeria?â

âNo, not Algeria. Eritrea.â

âNigeria?â He was floundering now.

âNo.â

A wild guess. âAl-Jazeera?â

âNo, no. Eritrea.â Enunciating the word with the exaggerated lip movements of a teacher addressing a class with special needs, I searched for some explanatory shorthand. âYou know. Small country on the Red Sea. Used to be part of Ethiopia. Itâs only two hoursâ flight from here. Iâm waiting for my connection.â

There was a brief silence. This seasoned traveller looked both flummoxed and embarrassed. âIâm sorry. But Iâve simply never heard of the place.â

It was a conversation that was to keep recurring throughout the four years I spent writing this book. Mention that I was researching Eritrea and the reaction would be a sympathetic nod and ruminative silence as the other person tried to work out whether I was talking about a no-frills airline, a Victorian woman novelist or, perhaps, some obscure strain of equine disease. The same ignorance, I discovered, extended to the written record. I read books on Art Deco and Modernist architecture that made no mention of the city of Asmara, containing some of the worldâs most perfect examples of the styles. I waded through weighty accounts of the American intelligence services that either never referred to the fact that Eritrea had been the site of one of Washingtonâs key listening posts, or dismissed it in a few paragraphs. I dusted off biographies on the suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst that treated her involvement in the Horn of Africa as little more than an eccentric coda to her life. Whether in conversation or in print, Eritrea rang few bells.

At first, it amused me, then, slowly, it began to irritate. My annoyance grew in parallel with my knowledge, for the deeper I delved, the clearer it became that Eritrea had never been the obscure backwater suggested by the polite, blank expressions. Its narrative was entwined with those of colonial empires and superpowers, its destiny had engaged presidents in the White House and leaders in the Kremlin. It had obsessed emperors who believed themselves descended from Solomon and preoccupied dictators who took the Fascist salute.

I became increasingly defensive as I staked out claims to relevance, spelling out links and liaisons obliterated by the passage of time. âYou know, we ran the place for ten years,â I would say, talking to a fellow Briton. Or, if it was an American: âActually, the US had one of its most important spy bases in Eritrea during the Cold War.â As for the Italians, I heard myself speaking with the fixed-eye testiness of someone lost in a private obsession: âIt was your oldest colony, your âfirst-bornâ. Didnât they teach you that at school?â

History is written â or, more accurately, written out â by the conquerors. If Eritrea has been lost in the milky haze of amnesia, it surely cannot be unconnected to the fact that so many former masters and intervening powers â from Italy to Britain, the US to the Soviet Union, Israel and the United Nations, not forgetting, of course, Ethiopia, the most formidable occupier of them all â behaved so very badly there. Better to forget than dwell on episodes which reveal the victors at their most racist and small-minded, cold-bloodedly manipulative or simply brutal beyond belief. To act so ruthlessly, yet emerge with so little to show for all the grim opportunism; well, which nation really wants to remember that?

The problem, as the news headlines remind us every day, is that while the victims of colonial and Cold War blunders do not pen the story that ends up becoming the worldâs collective memory, they also donât share the conquerorsâ lazy capacity for forgetfulness. Any regular Western visitor to the developing world will be familiar with that awkward moment when a local resident raises, with a passion and level of forensic detail that reveals this is still an open wound, some injustice perpetrated long ago by the colonial master. Baffled, the traveller registers that the forgotten massacre or broken treaty, which he has only just discovered, is the keystone on which an entire communityâs identity has been built. âGosh, why are they still harping on about that?â he thinks. âWhy canât they just move on? We have.â It is a version of the âWhy do they hate us so?â question a shocked America asked in the wake of September 11. Eritreaâs story provides part of the answer to that query. It is very easy to be generous with your forgiving and forgetting, when you are the one in need of forgiveness. A sense of wounded righteousness keeps the memory sharp. Societies that know they have suffered a great wrong have a disconcerting habit of nursing their grievances, keeping them keen through the decades.

Itâs hard to think of another African country that was interfered with by foreign powers quite so thoroughly, and so disastrously, as Eritrea. âMy country has a lot of history,â an Eritrean academic once told me. âIn fact,â he added, with lugubrious humour, âthatâs all it has.â And like Palestine and Rwanda, East Timor or Northern Ireland, Eritreaâs fate has illustrated the truth that, when it comes to destabilizing regions and disturbing the sleep of nations, size doesnât matter. When the UN laid the groundwork for a guerrilla war by ushering in a flawed constitution in the 1950s, Eritreaâs population was slightly more than 1 million. When Ethiopiaâs mighty army lost to what its leadership had dismissed as âa handful of banditsâ in 1991, Eritreaâs residents numbered less than the population of Greater Manchester today. A province no larger than a medium-sized American state, most of it uninhabited, raised a clamour so loud that in the end it could no longer be ignored. Eritreaâs history resembles one of those expensive television advertisements in which the flicking of a tiny cog leads to the toppling of a spanner, which sends windscreen wipers gyrating, a tyre rolling â a long chain of cause and effect which eventually climaxes in the revving of a sleek family car. Grudges which are not addressed acquire a momentum all their own, shuddering across continents and centuries until they erupt in a thunderous roar. âSmallâ conflicts, left to fester long enough, have an uncanny way of bringing down empires.

Written as Eritrea faces one of the toughest challenges in its history, this is a book about betrayal, repeated across the generations, and how the expectation of betrayal can both create an extraordinary inner strength and distort a national psyche, sending a community down strange and lonely paths.

Despite the glazed-eye reactions I encountered, Eritreaâs history is not an abstruse irrelevance. The peculiar mulishness of its citizens did not spring spontaneously into existence. Eritreaâs seeming idiosyncrasies have entirely logical roots, roots that â to the Western reader â reach surprisingly close to home. They cannot be unpicked from the vainglorious dreams of a 19th-century Italian man of letters, an English suffragetteâs clash with snooty British officialdom and the pantomime antics of several generations of GIs. In a new era of superpower intervention abroad, in which the War on Terror has replaced the fight against Communism as justification for Western military adventurism, the old clichÃ© about the dangers of forgetting historyâs mistakes holds truer than ever. Part and parcel of our own story, Eritrea should serve as a lasting cautionary tale, encouraging us to pause and ponder before rushing in. We forget the roles we play in such far-off outposts at our peril.

CHAPTER 1 The City Above the Clouds

âThat thin air had a dream-like texture, matching the porcelain-blue of the sky, with every breath and every glance he took in a deep anaesthetising tranquillity.â

Lost Horizon, James Hilton

Whenever I land in Asmara, a novel read in adolescence comes to mind. It tells the story of a small plane whose pilot turns hijacker. Crash-landing in a remote part of the Himalayas, he dies of his injuries before he can explain his bizarre actions to the dazed passengers. They emerge from the wreckage to be greeted by a wizened old monk, who leads them to a citadel hidden above the peaks, a secret city whose existence has never been recorded on any map. They are welcomed to Shangri-La, where, breathing the chill air that wafts from the glaciers and surveying the world from a tremendous height, they begin reassessing their lives with the same calm detachment and cosmic clarity as the monks. But as time goes by, they learn they must make a terrible choice. They can stay in Shangri-La and live forever, for their hosts have discovered something approaching the secret of eternal youth. Or they can plunge back into the hurly-burly of the life they knew and eventually die as ordinary mortals, grubbing around down on the plains.

Flying in from Cairo, where even during an early-morning stopover the air blasts radiator-hot through the open aircraft door, one always has the sense of landing in a capital located where, by rights, it has no place to be.

Even in the satellite photos Eritrea, a knobbly elongated triangle lying atop Ethiopia, its giant neighbour to the south, seems an inhospitable destination, a landscape still too raw for human habitation. The route the planes follow takes you over mile upon relentless mile of dun-coloured desolation, made beautiful only by the turquoise fringe where sand meets sea; a beauty that you know would evaporate if ever you ventured down to sea level to brave the suffocating heat. A spray of islands, the Dahlak, shows only the faintest dusting of green. The rolling coastal sands, which show up from outer space as a strip of pearly-pink, run from the port of Massawa north-west to the border of Sudan. To the south-east, where a long, thin finger of land points towards Djibouti, the rock turns a forbidding black. Volcanic lava flows have created a landscape grimmer than the surface of the moon. This is the infamous Danakil Depression, said to be the hottest place on earth, where summer temperatures touch heights feared by even the whippet-thin Afar tribesmen. Behind this flat coastal strip, the land billows up to form a magnificent escarpment, the ripples of hills deepening into jagged waves of dark rock, a giant crumple of mountain creased by empty ravines and bone-dry river beds. It is only in the triangleâs western corner, where Eritrean territory juts and bulges into northern Ethiopia, that rivers â the Gash and the Barka â flow all year round. Here in the western lowlands, the gradient finally levels off, wrinkles smooth away and the arid sands cede to the deep green that spells rain, the shade of trees, the blessing of crops.

But it is not the bleakness, but the altitude that makes Asmaraâs location as improbable as that of Shangri-La. The Italians who colonized Eritrea at the tail end of the 19th century fled the stifling heat of the Red Sea by heading into the ether, up towards the kebessa, or central highlands. Coming in to land on the wide Hamasien plateau, there is none of the familiar routine of diving through a carpet of white fug to emerge in another, greyer reality. Defying the laws of gravity, planes bound for Asmara certainly go up, but to passengers aboard they barely seem to bother coming down. You hardly have time to register the neat concentric rings â like wormâs trails â left by farmersâ terracing, the rust-coloured plain, the long white scratches of roads, before the wheels hit the ground. At 7,600 ft â a mile and a half high â the capital lies at the same heady altitude as many of Europeâs lower ski stations. The crisp mountain air is so thin, landing pilots must slam on their brakes and then keep them, shrieking, in place, to prevent their aircraft overshooting the runway. Take-offs seem to go on forever, as the accelerating plane lumbers down the tarmac in search of air resistance, finally achieving just enough friction for the rules of aerodynamics to kick in before it careers into the long grass.

Go to the edge of the escarpment, on the outskirts of town, and you will find yourself on the lip of an abyss. You are at eye level with eagles that launch themselves like suicides into the void, leaping into a blue haze into which mountain peaks, far-off valleys and distant sea all blur. At this altitude, only the most boisterous clouds succeed in rising high enough to drift over the city. Pinned down by gravity, they form instead a sulky cumulus eiderdown that barely shoulders the horizon. So for much of the year, the sky above Asmara is clear blue â a delicate cornflower merging into a deep indigo that holds out the promise of outer space. In Western cities at night, the orange glow of street lamps washes out the stars. Asmara, where hotels issue rooms with 20-watt bulbs to keep overheads down, gives out so little light that the reclining crescent moon seems almost within reach at the bottom of the street, and the constellations glisten in your upturned face. When you fly out of the capital in the dark, it feels as though you have quit the earth to soar, like some half-bird, half-man creature from Greek mythology, straight into the Milky Way itself.

With so little between you and the sun, the light possesses an alpine sharpness, so bright it almost hurts, chapping lips and creasing faces. While you shiver in the underlying chill, your skin tans at breakneck speed. Locals handle the contrast in temperatures with a practised twitch of their white cotton shawls, while the outsider finds himself neurotically dressing and undressing as he moves from icy shade to scorching sun and back again. At midday, when the light beats so strongly it numbs the senses, colours are washed away, and the world becomes an over-exposed landscape of black and white. On the street, people become dark silhouettes: here an old woman, wrapped in a shemmah, hides below an umbrella, there a student walks in a familiar Eritrean attitude, exercise book brandished before him to shield his eyes. The light is so white it seems to etch the thinnest of black borders around everyday objects and carve their mark upon the retina, like a nuclear flash outlining a body against a wall.

Up on the plateau, lungs must labour a little to pump enough oxygen into the bloodstream. New arrivals tend to find that alcohol rushes disconcertingly quickly to the head. Down a few of the local Melotti beers here and you can stagger to bed as drunk as if youâd worked your way through a couple of bottles of wine. When combined with the constant awareness of the vertiginous fall on the outskirts of town, the rarefied air, some say, lends itself to a certain giddiness in temperament. âWeâre at 2,500 metres and itâs my belief that those 2,500 metres have a lot to answer for,â a Swiss expatriate told me, struggling to explain a national hot-headedness, a tendency to quick reactions and extreme measures. âThe lack of oxygen, it has an effect on peopleâs brains. Maybe people here go a little bit crazy.â

Asmara itself is a giant monument to colonial folly. When it came to architecture, the Italians simply lost their heads. Outside the capital, the slopes are dotted with modest stone shacks and grass-roofed rondavels. But in Asmara, pride of Benito Mussoliniâs short-lived second Roman empire, the architects of the 1930s unleashed the full, incongruous force of their Modernistic creativity.¹ Their cinemas were Art Deco palaces built for the worship of the glamorous gods of Hollywood, their streamlined apartment blocks paid tribute to the twin cult of speed and technological progress. Fascismâs architects designed petrol stations that looked like aircraft in mid-flight and office blocks that resembled space rockets surging into orbit. With port-hole windows and jutting prows, their factories conjured up visions of vast ocean liners cresting the waves, their shopping arcades curved around hillocks like locomotives shrieking round a turn.

These days, the vigorous designs have lost their clean-cut certainty. The pastel-coloured buildings, painted in the soft apricot, pink and pistachio tones of melting Neapolitan ice cream, are shabby, plaster peeling in great scabs from their exteriors. Red-eyed pigeons coo above broken water pipes and the rusted persiane shutters hang akilter in their grooves. Nonetheless, draped in billowing blankets of bougainvillea, scattered with red-blossomed flamboyants, doused in the purple petals of the jacaranda, Asmara is undoubtedly the most beautiful capital on the continent.

Its beauty has a sombre tinge, for it has been premised on tragedy. No enlightened conservationist ever set out to preserve Asmara from the over-excited developers who spoiled downtown Nairobi or turned Lagos into a tangled mess of motorways and bridges in the 1970s. Conflict kept Asmara locked in time, creating in the process an accidental architectural treasure. While entrepreneurs with more money than sense ripped the hearts out of other colonial African cities, the economic stagnation that came with Eritreaâs long war of secession against Ethiopia proved more effective than any neighbourhood campaign ever could at preserving Asmaraâs pure lines.

Such stultification has bestowed a Toy Town dinkiness upon the capital, the city that time forgot. On my first visit, I felt as though I had walked into a world in which my Italian grandfather would have felt completely at home, an Italy I had only ever glimpsed in family photo albums, because it has ceased to exist in Europe. Perhaps the nostalgia of that borrowed memory went some way to explaining the sudden happiness that gripped me whenever I returned, as tangible as the aroma of berbere spices permeating the streets. The Fiat 500 bubble car, known affectionately as the Topolino, might have disappeared from Romeâs streets, but it still bowled valiantly â if rather slowly â along Asmaraâs avenues. Asmarinos drove museum pieces not because they were admirers of classic cars but because, for decades, no new cars were imported. Every Asmara cafÃ© served the same stubby brown bottles of unlabelled beer. Since expensive foreign lagers rarely reached these parts, why bother identifying the only brand in town? In the little barber shops old men wearing the same pinched Borsalino hats and woollen waistcoats that once hung in my grandfatherâs closet exposed their jugulars to cut-throat razors, while their friends perched gossiping behind them. The term âblue-collarâ has become such an intellectual abstraction in the West, it gave me a jolt to see that workmen in Eritrea actually wore blue overalls. As for the white-collar business suits displayed in tailorsâ dusty windows, they were as quaintly old-fashioned as the hand-painted shop signs, with their approximate, impressionistic English: âFruit and Vagatablesâ, âPinut Butterâ, âLubricuntâ, âDraiving Schoolâ, âComputer Crush Courseâ.

Those who travel around Africa will be familiar with the mental game of âSpot the Colonial Inheritanceâ. Is that Angolan secretaryâs failure to process your paperwork the result of Mediterranean inertia, fostered by the Portuguese, or a symptom of the bureaucratic obfuscation cultivated by a Marxist government? Is the bombast of a West African leader a legacy of a French love of words, or a modern version of the traditional African village palaver? Which colonial master left the deeper psychological mark: Britain, France, Portugal or Belgium? There are places where the colonial past seems to have left only the most cosmetic of traces on a resilient local culture, and places where the wounds inflicted seem beyond repair. In the river city of Kisangani, where I saw destitute Congolese camping in the mouldering villa built for the ruthless explorer Henry Stanley, rooms intended for pianos and chandeliers holding scores of families who washed out of buckets, I had a sense of a host body rejecting a badly-applied graft. White manâs culture had been imposed with such bullying force, its buildings had never appeared to uncomprehending locals more than meaningless hulks, as surreal and totemic as the motorbike helmet Che Guevara once saw being proudly sported by a tribal chieftain in the equatorial forest. In Eritrea, the opposite seems the case: the graft has taken â so well, indeed, that the new skin has acquired a lustre all its own. âSo youâre half Italian, are you?â Eritreans say when I mention my parentage. âThen half of you belongs here.â At weekends, the plains around Asmara are dotted with groups of cyclists in indecently tight shorts who whiz past grazing goats: the Italians left behind one of their favourite sports. The twittering swallows dive-bombing the steps of the Catholic church of Our Lady of the Rosary, whose bells compete for attention with the muezzinâs call and prayers from the Orthodox cathedral, would not look out of place swooping over a honey-coloured Tuscan piazza. When schoolgirls tumble out of school they wear grembiulini, the coloured aprons once ubiquitous in Italian playgrounds. At the marble-countered bars, where bottles of Eritrean versions of Campari, Fernet Branca, Martini and Pernod form a stained-glass display, hissing Gaggia machines pour out cappuccinos and espressos so strong they are little more than a brown dab at the bottom of a dollâs cup. âCome stai?â one coffee-drinker asks another, âAndiamo, andiamo,â call the ticket touts at the bus station, âVa bene, dopo,â shrugs the unsuccessful beggar (âAll right, laterâ) and little children scream ââTilian, tilianâ (âItalianâ) â followed by a hopeful âbishcottiâ (âbishcuitsâ) â at the sight of an unfamiliar face, whether Japanese, Indian or American.

Whether one is watching the evening passeggiata along Asmaraâs Liberation Avenue, when hundreds of dark-haired youths stroll arm-in-arm past gaggles of marriageable girls, eyes meeting flirtatiously across the gender divide; or observing the Sunday ritual in which bourgeois Eritrean families, bearing little cakes and little girls â each fantastically ribboned and ruched â pay each other formal visits, itâs impossible to view these as alien colonial rituals. Maybe it was the similarity between the Eritrean mountains and the rugged landscape of the mezzogiorno, or maybe the fact that so many southern Italians, Arab blood coursing through their veins, are actually as dark as Eritreans. But the colony never felt quite as unremittingly foreign to the Italians as Nigeria did to the British, Mali to the French or Namibia to the Germans. Something here gelled, and the number of light-skinned meticci (half-castes) left behind by the Italians is abiding evidence of that affinity.

Which is not to suggest that this liaison is a source of simple congratulation. Quite the opposite. Eritreans flare up like matches when they talk about the abuses perpetrated during the Fascist years, when they were expected to step into the gutter rather than sully a pavement on which a white man walked. âIf you did the slightest thing wrong, an Italian would give you a good kicking,â one of the white-haired Borsalino-wearers recalls, his eyes alight with remembered fury. But this is the most ambivalent of hostilities. Eritreans remember the racism of the Italians. But they know that what makes their country different from Ethiopia, their one-time master to the south, what made it impossible for Eritrea to accept her allotted role as just another Ethiopian province, is rooted in that colonial occupation which changed everything, forever. The Italian years are, simultaneously and confusingly, both an object of complacent pride and deep, righteous anger. âItaly left us with the best industrial infrastructure in the world. Our workers were so well-educated and advanced, they ran everything down in Ethiopia,â Eritreans will boast, only to complain, in the next breath, that Fascismâs educational policies kept them ignorant and backward, stripped of dignity. âFourth grade, fourth grade. Our fathers were only allowed four years of education!â So central is the Italian experience to both Eritrea and Ethiopiaâs sense of identity, to how each nation measures itself against the other, that during the war of independence the mere act of eating pasta, Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki once revealed, became a cause of friction between his rebel fighters and their guerrilla allies in northern Ethiopia, a dietary choice laden with politically-incendiary perceptions of superiority and inferiority.²

But the history that obsesses Eritrea is rather more recent. Once, on a visit to Cuba, I was fascinated to see, displayed at the national museum with a reverence usually reserved for religious icons, Che Guevaraâs asthma inhaler and a pizza truck that had been raked with bullets during a clash between Castroâs men and government troops. Before my eyes, mundane objects were becoming sanctified, events from the still-recent past spun into the stuff of timeless legend. I had never visited a country that seemed so in thrall to its own foundation story. But then, that was before I went to Eritrea.

Arriving in 1996 to write a country survey for the Financial Times, I became intrigued by the extent to which Eritreaâs war of independence had been woven into the fabric of thought and language. The underdog had won in Eritrea, confounding the smug predictions of political analysts in both the capitalist West and communist East, and the vocabulary itself provided a clue as to why outsiders had got it so wrong. A lot of concepts here came with huge, if invisible, capital letters. There was the Armed Struggle, as the 30-year guerrilla campaign launched in the early 1960s against Ethiopian rule was universally known. There was the Front or the Movement, both ways of referring to the Eritrean Peopleâs Liberation Front (EPLF), the rebel group that eventually emerged as main challenger. There was the Field, or the Sahel â the sun-blasted region bordering Sudan where the EPLF turned soft civilians into hard warriors. There were the Fighters or tegadelti, the men and women who fought for the Movement, and the Martyrs, Fighters who did not live long enough to witness victory. There was the Strategic Withdrawal, not to be confused with retreat (Eritreans never retreat) â that testing moment in 1977 when the EPLF, facing a crushing onslaught by a Soviet-backed Ethiopian army, pulled back into the mountains. Above all, there was the Liberation and its conjugations (âI was Liberatedâ, âWe Liberated Asmaraâ, âThis hotel was Liberatedâ), the glorious day in 1991 when Ethiopian troops rolled out and Eritrea finally became master of its fate. The street names being introduced by the new government: Liberation Avenue, Heroes Street, Revolution Avenue, Knowledge Street were part of the same phenomenon. The language itself left precious little room for a critical distance between speaker and subject, no gap where scepticism could crystallize.

The bright murals painted on Asmaraâs main thoroughfares were the equivalent of the Bayeux tapestry, commemorating a time of heroes that still spread its glow. They showed young men and women sporting no-fuss Afros, thigh-length shorts and cheap black sandals, the pauperâs military kit. They crouched in the mountains, shooting at silvery MiG jets, or danced in celebration around camp fires. The muralsâ original models strolled below, older now, weighed down by the more pedestrian, if equally tricky challenges posed by building a new nation-state. Meeting in the street, two male friends would clasp hands, then lean towards each other until right shoulder banged into right shoulder, body bounced rhythmically off body. When vigorous young men did it, they looked like jousting stags, when old comrades did it, they closed their eyes in pleasure, burrowing their heads into the crook of each otherâs necks. Peculiar to Eritrea, the shoulder-knocking greeting originated in the rural areas but became a Fighter trademark, and it usually indicated shared experiences rarely spoken about, never to be forgotten. The women Fighters â for women accounted for more than a third of the Movement â were also easily spotted. Instead of white shawls, they wore cardigans. Their hair was tied in practical ponytails, rather than intricately braided in the traditional highlands style. They looked tough, weathered, quietly formidable.

âEritreaâs a great place, if you have a penchant for tragedy,â a British doctor on loan to one of the government ministries quipped. The titles of the standard works on Eritrea, displayed in the windows of every bookshop, told you everything about a national familiarity with suffering, a proud communityâs capacity for teeth-gritting: Never Kneel Down, Against All Odds, Even the Stones are Burning, A Painful Season and a Stubborn Hope. Reminders of loss were everywhere. Over the age of about 40, most Westerners become familiar with the sensation of carrying around with them a bevy of friendly ghosts, the spirits of dead relatives and lost comrades who whisper in their ears and crack the occasional joke. In Eritrea, the wraiths crowded around in their multitudes, threatening to engulf the living. During the Armed Struggle, which claimed the unenviable title of Africaâs longest war, Eritrea probably lost between 150,000 and 200,000 to conflict and famine. Some 65,000 Fighters died before the regime in Addis Ababa, toppled by a domestic rebel movement in league with the EPLF, agreed to surrender its treasured coastline. Given Eritreaâs tiny population, this amounted to 1 in 50. Visiting Eritrean homes, one came to anticipate the sideboard on which a blue-fringed âMartyrâs Certificateâ, issued in recognition of a family that paid the ultimate sacrifice, held pride of place; the framed degree papers and graduation photographs testifying to skills a serious-looking son or daughter would now never put to the test. The Struggle had affected every family, it could not be escaped. Perhaps this explained why the Martyrsâ Cemeteries scattered around the country were usually, behind the defiant paintings of Kalashnikov-toting warriors, neglected and overgrown. Who needed to tend graves, when the memory of the dead was so very present?

This was a nation of citizens with bits missing. Often, at the end of a conversation, I would rise to my feet only to register, as the man I had been talking to escorted me to the door, that he walked with the lunging awkwardness of someone with an artificial leg. The hand I was shaking, Iâd realize, was short of a finger or two, the eye that had failed to follow my movements, or was watering painfully, was probably made of glass. The capital was full of young men and women on crutches, one empty trouser leg flapping in the breeze. If they were lucky, they sat at the controls of motorized wheelchairs, provided by a government mindful of the debt it owed its tegadelti. Of an evening in Asmara, you could sometimes spot a lone amputee whizzing down Martyrsâ Avenue at breakneck speed, determinedly propelling his wheelchair towards Asmaraâs nightspots with two flailing sticks; an African skier without snow.

It was difficult not to be moved. It was difficult not to be admiring. My reaction was far from unique. When it came to falling for Africaâs 53rd and newest state, hundreds of well-intentioned Westerners had already beaten me to it.

There is a breed of expatriate that seems particular to the Horn of Africa. Foreigners who, quite early in their travels, discovered Ethiopia or Eritrea and fell in love, with all the swooning, uncritical absolutism of youth. Perhaps they had ventured elsewhere in Africa and didnât like what they found: the inferiority complexes left by an oppressive colonial past, menacing hints of potential anarchy, the everyday sleaze of failing states. Then they came to the Horn and were swept away by the uniqueness of the regionâs history, the sophistication of their Ethiopian and Eritrean friends. They marvelled at the dedication of puritanical leaderships trying to do something more creative than fill Swiss bank accounts, and became True Believers. âAh yes, so-and-so. He has always been a Friend of Ethiopia,â you would often hear officials in Asmara and Addis say. âHave you read so-and-soâs book? Sheâs a true Friend of Eritrea.â The rebels-turned-ministers had grasped a vital truth. True Believers are worth a hundred spokesmen to guerrilla organizations and the cash-strapped governments they go on to form. Sharing the religious convertâs belligerent frustration with those who have not seen the light, quicker than the locals to detect a slight, they are tireless in defending the cause. During their time in the bush, both the EPLF and Ethiopiaâs Tigrayan Peopleâs Liberation Front (TPLF) had acquired a coterie of them: hard-working Swedish aid workers, idealistic human rights activists, self-funded journalists and left-wing European parliamentarians. They had remained loyal during the hard times and now revelled in the sight of their old friends, once regarded as tiresome nuisances by Western governments, holding executive power on both sides of the border.

By the time I left Asmara, I was well on the way to joining their ranks. Looking back, I know I would have been less susceptible to Eritreaâs tragic charms had I spent less time reporting on the horrors of central Africa. Having gorged on gloomy headlines, I was hungry for what seemed increasingly impossible: an African good news story. I was used to guerrilla groups who raped, pillaged, even â occasionally â ate their victims, whose gunmen were despised by the communities they claimed to represent. In Eritrea you could hear the hushed awe in civiliansâ voices when they talked about the demobilized Fighters who had won them independence and were now trying to build a society freed from the stifling constraints of tribe, religion and gender. As a white woman, I was used to being shooed to the front of queues, paid the exaggerated respect that spoke of generations of colonial browbeating. It gave me a perverse thrill to hear an Eritrean student confess that he and his fellow citizens suffered from a superiority complex towards outsiders. In other African nations, I was accustomed to being refused interviews by government ministers terrified by the possibility that they might show some spark of individual intelligence that could later be judged to have undermined the omniscient Big Man. Here ministers not only spoke to me, they strayed with confidence outside their official briefs and showed a disconcerting habit of wanting to discuss Samuel Pepys and Charles Darwin. I was used to writing about supplicant African governments moaning over conditions placed on aid by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, dependent on Western approval for every policy change. These men told me, in tones that brooked no dissent, that having won independence on its own, Eritrea would decide its development programme for itself. The advice of strangers was neither wanted nor needed: self-reliance was the watchword.

In the Field, the EPLF had eschewed ranks, and the personality cults that were de rigueur elsewhere in Africa were regarded with fastidious disapproval. What a relief, after seeing portraits of Moi and Mobutu above every shop counter, to hear an Eritrean, driving past a window displaying a rare photograph of Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki, âtskâ disapprovingly and say: âI really donât like that.â Rather than building a palace, Isaias still lived in a modest Asmara home donated by the government. He wore simple safari suits, not Parisian couture. Visiting journalists were granted interviews within a day of arrival (in my years of visiting I had four); here was none of the scripted inaccessibility of the leader hiding behind his fawning courtiers. As for the blaring motorcades favoured by his contemporaries, shoppers on Liberation Avenue would sometimes register with a start that the man they had just passed, walking quietly along on his own, was their head of state. Isaias was in the habit of rising from the table at the end of official receptions and â to the horror of scrambling bodyguards â asking guest presidents to join him on one of his unscheduled strolls around Asmara. While foreign investors raved about the absence of official corruption, the stiff-backed integrity of those in government, Western capitals hailed Isaias and his freshly-instated friend across the border, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, as forming the core of a new group of principled leaders spearheading a much-needed African Renaissance. The two men had worked together as rebel leaders â they were rumoured to be distantly related â and future cooperation seemed assured. With this visionary duo at the helm, what could go wrong? The Horn seemed destined for an unprecedented era of stability and prosperity.

The country was awash with Soviet and American weaponry, yet crime was almost unknown. The most dangerous thing that could happen to you in Asmara after dark was to stumble on a piece of broken paving. Ironically, a capital that had witnessed so much violence was blessed with an extraordinary tranquillity, it breathed peace in time with the cicadaâs rhythmic rasp. Asmara was certainly the only African city in which not only was I regularly offered lifts by strangers, but I accepted them without hesitation. I joined diners who gestured me over to their tables in restaurants and cleared a seat for customers who decided, off their own bat, that they fancied sharing a coffee. As for begging, it was regarded as below Eritrean dignity. I saw a persistent beggar boy being given a reproving cuff round the ear from an ex-Fighter mortified by the impression he was making on a visitor. Oneâs expectations were always being turned on their head. âHave you got any local money?â a handsome Eritrean student who had shared my flight asked as we were about to leave the airport terminal. Before I had time to mutter a refusal, he had extracted a banknote from his wallet: âHere, take this for the taxi. You can pay me back later.â It was a typically Eritrean moment: in one of the worldâs poorest nations, I had just become the scrounger.

Journalists are mocked for using their taxi drivers as political barometers. But the conversation between airport terminal and city centre can prove more insightful than any diplomatic briefing. I was accustomed to the standard African taxi manâs dirge. It started with a whinge about economic hardship, moved to a caustic assessment of both the president and oppositionâs shortcomings, and climaxed in a prediction â usually horribly prescient â of just how awful things were about to get. In Eritrea, the first taxi driver I met turned out to be one of Eritreaâs longest-serving ex-Fighters. Ministers booked for interview strode past me in reception to knock shoulders with him and pat him on the back. He not only thought the president was a hero, he knew exactly what needed to be done to rebuild a war-shattered country. But then, so did every Eritrean I met. In truth, conducting a range of interviews began to feel like an exercise in futility. Whether minister, businessman, waiter or farmer, everyone seemed to think along identical lines. But this didnât sound like regurgitated propaganda. The need for self-reliance, the miracles that could be worked through discipline and hard work, the importance of learning from Africaâs mistakes: such beliefs had been hammered out during committee meetings and village debates, for the EPLF was passionately committed to grassroots discussion. I had the uncanny feeling that I was speaking to the many mouths of one single, Hydra-headed creature: the Eritrean soul.

By God, they were impressive, though it has to be said that one rarely experienced a fit of uncontrollable giggles. The self-deprecating, surreal hilarity I had come to appreciate in central Africa as the saving grace of lives lived in grotesque disorder was absent here: Eritreans did dour intensity better than they did humour. Their wiry physiques â the result of not years, but generations of going without â spoke of iron control. Their personalities were as starkly defined as the climate itself, stripped of fuzzy edges. If you made the mistake of flippantly challenging one of their black-and-white certainties, you could feel the shutters coming down, as they withdrew into prickly, how-could-you-expect-to-understand-us censoriousness.

A refrain kept running through my head, a catchphrase from a British sitcom of the 1970s. âI didnât get where I am today â¦â a beetle-browed magnate would intone at the start of every sweeping pronouncement. Eritrea, it seemed to me, had its own, unarticulated version of the uncompromising mantra. âI didnât spend 10/20/30 years at the Front to be patronized by a foreigner/kept waiting by a bureaucrat/messed around by a traffic cop,â it ran. Extraordinary suffering brought with it, I guessed, a sense of extraordinary entitlement that easily tipped over into chippiness. âWhy are Eritreans so bad at saying âthank youâ?â I once asked an ex-Fighter friend. I was feeling slightly irritated at receiving the classic Eritrean reaction to a gift chosen with some care: an expressionless grunt, followed by the quick concealment of the unopened present, never to be mentioned again. âI bet itâs because they feel itâs below their dignity.â My friend launched into a long explanation as to how, in rural communities, a peasant was expected automatically to share anything he received with the village. This democratic practice had been maintained at the Front, he said, so gifts had little meaning. In any case, showing emotion â whether happiness or grief â was regarded as a sign of weakness, simply not done. Even saying âpleaseâ seemed unnecessarily effusive. The explanation continued, various theories were explored, until finally my friend paused and added, almost as an afterthought, âAnyway, thereâs a feeling that we fought for 30 years and no one helped us, so why should we thank anyone? We donât owe thanks to anyone.â

Even that small admission felt like a major insight, because Eritreans, famous for their reserve, do not like to talk about themselves. Whether they spoke in Italian â the Western language of the older generation â or English, taught to the young, it was always a struggle persuading an Eritrean to drop the collective âWeâ and experiment with a self-indulgent, egotistical âIâ. The flow of words would slow to a dribble and dry up. For the tegadelti, in particular, it went against every lesson of community effort and shared sacrifice learnt at the Front. A curious monument taking shape on one of Asmaraâs main roundabouts captured those values. Celebrating its victory, any other new government would have ordered either a statue of its leader, a tableau of freedom fighters depicted in glorious action, or a symbolic flaming torch. The Eritreans chose instead an outsize black metal sandal, a giant version of the plastic shidda worn by hundreds of thousands of Eritreans who could afford neither leather nor polish. Ridiculously cheap, washable, long-lasting, the Kongo sandal â as it was known â was the poor manâs boot, perfect symbol for an egalitarian movement. It must be the worldâs only public monument to an item of footwear.

My survey done, I took the image of Eritrea away with me, a memory to be treasured and coddled, summoned when bleakness loomed. I was not alone in finding that with Eritrea as an example, Africa seemed a little less despairing, a touch more hopeful. If Eritrea, with its devastating history, could pull it off, surely other nations might too?

Then True Believerdom took a tumble. In May 1998, to general astonishment, Eritrea and Ethiopia went back to war, after a minor dispute over a dusty border village escalated into mass mobilization on both sides. The much-trumpeted friendship between Isaias and Meles had counted for little: the two leaders were no longer talking. Ethiopia accused Isaias of being a megalomaniac, Eritrea regarded the new war as proof that Ethiopia had never digested the loss of its coast and was bent on reconquest. Defying an Ethiopian flight ban, I flew to Asmara with a group of journalists, our chartered Kenyan plane taking a looping route via Djibouti and over the waters of the Red Sea to lessen the chances of being shot down. At the end of a buttock-clenching trip, we landed to find Eritrean helicopters crouched on the tarmac of an airport that had just been bombed by Ethiopian jets. Foreign embassies were scrambling to evacuate their nationals, the BBCâs World Service was telling British citizens to leave while they still could.

The mood in town was bewildering: every Asmarino I met was convinced they would win this new war, albeit at the highest of prices, every foreign journalist believed they must lose. The Eritreansâ unshakeable certainty was exasperating, a positive handicap during a crisis that might require for its solution the murky skills of diplomacy, an ability to conceive of shades of grey. As ever, the community stood grimly united. âEritrea is not made of people who cry,â said an old businessman who had just waved goodbye to a son going off to fight. âWe did not want this, but once it comes we will do whatever our country requires.â The Eritrean capacity for speaking with one voice was beginning to sound a little creepy to my ears, as depressing as the belligerent warmongering blasting from television screens in Addis Ababa. In its chiming uniformity, it had a touch of The Stepford Wives.

Two years later, after at least 80,000 soldiers from both sides of the border had died, the doubters were proved correct. With Ethiopian forces occupying Eritreaâs most fertile lands to the west and a third of Eritreaâs population living under UNHCR plastic sheeting, a peace deal was signed and a UN force moved in to separate the two sides. The war had been a disaster for Eritrea. But True Believers, already seriously 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 â including the ex-Fighters who had been closest to him during the Struggle â and shut down Eritreaâs independent media, a step even the likes of Mugabe, Mobutu and Moi had never dared, or bothered, to take. So much for Africaâs 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 countryâs skilled workers were all in uniform, the president had fallen out with Western governments, and relations with Ethiopia, Eritreaâs 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 childrenâs departure for the front.

Far from learning from the continentâs mistakes, Eritrea had turned into the stalest, most predictable of African clichÃ©s. 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. âHow could they, oh, how could they?â I remember an Israeli cameraman friend moaning over lunch in Londonâs Soho. This from a man who could not have spent more than a fortnight in Eritrea in his life.

Somewhere along the line, it wasnât 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. âThey carry their history around with them like an albatross,â 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 countryâs 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 â 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 â 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

âWhen the white snake has bitten you, you will search in vain for a remedy.â

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 ducksâ direction. âNo, no,â grunted Cicoria, jabbing rhythmically with his cane. âYou have [jab] to hit them [jab, jab] on the head [jab].â 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. âThatâs enough, you stupid bastards â¦ THATâS ENOUGH.â 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. Cicoriaâs 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 manâs 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 yachtâs broken engine or get a hotelâs 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. âHeâs the last one in Massawa,â an elderly Italian friend in the capital had said. âWhen all the other Italians left, he stayed, through all the wars. He canât come up to Asmara now, the airâs too thin for him.â 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. âIs there anything youâd like me to take him, since you havenât seen him for a while?â I asked my friend. âErrr â¦ No.â âWell, Iâll just pass on your best wishes, shall I?â I suggested. âYes, hmmm, that would be nice.â The reticence was puzzling.

The Italians have a word for those who fall in love with Africaâs desert wastes, putting down roots which reach so deep, they can never be wrenched up again. We say âgone to seedâ, or âgone nativeâ. The Italians call them the insabbiati â those who are buried in the sand â âpeopleâ, as Cicoria pronounced with lip-smacking relish, âcompletely immersed in the mireâ. At 77, Cicoria was happy to count himself amongst their ranks and indeed, when Iâd arrived for my appointment with Massawaâs 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. âIn there, I felt like a beast in a cage, out here, at least I can swear at my animals.â They say menâs ears keep growing when everything else has stopped, and in Cicoriaâs 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 cafÃ©s 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 townâs geographical layout â two large islands linked to the mainland by slim causeways built by the 19th-century Swiss adventurer Werner Munzinger â 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 Ethiopiaâs 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, youâll come across a building in the traditional Arab style, its intricately-carved wooden balcony slipping gradually earthwards. But some of Africaâs most grotesque modern buildings â pyramids of glass and cement â 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 Cicoriaâs workshop captures what, in light of Massawaâs history, seems an understandable sense of foreboding. âOur trip â long. Our hope â far. Our trouble â manyâ it reads.

Cicoria had lived through it all, surviving each military onslaught miraculously unscathed. âOnce, 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. Iâve always had the devilâs own luck.â Heâd come to Massawa in the 1940s, a 15-year-old runaway escaping an unhappy Asmara home. âMy mother had died and I never got on with my dad. I hated my father terribly. He was an ignorant peasant.â His grandfather had been one of the areaâs 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. âMy family has a chapel in Asmara cemetery. You should visit it.â 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 â âthe ones whoâd gone crazy in the warâ â were repairing damaged Allied battleships. After the machinists clocked off, the boy would sneak in and mimic their movements at the lathes. âI 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 itâs black and greasy,â he boasted.

This was the talent that had allowed him to play the inglorious role of Vicar of Bray, adapting smoothly to each of Eritreaâs successive administrations. When Massawaâs other Italians were evacuated, Cicoriaâs 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. âAll the Derg officers used to bring me their fridges to repair.â 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. âIâm one of theirs. Iâm Shabia, a guerrilla.â 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 friendâs 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 â 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 âcrass idiotsâ, the Ethiopians hateful occupiers. He despised his contemporaries in Asmara â my friend, it emerged, was a particular object of scorn â for not bothering to learn Tigrinya (âa bunch of illiteratesâ). 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 theyâd been alienated by Cicoriaâs weakness for drink, or his habit of taking a new wife whenever he tired of an existing mate. âItâs not legal, but if you knew my life history, youâd understand.â Leafing through a smudged photo collection he pointed to a first wife (âas black as coal â canât stand the sight of meâ), a daughter (âthat bitchâ), a brother (âa real shitâ) and a son (ânothing in his headâ). The 16-year-old son running errands around the yard scored little better. âLook at him. Strong as an ox,â he shook his head pityingly. âBut heâs got no brain, no brain at all.â Even the muscovy ducks were viewed with jaundiced eyes. âMy fondness for them only goes so far. Then I eat them.â Only the latest of the many wives, whose face lit up with extraordinary tenderness when it rested upon him, won grudging praise. âSheâs a good woman. Incredibly strong,â he said, watching admiringly as she manoeuvred a fridge out of the house. âBut sheâs too old for me now. What I really need is a nice 19-year-old.â Most depressing of all, Cicoria really did not seem to like himself â âIâve always been a rascal, a pig when it comes to women, and I drink too muchâ â while clearly finding it impossible to rein in a fury that kept the world at bay.

His view of Eritreaâs future was bleak. âThis war is never ending. Believe me, these imbeciles will be fighting each other till the end of time.â Ill-health had deprived him of his one pleasure â his joy at hearing the stalled and obsolete revving back into life â and gravity pinned him at sea level. With the loss of his beloved lathes, which lay exasperatingly out of reach, something had died. âI used to have high hopes,â he muttered, âbut this fall has been the last blow. Now I canât see things improving.â 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 Europeâs retirement homes, they fade away, pale and diminished, smitten by the syndrome Italians call âmal dâAfricaâ. 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. âWhatâs the slingshot for?â His eyes lit up: âAny moment now, a crow will land on that telephone line. Iâm a very good shot, but the bastards are canny. If you watch, as soon as my hand moves towards the slingshot, heâll be off.â We waited. On cue, a crow landed on the line. âNow watch.â Cicoriaâs 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. âBastard.â

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 Africaâs 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 â shared by all Europeâs expanding powers at that time â 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 Hornâs 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 Mahdiâs 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. âHow could I ever agree to sign away the lands over which my royal ancestors governed?â he once protested in a letter to the Italians. âChrist gave them to me.â

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 â itself serving as proxy for a cautious government â bought the port of Assab from a local sultan. The trigger for the purchase was that yearâs 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 Italyâs 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 Abyssiniaâs 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 Italyâs writers, parliamentarians and journalists, who talked up Romeâs âcivilizing missionâ, its duty to bring enlightenment and Catholicism to a region blighted by the slave trade and firmly in the clutches of the Orthodox Church. âAfrica draws us invincibly towards it,â declared one of the Italian Geographical Societyâs patrons. âIt lies just under our noses, yet up until now we remain exiled from it.â¹

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 Italyâs 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: âJust the place for our poor and huddled masses!â But then, Italyâs 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 Godâs 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. (âThe Abyssinians go barefoot and it will be hard to persuade them to use shoes â¦ A thousand metres of the richest fabrics would be more than enough to meet the Abyssiniansâ annual needs,â worried one.)² Italian politicians who toured the highlands would rave about âtruly emptyâ 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: âThe keys to the Mediterraneanâ, one foreign minister famously, bafflingly, assured parliament, were to be found âin the Red Seaâ.⁴ Ignorance sets the imagination free. When it came to their own internal affairs, Italyâs 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 â continent of doe-eyed beauties, noble warrior kings and peculiar creatures â 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 Italyâs 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.

Massawaâs capture left Italy in control of a stretch of the coast. But with their men succumbing to heatstroke, typhoid and malaria, the Italians knew the boundaries of their fledgling colony would have to be extended into the cool, mosquito-free highlands if it was ever to amount to anything. They began edging their troops up the escarpment, claiming lowland towns whose chiefs had little love for Ras Alula, Emperor Yohannesâ loyal warlord and ruthless frontier governor. It was at a spot called Dogali, 30 km inland, that Alula decided to draw a line in the sand in 1887, his warriors virtually wiping out an advancing column of 500 Italian troops. But, distracted by a major Dervish attack, Yohannes was in no position to press home his advantage. When the Abyssinian emperor was killed in battle and the Abyssinian crown claimed by his rival to the south-east, the King of Shewa, the Italians seized the opportunity to scale the Hamasien plateau, marching to Asmara and into the highlands of Tigray.

The colony baptized âEritreaâ after Erythraeum Mare â Latin for âRed Seaâ â was beginning to take shape, and in the capital Massawa, Italian administrative offices sprang up alongside the classical Turkish and Egyptian buildings. Backed by King Umberto, always one of Italyâs most enthusiastic colonialists, the government initially entrusted the territory to Antonio Baldissera, a general with a reputation for ruthlessness. Registering that Italy could not afford to keep a standing army in Eritrea, Baldissera turned Massawa into a military recruitment centre for what he referred to as âthe inferior racesâ. Stripped of farming land by their new rulers, Eritrean youths had little option but to sign up as ascaris, ready to fight Romeâs colonial wars at a fraction of the price of an Italian soldier.

Romeâs primogenito, its colonial first-born, was hardly the earthly paradise parliament â deliberately kept in the dark by both King and cabinet â had been led to expect. This was a military regime built on bullying and fear. Playing a clumsy game of divide and rule, in which he tried to turn local chieftains against the new Emperor of Abyssinia, Menelik II, while professing eternal friendship, Baldissera filled Massawaâs jail with suspected traitors and would-be defectors. When his officers met resistance, they resorted to enthusiastic use of the curbash, a whip made of hippopotamus hide that flayed backs raw. But the Italian public would have remained blithely unaware of the true state of affairs, had it not been for a scandal that exploded in the press in March 1891.

Ironically enough, the controversy was triggered by the government of the day. It had grown uneasy at what it was hearing from Massawa, where a formerly trusted Moslem merchant and a tribal chieftain had been sentenced to death for treason. Smelling a rat, Rome ordered an inquiry into the activities of Eteocle Cagnassi, Eritreaâs secretary for colonial affairs and Dario Livraghi, head of the colonyâs native police force, who promptly fled. From exile in Switzerland, Livraghi penned a detailed confession, which he sent to a Milan newspaper. Just why the police chief should choose to thus expose himself remains unclear. But the editors of Il Secolo were so alarmed by Livraghiâs account, they ordered their journalist on the ground to carry out his own investigation before they dared print a word. His findings caused a sensation.

Rich Eritrean notables, including respected holy men, were regularly disappearing at night, never to be seen again. Their fate was an open secret in Massawa, reported journalist Napoleone Corazzini. Arrested by Livraghiâs policemen, they were being shot, clubbed and stoned to death and immediately buried in shallow graves on the outskirts of town. Others had been tortured to death in prison, arrested not for genuine security reasons but because corrupt Italian officials were greedily intent on confiscating their assets. Lists of intended victims had been found in Cagnassiâs office and Livraghi had personally carried out many of these extrajudicial killings. Corazzini, something of a tabloid hack, painted a grotesque scene: a Moslem cleric begging for mercy before a freshly-dug grave; Livraghi, cackling like a maniac, firing repeatedly into the old man; the police chief smoking calmly as the pit was filled and finally trotting his horse cheerfully over the mound to ensure the earth was packed nice and tight.

Having published Corazziniâs account, the newspaper felt it was safe to run Livraghiâs story, which presented an even grimmer picture. On top of what the journalist had described as âroutine assassinationsâ, the Italians were using terror to keep locally-recruited Eritrean warriors loyal to the new colonial regime. Officially, suspected waverers were led to the border with Abyssinia and âextraditedâ. In fact, Livraghi revealed, they ended up in mass graves, slaughtered on the orders of Massawaâs military command. At least 800 ârebelsâ had been killed in this way, sending a blood-curdling lesson to anyone thinking of following their example.

For decades, a barely-interested Italian public had lazily taken it for granted that Italy was doing good in Africa, its enlightened administrators lifting a heathen people out of the primeval slime. The Massawa scandal exposed colonialism at its most bestial. With every day that passed, new revelations about life in Eritrea â including a shocking account of how Italian officers had jokingly drawn lots for the five attractive widows of a murdered victim, then carted them off by mule â were being published in the press. Ordinary Italians were beginning to wonder why so many soldiersâ lives had been lost setting up a colony in which atrocities were apparently commonplace. The newspapers demanded an investigation, reluctant to believe their own articles. Aware that its fledgling African policy faced a test more dangerous than any military confrontation, Rome announced the establishment of a royal inquiry. And this was where Ferdinando Martini, ruthless humanist, pragmatic sophisticate, the iconoclast who ended up saving the establishment, entered the picture.

The son of a comic playwright, Martini came of aristocratic stock. He was born in Florence, a city whose inhabitants regarded themselves, in many ways, as guardians of Italian culture. As a liberal member of parliament for the Tuscan constituency of Pescia and Lucca, he was to be returned to parliament a total of 13 times. By the time the old magic finally failed and he lost his seat, held without interruption for 45 years, he was 77 years old and inclined to regard retirement as a blessing. But any 19th-century gentleman worthy of the title prided himself on being a polymath and, for Martini, a political career always went hand-in-hand with literature. Following in his fatherâs footsteps, he was to produce a steady stream of light comedies, erudite speeches and witty articles, taking time out from the political manoeuvrings and backroom bargaining associated with Montecitorio, the parliament in Rome, to run and edit several literary newspapers.

When it comes to history, those who write with ease enjoy an unfair advantage over ordinary mortals. They may be slyly self-promoting or subtly manipulative without us fully realizing it. Time has placed forever out of reach the ultimate litmus test, in which we hold their version of events up against our own memories and spot the inconsistencies. Because their words are what the records retain, because the gaps in their accounts left by the embarrassing and discreditable cannot always be filled, we see them largely as they intended to be seen.

No politician ever mastered his own legacy more effectively than Martini, thanks to the huge body of work he left behind. This was someone who felt compelled to put pen to paper every day, even if it was only to record a mocking paragraph in his diary or dash off an affectionate note to his daughter. The screeds of elegant copperplate draw the portrait of a man both irreverent and perceptive, capable of acknowledging his own failings while deriving huge amusement from those of others. They chime with the posed portrait photographs which show the author, eyebrows raised, high-domed head tipped quizzically to one side, challenging the camera. âHe is balding, and this bothers him,â reads the entry in a light-hearted biographical dictionary of the day.⁵ It describes an acid-tongued perfectionist, who liked to boast that his intellectual independence had won him the enmity of every political party. âHe is blessed with an incisive mind and a lively turn of phrase. But if he judges others harshly, he is no less exacting with himself.â Martini comes across as a charismatic maverick, hard to dislike, a fact that makes his unexpected role as apologist for white supremacy all the more insidious.

He had started out as one of the fiercest critics of Italyâs African adventure, arguing that a European nation which had itself only just thrown off the yoke of foreign rule was, in trying to subjugate a foreign people, guilty of the worst kind of hypocrisy. Why invest in Massawaâs infrastructure, when Italyâs poor south itself stood in crying need of development? After the Dogali massacre, Martini stuck his neck out by refusing to hail the slaughtered men as heroes and demanding the immediate recall of Italian troops, on the grounds that remaining in Eritrea was âneither the policy of a daring nation nor a wise peopleâ. So, by asking Martini and several other well-known anti-colonial campaigners to be part of the seven-man team assigned to investigate the goings-on in Massawa, Rome was signalling its honourable intentions to a suspicious public. With Martini as vice-chairman of the royal inquiry, how could there possibly be a cover-up?

Setting off from Naples, the team spent eight weeks touring the colony. Travelling by mule, they interviewed Eritrean chiefs and Italian officials, took notes on climatic conditions and analysed local trade. For the inquiryâs remit went far beyond investigating the alleged human rights abuses. The Massawa scandal had highlighted the need for an authoritative appraisal of Eritreaâs economic and strategic potential. It was time Rome decided exactly what it wanted of its Red Sea colony.

It was a potential turning point in Eritrean history. Given Martiniâs reputation for forthrightness and the doubts he had voiced about the colonyâs raison dâÃªtre, his left-wing colleagues in parliament and Italian voters had no reason to expect anything other than a stringently impartial account. The level of trust placed on his shoulders makes what transpired that much harder to forgive.

For when the team published its conclusions in November, editorsâ mouths dropped open. In their first, 9,000-word report, the inquiry members meekly accept the excuses made by the military commanders they had questioned in Rome and Massawa. Damning journalistic accounts are brushed to one side, as are Livraghiâs confessions, the product, the report hints, of an unhinged mind. With the exception of less than a dozen executions ordered during a crisis by Baldissera, who had helpfully explained that âit was necessary to strike terror into those barbarians to make them submitâ, the team finds no evidence of night-time assassinations. It sympathizes with the general for the pressures he came under, finding that the colonyâs existence âreally was under threatâ. As for the âsupposed massacresâ of entire Eritrean military units, these âdid not take placeâ. There might have been a couple of incidents in which rebels being escorted to the border â a mere 16, rather than 800 â had been shot. But, adopting an approach favoured in many a rape trial, the team prefers to blame the victims, whose failure to cooperate with their captors brought their fate upon themselves. Another convenient scapegoat was the Eritrean police force, which apparently had a problem grasping the concept of military discipline.

The very wording of the inquiryâs extraordinary conclusion, with its wealth of unconscious racism, tells us everything we need to know about the teamâs philosophical point of departure. âIf, in some isolated case, an abuse was committed, it can only be attributed to the savage temperament of the indigenous policemen necessarily entrusted with carrying out orders, and to the victims themselves,â it reads. âNeither the [military] command nor any colonial officials can be held responsible.â In the light of these findings, it was hardly surprising that a Massawa court absolved both Cagnassi and Livraghi, while sentencing two Eritrean police chiefs to long prison sentences. Newspapers which had called for an Italian withdrawal from Eritrea were left flailing, the parliamentary debate on the matter â despite some sarcastic speeches by anti-colonial deputies â sputtered to an anti-climax, without a vote. The system had protected its own and, as several Italian officials revealed in memoirs published long after events, the mass killings and frenzied executions of suspected troublemakers swiftly resumed in Eritrea.⁶

The second report the team drafted represents, at least as far as the former anti-colonials on the team were concerned, a further betrayal of principle. Rejecting the sceptical accounts of previous visitors, Martini and his colleagues hail Eritrea as a âfertile and virgin land â¦ stretching out its arms to Italian farmersâ. The colony, they say, is ideally placed to serve as an eventual outlet for Italyâs Ã©migrÃ©s. To that end, Rome should concentrate on consolidating Eritreaâs borders, improving relations with local chiefs, replacing the military command with a civilian administration and attracting the peasant landowners who will form the backbone of a vibrant Italian community. Not an inch of acquired territory should be surrendered.

By simultaneously burying a scandal that threatened to rock the government and bestowing its blessing on Italyâs African daydreams, the inquiry had effectively granted a faltering colonial project a new lease of life. On this, the first of Martiniâs two key encounters with Eritrea, the supposed freethinker had played a central role in a shameless whitewash which not only ensured Massawaâs atrocities quietly faded from view, but guaranteed the colony survived to be fought over another day.

Why did Martini do it? Why did he risk his reputation by putting his name to what a historian of the day described as âan incredible, medieval document, which should have been confiscated as an apologia for the crime â¦ A sickening defence of assassinationâ?⁷

Any journalist is familiar with the sensation of being ânobbledâ by the target of an investigation. Starting out on a story in a state of hostile cynicism, his views falter as one interviewee after another put their cases with impassioned sincerity. The trust placed in the journalist is so unwavering, the hospitality so warm and, on closer examination, the people he was originally gunning for seem so reasonable. Years later, looking back on the glowing write-up that resulted, he winces at how easily he allowed himself to be manipulated, shrugs his shoulders and blames it on a heavy lunch. But it is hard to argue that Martiniâs keen intelligence was momentarily befuddled by the justifications presented by the colonial officials he met. In later life, he never showed any sign of regretting his role as co-author of the vital report. What puzzled contemporaries described as Martiniâs âconversionâ to the colonial cause was to be a permanent change of heart.

Did the quest for self-advancement play a role? Here, the picture becomes more murky. Martini was undoubtedly vain and hugely ambitious. It seems unlikely that he could already have had his eye on the post of Eritreaâs governorship, which would only be created 10 years into the future. But once granted a place on a high-profile royal inquiry, investigating a topic known to be particularly close to King Umbertoâs heart, Martini must have been aware that a bland finding would mean political rewards somewhere down the line.

Martiniâs own explanation for his U-turn â however nigglingly unsatisfying â probably lies implicit in the pages of NellâAffrica Italiana, a highly personalized account of the Eritrea trip published after his return. Written in the self-consciously literary language of the day, but blessed with the authorâs characteristic sharp eye for detail, it became a runaway bestseller, appearing in 10 editions and remaining in print for 40 years. Reaching a far wider audience than a dry government report ever could, NellâAffrica Italiana, it could be argued, played a more crucial role in shaping public opinion towards Eritrea than anything else Martini wrote.

In it, Martini pulls no punches about the Italian-made horrors he witnessed in Eritrea. He describes the notorious âField of Hungerâ â a desolate plain outside Massawa where the town governor had ordered destitute natives to be taken and left to die. âCorpses lay here and there, their faces covered in rags; one, a horrible sight, so swarmed with insects, which snaked their way through limbs twisted and melted by the rays of the sun, he actually seemed to be moving. The dead were waiting for the hyenas, the living were waiting for death.â

Martini takes to his heels after glimpsing a group of young Eritrean girls sifting through mounds of camel dung in search of undigested grain, fighting for mouthfuls from a horseâs rotting corpse. âI fled, horrified, stupefied, mortified by my own impotence, hiding my watch chain, ashamed of the breakfast I had eaten and the lunch that awaited me.â

He winces at the use to which the curbash is put, on both sides of the recently-established border. âAcross the whole of Abyssinia, not excluding our own Eritrean colony, the curbash is an institution. Native policemen and guards are issued with it and when needs must (and it seems, from what I saw, that needs must rather often) they flog without mercy.â

Visiting an orphanage, he is repulsed by the sight of the sons of Eritrean rebels, shot âfor the sole crime of not wanting Europeans and not wanting to take ordersâ, being taught to sing Romeâs praises. âConquest always comes with its own sad, sometimes dishonest, demands. Yet this seemed, and still seems, an outrage against human nature. Even now, remembering it, I feel a rush of blood to my head.â

Elsewhere, he bitterly ruminates on the hypocrisy of the Italian colonial project. âWe are liars. We say we want to spread civilization in Abyssinia, but it is not true â¦ Far from being barbaric and idolatrous, these people have been Christians for centuries â¦ We claim to want to end the fratricidal wars that have crushed any sprig of human industry in those regions, yet each day we sign up Abyssinians in our forces and pay them to butcher other Abyssinians.â

Yet having supped full of such horrors, having grasped the extent of his governmentâs hypocrisy, Martini comes to what might seem a counterintuitive conclusion. It is now too late, he argues, for Italy to pull out of Eritrea. By embarking in Africa, Italy has set in motion an unstoppable process of racial extermination which, however distasteful, must be allowed to run its course. Any other policy would be shameful. Rather than wasting time fretting over the legal niceties of land confiscation, he argues, Italy should be dispatching farmers to start work. âLet me repeat it for the 10th time: I would have preferred us never to have gone to Africa: I did what little I could, when there was still time, to get us to return home: but now that that time has passed â¦ it is neither wise nor honest to keep spreading exaggerated stories.â One can hear a sardonic disdain in Martiniâs voice as he imagines the eventual fate of Africaâs indigenous tribes. âWe have started the job. Succeeding generations will continue to depopulate Africa of its ancient inhabitants, down to the last but one. Not quite the last â he will be trained at college to sing our praises, celebrating how, by destroying the negro race, we finally succeeded in wiping out the slave trade!â

The white race is ordained to supplant the African. âOne race must replace another, itâs that or nothing â¦ The native is a hindrance; whether we like it or not, we will have to hunt him down and encourage him to disappear, just as has been done elsewhere with the Redskins, using all the methods civilization â which the native instinctively hates â can provide: gunfire and a daily dose of firewater.â

His language is staggeringly blunt, but it is meant to shock. Martiniâs main message to his Italian readers, to paraphrase it in crude modern terms, was: âLetâs cut the crap.â A genocide is already under way in Eritrea, he tells his audience, a genocide that is the expression of ineluctable historical forces. âWe have invaded Abyssinia without provocation, violently and unjustly. We excuse ourselves saying that the English, Russians, French, Germans and Spaniards have done the same elsewhere. So be it â¦ injustice and violence will be necessary, sooner or later, and the greater our success, the more vital it will be not to allow trivial details or human rights to hold us up.â Moral squeamishness cannot be allowed to stand in the way of a glorious master project. Let us not shrink from what is necessary, however distasteful. But let us, at the very least, have the decency to admit what we are doing.⁸

In modern-day Eritrea, popular memory tends to divide the Italian colonial era into two halves; the Martini years, time of benign paternalism, when Eritreans and Italians muddled along together well enough; and the Fascist years, when the Italians introduced a series of racial laws as callous as anything seen in apartheid South Africa. But as NellâAffrica Italiana shows, the assumptions of biological determinism that came to form the bedrock of both Fascism and Nazism were present from the first days of the Italian presence in Africa. The thread runs strong and clear through half a century of occupation. If men of Martiniâs generation, in contrast with their successors, felt no need to enshrine every aspect of their racial superiority in a specific set of laws, it was only because they took their supremacy utterly for granted.

Martini is a fascinating example of how it is possible for a man to be both painfully sensitive and chillingly mechanistic. The views he expressed were the notions of his day, an era in which Darwinâs theories of Natural Selection and survival of the fittest were used to justify the slaughter of Congoâs tribes by Belgian King Leopoldâs mercenaries, the German massacre of the Herero tribesmen in South West Africa and the British eradication of Tasmaniaâs natives. Like the rabbits a British landowner introduced to Australia, like the rampant European weeds overrunning the New World, the intellectually and technologically superior white races would push aboriginal tribes into extinction. British Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury summarized the philosophy in a famous 1898 speech. âYou may roughly divide the nations of the world as the living and the dying. The weak states are becoming weaker and the strong states are becoming stronger â¦ the living nations will gradually encroach on the territory of the dying.â⁹

Nor was Martini alone in finding the process distressing to watch. A strange kind of benevolent ruthlessness has always been the hallmark of the colonial conqueror. From H. Rider Haggardâs fictional hero Allan Quatermain muttering âpoor wretchâ as he puts a bullet through yet another Zulu warriorâs heart, to the real-life Winston Churchill, shuddering with excitement and horror as shellfire rips through Mahdi lines at Omdurman, the literature of the day is peppered with compassionate exterminators. Martini was too intelligent not to grasp the humanity of the wretched Eritreans he met. Their plight, he told his readers, haunted his dreams. But at the end of the day, despite all his anti-establishment posturing and elegant irony, nothing mattered more to this Italian patriot than the greater glory of the Motherland.

NellâAffrica Italiana contains one last clue as to why Martini changed his mind on Eritrea, though it is hard to distinguish authentic feeling from the rhetoric considered appropriate to the closing paragraphs of a 19th-century memoir. Sailing out of Massawa, Martini launches into a high-octane paean to Africa, the continent where, he says, âthe mind purifies, the spirit repairs itself and we find Godâ. âOh vast silence, oh nights spent in the open air, how you invigorate the body and strengthen the soul!â he raves. Adopting the pose of jaundiced Westerner weighed down by the burdens of civilization, he envies the nomads of Africa. In their âhappy ignoranceâ, he says, they never think to ask the moon why it moves across the sky or interrogate their flocks on the meaning of life. âHow sweet it is to dream, amongst sands untouched from one month to another by a human footprint, of a society without sickness or strife, without wars or tail-coats, without coups dâÃ©tat and visiting cards!â It is a vision of the Noble Savage that owes everything to Rousseau and Romantic poetry and nothing to reality. Like so many travellers to Africa before and after him, Martini confused the absence of a set of rules recognized by a European with personal freedom. Plagued by outbreaks of cholera and the raids of local warlords, bound by their own communityâs conservative codes of behaviour, Eritreaâs nomads had far more reason to feel hemmed in than an effete Italian aristocrat on a government expense account.

But underneath all the hyperbole, one catches a glint of sincere emotion. For Martini, it had been easy enough to argue for Eritreaâs abandonment from the distance of Rome. But criss-crossing the Hamasien plateau by mule, watching flying fish skipping over the Red Sea, basted by Eritreaâs harsh light, Martini had blossomed. Part of him had fallen in love with the place, a love affair that would last the rest of his life and bring him back. He was not about to pronounce the death sentence on a land that had touched his heart. Perhaps this was the true reason why, with typical sophistry, he managed to convince himself that a doomed and destructive colonial project was, in fact, the soundest of investments.

Driving back to Asmara in the evening light, I decided to take up Cicoriaâs suggestion. The old Italian cemetery sprawls in rococo magnificence on the edge of town, next to its strangely anonymous modern Eritrean equivalent. Bougainvillea billows around weeping angels, stone fingers tear stone hair in grief. Between the cypresses, separated by a yellow scrub rustling with crickets and lizards, the old family mausoleums stand proud. In the more recent section, the gravestones bear Tigrinya lettering and photographs of Eritreans in graduation robes, instead of portraits of stolid Italian matrons in black. But the old mausoleums are exclusively the white manâs province. Serenaded by cooing doves, I strolled between the mini mansions, reading the names which must have once featured in local newspaper articles and taken pride of place on government committees. âFamiglia Ricupito dâAmicoâ, âFamiglia Giannavolaâ, âFamiglia Antonio Ponzioâ. Asmaraâs burghers had not stinted when it came to their final resting places. With their gothic turrets and marbled doorways, the chapels were more substantial than many Eritrean homes. This was a cemetery built by a conquering power, established by people so sure they were in Africa to stay they had laid down vaults for the great-grandchildren they knew would succeed them.

As one of the colonyâs earliest settlers, the Cicoria family had claimed a prime site near the entrance. The chapel next door was being used as a storeroom by the elderly graveyard workers, paint tins resting on the floor. Undoing a rusty wire securing the door, I slipped inside. All Soulsâ Day had just been and someone had left flowers, an old family friend, perhaps, able to grant the Cicorias the forgiveness they seemed incapable of offering one another. Water dripped from the cut blooms, gathering in a small rivulet that ran along the floor. Looking at the black-and-white photographs marking each resting place, I was struck by the hardness of the expressions. No smiles or tenderness here. The face of Antonio Cicoria, Filippoâs bridge-building grandfather, bore the deep grooves of a life in which nothing had come easy. Flinty and implacable, he looked a paterfamilias who would wield the belt with enthusiasm when disciplining wife and children. Another white-haired Cicoria stared from the slab above, chin jutting aggressively. Was this the hated father? There was no inscription, but he bore a passing resemblance to Filippo. The Italian equivalent of âWhatâs it to you?â seemed to hover on his lips. With relatives like this, I thought, no wonder Cicoria had run away.

As I headed for the gates, I noticed a pile of splintered gravestones stacked in a corner. Every man tries to leave his mark upon the earth, but even stones eventually wear out. When these headstones had cracked, no solicitous Italian descendant was left in Eritrea to order a replacement. Would Cicoriaâs body be brought here when his straining breath finally ran out? It seemed unlikely. And once the family friend stopped visiting and the rusty wire dropped off the door, this chapel, too, might end up serving as a workmanâs shed. I was to visit the cemetery many times after that, but only once overlapped with a relative fussing over a tomb, a young meticcio based in Rome. On his rare visits to Eritrea, he said, he fought a losing battle against the weeds slowly obliterating his parentsâ grave. Burial grounds, like hospitals, need fresh clientele to stay alive. In Asmaraâs cemetery, you could feel the Italian story coming to a stop.

Clever as he was, Martini could not have got it more wrong. He never faltered in his belief in a future white Eritrea, a little Italy in Africa. Amid the bombastic self-confidence of the late 19th century, it seemed a foregone conclusion, so certain that only the methodology remained to be discussed. But Martiniâs âdoomedâ native proved more resilient than expected. Across Africa, the supposedly unstoppable flood of European settlers was easily dammed and reversed. Earning a living in Eritrea proved too tough for even the hardy peasants of Sicily and Calabria. Italyâs African colonies would never absorb more than one per cent of the countryâs Ã©migrÃ©s, compared to the 40 per cent that headed to America. In the 1940s, ridiculing Italyâs pretensions to empire, the British â who had so many of their own â started sending Italian settlers back from the Horn. When Ethiopiaâs regime turned Marxist and nationalized Italian businesses in the 1970s, those who had clung on registered sadly for repatriation. Today the breed facing imminent extinction in Eritrea is white, not black. Less than 120 Italian families remain, liver-spotted men and women in their seventies and eighties who came back after independence in 1993 to die in the only place that felt like home. Not a single country estate lies in Italian hands and each year Vittorio Volpicelli, manager of the Casa degli Italiani, the Italian Club, is called upon to organize yet another medical evacuation, yet another funeral mass at the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary.

With each disappearance, the dwindling community grows a little more mournful, a little more inward-looking. Martiniâs descendants, dubbed âsoft Fascistsâ by some Eritreans, have none of his brash confidence. If they still meet friends for an espresso at the Casa, where the Fascist party insignia â a bundle of rods symbolizing âstrength through unityâ â graces the main gate, the Italians rarely allow the âFâ word to pass their lips. âYou know, when theyâre annoyed with us they like to throw Fascism in our faces. But if you look at the origins of the word, it actually stands for something rather beautiful,â a faded Italian beauty told me as we sat having our hair done in Gino and Ginaâs. Gino was Asmaraâs first Italian hairdresser and his salonâs walls are decorated with photographs of heavily made-up European models, showing off the latest in 1960s styles. Now he potters around in a confusion of Alzheimerâs, collecting towels and taking orders from his wife. âThis used to be such a beautiful, beautiful city,â the signora reminisced. âEvery day, a plane would fly in from Rome with fresh orchids for the flower shops. But now â¦â There was no point going on. Asmaraâs Italians may purse their lips, remembering days bathed in the golden light of memory, but they know better than to voice such views in public. They stay out of politics, keep themselves to themselves. Having experienced one nationalization, they know what angry African governments can do to unwanted white communities. Masters of yesteryear, they are now here on sufferance.

CHAPTER 3 The Steel Snake

âTruly I could say that I built a colony and gave it to Italy.â

Ferdinando Martini

I noticed the scar on the first trip I made to Eritrea. It was impossible to miss: a thin white line that traced a winding route through the clumps of fig cactus and clusters of spiky aloes, lying like upturned octopi on the bottom of a fishermanâs boat. At times, the overgrown track ran alongside the road. At others, it veered off, plunging through a tunnel into the bowels of the mountain, only to resurface, gulping for air, a few minutes later. Lurching from side to side as the car took the hairpin bends on the road from Asmara to Massawa, I caught glimpses of terracotta brick buttressing hugging the cliff face, viaducts rearing high above the valley, bridges hurled recklessly across gorges. âThat? Itâs the old Italian railway,â a friend explained. âA railway? Up here? Surely thatâs not possible.â âOh yes. They were good builders, those Italians. They understood the mountain.â

It had been closed by the Ethiopians when the guerrilla war began to bite in the 1970s, its sleepers ripped up by soldiers and rebel fighters who used them to line the trenches. The elegant Italian arches now supported nothing at all, the track was just a convenient shortcut for Eritreans strolling to the nearest hamlet in the position they found so comfortable: walking stick slung across the shoulders, hands flopping, prisoner-of-war-like, from the pole. While structurally intact, the tunnels had followed the inexorable rule governing all dark places near human dwellings and were doused in the acrid aroma of urine. But these al fresco toilets would have won the admiration of Brunel himself.

Only a people that had already thrown railroads across the Alps and Dolomites would have dared take on the Eritrean escarpment. Trains, which cannot shift into lower gear or roar round hairpin bends when the gradient begins to bite, are not really designed to go up mountains. Between Massawa and Asmara the land soars from sea level to 2,300 metres in just 70 km. The engineers of the 19th century considered a 1 in 100 gradient to be âheavyâ, a gradient of 1 in 16 represented the physical limit a railroad could tackle without cog or cable. At its steepest, on the vertiginous climb between the town of Ghinda and Asmara, the Eritrean railway would touch 1 in 28. And that gradient was only achieved by sending the narrow-gauge track looping for 45 km through the mountains, a sinuous, fiendishly-clever itinerary that won it the sobriquet âserpente dâacciaioâ â âsteel snakeâ. The key MassawaâAsmara section alone, I later discovered, boasted 30 tunnels, 35 bridges, 14 arches and 667 curves.

Fastidious in their choice of route, the Italians were equally ingenious when it came to choice of hardware. The techniques adopted, whose idiosyncrasies have turned Eritrea into a place of pilgrimage for modern trainspotters, ranged from the childishly simple to the sophisticated. The Italians imported French steam locomotives, specially designed for mountain transport, whose engines boasted twice the grip of ordinary models, thanks to a system that recycled steam from the main cylinders to a powered front bogie. The locomotivesâ normally rigid blast pipe was designed to be flexible, allowing the trains to take the tightest of curves. And wagons were fitted with individual hand brakes, which railwaymen spun to prevent the train picking up too much speed on the downhill run and released on the flat. It all made for a very slow, if spectacular ride: 10 hours from coast to capital.¹

Even to the untutored eye, the Eritrean railway was clearly something of an engineering masterpiece. And the man responsible for this gravity-defying marvel, which would take 30 years to complete, was none other than Ferdinando Martini, epigram-loving politico and raconteur.

Why did Martini return to Eritrea? When the royal inquiry team packed its bags and set sail from Massawa in June 1891, the parliamentarian had every reason to believe that, thanks in part to his own efforts, the colonyâs future was now assured. But Martini could never have predicted the blow Rome would be dealt five years later, a humiliation so profound it would leave its public feeling heartily sick of all things colonial and ready to throw in the towel on his beloved Eritrea.

Well before Menelik II succeeded Yohannes as Emperor of Abyssinia, it had been clear that two expansionist forces which had been rubbing up against one another â resurgent Abyssinian nationalism and embryonic Italian colonialism â must one day clash head on. Having stamped its mark on Eritrea and signed a series of treaties with sultans on the Somali coast, Italy continued to circle the Horn of Africaâs real prize: Abyssinia. The eventual trigger for this shuddering collision was to be the Treaty of Uccialli, an agreement Menelik II signed with the Italians in the belief he was trading recognition of an Eritrean border encompassing the kebessa highlands for the right to import arms through Romeâs new colony to his landlocked empire. While Menelik had agreed certain terms in the treatyâs Amharic version, he gradually came to the outraged realization that he had put his name to very different undertakings in the Italian translation, which contained a sly clause turning his nation into a protectorate of Rome â effectively a vassal state. When Italy refused to reverse what must qualify as one of the crudest sleights of hand in diplomatic history, war became inevitable.

The battle that followed, staged outside the Tigrayan town of Adua in 1896, pitted 19,000 Italian-led troops against 100,000 Abyssinians, many of them equipped, ironically, with Remington rifles obligingly supplied by Italian emissaries trying to ingratiate themselves with Menelik.² Outwitted and outmanoeuvred, some 6,000 Italians and their Eritrean ascari recruits were slaughtered by the Abyssinians, more men dying in one day than throughout the whole of Italyâs war of independence. To ensure they never fought again, the Abyssinians amputated the right arms and left legs of surviving ascaris, a harsh lesson to those who took the white manâs silver. It was the first time a Western army of such a size had been bested by an African force, the most shocking setback experienced on the continent by a 19th-century colonial power. Stunned by a defeat that was in part attributable to the automatic assumption that primitive black warriors would stand no chance against modern white troops, in part to Italian Prime Minister Francesco Crispiâs disastrous habit of second-guessing his generals, Rome sued for peace.

Menelik could have capitalized on this stunning victory and attempted to eject the Italians altogether from the Horn. Instead, while insisting on Uccialliâs abrogation, he accepted the principle of an enlarged Italian Eritrea. But such concessions did little to dilute Aduaâs devastating impact back in Italy. It was not for mountainous Eritrea and arid Somalia that the Italian public had supported the governmentâs expensive colonial project. Its eyes had always been locked on the green pastures further to the south, the fertile, farmable Abyssinian lands Menelik II had now decreed forever out of reach. Chanting âViva Menelikâ, furious crowds demonstrated against the Italian government, while socialist members of parliament renewed calls for Italy to pull out of Africa. Some already heard Eritreaâs death knell tolling: âThe colony no longer lives, it breathes its last,â pronounced Eteocle Cagnassi, the official who had so deftly escaped punishment for the Massawa atrocities. âThe ministry is demolishing, not running it; it no longer has a governor, very soon there will be no settlers either. Even in its most difficult and dangerous moments, Eritrea never went through a more inauspicious and painful time.â³

It was at this delicate juncture that the government called in Martini, offering him the post of Eritreaâs first civilian governor. He turned it down, hesitated, then accepted. For conservative leader Antonio Di Rudini, who had taken over from the disgraced Crispi as prime minister, Martini was a canny choice. Although Di Rudini had made huge political capital out of criticizing the governmentâs handling of Adua, he was a pragmatist on colonial matters. He had decided to hang on to Eritrea, but only after playing briefly with the idea of handing the colony to Belgiumâs King Leopold, master of the Congo. He realized that he could only successfully defy public opinion if the colony, focus of so much controversy, assumed the lowest of profiles. It must be removed from the control of a profligate military, its shifting border needed to be fixed and, above all, its demands on Italyâs exchequer must be drastically reduced. By recruiting Martini, who had somehow managed to survive the Massawa debacle with his reputation for feistiness intact, Di Rudini could appear to be responding to public sentiment. In fact, both he and King Umberto knew they were placing the colony in the safest of hands.

When Martini set to sea, there was talk in Rome of pruning Eritrea down to a triangle linking Massawa on the coast with Asmara and the highlands town of Keren, or something even more modest. Many of Martiniâs colleagues actually expected the new governor to waste no time in winding up Eritreaâs affairs. But the establishment was intent on consolidation, not dissolution. âI have made quite enough sacrifices to public opinion on this African issue,â the King confided to Martini before he left. âI will not make the ultimate sacrifice: we must and will not descend from the plateau.â⁴ And Martini, the ever-equivocal Martini, was on exactly the same wavelength. âIf I can stop Africa being a thorn in our flesh â¦ if I can pacify the colony, raise it to a point where it is self-supporting, allow it to become, so to speak, forgotten, wouldnât I be doing the country a major service?â he mused.⁵ He spelled out his position in a letter to a friend: âI will not return a single inch of territory â¦ the day the government asks me to descend to Massawa is the day I land in Brindisi.â

For Martini, this represented a risky career move. By the time he left for Eritrea in December 1897, he was 56 years old, an age where the delights of African travel, with its malarial bouts, month-long mule treks and most basic of amenities, begin to pall. The job, which meant leaving behind his family, was no sinecure, and others had rejected it. He had already done well for himself, rising briefly to the post of Education Minister. By going to Eritrea, he would be removing himself from the buzz and chit-chat of Montecitorio, with all the opportunities it represented. But at his age, with so much already achieved, such things mattered less than they once had. There were times, indeed, when he felt nothing but disgust for politics, sorry he had ever entered the game. âWhen I look back on my 23 years in parliament, I mourn all that wasted time,â he told a friend. âIf I stay here, what will I do? Make speeches to the chamber: Sibylline words, scattered by the wind.â⁶ The clear skies he had lauded in NellâAffrica Italiana were calling. Eritreaâs first civilian governor, he knew, would be a huge fish in a tiny pool, always a cheering position to hold. It must have been enormously flattering to think that, once again, the future of Italyâs âfirst-bornâ rested largely on his shoulders. Who else, after all, knew more about Eritrean affairs? Who else could be trusted to do the right thing?

His nine-year stint as governor is recorded in Il Diario Eritreo, 7,000 pages of handwritten entries which constitute a priceless resource of the Italian colonial era. Although he indexed each of its 26 volumes, Martini never seems to have had publication in mind, referring to the work only as a collection of ânotesâ. At most, he probably intended the diary to serve as source material for an African memoir he never, in the end, got round to writing. Had it not been for Italyâs Ministry of African Affairs, which ordered it published in 1946 â nearly 20 years after Martiniâs death â the diary would have remained locked away in the familyâs archives. Why did he put so much care into what was meant as no more than a personal aide-mÃ©moire? Because, one has to conclude, Martini simply could not do otherwise. A man with his inquiring mind, with his lifelong habit of capturing impressions on paper, simply had to record the intense sensations that came with his return to Eritrea. To write something down was to endow it with value, to allot it its proper meaning â the habit came to him as naturally as breathing. âThere is more satisfaction to be won from writing what seems a stylish page than in overturning a ministry,â he once remarked. Whether at sea, on the road, or at home, he faithfully kept his diary, rarely skipping a day. And the fact that publication was never on the agenda makes the diary far fresher, funnier and more accessible than the flowery NellâAffrica Italiana. Martini himself never understood this. âIn Africa, one writes rather badly,â he says at one point. âThis is certainly not a good page.â⁷ In fact, to modern eyes, he writes far better. A sustained ironic conversation with himself, the diaryâs very lack of artifice brings 19th-century Eritrea to life in a way his more laboured writing never could.

Here is Martini the amused sociologist, fascinated at the goings-on in the stretch of open ground outside his Asmara villa, which serves, he discovers, as a communal latrine. âThis wretched valley is the debating society for those who feel the need to shed excess body weight â¦ One man comes along and squats. The effect is contagious. Another comes along, measures the distance and squats a dozen metres from the first, in the same position and with the same aim in mind. And then a third, a fourth; sometimes a fifth and a sixth. And the conversation starts â¦ Simultaneous, contemporaneous, in parallel â¦ Words are not the only thing to emerge, but they last longer than the rest.â⁸

And here is Martini the urban sophisticate, despairing, as Eritreaâs attorney-general reads out a report, at his colleaguesâ pitiable level of education. âMy God! What a business! It was the most laughable thing imaginable: logic, dignity of expression, grammar, were never so badly mangled. And to think these are the magistrates the government sends to civilize Africa!â⁹

Everything interests him, from the awed reaction of Massawaâs residents to his governorâs regalia of plumed hat and gold braid, to the flavour of the turtle soup and ostrich steak (âlike vealâ, he notes) he is served at a welcome ceremony. The sexual mores of Eritreaâs tribes, the way in which a visiting chieftain falls in love with his reflection in a mirror, the staggering ugliness of a group of Englishwomen spotted in a Cairo hotel, the gossip in Asmaraâs expatriate community, all are recorded with Martiniâs characteristic impish sense of humour.

The task he had been set, he soon realized, was immense. Nearly 30 years after its arrival in the Horn, Italy had pitifully little to show for its investment. The Eritrea depicted in his diary is Italyâs version of the Wild West, swept by locust swarms and cholera outbreaks, braced for outbreaks of the plague; a land in which villages are raided by hostile tribes and shipping attacked by pirates. Half-Christian and half-Moslem, it is a frontier country in which slaves are still traded, shady European businessmen mingle with known spies and where government officials still fight â and die â in duels staged over adulterous wives.

Just as he had been warned in Rome, the military administration had careered out of control, spending Italian taxpayersâ money as though it would never be held to account. âEither idiots or criminalsâ, the dregs of the soldiering profession were drawn to Eritrea, he noted, men who believed âthat colonizing Africa and screwing the Italian government are one and the same thingâ. âDirty, out of uniform, they frequent the brothels until late, while the officers divide their time between prostitutes and the gaming table.â¹⁰ He was appalled to see how the military had lavished government funds on officersâ villas instead of investing in the roads, bridges and sewerage the colony so clearly needed. âEven the best soldiers feel they are only doing their duty when they throw money out of the window,â he lamented after discovering, rotting in Massawaâs storerooms, 60,000 menâs shoes, enough spurs to equip an army, 40,000 mattocks, 9 yearsâ supply of salt, 3 yearsâ of wine, 2 yearsâ of jam, 52 monthsâ worth of coffee and 22 monthsâ of sugar.

His Eritrean subjects were the least of his problems. The nine local ethnic groups had largely accepted Italian rule as a necessary evil. âThey do not love us, but understand the benefits that come with our rule,â remarked Martini, noting that local administrators regarded the Italians as âgood but stupidâ.¹¹ The settlers were the real disappointment. Far from serving as an alternative destination for the tens of thousands of Italians heading for the Americas, Eritrea held less than 4,000 âEuropeansâ, and that tally actually included hundreds of Egyptians, Syrians, Turks and Indians judged civilized enough to count as âwhiteâ. Land had been confiscated and experimental agricultural projects launched, but the going had proved so tough many Italian families begged to be sent home. Martini was none too impressed by those who remained, noting that their Greek colleagues seemed less prone to frittering away their profits. âThe Greek does not buy horses and does not keep mistresses, the Italian keeps both horse and mistress.â¹² The constant complaints by the hard core that remained drove him wild. âIâve always said that governing 20 Italians in the colony requires more patience, courage, and skill than governing 400,000 natives,â he fumed. When Rome had the temerity to inquire whether an Eritrean display should feature in the Paris Exhibitionâs colonial section, an exasperated Martini lost his temper: âAll we can send are dead menâs bones, bungled battle plans and columns of wasted money. Up till now these are the only fruits of our colonial harvest.â¹³

Moving the capital from Massawa to cool Asmara, he set about his work with characteristic briskness. A series of decrees created a new civilian administration, placing the army firmly under its control. Strict limits were set to the number of civil servants employed in Eritrea, a move that slashed Romeâs expenditure. The worst soldiers and officers were simply expelled. âThese steps will cause a great deal of ill feeling, but I know I am doing my duty. Order, discipline, justice and thrift: without these the colony can neither be governed nor saved,â Martini pronounced.¹⁴ The colony was divided up into nine provinces, each with its own capital, and Martini established the building blocks of a modern society: an independent judiciary, a telegraph system and departments of finance, health and education.

The man who had calmly predicted the disappearance of Eritreaâs indigenous peoples quickly changed his tone. It was all very well airily discussing the elimination of local tribes as a passing visitor. Now that he was actually running Eritrea and could see for himself the damage â both political and commercial â done by military confrontation, Martini turned accommodating pacifier. Determined to shore up the Eritrean border, he became the perfect neighbour, putting an end to Romeâs long tradition of double-dealing. When rebel chiefs on the other side of the frontier challenged Menelikâs rule, Martini turned a deaf ear to their pleas for weapons. Instead of fantasizing, like so many Italian contemporaries, about avenging Adua, he cooperated with Menelikâs attempts to check the lawlessness on their mutual frontier, stabilizing the region in the process. As for emigration, Martini quickly realized how poorly judged the royal inquiry report had been. The colony was simply not ready for a flood of Italian labourers, who risked clashing with locals and would, in any case, be undercut by Eritreans willing to accept a fraction of what a European considered an honest wage. He scrapped legislation authorizing further land confiscation and pushed employers to narrow the huge differential between the wages paid Italians and Eritreans.

But while righting certain blatant injustices, Martini was never a soft touch. If Eritrea was to survive, the locals must be taught a lesson in the pitiless consistency of colonial law, the merest hint of insubordination ruthlessly crushed. Mutinous ascaris were shackled or whipped and the sweltering coastal jails filled with prisoners who often paid the ultimate price. âIâve never had a bloodthirsty reputation and I really donât deserve one,â Martini wrote, after refusing to pardon a condemned bandit. âBut here, without a death penalty, you cannot govern.â¹⁵ He was building a state, virtually from scratch, and often he felt as though he was doing the work single-handed. âThere is not a dog here with whom one can hold an intellectual discussion,â he complained in a letter to his daughter.¹⁶ It was a lonely, heady experience, bound to encourage delusions of grandeur. âAt times, unfortunately,â he confessed to his diary, âI feel it would not be too arrogant to say, adapting the words of Louis 14th, âI am the colonyâ.â¹⁷

The longer he stayed, the more convinced he became that the success of this monumental project hinged on one key element. He knew Eritrea had gold, fish stocks in abundance and river valleys capable of producing coffee and grain, cotton and sisal. But as long as a rickety mule track was the only way of scaling the mountains separating hinterland from sea, Eritrea would remain forever cut off from the African continent, its ports idle, its administration reliant on government subsidies. Only a railroad could unlock the riches of the plateau and â beyond it â the markets of Abyssinia and Sudan. It was the one explicit undertaking Martini had sought in exchange for his loyal service during his final conversation with King Umberto. âWithout a railway joining Massawa with the highlands, nothing good, lasting or productive will ever come from Eritrea,â he told the monarch. âRest assured,â the King had promised. âThe railway will be built.â¹⁸

The close of the 19th century was the golden era of African railways. Flinging their sleepers and coal-eating locomotives across savannah and jungle, the colonial powers sent a blunt message to the locals: progress was unstoppable. The railroad was both an instrument of war, depositing troops armed with machine guns within range of their spear-carrying enemies, and an instrument of commercial penetration, bringing the ivory, minerals and spices at the continentâs heart to market, opening the interior to land-hungry farmers and hopeful miners. Cecil Rhodes dreamt of one that would run from Cape to Cairo, the explorer Henry Stanley, nicknamed âBreaker of Rocksâ, was building one which would link Leopoldville to the sea, the British were braving man-eating lions to connect Uganda with the Swahili coast. Railways were the equivalent of todayâs national airlines â no African colony worth its salt could be without one.

Martini did not intend to be left out, although he knew Eritreaâs topography made this a uniquely demanding challenge. When Martini arrived, the Italian army had already laid 28 km of track to the town of Saati, carrying troops to fight Ras Alula. But the work had been carried out in such haste, it all needed to be redone. There were drawings to be sketched, sites visited, contracts put out to tender and strikes to be settled. It all fell to Martini, acutely aware that Italyâs colonial rivals were establishing their own trade routes into the interior, with France and Britain vying for control of a railway that would link Djibouti with Addis Ababa. âThe railway means peace, both inside and outside our borders, and huge savings on the budget,â he told his diary, time and again. Despite the Kingâs promise, winning the funding did not prove easy. Having sent Martini out with orders to cut spending, Rome did not take kindly to constant requests for money. He would waste months peppering the Foreign Ministry with telegrams, winning his bosses round to the railroadâs merits, only to see the government fall and a new set of ministers take office, who all had to be persuaded afresh. The railway, fretted Martini, âwould be the only really effective remedy to many â perhaps all â of the colonyâs ills. But in Rome they do not want to know.â¹⁹

He assembled a small army of 1,100 Eritrean labourers and 200 Italian overseers for the backbreaking and dangerous work, hacking and blasting through the rock, building stations and water-storage vaults as the railroad inched forwards. Struggling to master the technical minutiae of rail engineering, Martini found himself acting as peacemaker between irate private contractors and his abrasive head of works, Francesco Schupfer, a stickler for detail capable of forcing a company caught using sub-standard materials to knock down a stretch of earthworks and start again. âPerhaps he is too rough, but he is a gentleman,â Martini pondered, intervening yet again to smooth ruffled feathers. âHe is hated by everyone, but very dear to me.â²⁰ When Britain raised the possibility of connecting Sudanâs rail network to the Eritrean line â a move that would have turned Massawa into eastern Sudanâs conduit to the sea â Martini was almost beside himself with excitement. âThis is a matter of life and death, either the railway reaches as far as Sabderat or we must leave Eritrea,â he pronounced.²¹ Just when his plans looked set in concrete, Rome began wondering â in a reflection of the changing technological times â whether it might not be better off investing in a highway to Gonder and Addis Ababa instead.

Despite all the telegrams and discussions, the stops and starts, the track slowly edged its way up to Asmara. By 1904, the crews had reached Ghinda, by 1911, four years after Martini had returned to Italy, it had reached Asmara. The final heave up the mountain proved the trickiest. Even today, old men living in Shegriny (âthe difficult placeâ), remember the dispute that lent their hamlet its name, as a father-and-son engineering team squabbled over the best route to take, each retiring to sulk in his tent before the precipitous route along âDevilâs Gateâ â little more than a narrow cliff ledge looking out over nothingness â was finally agreed.

The single most expensive public project undertaken by the Italians in Eritrea, Martiniâs railway was emblematic of his rule. Its construction marked the time when Eritrea, exposed to Western influences and endowed with the infrastructure of a modern industrial state, started down a path that would lead its citizens further and further away from their neighbours in feudal Abyssinia. Yet, as far as Martini was concerned, this gathering sense of national identity was almost an accidental by-product. Like so many colonial Big Men, he was haunted by the need to tame the landscape, to carve his initials into Eritreaâs very rocks. Literally hammering the nuts and bolts of a nation into place, he was more interested in the mechanical structures taking shape than what was going on in the heads of his African subjects. This colony was being created for Italyâs sake and if much of what he did improved life for Eritreans, it was motivated by an understanding of what was in Romeâs long-term interests, not altruism. No one could accuse Martini of remaining aloof â he toured constantly, setting up his marquee under the trees and receiving subjects whose customs he recorded in his diary. He knew the ways of the lowland Kunama and the nomadic rhythms of the Rashaida. But these were more the contacts of a deity with his worshippers than a parliamentarian with his constituents. This was the interest a lepidopterist shows in his butterfly collection â cool, distant and with a touch of deadly chloroform.

The approach is at its clearest when Martini writes about the two areas in which intimate contact between the races was possible: sex and education. Racial segregation had been practised in the colony since its inception. In Asmara, Eritreans were confined to the stinking warren of dwellings around the markets, while the Europeans, whose most prominent members donned white tie and tails to attend Martiniâs balls, lived in villas on the south side of the main street. Public transport was also segregated: Eritreans would have to wait another half-century to share the novel experience of using a busâs front door. But the races still mingled far more than the prudish Martini felt comfortable with. He disapproved of prostitutes, but was also repelled by the widespread phenomenon of madamismo, in which Italian officials took Eritrean women as concubines, setting up house together. The practice, he warned, raised a truly ghastly prospect. âA black man must not cuckold a white man. So a white man must not place himself in a position where he can be cuckolded by a native.â²² If the offspring of such unsavoury unions were abandoned, it would bring shame upon âthe dominant raceâ; if decently reared, it could ruin the Italian official concerned. Either outcome was to be deplored, so the entire situation was best avoided. It was an attempt at social engineering that enjoyed almost no success. By 1935, Asmaraâs 3,500 Italians had produced 1,000 meticci, evidence of a healthy level of interbreeding.²³

But it is for his stance on education that Martini is chiefly resented by Eritreans today. The former education minister violently rejected â âNo, no and once again, noâ â any notion of mixed-race schooling. His justification was characteristically quixotic, the opposite of what one might expect from a man who had embraced the credo of racial superiority. âIn my view, the blacks are more quick-witted than us,â he remarked, noticing how swiftly Eritrean pupils picked up foreign languages.²⁴ This posed a problem at school, he said, where âthe white manâs superiority, the basis of every colonial regime, is underminedâ. No mixed-race schooling meant there would be no opportunity for bright young Eritreans to form subversive views on their dim future masters. âLet us avoid making comparisons.â The natives must be kept in their place, taught only what they need to fulfil the subservient roles for which Rome thought them best suited. It was a variation of the philosophy Belgium would apply to the Congolese in the field of education: âPas dâÃ©lites, pas dâennemisâ (âNo elites, no enemiesâ).

In 1907, Martini asked to be recalled. He had pulled off a final diplomatic coup, travelling to Addis to pay his respects to an ailing Menelik II â âone of the ugliest men I have ever seen, but with a very sweet smileâ. It was a nightmarish journey during which the mules plunged up to their stomachs in mud and Martini, vain as ever, fussed constantly over the size of the ceremonial guard each provincial ruler sent to meet him.²⁵ His work on the railway was not complete. It would never, in fact, be completed to his satisfaction, for Italyâs invasion of Ethiopia in the 1930s would interrupt construction of a final section intended to link the Eritrean line to Sudanâs network. But Romeâs procrastination had fatigued him. Being lord of all he surveyed had been enjoyable, but the small-mindedness of colonial life depressed him and he was fed up with army intrigues. As he prepared to embark aboard a P&O liner, with Eritreaâs notables â both black and white â mustered in Massawa to say goodbye, the man of letters was, for once, lost for words. âI feel such emotion that I have neither the strength nor ability to express it.â

His farewell message to the Eritrean people reveals just how far the anti-colonialist of yesteryear had travelled, how heady the role of Lord Jim, sustained over nearly a decade, had proved. It reads more like a prayer penned by an Old Testament patriarch ascending to his rightful place at Godâs side, than an Italian politician returning to his Tuscan constituency and, eventually, the top job at a newly-created Ministry for Colonies.

âPeople from the Mareb to the sea, hear me! His Majesty the King of Italy desired that I should come amongst you and govern in his name. And for ten years I listened and I judged, I rewarded and I punished, in the Kingâs name. And for ten years I travelled the lands of the Christian and the Moslem, the plains and the mountain, and I said âgo forth and tradeâ to the merchants and âgo forth and cultivateâ to the farmers, in the Kingâs name. And peace was with you, and the roads were opened to trade, and the harvests were safe in the fields. Hear me! His Majesty the King learnt that his will had been done, by the Grace of God, and has permitted me to return to my own country. I bid farewell to great and small, rich and poor. May your trade prosper and your lands remain fertile. May God give you peace!â²⁶

With this portentous salutation, the Martini era came to a close.

He left behind a society transformed, but one â as far as its Eritrean majority was concerned â that held him in awe rather than affection. Today, when most Eritreans learn English at school, Martini has become little more than a name, his thoughts and achievements obscured by the barrier of language. Asmara holds not a single monument to this seminal figure. But older, Italian-speaking Eritreans remember, and their assessment of Martini is as ambivalent as the man himself. âHis legacy has been enormous, yet his aim was always to keep Eritrea in chains,â says Dr Aba Isaak, a local historian. âHe was a number one racist, but a superb statesman. I admire him, even while I regard him as my enemy.â²⁷

When Martini left, there was no doubt in his mind that his government owed him thanks beyond measure. By his own immodest assessment, he had shored up a bankrupt enterprise and âsavedâ an entire colony from abandonment, transforming a military garrison into a modern nation-state. But Martini had also laid the groundwork â quite literally, in the case of the railway â for the sour years of Fascism, when the implicit racism of his generation of administrators was turned into explicit law, and a colonial regime that had seemed a necessary irritation began to feel to Eritreans like an intolerable burden.

In the years that followed, the colony would serve as little more than a supplier of cannon fodder for Italyâs campaign in Libya, sending its ascaris to seize Tripolitania and Cyrenaica from the Turks in 1911. Italyâs African pretensions were largely forgotten as the country was plunged into the horrors of the First World War. The Allied carve-up of foreign territories following that conflict left Italians bruised. Right-wingers who still quietly pined for an African empire felt their country had been promised a great deal while the fighting raged, only to be palmed off with very little by the Allies when the danger of German victory passed. It was an anger that played perfectly into the hands of the bully who was about to seize control of Italy.

As a youthful Socialist, Benito Mussolini had railed against liberals such as Martini for frittering away funds he felt would have been better spent tackling Italyâs underdeveloped south, actually going to prison for opposing Italyâs invasion of Libya. But once he assumed office in 1922 as prime minister, Mussoliniâs attitude to empire changed. Hardline Fascist commanders were dispatched to Libya and Somalia, where they ruthlessly crushed local resistance and expropriated the most fertile land. The extreme nationalism at Fascismâs core required a rallying cause and Mussolini was a great believer in the purifying power of battle. âTo remain healthy, a nation should wage war every 25 years,â he maintained. He was determined to prove to other European powers that Il Duce deserved a seat at the negotiating table. Nursing expansionist plans for Europe, he needed a quick war that could be decisively won, giving the public morale a boost before it faced more formidable challenges closer to home. Abyssinia, which many Italians continued to regard, in defiance of all logic, as rightfully theirs, seemed the perfect choice. France had Algeria, Britain had Kenya. It was only fair Italy should have her âplace in the sunâ.

As the official propaganda machine cranked into action, Italians were once again sold the idea of Abyssinia as an El Dorado of gold, platinum, oil and coal, a land ready to soak up Italian settlers â Mussolini put the number at a blatantly absurd 10 million. Once again, one of Africaâs oldest civilizations was portrayed as a land of barbarians, who needed to be âliberatedâ for their own good. Italian officials were not alone in nursing a vision of Abyssinia that could have sprung from the pages of Gulliverâs Travels. âThere human slavery still flourishes,â Time magazine told its readers in August 1926. âThere the most trifling jubilation provides an excuse for tearing out the entrails of a living cow, that they may be gorged raw by old and young.â Itching for a pretext to declare war on Ras Tafari, the former Abyssinian regent who had been crowned Emperor Haile Selassie in 1930, Mussolini finally seized on a clash between Italian and Abyssinian troops at an oasis in Wal Wal as a pretext. Retribution had been a long time coming, but the battle of Adua was about to be avenged.

For Eritrea, the obvious location for Italyâs logistical base, the forthcoming invasion meant boom times. Ca Custa Lon Ca Custa (âWhatever it costsâ) reads the slogan, written in Piedmontese dialect, carved into the cement of the ugly Fascist bridge which fords the river at Dogali. It epitomized Mussoliniâs entire approach to the war he launched in the autumn of 1935, ordering a mixed force of Italian soldiers and Eritrean ascaris to cross the Mareb river dividing Eritrea from Abyssinia. âThere will be no lack of money,â he had promised the general in charge of operations, Emilio de Bono, and the ensuing campaign would be characterized by massive over-supply.²⁸ When de Bono asked for three divisions, Mussolini sent him 10, explaining: âFor the lack of a few thousand men, we lost the day at Adua. We shall never make that mistake. I am willing to commit a sin of excess but never a sin of deficiency.â²⁹ Some 650,000 men, including tens of thousands of Blackshirt volunteers, were eventually sent to the region and with them went 2m tonnes of material, probably 10 times as much as was actually needed. Flooded with supplies â much of it would sit rotting on the Massawa quayside, only, eventually, to be dumped in the sea â Eritreaâs facilities suddenly looked in dire need of modernization.

A 50,000-strong workcrew was dispatched to do the necessary: widening Massawa port, building hangars, warehouses, barracks and a brand-new hospital. The road to Asmara was resurfaced, airports built, bridges constructed. Martiniâs heart would have thrilled with pride, as his beloved railway finally came into its own. Trains shuttled between Massawa and Asmara nearly 40 times a day, laden with supplies for the front. Even this was not considered sufficient, however, and, in 1936, work started on another miracle of engineering, the longest, highest freight-carrying cableway in the world. The 72-km ropeway erected by the Italian company of Ceretti and Tanfani, strung like a steel necklace across the mountain ranges, was as much about demonstrating the white manâs mastery over the landscape as meeting any practical need. It was exactly the kind of high-profile, macho project Mussolini loved.

Asmara blossomed. New offices and arsenals, car parks and laboratories sprang up, traffic queues for the first time formed on the cityâs streets. The most modern city in Africa boasted more traffic lights than Rome itself. Soon the simple one-storey houses of the 19th century were dwarfed by Modernist palazzi. In the space of three frenzied years, Italyâs avant-garde architects, presented with a nearly blank canvas and generous state sponsorship, created a new city. A mere five years before Mussoliniâs new Roman empire was to crumble into dust, Eritreaâs designers dug foundations and poured cement, never doubting, it seems, that this empire was destined to endure.

It was a short military campaign. By May 2, 1936, Italyâs tactic of bombing Abyssinian hospitals and its widespread use of mustard gas, which poisoned water sources and brought the skin out in leprous, festering blisters, had had the desired effect. With his army in tatters and Italian troops marching on Addis, Haile Selassie fled the country. He made one last poignant appeal for help before the League of Nations in Geneva, where, jeered by right-wing Italian journalists, he warned member states that their failure to stop Mussolini would destroy the principle of collective security that had been the organizationâs raison dâÃªtre. âInternational morality is at stake,â he said, âwhat answer am I to take back to my people?â³⁰ European powers, who had already decided to take no more than token action, listened in silent embarrassment to this Cassandra-like warning. Riding a wave of popular rejoicing, Mussolini set about dividing Haile Selassieâs territory on ethnic lines. Abyssinia was swallowed up in Italian East Africa, a vast new Roman empire which embraced Eritrea and Somalia and covered 1.7 million sq km, stretching from the Indian Ocean to the borders of Kenya, Uganda and Sudan.

In Eritrea, this should have been a golden age, for white and black alike. But while the economy thrived, relations between Eritreans and Italians had never been worse. The new Italians, Eritreans quickly noticed, were different from the old. They came from the same modest backgrounds as their predecessors, but they seemed, like Il Duce himself, to feel a swaggering need to demonstrate constantly who was boss. There was little danger of these new arrivals, convinced of their Aryan superiority, becoming insabbiati: they despised the locals too thoroughly to mix. âEvery hour of the day, the native should view the Italian as his master, sure of himself and his future, with clear and defined objectives,â explained an Italian writer of the day.³¹ To that end, a raft of increasingly oppressive racial laws was introduced across Italian East Africa between 1936 and 1940. Part and parcel of the anti-Semitic legislation being adopted in mainland Italy, they aimed at keeping the black man firmly in his place.³²

Asmarinos today still refer to the city as âpiglo Romaâ and the centre of town as the âcombishtatoâ, bastardizations of the âpiccolo Romaâ Italy recreated on the Hamasien plateau and the campo cintato (âenclosed areaâ), ruled off-limits for Eritreans outside working hours âfor reasons of public order and hygieneâ. Eritrean merchants with premises on prime shopping streets were forced to surrender their leases to Italian entrepreneurs. Consigned to the public gallery at the cinema, Eritreans were barred from restaurants, bars and hotels and made to form separate queues at post offices and banks. Africans actually preferred to keep their distance, claimed the Italian Ministry for African Affairs in justification.³³ Once, Eritreans and their white compatriots had greeted each other as âarkuâ (âfriendâ). In future, Fascism decreed, Italians would address Eritreans with the peremptory âattaâ and âattiâ (âyouâ), while the Eritrean was expected to use the respectful âgoitanaâ (âmasterâ) towards his white superior.

The new legislation enshrined the principle of separate education Martini had first embraced. And no matter how talented or well-heeled, an Eritrean could not stay longer than four years at his all-black school. Italy needed obedient translators, respectful artisans and disciplined ascaris, not trouble-making intellectuals. âThe Eritrean student should be able to speak our language moderately well; he should know the four arithmetical operations within normal limits; he should be a convinced propagandist of the principles of hygiene, and of history, he should know only the names of those who have made Italy great,â announced the colonyâs Director of Education.³⁴ The subject of Italyâs Risorgimento was dropped entirely from the syllabus, for fear it might spark inappropriate ideas.

If the Fascist administrators disliked the notion of uppity natives, the prospect of an expanding âbreed of hybridsâ positively appalled.³⁵ Young Italian soldiers, whose tendency to acquire female camp followers was noticed by reporters covering the conflict, marched into Abyssinia singing the popular hit âFacetta Neraâ (âLittle Black Faceâ), in which a black Abyssinian beauty is saved from slavery, taken to Rome by her lover and dressed in Fascismâs black shirt. A year later, the authorities were attempting to suppress the song as Italian newspapers warned that the Fascist Empire was in danger of becoming an âempire of mulattosâ.³⁶ The new laws betrayed a vindictive determination to wipe out any vestige of affection, loyalty and love between the races. âConjugal relationsâ between Italians and colonial subjects were prohibited, marriages declared null and void. Italians who visited places reserved for ânativesâ were liable to imprisonment and it was ruled that an Italian parent could neither recognize, adopt or give his surname to a meticcio. With a stroke of the pen, Rome turned a generation of mixed-race Eritreans into bastards. âFiglio di Nâ was the mocking playground cry that greeted the mixed-race child, officially stripped of inheritance, citizenship and name: âson of Xâ.

Long before racial segregation was adopted as an official credo in South Africa, Eritrea had already tasted the delights of apartheid. In its day, it was the most racist regime in Africa. Eritreans no longer regarded their Italian administrators as âgood but stupidâ. Every Eritrean who lived through that era nurses in his memory a moment of humiliation he can today shake his head over with the bitter satisfaction that comes from knowing history has had the last laugh, a deep guffaw that comes from the belly. âWhen a white man walked along the street, you always followed a couple of steps behind, never alongside,â an old railwayman told me. âThe white man always walked alone.â âYou could be dying of thirst, but the cafÃ©s in the town centre would still refuse to serve you so much as a glass of water,â said another. A pastor remembered how, as a boy, he once made the mistake of crossing the road in front of an Italian policeman on a motorbike. âHe was quite a long way off, but as far as he was concerned I should have waited for him to pass. He caught up with me and slapped me round the face.â The pastor recalled an old Italian lawyer expostulating at his failure to step into the gutter as he passed. âHe said âHey, canât you see that a white man is coming?â,â he chuckled. âIt was his way of saying âGet off the pavementâ.â

For Italy, the conquest of Abyssinia and racial subjugation of Eritrea would prove Pyrrhic victories. Resistance by Haile Selassieâs followers meant much of the Abyssinian countryside remained unsafe, and the number of settlers never rose above the disappointing. The extravagantly-funded war plunged Rome into debt and while other European powers milked fortunes from their territories abroad, Italy, embarrassingly, never managed to make colonialism work for her financially. Pouring investment into both Eritrea and Ethiopia, her empire cost her more than she gained and the government was juggling ballooning budget deficits when the Second World War began. Thanks to the predictably easy victory in Abyssinia, Italians would enter that campaign with a dangerously unrealistic belief in their military might, a confidence which shattered at huge national cost. And while the European powers agreed temporarily to turn a blind eye to Mussoliniâs bullying, the Abyssinian campaign also marked the moment when Il Duceâs eventual destiny as Hitlerâs patsy began to take shape. Having thoroughly alienated the liberal democracies with his behaviour towards Abyssinia, Mussoliniâs natural place, increasingly, would seem alongside the Nazi leader.

The warâs most dramatic long-term outcome was to effectively kill off Italian colonialism. Crude and invasive, often loathed by Italian settlers whose presence in Eritrea predated Fascism, the racial legislation made daily life so ghastly for Eritreans that when history finally granted Italyâs African subjects an opportunity to decide their fate, they would turn and spit in the face of their former masters.

Looking back, many Eritrean intellectuals view the 1930s as the period in which the characteristics now regarded as quintessentially Eritrean began to take recognizable form. Every country which experiences colonialism is defined by how it digests humiliation. In many African states, the experience corroded a communityâs sense of self-worth, dripping through the generations like acid. But in Eritreaâs disciplined, tightknit communities, sure in the knowledge of their ancient traditions and religious faith, subjugation ate into the soul in a different way. In the kebessa, families had always prided themselves on settling their disputes without recourse to outsiders. Nothing was considered more undignified than being seen to lose control, to let go. The brutality of the racial laws was met with tight-lipped self-restraint. Turning inwards, the Eritreans bottled up their emotions and waited to see what the future would bring. âWhatever sun rises in the morning is our sun, and whichever king sits on the throne is our king,â runs a Tigrinya proverb which summarizes the bittersweet philosophy of a people accustomed to having things done to them. Since there was no point standing up to a mightier adversary, silence seemed the only way of salvaging self-respect. âYou knew what the consequences would be if you openly revolted, so you were advised to bide your time, to be patient. That was the advice my father always gave me when I was growing up: âjust be patientâ,â says Dawit Mesfin, an Eritrean intellectual living in London.³⁷ He calls this preternatural calm, the apparent passivity cultivated in that era, âquietismâ. Like all superficial passivity, it was a lid on a pressure cooker, clamped over a storm of hurt pride and a longing for retribution.

CHAPTER 4 This Horrible Escarpment

âIt was contrary to every book that had ever been written, but it came off.â

Lieutenant-General Sir William Platt

If you drive two hours north-west of Asmara, on what was once Mussoliniâs Imperial Way, you eventually reach the town of Keren. The road takes you through eucalyptus groves, whose leaves, in the early morning, give off a heady medicinal perfume, before crossing a plateau of almost unimaginable bleakness. When it came to power in 1993, Eritreaâs new government launched an ambitious reforestation campaign and brave green saplings, their bark protected from nibbling goats by little iron wigwams, have been planted at neatly-spaced intervals along the way. But it will be decades before their handkerchiefs of shade make any impression on this glaring, denuded landscape. Much of the Hamasien highlands looks as though it was scooped up at a quarry and deposited from the tailend of a dumper-truck. With so little standing in its path, the wind is free to harry the cappuccino-coloured dust, so soft it could have been poured from a ladyâs powder compact, so fine a trailing fingertip registers no contact at all. Donkeys stand motionless in the middle of the road, as though stunned into imbecility by the heat and sheer unfairness of being expected to graze off an expanse of rubble.

Keren itself is a bustling crossroads of a town, a natural meeting point for Eritreaâs various tribes. White-robed nomads bring their animals to the weekly livestock market, a moaning, bleating, piebald medley of camels, sheep and goats. City dwellers make weekend jaunts to a Holy Shrine hidden in the womb of an ancient baobab and stroll along the colonnaded street where silversmiths crouch over bracelets and rings. But Keren only makes historical sense if you keep going, through the centre and out the other side. On the edge of town, by the side of the road that points towards the border with Sudan, lies a British cemetery from the Second World War. Jump over the low wall â visitors here are too occasional for anyone to man the gates permanently â and you can pace the rows of neat white British graves, each with its own crinkly bush of red geranium. The birthday-card triteness of the mottoes carved into the stones betrays a terrible anguish for young lives abruptly ended. âHe gave his life, forget him never, for in giving he lives for ever,â plead the relatives of 22-year-old W Hollings, who served with the West Yorkshire Regiment. âWith many sad regrets, we shall remember when the rest of the world forgets,â promises the family of PFC Mapes, 26. âIn memoryâs garden, we meet every day,â is the only consolation the mother of AV Simmons, just 18 when his life came to a sudden stop, can offer herself.

Further on, by the wayside, a grieving Madonna inclines her head in an expression of infinite tenderness. Her location is not accidental. A moment later, the road plunges, weaving and winding its tortured way through a ragged gash in the mountains which the British, mangling the local name, dubbed Dongolaas Gorge. Cliffs of bulbous brown rock crowd in on all sides, blocking out the sun, while the sheer slopes below are scattered with the rusting debris of vehicles that missed the curves. There is something oppressive about this pass, and it is a relief to emerge finally in the valley, a scrubby floodplain so dry it seems impossible water should ever run across these yellow sands. It is only when you hit the bottom and look back to where you came, that Kerenâs geography suddenly becomes clear. Between you and the town a knobbly range of barren peaks now stretches, a giant amphitheatre coddling Keren in its lap. With Dongolaas Gorge offering the only easy access route across this rock wall, Keren is one of the most formidable fortresses ever thrown up by nature.

This was the sight that met a force of around 30,000 British troops as it chased Italyâs retreating army from Kassala, on the Sudanese border, east across Eritrea. It was February 2, 1941 and the first dents were being knocked into what had until then seemed like an unstoppable Nazi and Fascist war machine. In the preceding two years, Hitler had swallowed up Czechoslovakia and Poland, invaded Norway and Denmark, toppled the French government and forced the humiliating evacuation of British forces from continental Europe. Hanging on to the German dictatorâs coat-tails, Mussolini had invaded Albania and Greece and used his colonies in north and east Africa to attack Egypt and eject the British from Somaliland. Afraid of losing control of the vital supply route through the Suez Canal to the Indian Ocean, Britain was hitting back. It had trounced Italian forces in Libyan Cyrenaica and was now sending three separate forces â one bearing with it the deposed Haile Selassie â in a vast pincer movement aimed at squeezing the life out of the marooned Italian administration in the Horn. Before the Red Sea could be made safe for Allied shipping, both Asmara and Massawa had to be captured. But between the advancing British forces and their target lay Keren.

No one remembers the battle of Keren now, except the men who fought there. Perhaps that is only to be expected. The Normandy landings were staged on beaches within reach of modern European holidaymakers, the Blitz left permanent scars on the map of London, every time Berliners gaze at their cityâs skyline, they are reminded of the devastation of Allied bombing. Keren took place in a country whose name was unfamiliar even to the soldiers dispatched there to fight, in a part of the world so alien as to be virtually unimaginable to those back home, against an enemy regarded as a joke. El Alamein and Tobruk were to be the African campaigns of the Second World War remembered by British audiences, not Keren. Even Eritreans, who live amongst memorials and cemeteries spawned by the battle, are distinctly fuzzy about the details, too obsessed with their own still raw military history to show much interest in an episode logged in the general category of âneo-colonialist adventuresâ.

Yet it was a linchpin episode, on which turned a long sequence of events stretching to eventual Allied victory. The BBCâs decision to send its star reporter Richard Dimbleby to cover the battle shows it recognized that fact. But as far as the BBC was concerned, Dimbleby was covering an early bout in a mighty strategic contest, not a liberation campaign. Not for the first time, Eritrea would play unwitting host to a battle in which its citizens would be slaughtered, yet their own aspirations remained almost immaterial, of interest purely for their passing propaganda potential. The battle of Keren might have been fought on Eritrean soil, but it was plotted, planned and ultimately capitalized on in the capitals of Axis and Allied powers.

It was to prove a grinding, infinitely testing campaign in which victory against the Italians, viewed until then with amused condescension, never looked assured. âIt was a dingdong battle, a soldiersâ battle, fought against an enemy infinitely superior in numbers, on ground of his own choosing,â General William Platt, head of the armed forces in Sudan and mastermind behind the Eritrean campaign, later said. âWe got down very nearly to bedrock, very nearly.â¹ Those who took part and went on to fight in the deserts of North Africa, the streets of European cities and the jungles of Burma were to recall the fighting at Keren as the most dreadful they ever experienced. âPhysically, by World War Two standards, it was sheer hell,â remembered Major John Searight, of the Royal Fusiliers, in a letter written after the war. âNOTHING I met in nine months as a company commander in NW Europe compared with it.â²

It is interesting to log the process by which the mind gives form and shape to landscape. Colonial explorers in Africa had a knack for it, baptizing waterfalls and lakes whose existence had been known to locals for centuries after childhood sweethearts and royal patrons. When the British forces arrived on the Keren floodplain they looked at the scenery with the outsiderâs lazy eye. The soldiers, recruited not only from Britain but from India, Sudan and Palestine â these were the days of the British empire, after all â saw a craggy range of mountains, rising to 7,000 ft, pierced by an occasional curious nipple of rock. Foothills formed rucks in a ribbon of brown land that stretched across the horizon. From a distance, what little vegetation there was â sprays of candelabra cactus, stunted thorn bushes here and there â resembled a light dusting of pepper sprinkled by a giant hand. To the far east crouched a curious promontory resembling a squatting cat, to the far west rose a peak like a ripped-out molar.

Fear changes oneâs perspective, lending what was of purely abstract interest a sudden urgent relevance. By the time the men had moved on, 53 days later, every inch of the terrain had acquired a dreadful, unwanted intimacy, more familiar to them than the soft folds of their Yorkshire valleys or the alleyways

of their villages in the Punjab. Peaks and hillocks had been captured and lost, recaptured only to be surrendered again, as the front line juddered forwards and backwards. Each feature of the land had acquired its own distinct, tantalizing identity in the bloody baptisms that tracked the battleâs progress. Hellfire Corner, they called the point at which British troops were forced out of the shelter of the hills, exposing themselves to withering enemy fire. Above the horribly exposed plain, dubbed âHappy Valleyâ with the squaddieâs traditional irony, towered razor-sharp Mount Sanchil. The highest peak, it ran north-west, stretching into Brigâs Peak â christened after the 11th Brigade sent to conquer it â Hogâs Back and Mole Hill. At Sanchilâs base, overlooking the mouth of Dongolaas Gorge, reared the bluff that would be named Cameron Ridge, after the Cameron Highlanders who managed to scrape a vital first position there. Across the pass, above the foothills called the Pimple and the Pinnacle, rose Fort Dologorodoc, a cluster of trenches and cement parapets enjoying panoramic views. The cat-like formation became, with a certain inevitability, the Sphinx.

The Italians had never meant to make a stand at Keren. General Luigi Frusci, governor of Eritrea, had originally planned to dig in further up the road to Asmara. Since pulling out of Kassala in January, the Italians had been consistently on the defensive, holding up the British advance when the terrain gave them the upper hand, but always pulling out before losses rose. The British soldiers had almost been caught off-guard by an ambush at a place called Keru, where an Italian officer on a white horse had led a troop of Eritrean horsemen in a wild gallop straight into the mouths of the British guns.³ Taken by surprise by what must have been one of the last cavalry charges of the 20th century, British troops had recovered just in time, tipping their cannon so that they pointed into the ground in front of the horsesâ hooves. âIt was suicide, really, but it was gallantry one wouldnât expect of the Italians. They were totally destroyed,â remembered Colin Kerr, an intelligence officer with the Cameron Highlanders.⁴

As his troops withdrew ever further up the Imperial Way, Frusci belatedly realized the huge advantages Keren offered and ordered his men to stop and turn. There would have been no subsequent battle, had the British forces succeeded in keeping up their momentum. But the Italians had blown up a bridge behind them; and mined the river bed. By the time the obstacle had been cleared and the British convoy trundled into Happy Valley, the dull thud of explosions was audible ahead. General Orlando Lorenzini, the âLion of the Saharaâ to his men, was dynamiting the walls of Dongolaas Gorge, triggering a massive rock fall that closed off the pass. If Keren could be compared to a medieval fortress, the Italians had just rushed across the moat and pulled up the drawbridge.

Hoping to catch the Italians while they were still out of breath, British commanders ordered an immediate assault on Mount Sanchil. The Cameron Highlanders and Punjab Regiment stormed the slopes, capturing Cameron Ridge and Brigâs Peak, only to be forced off the latter by an Italian counterblast. âI saw a certain amount of the war after that, in various places, but the first 24 hours of Keren were about as unpleasant as any I saw anywhere,â recalled Kerr. âIt was incessant shelling and we were unable to reply to it because we were under observation.â The first attack ground to a halt as a sober understanding of the enormity of the task ahead dawned. The Italians, whose ranks were being swelled by reinforcements from the rear, were now dug in. They had set up machine guns and heavy mortars on all the loftiest points in the mountain range and designated them âlast man, last roundâ positions. There was to be no surrender, only death.

In contrast with what many civilians assume, military action does not always require extraordinary degrees of personal courage. Usually, the landscape offers so many possibilities for ambushes and outflanking movements, careful advance and sensible retreat, that a soldier can convince himself he stands a fair chance of surviving. Not so in Eritrea, where the campaign would essentially be fought along one road. On that road, Keren represented the head-on confrontation that brings with it the oppressive awareness of likely death. âIt was the first set-piece battle Iâd been near. The others were skirmishes where one could dodge out of the way. Here there was no avoiding it,â said one former artilleryman.⁵ Reconnaissance revealed that there was going to be no way of sidestepping this particular showdown: the mountain range stretched for 150 miles. âIt was a question,â recalled Platt, âof fighting this horrible escarpment somewhere or coming somewhat back. We could not live continuously under the escarpment.â⁶

When, in 2002, a British general took command of a UN peacekeeping force posted to Eritrea, he decided to use the battle of Keren as a training exercise for his under-employed troops. His aide-de-camp was ordered to dig out the 60-year-old military records, and groups of blue-capped UN officers were taken on tours of the battlefield to discuss how, facing the same logistical challenge but equipped with todayâs equipment, they would plan their attack.

I joined one of the tours, tagging along as the peacekeepers scrambled part way up Cameron Ridge to survey the terrain. None of us was carrying heavy loads, but we were soon stumbling and staggering, rasping for breath. The sand churned beneath our feet, making it hard to get a grip, rocks used for leverage had a nasty habit of rolling back onto you. It was only 10.00 in the morning, but it was already 41Â° C. The water in our plastic bottles had turned bathwater warm. Within a few minutes, I realized, to my embarrassment, that I was on the brink of fainting. Dots were dancing before my eyes. I couldnât seem to get enough oxygen into my lungs. The men in the group, I noticed with relief, looked no better: their faces had flushed an unbecoming gammon-pink.

âLook around you,â trumpeted the boisterous British general. âNo shelter anywhere from the sniper fire. Just imagine what it must have been like.â Our faces coated in a shiny slick of sweat, we gazed from the bare brown boulders on which the British had once crouched up to the unforgiving heights of Sanchil, where the Italians had sat waiting with their machine guns. âHorrid terrain to fight in,â muttered the general. âHorrid.â

Few of the soldiers mustering in Happy Valley had any real idea of the ordeal awaiting them. Their advance across Eritrea had gone swimmingly up until that point, with victory tumbling upon victory and few casualties suffered on the way. âWe were very confident. Morale was grand,â recalled Patrick Winchester, an artillery officer with the 4th Indian Division, just 21 at the time. âWeâd been up in the Western Desert, which was the first good thing to happen in the war. We thought âWeâll go and sort them out over there.ââ⁷

Such optimism was compounded by the low regard in which the Italians were held as fighting men. The sight of thousands of Italian prisoners-of-war straggling along in dejected columns had registered on the British troops gathering in Happy Valley. Your average Itie, it was felt, was essentially a fun-loving, happy-go-lucky sort, who packed up fairly easily, showing nothing approaching the steely focus of the German. Italian equipment was lightweight and insubstantial because, in his rush to arm a ballooning military, Mussolini had cut corners and gone for the cheapest options. Often it lay unused at the depot, because the munitions from Rome did not match up with hardware on the battlefield. If the Italians nominally boasted 250,000 men in eastern Africa, Eritrean and Ethiopian ascaris accounted for 75 per cent of these forces, and their loyalty to their masters â who were only paying their wages spasmodically â was shaky. What was more, the Italians, cut off in the Horn, would inevitably face tremendous problems of resupply once they came under pressure. In trying to protect an African empire stretching across 1 million square miles, Italian forces were dangerously over-extended.

What the British troops initially failed to appreciate, however, was that those facing them were no ordinary Italian troops. The regiments and battalions sent to fight in Keren â the Savoia Grenadiers, the Bersaglieri and the Alpini â were the best Italy could muster. The moment they crossed the border with Sudan and stepped onto Eritrean soil, these men were fighting on what they considered home turf, defending Italyâs oldest colony from a foreign invader. In the case of the Alpini, they had grown up in a northern version of the mountainous terrain now confronting them. âWhat are those goats running up there for?â a British colonel asked one of his officers on arrival in Happy Valley, spotting movement on the heights. âThose are not goats, sir,â was the ominous reply. âThey are Alpini.â⁸

The Italians had the confidence that comes with knowing you enjoy a nearly impregnable position. They held the high ground. The slopes were so rocky that the British could never dig trenches, sheltering instead behind sangars, piles of rocks that provided little protection against a direct hit. What was more, however cheap Italian hardware might be, British equipment â much of which dated back to the First World War â was ill-suited to Keren. The lumbering 25-pound guns were too cumbersome to be taken up the slopes and their long, low trajectories were most effective on flat terrain. Used in mountains, the shells either screamed harmlessly over the heads of Italians crouched on the far sides of the ridges or clipped the tops of the crests on which British troops moved, subjecting soldiers to terrifying âfriendlyâ fire. âTo be shot up the back passage by your own guns when your rickety breast work is designed to give you protection from the front creates a paralysing terror,â remarked Peter Cochrane, who served with the Cameron Highlanders.⁹ In contrast, the nimble Italians had pack guns that could be moved about on the backs of mules, small red grenades which were simply dropped onto advancing troops and mortars which lobbed their missiles high in the air and neatly onto British positions.

The terrain in itself was challenge enough, but there was also the climate to contend with. On the plains, temperatures rose so high that convoys would sometimes grind to a halt within minutes of departure; radiators boiling, fit young soldiers keeling over with sunstroke. Today, the UN issues its forces in Eritrea with four and a half litres of drinking water a day. The soldiers at Keren were expected to march, run and fight on a pint a day, dysentery or no dysentery. No one wanted to waste a precious drop on washing, so teeth grew black, faces so caked with dirt soldiers often struggled to recognize one another. Rations were monotonous: dried biscuits and bully beef served in metal tins which became too hot to hold and whose instruction labels â âchill before servingâ â were a source of bleak amusement. In other campaigns, British forces supplemented their diet with fruits and vegetables collected on the way. Here, with the exception of the occasional guinea fowl, the landscape had almost nothing to offer. The result was a low-vitamin diet that undermined the bodyâs immune system. Scratch your arm on a thorn tree and within a few days it would go septic. Then the âdesert soreâ would spread until much of the limb was a suppurating mass of pus requiring hospital treatment. The baggy shorts and kilts worn by the troops were a menace, the soldiers soon concluded: in daytime they failed to protect the legs from sun and scratches, at night the men shuddered with cold on the hillsides.

This was not to be a sophisticated campaign. With mechanized transport ruled out by the gradient, fighting often took on an almost medieval directness. When the big guns fell silent, the battle of Keren was reduced to a low-tech war in which the readiness to emerge from cover, stagger up a mountain slope and simply bludgeon a way through mattered far more than weaponry. When Italian positions were overrun, it was a question of hand-to-hand fighting, with few prisoners taken and killing done by bayonet. At one stage, an Indian brigade actually made itself shields of corrugated iron. Held over the head in true storming-the-ramparts tradition, they proved surprisingly effective in warding off the pepperpot grenades raining down from above.

Three days after the first assault on Sanchil and Brigâs Peak had failed, leaving only Cameron Ridge in British hands, Platt ordered an outflanking attempt to be made at Acqua Col, the mountain pass over which the Sphinx held watch. But commanders had only a vague grasp of how the land lay and the Rajputana Rifles were obliged to grope their way forward in the dark. The Italians, enjoying sweeping views, realized what the British were attempting well ahead of time and prepared a devastating response. After four days of fighting, both sides pulled back, exhausted.

Platt was coming under enormous pressure to wrap the Keren campaign up. In London, Winston Churchill was desperate to move British forces back to the Western Desert, to combat the growing menace posed by Rommelâs Afrika Korps. The rains were due to start in a few weeksâ time â another good reason to get Keren over with. But the first two attempts had shown the town could neither be taken by surprise nor from the side. Frontal assault, the great taboo of military strategists, was going to be the only way in. British forces would have to take the mountain range the hard way: feature by individual feature. It was not a task, Platt knew, to be undertaken without a great deal of logistical preparation.

The next month was spent in a frantic whirr of activity as the British stockpiled ammunition, fuel, rations and water. Martiniâs old Italian railway was extended, every available wagon, truck and mule and camel press-ganged into service as the British set up a supply chain that stretched from Port Sudan, via Kassala, all the way to Happy Valley. The troops would not attempt another push, Platt decided, until he had enough supplies to last two divisions for 14 days of sustained assault.

While the stockpiling continued, soldiers up on Cameron Ridge gritted their teeth and hung on to their precious bluff of captured land. They had never experienced conditions like this before. Italian fire was killing or wounding between 25 and 30 men on the ridge every day. Adopting a technique that would later become a way of life for the Eritrean guerrilla movement, the British forces learnt it was wisest to move at night, covering the ground in scampering crawls. Wounded soldiers would lie stifling their groans during daylight, waiting for the darkness that made evacuation possible. It took 12 men to carry one man down the mountain. There was no way of safely burying the dead, so bodies lay where they had fallen or were pushed into nearby ravines, where they blew up in the heat, attracting dark clouds of flies. Rotten odours seem to travel further in dry heat, there was no avoiding the smell. Digging latrines was out of the question, so the stench of human excrement was soon added to the sweet stink of rotting flesh. The men smoked hard to drown out the nauseous odour and when the tobacco ran out, they smoked tea leaves. At night they could hear jackals tearing at the corpses of their former friends, a sound to turn the stomach. In daytime, another local species made its unwelcome appearance. âThereâd be a scrambling around and a rush of stones. Everyone would get in a state of tension and think this was the start of an attack, only to see the coloured behind of a baboon passing on the skyline,â said Kerr.¹⁰

Keeping the Cameron Highlanders up on the ridge supplied with water presented Platt with a major operational challenge in itself. A train of mules had been brought in from Cyprus, but even these surefooted animals regularly lost their footing, their bodies bouncing down the slopes. In any case, there were never enough mules for the task, so the troops were enrolled as pack animals, carrying water and bullets to those on the front line.

But the Italians were also suffering. Normally, attacking forces sustain the lionâs share of injuries. At Keren, however, the hard rock surface was responsible for hundreds of deaths by indirect fire, as each landing shell sent shards of shattered stone flying in all directions. âMy troops are exhausted both physically and morally,â General Nicola Carnimeo, who repeatedly demanded reinforcements, warned Frusci. âWe have had very heavy casualties and the length of the perimeter is such that the defence will necessarily be thin on the ground. If the British concentrate a sufficiently strong force, they may well smash a gap in the ring.â¹¹ Italian forces had also been thinned by desertions. The RAF had been dropping leaflets over enemy lines announcing that Emperor Haile Selassie was returning to his rightful throne in Ethiopia and calling upon the ascaris to rise up against their Italian masters. Whether the propaganda had any effect or the British bombardment was simply too ghastly to endure, hundreds of Eritrean and Ethiopian recruits were defecting.

In mid-March, Platt decided he was ready and summoned his officers. âDo not let anybody think this is going to be a walkover,â he told them. âIt is not. It is going to be a bloody battle, a bloody battle against both enemy and ground. It will be won by the side which lasts longest. I know you will last longer than they do. And I promise you I will last longer than my opposite number.â¹² As far as Platt was concerned, this represented the last throw of the dice, for he had run out of alternative schemes. âWhat will you do if it doesnât come off?â General Archibald Wavell, Commander-in-Chief of the Middle East, asked him in the days leading up to the attack. âIâm damned if I know, sir,â he replied. March the 15th was designated as the day of the assault, a week earlier than Platt would have liked, but headquarters were pushing. Platt quickly regretted his scheduling: the day dawned oppressively muggy. âI could not have chosen a worse date. Some of the efforts of the troops that day were defeated almost as much by the heat and heat exhaustion as by hostile opposition.â

As 96 British big guns opened fire and the Italians responded with a barrage of machine-gun fire and a hail of mortars, the 4th Indian Division launched a multi-pronged assault on Hogâs Back, Brigâs Peak and Sanchil, while the 5th Indian Division followed up with an attack on Fort Dologorodoc. This was the rationale behind the long weeks of stockpiling. Over the next 12 days, British artillery worked its way through a stockpile of 110,000 shells, representing, Platt later calculated, the equivalent of 1,000 lorry-loads of ammunition. Firing continually, the British were inflicting a highly effective form of psychological torture: sleep deprivation. âWeâd be given a list of pre-arranged targets and we would go through them in chronological order through the night, keeping them on their toes,â recalled Winchester.¹³ In that rocky terrain the shock waves bounced from cliff to cliff, numbing the brain and shattering the senses. Cochrane experienced the intolerable effect of this constant bombardment from the other side after being taken prisoner by the Italians. âBy the second night,â he recorded in his memoirs, âI would have given anything to get off the hill.â¹⁴

The West Yorkshires finally broke through on March 16, seizing first the Pimple, then the Pinnacle and finally Fort Dologorodoc. For the first time, the British could venture close enough to inspect the pile of rocks blocking Dongolaas Gorge. It proved to be nothing like as solid as feared â sappers estimated they could clear it in two days. Suddenly Keren no longer seemed quite so impregnable. âKeren is ours!â declared one British commander.

He was a trifle premature. Realizing that Dologorodoc represented a fatal breach, Carnimeo tried repeatedly to recapture the fort, sending wave upon wave of Savoia Grenadiers and native troops unsuccessfully against the position. As bodies piled up at the fort perimeter, Italian morale began to waver. It nearly buckled entirely when the popular Lorenzini, said by the ascaris to be immortal, was killed reconnoitring the ground for a seventh counterattack. Italian units were now down to two-thirds of their original strength. But British nerves were also starting to go. On the crests, young men who knew they were about to die penned farewell letters to their parents. Casualties were running so high that drivers, orderlies and mess sergeants were being mustered to form new companies thrown into the fray. âThere was a nasty moment when one or two people got so-called shell shock and we had to take a very firm line,â remembered Kerr. âIt started spreading, demoralization is very infectious. There are moments when you simply have to say âGo back where you came from and donât come running down here.â At heart we all wanted to turn away. It was only pride or shame or a sense of responsibility that kept you going.â¹⁵

In the early hours of March 25, the British played their final card. Two brigades attacked on either side of Dongolaas Gorge, one unit working its way silently along what proved to be a poorly-barricaded railway tunnel high on the ridge, the other moving up from Fort Dologorodoc. By the morning of March 27, a last desperate Italian counterattack had been repulsed and sappers had cleared the pass. The guns fell silent as white flags shot up from Italian soldiers on the peaks. With his units in tatters, Frusci had ordered a withdrawal, congratulating his soldiers for their heroism in a florid declaration. âOur many dead, who include one general and five senior officers, remain in Keren as armed guards and a warning to the enemy. We have left Keren only temporarily,â he promised, unconvincingly. âWe will soon return there and the sacred flag of our country will once again flutter in the light of our future glory.â¹⁶

If Platt had fulfilled his pledge to last longer than his opposite number, it had only been by a hairâs breadth. The British had come within a whisper of calling off the assault. The general later confessed that in the last three days of the battle, his reserves had shrunk to just three tanks. âA company commander said to me when he heard that, âWas that quite sound sir?â No, it was contrary to every book that had ever been written, but it came off.â¹⁷

The battle of Keren was over and with it, Italyâs most spirited military performance of the Second World War. The official Italian tally was 3,120 dead â a total that characteristically omitted around 9,000 Eritrean and Ethiopian ascaris who had fallen alongside their European comrades.¹⁸ British forces, which had pulled off what was as much a quartermasterâs as a soldierâs victory, had lost between 4,000 and 5,000 men.¹⁹ Added together, both sides had probably sustained more than 50,000 casualties, averaging out at around 1,000 dead and wounded each day. âIt was incredibly tough, and it is a source of wonder how we ever succeeded,â an officer in the West Yorkshire Regiment later recalled. âIt will never, like some battlefields of the First World War, look small and insignificant, but will stand always, huge and rugged, the gateway to Eritrea.â²⁰

The feared escarpment had gone from insurmountable threat to just another geological feature. The Pimple, the Pinnacle and the Sphinx were no longer of any interest to the British soldiers who had crouched in the dust, trying to guess what hidden gullies and unexpected ridges â the dips and bumps that held the key to survival or destruction â lay ahead. As instructions were shouted, equipment packed and trucks and tanks jostled, nose to tail, for their place in the grey-green caterpillar working its way up Dongolaas Gorge, past the inevitable anti-climax that was Keren itself, the men were already forgetting a landscape they would never see again. For many, there was a dreamlike quality to the sudden telescopic shift in focus. âIt always surprised me, in any battle, how limited oneâs life was while the battle was going on,â remarked Kerr. âYou knew every stone for the next 50 yards. It always struck me as extraordinary how when a battle ended, like in Keren, how the next day the birds were there, peace reigned, the place was in a bit of a mess, suddenly there were trees and everyone walking about and standing up in daylight and one wondered at how different it was from yesterday, a different world entirely â what had we been doing all those weeks? At one moment somewhere is a battlefield and life is being lost right and left. And the next day, total peace and silence.â²¹ The convoy roared through Keren â âa pathetic little townâ, commented Richard Dimbleby, before putting it out of his mind forever â and ground on to Asmara.

Frusci was to stage a series of rearguard actions further up the Imperial Way, but his men had lost their stomach for the fight. The trouble with Maginot lines, as military strategists know, is the symbolic significance they come to acquire in the eyes of those who shelter behind them. When they collapse, so does the notion of further resistance. The Italians knew that they were not going to stumble on a better position than Keren, and Keren had gone. A few days later, Dimbleby, who had given his radio listeners a crisply eloquent account of the campaign, watched open-mouthed as a small touring car loaded with Italian officers and dignitaries, waving a large white flag, drove past him. They had come to negotiate a surrender. On April 1, Asmara was declared an open city, saving its elegant boulevards from the ravages of British artillery. Massawa fell a week later. After half a century of occupation, the Italians had lost their first-born colony, and with that defeat the surrender of Ethiopia to the south became a matter of time.

Mussoliniâs new Roman Empire was imploding, and Eritreaâs surrender freed up the troops Wavell desperately needed. They were allowed only the briefest of breathing spaces before being whipped away to fight Rommel. Had Keren not fallen when it did, British morale, bruised by Dunkirk and the Blitz, might never have recovered. Its conquest was a small but crucial part in turning the tide of the Second World War, from a position where a vast Nazi empire seemed a certainty to a point where Allied victory was for the first time conceivable.

Strikingly absent from this whole strategic picture â staggeringly absent, indeed, from all the vivid veteransâ memories and detailed military reports on Keren â is any mention of the people most immediately concerned by the events of 1941: the Eritreans themselves. The British soldiers who fought in Keren struggle to recall a single encounter with a local, an unsurprising lacuna, perhaps, given that until Asmara, Eritrean towns had either been bombed or marched through by the Allies, but never occupied or administered. Asked about the Eritrean countryside, one officer mused, âThere was no countryside, really,â as if he had been marching across a blank vista. What the invaders retained was the impression of a landscape bereft of people, stripped of vegetation, a moonscape so desolate it seemed the ideal setting for a war. As for the Italians, the words they ordered to be carved on the white gravestones erected over the tombs of every Eritrean and Ethiopian who fell at Keren say it all. âAscaro Ignotoâ â âUnknown Ascaroâ. The Italians didnât even know the names of the natives who died for them.

The post-independence Kenyan politician Tom Mboya used to recount how a white customer once poked her head into the office where he was sitting working, looked around, and said: âAh, nobody here,â as an example of how colonial assumptions about authority rendered blacks effectively invisible. There are echoes of the Tom Mboya experience for the Eritreans at this juncture in their history: to the outside world they seemed as insubstantial and transparent as the chill mountain air. Despite all the promises made in the leaflets sprinkled by the RAF, Britain had not invaded Eritrea to free the natives from colonial rule. It had fought the battle of Keren for strategic reasons that stretched far beyond Eritreaâs borders and bore no connection to local wishes, a matter of supreme indifference, at this stage, to London.

It is a view of the world reflected in the story that has passed into Eritrean history concerning Keren. In a way, it doesnât really matter whether the tale is apocryphal or not, because it says so much about the gathering cynicism of a people who had come to understand their country was no more than a proxy location for a war, this merely a dress rehearsal of the great fight between Fascism and Liberal Democracy that would be concluded elsewhere.

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