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queenluaOkay, look: the story here is, years ago, I had an awesome chat with a cab driver, and when he mentioned he was from Eritrea, I was pretty embarrassed that (1) I didn’t know how to pronounce it, and (2) I couldn’t point the place out on a map, and (3) okay, yeah, I’d never heard about the place before. So when I saw this book on some list of recommendations from an African history professor, I was like, hell yeah, let’s fix my ignorance a bit.
And wow, I can see why this book made the professor’s shortlist. It’s a fascinating account of a really admirable/plucky/independently-minded nation that has been through some shit. If you want interesting examinations of colonialism, postcolonialism, wild Cold War shenanigans, the art of supplying & arming long-term resistance movements, or really getting into the details of how and why e.g. a seemingly-trivial border conflict over some tiny town can spiral out of control—this book covers it all, with a richly-detailed cast of characters and a strong narrative sense that makes it all feel like a page-turner even when it’s relating dense geopolitics.
So yeah! I really enjoyed this read.
Some highlights from my reading of the book:
* Wow Fuck That Ferdinando Martini Guy.
The history of Italian colonization in Eritrea is fascinating (and devastating) because there was a moment when it really might have been reversed. Like, Italy was seriously thinking about pulling out of the colony altogether, and then they didn’t, because of specifically this guy. Fuck this guy.
Backing up a bit: Martini was an Italian aristocratic parliamentarian and writer, and throughout most of his lifetime, one of the most steadfast opponents of Italy’s colonization ventures. He argued that such a desperate land-grab was horribly hypocritical, given that Italy had relatively recently bucked off its own foreign rulers; he didn’t understand why Italy would invest in Eritrea’s infrastructure when they could be focusing on the poor in southern Italy; he roundly condemned military action in the colonies.
Mostly, his complaints fell on deaf ears—until a newspaper published, in 1891, a particularly disturbing account of massacres/atrocities in Massawa (Eritrea’s main port city), and that combined with other reports led to a massive public outcry.
The Italian government chose a team to go investigate, to see how bad things really were—and as a demonstration of good faith, the team placed Martini and some other well-known anti-colonialists on the commission. Italy was finding it difficult to farm the land in Eritrea, and Massawa wasn’t as profitable a port as they’d hoped, and they’d only been in Africa for a handful of years at that point—if the commission’s report had been sufficiently damning, they really might’ve rethought things.
But, uh, then Martini returned with a report insisting, “Hey, things are fine down there, not bad at all, it’s all good here!”
Er, what?
The author points out, based on other records we have from the era, that yeah, actually it was that bad. Martini was old and mostly retired from politics at this point; he didn’t have any obvious financial or status-based incentive to lie. And yet lie he did. Why?
Martini doesn’t give a particularly clear account of this about-face (and by all accounts the Italian government was pretty surprised/confused by Martini’s report). The only hint the author could find was in one of Martini’s latter memoirs, where he basically says, “well, colonization was a mistake, and we definitely shouldn’t have been there, but since we started it we have to finish what we started, yaknow.” He also ties the musing up with a vague comment about how “yeah this will inevitably lead to the destruction of African people as a whole, how sad.”
What.
Rarely do I read, in history, someone who was so outspoken about a cause, so convinced of the correct course of action, and then when they actually were given a chance to do something (with relatively little personal risk!), they just... backed off. Wow.
So yeah I guess there’s your bummer colonialism narrative of the day. On a lighter note:
* LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT THE KEBRA NAGAST
tl;dr, Indiana Jones lied to you; the Ark of the Covenant is actually at the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion in Axum, Ethiopia.
longer version:
So Ethiopia has its own national epic, and besides being super interesting, it explains why there’s probably at least one Ethiopian restaurant in your town named Queen of Sheba—
Okay, so the Kebra Nagast was written in the 1300s, when Ethiopia was ruled by the Axumite Empire. At the time of its writing, the Empire’s previous dynasty had been overturned by the new Emperor Yekuno Amlak, who claimed King Solomon of Israel as a distant ancestor. Similar to what Virgil’s Aeneid did for Rome, this story helped grant legitimacy to the new ruler, as well as a uniting, inspiring bit of legend.
In the story, the pagan Queen of Sheba is intrigued when she hears of King Solomon’s great wisdom, and travels to meet him. She converts to Judaism, has a bit of Dubious Consent sex with King Solomon, and then returns home to give birth to Menelik. Menelik eventually returns visit his Jerusalem, and while he’s showered in riches and offered the throne of Israel, he of course decides to return home to Ethiopia—and uh, then God gives him the Ark of the Covenant to take back to Ethiopia.
I... okay, I have a pet interest in national epics and similarly foundational myths; I took a class in college where we read a bunch of them; and so I found this whole thing just really fun/fascinating.
But okay, back to some darker stuff:
* Fuck the UN.
The author managed to track down John Spencer, the international lawyer responsible for representing Ethiopia’s interests at the UN Commission on Eritrea—and, thus, the man rather responsible for Ethiopia’s subsequent hostile annexation of Eritrea.
See, post-WWII, Ethiopia claimed that Eritrea had always been part of Ethiopia, that restoring Eritrea to Ethiopian rule would be the right thing to do, and so on. (Ethiopia had been stirring up a remarkable PR campaign targeting the western powers for years and years prior; Ethioipan king Haile Selassie was a US ally at this point; and also, Ethiopia really wanted access to a coastline.)
Eritrea wanted to remain independent, and so, the issue got kicked to the UN—and there, Spencer did his damndest to make Eritrea part of Ethiopia. Barring that, he did the damndest to make any separation the UN assured as toothless as possible, via whatever COINTELPRO shit he could come up with.
Ultimately, this ended in Eritrea becoming “an autonomous unit federated within Ethiopia under the sovereignty of the Ethiopian Crown”, and Spencer fought tooth-and-nail to make that “autonomy” as false as possible. While the head of the UN commission, a Bolivian man named Eduardo Matienzo, clearly suspected Spencer’s intentions, he was a bit preoccupied at the time—Bolivia had a revolution while he was hanging out at the UN, and he wound up having to flee into exile in Argentia, whups.
Thus, the federation was put into place—and while Matienzo had slipped a line into the final resolution that the autonomous unit could only be dissolved via a direct UN ruling on the matter, well... sometimes promises are only as good as the paper they’re written on. Ethiopia spent the next decade clobbering Eritrea’s free press, moving Ethiopian officials into Eritrea’s government, and so on, until in 1962 some Ethiopian dudes with guns showed up at Eritrea’s legislature and said “hey, you’re voting to dissolve into Ethiopia, and no you don’t get a choice.”
For a bit the Eritrean public thought: well, this is a flagrant violation of UN Resolution 390. Surely the UN will do something about it.
The answer, of course, was silence. The author of this book went to the UN to try and find anything about the UN’s thinking during this time—she thought, well, there was no public response, but surely they must have had some internal communications where they debated what to do? And if there were any such records, they’ve since been lost to time—the librarians who searched said that the relevant boxes had somehow gotten lost during the upgrade to a new filing system.
Ouch.
So yeah, after a bit, Eritrea noticed no help was coming, and they decided to take matters into their own hands, thus beginning a three decade long war.
* BADASS WARRIOR CAVE FORTRESS???
The whole section covering that war is fascinating—the Eritreans were hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned, but they had the advantage of terrain—so they pretty much hunkered down in the mountains, built these massive underground living complexes to hide from Ethiopian bombing runs, and just, like, guerilla war’d / held out there until they finally won their independence in 1991. Read the book to find out more about, like, everything that entailed—she interviews their head chef, interviews a dude responsible for an amazing heist that stole a ton of supplies from Ethiopia, goes into detail on life in the Barracks and their Marxist reading group and their international speaker series (!!!)—it is a whole THING.
* Cold War logic is special.
The US helped prop up Hailie Selassie post-WWII, which seemed both justified and useful at the time—Selassie had only be ousted by the Italians during their WWII campaign, and thus he was only being restored to what he’d had before; also, allyship with Ethiopia gave the US access to Eritrea’s major city, Asmara, which turns out to be at a very high elevation and, due to radio wave shenanigans, a very convenient spot for monitoring the global airwaves & other intelligence work. So the US and Ethiopia were allies.
But Selassie kept asking for more military funding (to bomb the shit out of Eritrea, and later on, rebels in northern Ethiopia), and while the US was willing to play ball for a while, eventually the US started getting a little concerned about the human rights story here, and also was tired of spending money, and also had developed other allies in the region, and started dragging their feet on providing more funding—
—until, shortly after a regime change, the new regime just kicked out the US out of Ethiopia, and got the Soviets to back them instead.
Up until this point, Ethiopia had been fighting a war against Soviet-backed Somalia. So the US decided to start funding Somalia, and briefly both the US and the Soviets were funding Somalia??? Until the Soviets pulled out, and then that same war continued, but the US and the Soviets had just completed swapped the horse they were betting on, for uh, no obvious tactical reason whatsoever?
Cold war logic. Special.
Other tidbits I couldn’t fit anywhere else
This book covers a ton, oh my gosh, so just some last tantalizing tidbits—
* The Italians went crazy-overboard on spending during the colonization era, so apparently the capital at Asmara has some of the finest examples of art deco architecture/art/etc in the world
* There’s a whole chapter on the American military dudes stationed at Asmara when it was a super secret Cold War spy base, damn, it was a whole thing. The military dudes behave pretty boorishly, as you might expect, but how the base worked/functioned/interacted with Asmara all made for amazing reading
* Ferdinando Martini, some ten years after joining that investigative team, became the governor of Eritrea, and I had to give a grim little laugh at his rationale for segregating schools in Eritrea:. he was convinced that Eritreans were smarter than the Italians, based on how quickly the Eritreans picked up new languages, and therefore you had to keep them segregated or it’d hurt the Italians’ feelings. (This sidebars into like—whenever I read passages from like, colonial governors and stuff? It’s always striking how familiar they were with the populace, how aware they are of their subjects’ humanity—it’s impossible to not notice, living and working with them so closely!—which kinda goes to show, while I feel like understanding and empathy are important for a lot of problems, on its own it’s often... not enough.)
* there’s a whole chapter about like, bicycle assassins??? and it’s fascinating, this whole book has so much, that’s what i’ve got for ya
And wow, I can see why this book made the professor’s shortlist. It’s a fascinating account of a really admirable/plucky/independently-minded nation that has been through some shit. If you want interesting examinations of colonialism, postcolonialism, wild Cold War shenanigans, the art of supplying & arming long-term resistance movements, or really getting into the details of how and why e.g. a seemingly-trivial border conflict over some tiny town can spiral out of control—this book covers it all, with a richly-detailed cast of characters and a strong narrative sense that makes it all feel like a page-turner even when it’s relating dense geopolitics.
So yeah! I really enjoyed this read.
Some highlights from my reading of the book:
* Wow Fuck That Ferdinando Martini Guy.
The history of Italian colonization in Eritrea is fascinating (and devastating) because there was a moment when it really might have been reversed. Like, Italy was seriously thinking about pulling out of the colony altogether, and then they didn’t, because of specifically this guy. Fuck this guy.
Backing up a bit: Martini was an Italian aristocratic parliamentarian and writer, and throughout most of his lifetime, one of the most steadfast opponents of Italy’s colonization ventures. He argued that such a desperate land-grab was horribly hypocritical, given that Italy had relatively recently bucked off its own foreign rulers; he didn’t understand why Italy would invest in Eritrea’s infrastructure when they could be focusing on the poor in southern Italy; he roundly condemned military action in the colonies.
Mostly, his complaints fell on deaf ears—until a newspaper published, in 1891, a particularly disturbing account of massacres/atrocities in Massawa (Eritrea’s main port city), and that combined with other reports led to a massive public outcry.
The Italian government chose a team to go investigate, to see how bad things really were—and as a demonstration of good faith, the team placed Martini and some other well-known anti-colonialists on the commission. Italy was finding it difficult to farm the land in Eritrea, and Massawa wasn’t as profitable a port as they’d hoped, and they’d only been in Africa for a handful of years at that point—if the commission’s report had been sufficiently damning, they really might’ve rethought things.
But, uh, then Martini returned with a report insisting, “Hey, things are fine down there, not bad at all, it’s all good here!”
Er, what?
The author points out, based on other records we have from the era, that yeah, actually it was that bad. Martini was old and mostly retired from politics at this point; he didn’t have any obvious financial or status-based incentive to lie. And yet lie he did. Why?
Martini doesn’t give a particularly clear account of this about-face (and by all accounts the Italian government was pretty surprised/confused by Martini’s report). The only hint the author could find was in one of Martini’s latter memoirs, where he basically says, “well, colonization was a mistake, and we definitely shouldn’t have been there, but since we started it we have to finish what we started, yaknow.” He also ties the musing up with a vague comment about how “yeah this will inevitably lead to the destruction of African people as a whole, how sad.”
What.
Rarely do I read, in history, someone who was so outspoken about a cause, so convinced of the correct course of action, and then when they actually were given a chance to do something (with relatively little personal risk!), they just... backed off. Wow.
So yeah I guess there’s your bummer colonialism narrative of the day. On a lighter note:
* LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT THE KEBRA NAGAST
tl;dr, Indiana Jones lied to you; the Ark of the Covenant is actually at the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion in Axum, Ethiopia.
longer version:
So Ethiopia has its own national epic, and besides being super interesting, it explains why there’s probably at least one Ethiopian restaurant in your town named Queen of Sheba—
Okay, so the Kebra Nagast was written in the 1300s, when Ethiopia was ruled by the Axumite Empire. At the time of its writing, the Empire’s previous dynasty had been overturned by the new Emperor Yekuno Amlak, who claimed King Solomon of Israel as a distant ancestor. Similar to what Virgil’s Aeneid did for Rome, this story helped grant legitimacy to the new ruler, as well as a uniting, inspiring bit of legend.
In the story, the pagan Queen of Sheba is intrigued when she hears of King Solomon’s great wisdom, and travels to meet him. She converts to Judaism, has a bit of Dubious Consent sex with King Solomon, and then returns home to give birth to Menelik. Menelik eventually returns visit his Jerusalem, and while he’s showered in riches and offered the throne of Israel, he of course decides to return home to Ethiopia—and uh, then God gives him the Ark of the Covenant to take back to Ethiopia.
I... okay, I have a pet interest in national epics and similarly foundational myths; I took a class in college where we read a bunch of them; and so I found this whole thing just really fun/fascinating.
But okay, back to some darker stuff:
* Fuck the UN.
The author managed to track down John Spencer, the international lawyer responsible for representing Ethiopia’s interests at the UN Commission on Eritrea—and, thus, the man rather responsible for Ethiopia’s subsequent hostile annexation of Eritrea.
See, post-WWII, Ethiopia claimed that Eritrea had always been part of Ethiopia, that restoring Eritrea to Ethiopian rule would be the right thing to do, and so on. (Ethiopia had been stirring up a remarkable PR campaign targeting the western powers for years and years prior; Ethioipan king Haile Selassie was a US ally at this point; and also, Ethiopia really wanted access to a coastline.)
Eritrea wanted to remain independent, and so, the issue got kicked to the UN—and there, Spencer did his damndest to make Eritrea part of Ethiopia. Barring that, he did the damndest to make any separation the UN assured as toothless as possible, via whatever COINTELPRO shit he could come up with.
Ultimately, this ended in Eritrea becoming “an autonomous unit federated within Ethiopia under the sovereignty of the Ethiopian Crown”, and Spencer fought tooth-and-nail to make that “autonomy” as false as possible. While the head of the UN commission, a Bolivian man named Eduardo Matienzo, clearly suspected Spencer’s intentions, he was a bit preoccupied at the time—Bolivia had a revolution while he was hanging out at the UN, and he wound up having to flee into exile in Argentia, whups.
Thus, the federation was put into place—and while Matienzo had slipped a line into the final resolution that the autonomous unit could only be dissolved via a direct UN ruling on the matter, well... sometimes promises are only as good as the paper they’re written on. Ethiopia spent the next decade clobbering Eritrea’s free press, moving Ethiopian officials into Eritrea’s government, and so on, until in 1962 some Ethiopian dudes with guns showed up at Eritrea’s legislature and said “hey, you’re voting to dissolve into Ethiopia, and no you don’t get a choice.”
For a bit the Eritrean public thought: well, this is a flagrant violation of UN Resolution 390. Surely the UN will do something about it.
The answer, of course, was silence. The author of this book went to the UN to try and find anything about the UN’s thinking during this time—she thought, well, there was no public response, but surely they must have had some internal communications where they debated what to do? And if there were any such records, they’ve since been lost to time—the librarians who searched said that the relevant boxes had somehow gotten lost during the upgrade to a new filing system.
Ouch.
So yeah, after a bit, Eritrea noticed no help was coming, and they decided to take matters into their own hands, thus beginning a three decade long war.
* BADASS WARRIOR CAVE FORTRESS???
The whole section covering that war is fascinating—the Eritreans were hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned, but they had the advantage of terrain—so they pretty much hunkered down in the mountains, built these massive underground living complexes to hide from Ethiopian bombing runs, and just, like, guerilla war’d / held out there until they finally won their independence in 1991. Read the book to find out more about, like, everything that entailed—she interviews their head chef, interviews a dude responsible for an amazing heist that stole a ton of supplies from Ethiopia, goes into detail on life in the Barracks and their Marxist reading group and their international speaker series (!!!)—it is a whole THING.
* Cold War logic is special.
The US helped prop up Hailie Selassie post-WWII, which seemed both justified and useful at the time—Selassie had only be ousted by the Italians during their WWII campaign, and thus he was only being restored to what he’d had before; also, allyship with Ethiopia gave the US access to Eritrea’s major city, Asmara, which turns out to be at a very high elevation and, due to radio wave shenanigans, a very convenient spot for monitoring the global airwaves & other intelligence work. So the US and Ethiopia were allies.
But Selassie kept asking for more military funding (to bomb the shit out of Eritrea, and later on, rebels in northern Ethiopia), and while the US was willing to play ball for a while, eventually the US started getting a little concerned about the human rights story here, and also was tired of spending money, and also had developed other allies in the region, and started dragging their feet on providing more funding—
—until, shortly after a regime change, the new regime just kicked out the US out of Ethiopia, and got the Soviets to back them instead.
Up until this point, Ethiopia had been fighting a war against Soviet-backed Somalia. So the US decided to start funding Somalia, and briefly both the US and the Soviets were funding Somalia??? Until the Soviets pulled out, and then that same war continued, but the US and the Soviets had just completed swapped the horse they were betting on, for uh, no obvious tactical reason whatsoever?
Cold war logic. Special.
Other tidbits I couldn’t fit anywhere else
This book covers a ton, oh my gosh, so just some last tantalizing tidbits—
* The Italians went crazy-overboard on spending during the colonization era, so apparently the capital at Asmara has some of the finest examples of art deco architecture/art/etc in the world
* There’s a whole chapter on the American military dudes stationed at Asmara when it was a super secret Cold War spy base, damn, it was a whole thing. The military dudes behave pretty boorishly, as you might expect, but how the base worked/functioned/interacted with Asmara all made for amazing reading
* Ferdinando Martini, some ten years after joining that investigative team, became the governor of Eritrea, and I had to give a grim little laugh at his rationale for segregating schools in Eritrea:. he was convinced that Eritreans were smarter than the Italians, based on how quickly the Eritreans picked up new languages, and therefore you had to keep them segregated or it’d hurt the Italians’ feelings. (This sidebars into like—whenever I read passages from like, colonial governors and stuff? It’s always striking how familiar they were with the populace, how aware they are of their subjects’ humanity—it’s impossible to not notice, living and working with them so closely!—which kinda goes to show, while I feel like understanding and empathy are important for a lot of problems, on its own it’s often... not enough.)
* there’s a whole chapter about like, bicycle assassins??? and it’s fascinating, this whole book has so much, that’s what i’ve got for ya
