An Eritrean Story: A Late Apology to a Spinster Sister

In American presidential election campaigns, the question “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” is very familiar. Presumably, after deliberating much on the question, the voters then decide whoever candidate or party better represent their hopes. There is nothing like this type of reminder in the Eritrean political scene. Come every year, some people both inside Eritrea (mostly coerced by the state) and abroad celebrate the March 8th International Women’s Day without bothering to ask whether women in Eritrea are better off now or fifty years ago, before the revolution/armed struggle and its program of women’s liberation.

What would be the opinion of people? We have no way of finding out for no poll has been made on the subject, nor has there been any significant writing. Among the few, who wrote incisively, Yosief Ghebrehiwet, will predictably say “before”, and this quote from one of his articles on the victimization of the Kebessa women leaves no doubt about it:

“If an evil genius was to give advice on how to render a certain people barren, and thus drive them towards extinction, he would put it oxymoronically: ‘Target the womb’. Of course, that means the women, the carriers of that womb. Once that is done, the society will sooner or later wither away and die. This is because, at times of wars and upheavals, women are the ones that keep the family intact; and, after the war, it is inside the home, in the bed of fertility and around the warm hearth, that the regeneration of the society takes place.”1

The one doing the bidding of the evil genius in the quote above is ghedli and the government that followed it in Eritrea. For the scenario above to occur in a country that had witnessed a “revolution”, and had particularly adopted a program for the “liberation” of women, is a tragedy of immense proportion. Or rather, was it predictable? After all, women in the former Soviet Union or China were not what many people expected them to be; they lacked many rights readily available in the West; they were more subjects than citizens with individual rights. Eritrea’s version wasn’t that different, if not immensely worse.

Undoubtedly, the past before the ghedli era in Eritrea was not certainly something to romanticize for. Women were, yes, oppressed and had little rights in the largely patriarchal society of the two dominant religions, that is, Islam and Christianity. Women were victims of female genital mutilation (still are to a lesser degree), rape and physical abuses, a state of affairs present in many traditional societies. These practices were not however challenges that a stable and reformist government can’t gradually address and solve. We have been lacking that in the region. And yet, the true nature of the oppression of women in contemporary Eritrea hasn’t been recognized.

In countries where “revolution” was not experienced, such as in the Democratic Republic of Congo, women are often victims of sexual violence in the hands of government soldiers and war lords who often condone its use as a weapon of war. The public in the West has been rightly horrified by this rampant violence. In Eritrea, however, women and girls have been victims of systematic rape and abuse for many years in the hands of the regime, which allegedly fought for the rights of the women.

The nature of this regime’s crime is not that different from what has been occurring in other forsaken places in Africa, but the regime has yet to face the reprimand and sanction it deserves; all because of the alleged reforms made in the name of women populace and the regime’s uncanny ability of concealing its crimes within the opaque Kebessa culture (as it shares the Wax and Gold ambiguous language with Ethiopia.)2 For a look at the magnitude of the violence on women, the boot camp for the Eritrean National Service is adequate.

Women and many teenagers in their thousands are forcibly recruited and separated from their families into the camp with little chance of surviving the demands of the tegadelti officers in the camp, and to a lesser extent the solicitations of their fellow male recruits. If they are lucky and made it across the border, they fall victims to the Bedouin, Sudanese and, yes, Eritrean human traffickers, who also exploit their bodies. In other words, they invariably land in Dante-like circles of inferno. According to some sources, inured to such abuses some of the women leave Eritrea nowadays with condoms in their possession lest they get pregnant from the male traffickers; a fact makes a mockery of the alleged emancipation of women in liberated Eritrea. Their lot hasn’t yet been told in its unembellished form, neither by their male compatriots nor by women. This piece will attempt to do a short examination.

Three types of women

The ghedli revolution was the victimizer of three prototypes of women. There were the few educated and urban fellows who joined the armed struggle in the 70s out of some poorly understood ideology. There were also some who found themselves among the guerrillas due to the many push factors of the Kebessa conservative society. But the large majority were mostly forcibly recruited during the later phases of the armed struggle, after the public was exhausted and showed a clandestine resistance. The increased presence of women combatants was the direct result of the male-deficit factor in the war theater. How did those girls and women who participated in the war fare? In the following part of the essay the woe of the women in Eritrea will be presented in a triptych style.

A war-bride

The women of Eritrea have suffered immensely during the last fifty years of making and maintaining the nation state of Eritrea, including the celebrated women fighters.  Ghedli’s only “merit” was making our women look sexless (looking like the boys with their afro hair-do and flat chests) and participate equally in the ethos of death and mutilation, resulting in the accolade “Amazonian Woman” (female warriors in Greek)3 given to them by gullible Western reporters who completely forgot to consider that, the estimated 35% of women fighters in the EPLF may have largely to do with the dearth of male fighters during the late 70s and 80s. Those few women who joined the ghedli voluntarily earlier do not represent the large majority of the women in military servitude in those years..

The policy of using women fighters, just like the child soldiers and the forced peasant recruits, was to substitute the large numbers of male fighters over the long duration of the ghedli’s existence. The fact that the regime callously disposed them, or decided to make money out of them by sending them to work as maids in Arab households in the Middle East (who have the notoriety of being habitual abusers) soon after independence, informs us of the true nature of the regime. Blaming the traditional society (which has been vanquished and made to prostrate by its rebel children) for the poor status of women after 1991 or on the replacement of “national liberation” by “national development” (capitalist)4 as Victoria Bernal wrote is erroneous, to say the least. Capitalism did not set its foot in Eritrea in any meaningful way under the “liberators.” The regime’s brief dallying with market economy for propaganda purposes did not sway it from keeping its long tested economy based on serfdom.

The use of women fighters in the EPLF organization has some resemblance with the experience of colonial empires. Severely lacking male whites to both wage war and maintain the lands occupied, they recruited on the cheap millions of the natives to do the dirty work.5 For example, when the First World War erupted, they also deployed them in the Western front as combatants and coolies. More specifically, Italy followed the same policy of exploiting the indigenous in its foolish adventures in the Horn and North Africa while practicing a blatant racist discrimination. With the same ferociousness but under the façade of the “woman’s question”, the Eritrean fronts, and particularly the EPLF, forcefully made tens of thousands of peasants, women and child soldiers for resurrecting Italy’s first colony. The violence did not end there, for ghedli not only banished thousands of our women for simply raising a family with Ethiopian soldiers and civilians, it also condemned many others to involuntary spinsterhood.

An expellee

In the same way as the lot of the teghdelti women depicted above, there were also those who, having waited for many years for their boys and husbands and despaired, married civilians and soldiers of the Ethiopian government, often defying the ostracism from their families and neighbors. Their womb, they rightly thought, could not be sacrificed for the revolution. They were to pay a heavy price for this desperate act, when they and their husbands and children were forcibly expelled from Eritrea together with the defeated army.

In contrast, nothing happened to the thousands of their mothers, who lived and had children from thousands of Italian soldiers a generation ago. The madamato phenomenon6, whose after effect left several thousands of mixed race parentage and was abhorred by the Fascists, did not bring punishment on the women from either the contemporary Eritrean society, leaders of autonomous Eritrea or Imperial Ethiopia. The resort to massive violence of the ghedli explains the predatory nature of the regime towards every sector of the society.

Practicing double standard, the organization left many male Eritreans who established families with Ethiopian women free, clearly showing the farce of the women’s emancipation, and the equality of sexes that it entails, that the Front had supposedly embraced.

The list of the victims does not end here. The women thrown out by the victorious had other sisters left behind. In fact, no one’s saga has been as badly neglected as the spinsters’, whom the male and some women fighters had left behind at home.

Imagine a canvass of a family gathered together in the typical small rooms in Asmera or other small towns soon after the independence of Eritrea. The family and the neighbors are serenading the surviving male fighters and the occasional guerrilla sister, both completely indifferent to their sister who “chose” to remain a spinster throughout the ghedli era. She is, more often than not, religious (belonged to one of the several Christian sects, searching for the truth), just like her brother’s and sister’s obsession with nationalist ideology, but always deferring though also bitter about her barren womb that was made a sacrifice for the country Eritrea.

In the crowd, almost everybody remembers and talks about the “martyrs” who fell in the war, but none of her prodigal siblings offer an apology for her sacrificed womb, which she has keened for untold years. None of her prodigal siblings offered their appreciation for the long and difficult years of care she bestowed on their already dead or aging parents with little means of the war economy. None of her prodigal siblings offered their appreciation for helping raise the little children (typical of big size families in Eritrea). The little concern is understandably from her mother, whose loyalty to her other children is divided.

When the long war ended, many of the rebels were not looking for their girl acquaintances left behind at home, but for other girls, younger in age and possibly from richer families. Similarly, tens of thousands of Eritreans flocked back to Eritrea from overseas for a long-delayed visit including for the chance of getting married. For these nationalists, the spinsters were not the likely candidate; they were instead looking for some females much younger than them. The spinster was an “old shoe”7 to the suitors from the diaspora.

Hence, the nation-state’s nationalist mythology about women and the programs for liberating them aside, there have been thousands of invisible women in the country. And yet, the fate of the spinster is rarely present in the literature on the women of Eritrea. What explains the description of the war-bride in a positive brush, the violent eviction of Eritrean sister married with Ethiopian men and with children; and most particularly, why was the spinster completely ignored in the history of Eritrean nationalism; written mostly by the ferenji (whites)?

Programs

Scholars and journalists (mostly foreigners) have written on the “women fighters” in the EPLF, romanticizing the role of women allowed to carry guns and “challenge” the traditional patriarchal society, and diminishing the role of the other women in the other rival front of the ELF, who were mostly assigned in tasks such as preparing food and nursing. The latter was considered as inconsequential and drudgery.8 Conversely, a few of them emphasized the important role of the indirect contribution of the war effort in the “feudal” ELF organization without disputing the alleged emancipating role of the female combatants in the war for independence with Ethiopia. The notable exception is Sondra Hale, who attributed the major presence of the women fighters in the EPLF to the need to sustain the long war with the more populous Ethiopia.9 She doesn’t seem, though, to have discovered the forced drafting for the jump in the growth of female combatants, now also a practice of the post-independence regime of Eritrea.

Believers as they were, most forgot to consider the dire demographic factors faced by the fronts in the long and protracted war, necessitating the front to fill the gap of the male recruits perishing in huge numbers. In comparison, the Derg, which also subscribed to the communist ideology like the EPLF, and espoused a program of women’s liberation, firmly refrained from deploying women to the front lines. It briefly started training women soldiers, however, prior to its military debacle, luckily saving them from harm. Believers as the scholars were, they attribute the current dismal post-independence status of the Eritrean women as regression and deviation from the program of women’s emancipation of the armed struggle era. Understandably, works of scholarship on women in Eritrea utterly failed to materialize.

Deception

To this writer, the circumstances of the Eritrean women evoke the sad lot of the Ethiopian woman patriot in the Amharic novel, Ende wetach kerech. The protagonist in the story meets a lady who had worked as a spy for the Ethiopian resistance during the brief Italian Fascist occupation, working in some drink house in Addis Ababa, and feels immense sorrow. Few women participated directly in the Ethiopian resistance (which was a noble cause) as women in Eritrea did, but the Eritrean women’s condition resembles, notwithstanding the “gender” revolution under the EPLF, the status of what was commonly known as chin gered10 in feudal Ethiopia. The feudal lords of Ethiopia were, however, more honest about it than the rebels in Eritrea of the twentieth century, who deceptively called them comrades.

For the state of Eritrea and the ghedli in the past, every person under their jurisdiction, peasants, workers, women and children, have only been fodders necessary for the insatiable war machine. In Eritrea, the state’s current complete control of the affairs of the nuclear family is a direct result of the practice during the heyday of the “liberation” war, which did not spare every member of the nuclear family. What took a long period of sustained industrialization to weaken the nuclear family in the West was achieved in Eritrea in 50 years, without the advantage of the cushioning and protecting institutions and gainful employment in the former. The rapid growth of female households is an example.

The abject status of women and girls (prostitution is now so rampant in the land that its victims have stopped venturing far to hide their “shame”) is not an isolated phenomenon or anomaly from the “golden age” of ghedli, an alleged honor attained by them during their participation in the Eritrean insurgency. The violence under the contemporary intimate-state of Eritrea is as intimate as it was with the body of men, women and children for various uses during the long armed struggle, having gradually displaced the power of the long surviving institutions such as the village baitos and the family from everyday life. Inured to such violence, both the abusers and the abused find themselves interlocked in each other’s world, making the task of extricating the individual Eritrean victim difficult and complex. Without doubt, no revolution or independence, noble or not, which sacrifices two generations of women is not worth celebrating, if it puts the sacred wombs of the women and their fertility into a certain risk. The case of Eritrea is a good illustration.

Carrying guns alone and dying in battles did not lend an agency to the tens of thousands of askeri soldiers under colonial Eritrea; likewise, the women fighters, who were recruited en masse to fight Ethiopia in the last century. The same thing happened to their fighter sisters under the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, an organization known for violent and massive repression including the use of civilians as a shield. Certainly, no International Women’s day, March 8, introduced into the mass culture by a regime known for its gross abuse of women, is worth celebrating in today’s nation state of Eritrea. It is simply a great scandal and a gross insult that condones the policy of violence on the womb and person of the womanhood in Eritrea (oddly some of them seem still celebrate it, not excepting some who oppose the regime now.)

References

[1] Ghebrehiwet, Yosief; Kebessa Eritrea’s Suicide Mission from Sahel to Lampedusa: The Other war; November 8, 2013; Asmarino.com

[2] Levine, Donald (2013) “Ethiopia’s Dilemma: Missed Chance from the 1960s to the Present,” International Journal of African Development: Vol. 1: Iss. 1, Article 3.

[3] Mason, Christine; Gender, Nationalism and Revolution: Re-assessing Women’s Relationship with the Eritrean Liberation Front; Working Paper # 274; December 2001.

[4] Bernal, Victoria; From Warriors to Wives: Contradictions of Liberation and Development.

[5] See several of Yosief Ghebrehiwet’s writings on the same subject in Asmarino’s archives.

[6] Barrera, G; Dangerous Liaisons: Colonial Concubinage in Eritrea, 1890-1941; 1996.

[7] A disparaging phrase commonly used on women in China

[8] Mason, Christine; Gender, Nationalism and Revolution: Re-assessing Women’s Relationship with the Eritrean Liberation Front; Working Paper #274; December 2001.

[9] Woldemikael, Olivia; Perceptions of Heroism: A Comparison of Women’s Roles Within the National Liberation Struggles of Eritrea and Zimbabwe; Asmarino.com; March 5, 2014; sighting Hale, Sondra in “The Soldier and the State Post-Liberation Women: The Case of Eritrea.”; Frontline Feminisms: Women, War, and Resistance.

[10] Daniel Semere has once used this term in his epic Tigrigna novel, Halaw Werkawit Gereb.