Journal of Eastern African Studies

ISSN: 1753-1055 (Print) 1753-1063 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjea20

The Trans-Mereb Experience: Perceptions of

the Historical Relationship between Eritrea and
Ethiopia

Dr Richard Reid

To cite this article: Dr Richard Reid (2007) The Trans-Mereb Experience: Perceptions of the
Historical Relationship between Eritrea and Ethiopia, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 1:2,
238-255, DOI: 10.1080/17531050701452523

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17531050701452523

Published online: 24 Jul 2007.

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Journal of Eastern African Studies
Vol. 1, No. 2, 238
255, July 2007

The Trans-Mereb Experience: Perceptions

of the Historical Relationship between
Eritrea and Ethiopia
RICHARD REID
University of Durham

ABSTRACT This article offers an exploration of the historical relationship between Eritrea and
Ethiopia. This has been a problematic relationship, as demonstrated by the degree of conflict in this
region, and, in the abstract sense, insofar as analysis of the history of the relationship has been both
polemical and polarised. The region’s pre-colonial history has been used either to demonstrate Ethiopia’s
legitimate historical control of much of what is now Eritrea, or to refute this older, more ‘traditional’,
perception and to prove that Eritrea was at no time an integral part of a ‘greater Ethiopian/Abyssinian
empire’. This latter, revisionist approach to the pre-colonial past is still in its infancy, the offspring of a
recent and potent Eritrean nationalism. Perceptions of key periods in the region’s twentieth-century
history are similarly polarised. By way of illustration, the article considers four historical scenarios, key
snapshots in the history of the relationship: (i) the pre-colonial era; (ii) the period of British
administration in the 1940s; (iii) the Eritrean liberation struggle; and (iv) the more recent war between
the two countries. Each scenario is looked at in three ways: first, for what we might call the ‘factual
indisputability’ of the scenario, in other words presenting as neutral and objective a view of the period
as is possible; second, the ‘standard Ethiopianist’ interpretation of the period in question; and third, the
‘Eritrean revisionist’ understanding of the scenario.

Introduction
Few peoples in Africa have had either a closer, or a more troubled, historical relationship
than those of Eritrea and Ethiopia. This fact is in itself justification for a study of the
relationship, and yet the project is no straightforward matter. It remains, indeed is
perhaps more than ever, an emotive subject of study, characterised by polarised positions
and well-defined lines of argument which resemble the trenches across which so many
physical battles have been fought between the two countries. On either side, it so often
seems that the maxim ‘if you are not with us, you are against us’ is the basis for whatever
discourse takes place. This is true whether the focus is on pre-colonial relations and the
nature of autonomy and/or political dominance before the late nineteenth century (an
era which, in particular, requires much more attention and is a major focus of this
paper), or the colonial period and early expressions of identity, or the era of Eritrea’s
liberation war. This is true despite the fact that the story of the Eritrean
Ethiopian
relationship is actually as much about co-operation as conflict, while both can often be

Correspondence Address: Dr. Richard Reid, Department of History, Durham University, 43 North Bailey,
Durham DH1 3EX, UK. E-mail: r.j.reid@durham.ac.uk

ISSN 1753-1055 Print/1753-1063 Online/07/020238
18 # 2007 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/17531050701452523
 The Trans-Mereb Experience 239

found simultaneously, on the macro and on the micro scale. And yet there is enough
contradiction and confusion in the various arguments and interpretations to suggest that
there is, in fact, a great deal of room for clear-headed analysis of the historical
relationship between the two countries. Such extreme contradiction is, in a strange sense,
cause for optimism, if only because it suggests that, amid all the available evidence and
partisan interpretation, clear-headedness has rarely been seriously attempted. It is not the
purpose of this chapter to address and ‘correct’ all the contradictions which appear in
both the written and the oral testimony and analysis, but rather to consider their
meaning and significance, and to suggest areas in which further research might be
profitable.
This paper, then, offers some preliminary thoughts and observations on perceptions of
the historical relationship between Eritrea and Ethiopia through time, dealing with the
pre-colonial question in some detail and the more recent past a little more briefly. This
has been a problematic relationship, both in real terms
as demonstrated by the degree
of conflict which has characterised the region, particularly in the past forty years
and in
the abstract sense, insofar as analysis of the history of the relationship by scholars and
other observers has been both polemical and polarised. The region’s pre-colonial history
has been used either to demonstrate Ethiopia’s legitimate historical control of much of
what is now Eritrea; or to refute this older, more ‘traditional’, perception and to prove
that Ethiopia was never in fact in control of the area, and that what is now Eritrea was at
no time an integral part of a ‘greater Ethiopian/Abyssinian empire’. Again, the latter
revisionist approach to the pre-colonial past is still in its infancy, and is to a very large
extent the offspring of a recent and potent Eritrean nationalism which has aimed at the
winning of intellectual as well as physical battles. Similarly, perceptions, both
contemporary and more recent, of key periods in the region’s twentieth-century history
reveal much in the way of particular political standpoints, and are again characterised by
polarisation which is frequently manifest in open bitterness. By way of illustration, the
paper takes four historical scenarios, key snapshots in the history of the relationship,
which need to be considered using both contemporary and secondary sources in
the analysis of how the relationship has been interpreted. We can consider each of these
scenarios in three ways: first, what we might call the ‘factual indisputability’ of the
scenario, in other words presenting as neutral and objective a view of the period as is
possible, incorporating the bare ‘facts’ as much as this is uncontroversial; second, the
‘standard Ethiopianist’ interpretation of the period in question, with all the political
implications of that interpretation; and third, the ‘Eritrean revisionist’ understanding of
the scenario, based largely on the emergent Eritrean nationalism already mentioned.
A couple of caveats should be noted from the outset, in terms of both the wording of
the title and the approaches and methodology of the paper itself. The reference to the
Mereb River represents, at least partially, a symbolic notion, as this particular
geographical feature marks only a section of the boundary between modern Eritrea
and Ethiopia. It separates the central Eritrean plateau
the inhabitants of which are
predominantly Tigrinya speakers
from Tigray in northern Ethiopia, whose population
in the main also speaks Tigrinya, and therefore has no geopolitical relevance for either the
western or the coastal (Danakil) lowlands of Eritrea, which must be examined, to a large
degree, in their own contexts. Nonetheless the paper does focus primarily on the highland
relationship between central and northern Ethiopia on the one hand, and the Eritrean
highlands, or kebessa, on the other. Further, in the context of the pre-colonial era, the
240 R. Reid

terms ‘Eritrea’ and ‘Ethiopia’ are clearly used for convenience only, as no states prior to
the 1890s resembled the polities called by those names today. Rather, for the pre-colonial
period the paper seeks to examine relations between the peoples and communities of the
region, and more particularly how those relations were, and continue to be, perceived and
interpreted both by the peoples themselves and by outside observers. Later, of course, the
peoples of the region came to be represented by governments and political movements,
and the relations between these are also examined. It should also be noted that, owing in
large part to the nature of the author’s ongoing work, the paper is mainly concerned to
examine the relationship with particular reference to the past, present and future position
of Eritrea and Eritreans.

Historic Trans-Mereb: A Pre-Colonial Survey

It is not possible, within the confines of the present project, to offer exhaustive coverage
of this vast era. A clearer definition of what we mean by the ‘pre-colonial era’ is also
needed, as otherwise the reader may infer that the author aims to examine several
millennia of human history in the region. We are concerned here with the period since
the seventeenth century, and in particular since the middle of the eighteenth century, as it
is somewhat more practical to attempt to understand regional relationships within this
early-modern time-frame than within one which stretches to antiquity. Our aim here is to
trace cycles of conflict and co-operation, and to examine regional relations and forms of
identity. In this context, it is important to note the polarised views of more recent writers
on this general subject.1 Again, the region’s earlier history has been used either to
demonstrate Ethiopia’s historical control over the region of Eritrea
and in particular
the Red Sea coast
or to challenge this ‘Ethiocentric’ interpretation and prove the long-
standing ‘independence’ of the region. In truth the pre-colonial history of Eritrea has, to
date, hardly been treated with any degree of academic rigour, and it can be assumed
at
least by way of a fairly safe hypothesis
that the reality was much more complex than
either of the two extreme positions allow for.
Covering the approximate century and a half between the middle of the eighteenth
and the end of the nineteenth centuries, our early-modern period comprises the
so-called Zemene Mesafint
the ‘era of the princes’, from the late 1760s to the mid-
1850s
and the subsequent era of a trio of powerful political figures, namely
Tewodros, Yohannes and Menelik, who were dominant in the central and northern
Ethiopian region between the mid-1850s and the early 1900s. Taken as a whole, the
Zemene Mesafint was a violent era, one of political fragmentation and the rule of local
military force; this was followed by an era which was in many ways just as violent as
that which preceded it, but which saw the building of an imperial polity (popularly
referred to as Abyssinia, and later Ethiopia) whose raison d’etre was the creation of
regional unity. Many of the themes of this latter period remained pertinent, and indeed
highly emotive, into the twentieth century. In particular, Yohannes would later be used
as a political icon, the symbol of resurgent Tigrayan nationalism as well as wider
Ethiopian nation-building (a paradox with which later politicians and guerrilla leaders
would grapple, and indeed continue to), while Menelik would be perceived as the
imperial ruler extraordinaire and indeed the founder of modern Ethiopia. Both men
would inspire antipathy among later Eritrean nationalists, who would perceive them as
the symbols of inherent Ethiopian/Abyssinian aggression.
 The Trans-Mereb Experience 241

From the standard Ethiopian point of view, the Zemene Mesafint was a period of
lamentable imperial weakness, manifest in the collapse of the territorial empire and
widespread catastrophe of almost biblical dimensions, as suggested by the epithet given to
the era itself; but, despite all of this, the continuity so beloved of Ethiopianists was
essentially unbroken, for ‘Ethiopia’ survived in fact if not in name,2 and in any case the
decline of central Solomonic authority proves temporary. The unworthy and calamitous
spectacle of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is followed by a period of new-found
imperial unity: ancient Ethiopia is reunited by a new generation of rulers
Tewodros,
Yohannes and Menelik
whose place in the pantheon of Abyssinian nationalist heroes is
further ensured through their powerful articulation of ancient and legitimate territorial
claims.3 Success in making good these claims, however, is only partial: crucially for our
study, they, and in particular Menelik, are cheated out of regaining Eritrea, an integral
part of the ancient and medieval Ethiopian empire, to which it was variously ‘subject’ or
‘tributary’, because of the onset of European colonial rule.4 The Eritrean perspective,
however, insofar as views on this particular period have been articulated, is rather
different. The Zemene Mesafint was in fact a demonstration of the fundamental weakness
of the Amhara-Tigray polity which had existed previously; this was a period of regional
self-assertion and one in which the area of modern-day Eritrea was clearly autonomous
from, if not wholly independent of, any central government to the south.5 Even the
unifying efforts of Tewodros, Yohannes and Menelik were founded on systematic state-
level violence, and the empire thus created was the result of wars of conquest and
oppression, which rendered the new state of ‘Ethiopia’ (a product of the otherwise
European-dominated ‘scramble’ for Africa) inherently unstable, if not downright
unfeasible in the long term.6 Moreover, from the Eritrean perspective, this was point,
at the end of the nineteenth century, at which ‘Eritrea’ was born, thus initiating the
decisive colonial phase in the growth and articulation of modern Eritrean identity.
Now, in this context, among the most problematic, overused and misleading phrases in
the study of pre-colonial African history in general are ‘subject to’ and ‘tributary to’.
These are clearly terms of considerable convenience, for contemporary observers and
scholars alike: the present writer has also made use of them. Yet they are in truth, in
certain contexts at least, frustrating and unsatisfying umbrella terms used to describe

and disguise
a wide range of political, diplomatic and military relationships, varying
degrees of influence and/or control, and levels of short- and long-range regional
suzerainty or hegemony. This is certainly the case in the region under study. In the
contexts in which we frequently find them used, for example, they do not necessarily
mean ‘under the control of ’, and as studies in other parts of eastern Africa suggest, the
paying of ‘tribute’ often represented a form of diplomatic interaction between mutually-
recognised equals.7 It may indicate a large-scale form of protection money
even an
insurance policy
by a smaller, weaker polity to a larger, more powerful one, in order to
offset or satisfy expansionist ambitions or simply prevent limited military incursions.
This does not necessarily imply ‘subject to’, any more than being in debt implies bondage.
Further along the spectrum, we can identify a situation in which a smaller, weaker society
or community has an overlord with political and military responsibilities imposed on it
by a state lying beyond its frontiers, but even here caution needs to be exercised in
assessing the position of the overlord himself, and in considering the nature of the
relationship between the supposedly ‘subjugated’ society and the larger external state,
as well as that between the overlord and his ‘subjects’. At the far end of the spectrum lies
242 R. Reid

the society which is completely destroyed and/or absorbed into a larger polity, and is
deprived of all practicable sense of separate identity.
All of these possibilities should be borne in mind when reviewing outsiders’ statements
regarding relationships within the region under examination. In his study of warfare and
diplomacy in pre-colonial western Africa, Robert Smith points out that the notion of
‘unconditional surrender’ seems to have been markedly rare: it was not usual practice for
an army to overrun and completely destroy its enemy, thereafter remaining in permanent
occupation or absorbing the defeated country’s identity into its own. Rather, the
hegemonic relationship was a more common consequence of outright military victory.8
To some degree this idea can be usefully, if cautiously, applied to the region under study.
In all probability, even in periods of violent state expansionism, it was comparatively rare
for weaker states and societies to be wholly absorbed and their independence completely
destroyed. The reality on the ground was much more flexible and pragmatic,
characterised by changing patterns of provincial and regional relations rather than
outright conquests which rendered inter-polity relations unnecessary. This is in no way
intended to detract from enormous significance of violence and warfare in the region’s
history
quite the opposite
but to suggest that ‘final solutions’ seem rarely to have
been the objectives of war in the region, at least until the period of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, and warfare in the
region could indeed result in great destruction.9 But the achievement of varying degrees
of influence, the capture of commerce, the ability to exploit local resources or access pools
of manpower, seem often to have been the key objectives of conflict. This said, there is, as
we shall see, a great deal of continuity in the violence of the pre-colonial era and the
hegemonic warfare of more recent times.
A further, and connected, problematic issue in contemporary sources lies in the usage
of the terms ‘Ethiopia’ and ‘Abyssinia’, something which has continued to influence
the perception of the region up to our own time in quite dramatic fashion. In this
context, we need to consider the influences brought to bear on the production of the
‘knowledge’ that appears in contemporary European texts, and what certain knowledge
actually meant in the local context. ‘Ethiopia’ and ‘Abyssinia’ were frequently used in their
broadest, most generic sense, as mere geographical expressions in much the same way as
the entire eastern African littoral, including much of the Horn, was once encompassed
within the term ‘Azania’. As geographical expressions, they were at once convenient and
representative of deep-seated ignorance of the region as a whole, although they may also
have been informed by local indigenous ‘knowledge’. (For example, such expressions were
often used on the approach to the central Ethiopian highlands, and may have been
picked up from local informants whose geographical gestures were fairly generalised.)
Certainly, the expressions were not always used to denote a recognisable political-
territorial state, but this is how they have usually been interpreted by subsequent writers
and scholars, wishing to support the concept of a continuous and ancient regional
imperium with all the romantic connotations such a concept implies. Yet even within
these sources, there is confusion over what the terms themselves actually mean. To take an
earlier example, Jerome Lobo’s assertion, in the early 1620s, that Tigray ‘was subject to the
king of Abyssinia’ appears to suggest that Tigray should be considered as something
separate from ‘Abyssinia’; yet elsewhere he referred to ‘the natives of Tigray’ as ‘the true
Abyssins’.10 Lobo used the term ‘upper Ethiopia’ to describe the area of Nubia, ‘Ethiopia’
in this context clearly denoting a general region rather than any kind of political entity.11
 The Trans-Mereb Experience 243

But was this what Lobo actually intended? In the early seventeenth century, the myths and
distortions were taking shape, as Lobo’s description of ‘Abyssinia’ demonstrates:

The empire of Abyssinia hath been one of the largest which history gives us an
account of: it extended formerly from the Red Sea to the kingdom of Congo, and
from Egypt to the Indian sea. It is not long since it contained forty provinces, but is
now not much bigger than Spain, and consists of but five kingdoms and six
provinces; of which, part is entirely subject to the emperor, but part only pays him
some tribute or acknowledgement of dependence, either voluntarily or by
compulsion.12

The scale of everything in this region is enlarged beyond all reality by mesmerised
European observers.
What, by the same token, was ‘Tigray’? The term was often applied in the most
undiscriminating way to the entire northern chunk of this ill-defined geographical
zone, incorporating both the highlands and the central coast of modern Eritrea. In the
eighteenth century, le Grand, for example, claimed that ‘[t]he kingdom of Tigre is the
most considerable part of Abyssinia. Its length, from Mazua to the desart of Aldoba and
mount Semen, is three hundred Italian miles’.13 Nonetheless, even as such dramatic arcs
were being drawn, the same writers were undermining their own theses. This ‘kingdom’
of Tigray, it turns out, was actually divided into numerous governments and provinces:
the ‘maritime governments’, presumably a reference to those in Eritrea, ‘being separated
from the general viceroyship of the kingdom, have a peculiar deputy assigned to them,
with the title Bahr Nagus, or Intendant of the sea’.14 This is a reference to the nebulous
position of the bahr negash, literally ‘ruler of the sea’, apparently originally appointed by
the expansionist Christian kingdom of the interior in the mid-fifteenth century to govern
the military colonies in modern-day Eritrea.15 The reality of political division, not for the
last time, is discernible through the specious imagery of the large scale, the unified, the
‘big blocks’ of supposed regional identity. ‘Tigray’, in other words, in the sense in which it
is described by le Grand, is an entity only in name. The ‘maritime governments’ are not
part of the entity which such authors purport to describe. Yet this is not, clearly, to deny
the existence of intertwined relations: war and ‘rebellion’ in Tigray often spilled across the
Mereb and necessarily involved the Eritrean highlands, where local rulers would take
refuge from imperial armies dispatched from the ‘Abyssinian’ heartland. In the early
seventeenth century, the area north of the Mereb was one over which more powerful
rulers further south had no lasting control, or only the most vaguely defined and
ineffectively asserted suzerainty. The old Amharic term for this area
Mereb Melash, or
the land beyond the Mereb
itself indicates a differentiation in the southern mind.
Political tensions, as well as political relations more generally, were at root the product
of physical environment. The steep escarpment which plummets from the highland
Eritrean plateau down to the Red Sea coast heralded a different socio-economic, political
and cultural environment, the product of physical and climatic differentiation. In the
early nineteenth century, references appear to a seemingly endemic ‘predatory’ warfare
along certain stretches of the road from Massawa into the highlands, with a number of
writers depicting a no-man’s-land between recognisable polities, where ‘wild’ groups
preyed on unsuspecting travellers and merchants.16 Henry Salt referred to the prevalence
along the Eritrean littoral of malaria and other fevers ‘which produce in the minds of the
244 R. Reid

Abyssinians that great dread and horror of the coast which they generally entertain’.17
This throws into interesting perspective the historic ‘Ethiopian’ claim over the coast itself,
despite the identification of this region as essentially alien, both in terms of political
organisation and physical environment.18 Salt, moreover, asserted that Tigray ‘proper’
was ‘bounded on the north by the river Mareb’, even though he also suggested that the
‘remaining portion of Tigre, commonly called the kingdom of the Baharnegash’ included
Hamasien and some surrounding provinces now encompassed within Eritrea.19 Such
chronic insecurity of both body and mind explains why, as Plowden claimed in the mid-
nineteenth century, ‘Abyssinians’ requiring salt from the area of production south of
Massawa had to ‘cut it under the protection of a large armed force’.20
In the early nineteenth century, Salt drew attention to the fact that ‘[t]he inhabitants of
Hamazen are said to bear a very distinct character from the rest of the Abyssinians’.21 In
the 1830s, the administration of the Eritrean coast and highlands was characterised as a
number of ‘petty districts’ each of which was under the control of a ‘chief of brigands’
who led ‘a life entirely independent of the Ras of Tigre’.22 Just a few years later, Plowden
further described how the people of Hamasien were caught between two ‘tributary’ fires.
‘They obey in some degree, and pay tribute to, the chief of Teegray, to avoid spoliation,
but are governed by chiefs of their own, and not appointed by him’; but they also had to
do the same for the Turkish authorities at Massawa.23 That same chief of Tigray, Wube,
regularly attacked the Bogos area around present-day Keren on account of its agricultural
wealth.24 Plowden specifically dated this sense of kebessa independence to ‘the time of Ras
Michael’ in the late eighteenth century:

The people of [Hamasien and Serae] . . . though speaking the same language, are
still scarcely considered by the people of Teegray as a portion of that country, whose
governors, since that period, have made war on them to enforce payments of an
irregular tribute. They are indeed a fierce and turbulent race.25

Avoiding spoliation is one thing; living in a state of self-government is another. By the

mid-nineteenth century, Hamasien had defined its ‘space’, and in so doing the trans-
Mereb relationship
characterised, for much of this period, by violence
had also been
clearly defined. ‘Tigray’ was also now clarified, and the land beyond the Mereb
was apparently not part of it. It is also noteworthy, however, that Tigray/Abyssinia is
always the reference point, the entity
however difficult to define in itself
from which
others are either ‘independent’ or to which they pay ‘tribute’. It is the shadowy imperium
whose presence is constant, if more in the mind than in reality. The Ethiopia of the late
nineteenth century, despite the perceptions of several decades earlier, was claiming the
kebessa, and other areas besides, as its own. As one later contemporary chronicler
observed, Menelik was ‘quite European in his method of dividing up the native lands of
the less civilised inhabitants’.26
The same imagery was projected by Plowden, who in the middle of the nineteenth
century described a group which seems to have been the Saho as ‘a wicked and
treacherous race’. As a people they were ‘at enmity with all men: no merchants pass their
inhospitable borders, no strangers visit them, and even the elephant-hunter dreads them’.
The ‘Abyssinians’ who had ‘established a slight intercourse with them, recount fearful
tales of their cool treachery and thirst of blood’; they were ‘ungovernable, brave, and
preserve their independence’.27 The use of the term ‘ungovernable’ is presumably
 The Trans-Mereb Experience 245

intended to mean that they could not be governed by Abyssinians/Tigrayans, as opposed

to governing themselves, as he also suggests that they defended their independence
fiercely. Again, the concept of the ‘Abyssinian’ state, however loosely defined in itself, is
used to define the surrounding region: it is the reference point alongside which
everything else is relative. Another source places together the inhabitants of Hamasien
and the ‘Shangallas’
the generic Abyssinian term for the Nilo-Saharan or Sudanic
peoples of western Eritrea and north-western Ethiopia
and describes the latter as ‘wild
and uncultivated’. The peoples of this area, as a whole, ‘are barbarous in the manners,
cruel in their tempers’.28
By the late nineteenth century, many of the modern ideas regarding the relationship
had been forged, sufficiently strengthened to survive unharmed (despite the experience of
Italian colonial rule) into the twentieth century and become the mantras of modern
scholarship on the region. No contemporary better encapsulated the received wisdom
than Gerald Portal, the British diplomat sent to Emperor Yohannes in 1887 to bring
about a peaceful resolution to the stand-off with the Italians at the coast. Portal can be
seen as the transmitter of Ethiopian imperial logic, reflecting the foreign policy of
Yohannes and his Tigrayan lieutenant Ras Alula which is summed up in Alula’s assertion
that ‘the sea was the natural frontier of Abyssinia’.29 By this time, importantly, the term
‘Abyssinia’ had begun to take a more tangible shape, at least in the minds of protagonists
and commentators. Yohannes, Portal wrote:

consistently denied the right of the Italian or of any foreign Government to be at

Massowah at all. He maintained that by right of descent Massowah and all the
south-western coast of the Red Sea had for centuries belonged to Abyssinia.
Tradition lives long in Abyssinia; as far back as the sixteenth century, the superior
armament and discipline of the Turks had driven the Abyssinians from Zeyla, and
later from Massowah . . . [D]uring all these 300 years, argued King Johannis,
Abyssinia had never given up its claim to the sea-coast; the Turks, and subsequently
the Egyptians, had only held these places as they had acquired them
by the power
of the sword.30

Yohannes understood well the power of the sword, as much of his control of the Eritrean
highlands was based upon it. Nevertheless, Portal again provides evidence for the curious
spatial contradiction of the Ethiopian claim, pointing to the fact that while ‘Abyssinia’
believed the coast to be rightfully part of the ‘empire’, the circumstances on the ground
were more than a little inconvenient. The coastal plains between Massawa and the
Hamasien plateau are depicted by Portal as a no-man’s-land: lawlessness characterised
the region, with ‘murder and brigandage’ so common ‘as almost to put a stop to all
trade’.31 The territory between Alula’s frontier army and the Italian positions at Sahati was
‘infested by wandering bands of brigands and evil-disposed Arab tribes’.32 The endemic
violence and instability of the area was symbolised by the settlement of Ailet, a village on
the main Massawa-Asmara highway portrayed by Portal in 1887 as the de facto frontier of
Alula’s military occupation. The village’s ‘proximity to the mountains of Tigre has made it
for generations . . . a bone of contention between the Arabs of the plains and the
Abyssinians of the hills’. When Portal passed through it, it contained a garrison of around
two hundred of Alula’s soldiers who ‘behaved with great hauteur and even brutality to the
Arab inhabitants’.33 ‘The land, not the people’ was the underpinning approach to the
246 R. Reid

‘Eritrean problem’ of successive Ethiopian regimes in the mid- and late twentieth century:
such an approach is evident in the age of Yohannes and Alula. Indeed, Alula’s occupation
of Asmara demonstrates part of the same strategy.34
A number of travellers’ accounts, then, dating from the Zemene Mesafint, depict to
varying degrees the Eritrean highlands and both western and coastal lowlands as separate
from what they understood as ‘Abyssinia’. Only later in the nineteenth century did some
observers, apparently struck by the success of Tewodros and, more significantly, Yohannes
and Menelik, begin to invest in the idea which all three of these rulers had articulated so
forcefully, namely that of the great and timeless Christian empire which deserved some
considerable respect, particularly after the defeat of the Italians at Adwa. The ‘right’ of
this great empire to stretch to the coast was at times acknowledged, even if not agreed to
in practice. These ideas would gather strength and momentum through the twentieth
century. It is clear, however, that the one theme unifying the entire era of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries is that of the use of force and of recurrent cycles of violence in
the attempt to forge new states and identities, backed up by creative and romantic
interpretations of the region’s history. The reign of Tewodros, for example, poignantly
noted as the ruler who ‘reunified’ Ethiopia, seems to have foreshadowed much of the
region’s twentieth-century history, in terms of the rhetoric of unity and the violence used
to support that rhetoric. He and his immediate successors laid the foundations of the
modern Ethiopian claim for the right of access to the sea, in the process of which
Ethiopian governments have frequently laid claim to Eritrea in its entirety. At the same
time, the attempt by modern Eritrea and Eritrean nationalist writers and scholars to
backdate their newly found sovereignty to include the pre-colonial era may be seen as
intellectually unsatisfying, not to mention unwarranted, as any critical examination
of pre-colonial relations between these regions need hardly weaken Eritrea’s modern case
for independence.

The Colonial Turning Point

We now leap forward to our second historical scenario, namely the colonial turning point
of the 1940s and the subsequent period of Ethiopian
Eritrean federation in the 1950s.
Remembrance and interpretation of this era remains highly emotional. Stripped to the
‘bare facts’, this was a period of intense political debate as to the future of the region in
general and of Eritrea in particular, debate which raged both inside and outside Eritrea
itself. It was a time of heightened political consciousness, if not always particularly well
informed, and among certain key groups in society if not among the broader populace.
From the Ethiopian perspective, this was a time in which Eritreans sought reunification
with the ‘motherland’, and when mother herself, Ethiopia, rightfully (and, ultimately,
successfully) laid claim to Eritrea and the coast from which she had been wrongfully
parted at the end of the nineteenth century. The mistakes and wrongdoings of the past
were eradicated by the events of the 1940s; Eritreans expressed themselves in the most
logical way, namely through the language of irredentism, and Ethiopians were happily
rejoined with their brothers across the Mereb. The Eritrean nationalist point of view
diverges from this interpretation quite dramatically. This was in fact an era in which
modern Eritrean nationalism was first cogently and potently expressed; Eritreans desired
independence, pure and simple. Yet popular resistance to Ethiopia was ultimately
undermined by Ethiopian manipulation and coercion
particularly the intrigues of
 The Trans-Mereb Experience 247

Haile Selassie and the extortions of the Coptic Church
foreign machinations and a
small clique of Eritrean lackeys who stood to benefit from the feudal structures and
patronage of Ethiopia’s ancien regime. For Ethiopia
or, more precisely, the Amhara
socio-political elite and Haile Selassie himself
the period of Italian and British colonial
rule in Eritrea was a historical anomaly, an unfortunate blip in the natural flow of events
and a contradiction of geography and demography; the decision of the United Nations at
the beginning of the 1950s that Eritrea should be federated with its southerly neighbour
was a rectification of this unnatural situation; or at least, considering that Eritrea was
supposed to have a significant degree of autonomy within the federal arrangement, a step
toward rectification.
For Eritrea, the experience of colonial rule set the territory decisively apart from
Ethiopia, which
and this was an argument developed despite the undoubted indignities
which Eritreans themselves had experienced at the hands of the Italians
was regarded as
something of a backward, feudal, anachronistic entity with its roots embedded in the
nineteenth century and perhaps earlier, disadvantaged for not having been the recipients
of the European civilising mission, or at least its tangible, material benefits. Whatever
the vagaries of the colonial experience, it had bred a clear Eritrean identity, which was
sufficiently developed to prompt an Eritrean intellectual elite to think deeply and
critically in the 1940s about their historical relationship across the Mereb, with Tigray in
particular and the Ethiopian heartlands more generally. At the core of this debate lies the
crucial issue of the relationship between colonialism and Eritrean nationalism. Years later,
the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) would use the Italian colonial experience as
the decisive historical ‘moment’ in which Eritrea became, forever and without
qualification, a separate and distinctive identity vis-à-vis Ethiopia. Colonialism, in other
words, had this positive element to it: it gave birth, literally and figuratively, to ‘Eritrea’
(which raises the slightly facetious issue of who had a greater right to claim ‘motherhood’
to Eritrea
Ethiopia or Italy), and fostered the development of ‘Eritrean-ness’, identity
and self-awareness. Colonialism was the sine qua non of Eritrean nationalism, as it was,
indeed, for so many other African national liberation movements; yet only the Eritreans
had cause to use the European colonial experience as the justification for so violently
rejecting a later African colonial experience. In other words, colonialism
manifest in
Ethiopian domination from the 1950s onward
was also the enemy of Eritrean
nationalism and should be fought wherever it might be found.
Many of the commentators of the period were unequivocally in favour of ‘union’, and
no one made the case with greater aplomb than the redoubtable Mrs Slyvia Pankhurst. In
the foreward she wrote to her own book on the reunion of Eritrea with Ethiopia, she
proclaimed that ‘[t]he whole Ethiopian people rejoices in a restored and new-found
unity’, and expressed her gratitude to Haile Selassie ‘who upheld the cause of Eritrea at
the United Nations even when all hope seemed lost’.35 Furthermore:

[t]he Ethiopian Government worked continuously for the liberation of the Eritrean
brothers and sisters from alien rule, and also to recover the ancient Ethiopian ports
in the interests of the prosperity of the whole Ethiopian population, including those
whom the Italians had misnamed Eritreans.36

Stephen Longrigg, chief administrator of the British Military Administration (BMA) in

Eritrea from 1942 to 1944, was confident enough in his historical knowledge to assert that
248 R. Reid

‘[h]ad Italians never landed at Massawa, Eritrea would to-day be partly, as always before,
the ill-governed or non-governed northernmost province of Ethiopia’,37 the qualification
being more important than he presumably realised. Indeed, Tigray ‘is homogeneous in
language and geography, with the highlands of Eritrea which, in history as in geography,
formed for centuries an integral part of it’.38 For Longrigg, whose account is, in terms of
focus at least, as yet unsurpassed, Ethiopia was the constant reference point in the
reconstruction of Eritrea’s own past. ‘Racially and culturally’, he wrote, ‘the Eritrean
highlanders are Ethiopian’; in any case, ‘it is untrue that the highlands . . . either demand
or reject Ethiopian union. They are divided [and] inarticulate’.39 For the contemporary
anthropologist Nadel, there could be little doubt that Eritrea, in large part because of its
historic cultural and commercial links further south, was an integral part of both Tigray
and Ethiopia as a whole.40
Yet other contemporary literature reflects a resignation to the supposed inevitable,
tinged with concern that the ‘inevitable’
the joining of Eritrea and Ethiopia in some
form or another
was far from an ideal scenario. There was a great deal of
ambiguity in the more sober, detached judgements; such writers recognised some
considerable complexity in the relationship of the past, and for the proposed
relationship of the future. Trevaskis, also attached to the BMA in the 1940s, suggested
presciently that:

[u]ndue Ethiopian interference in Eritrean affairs might also provoke a dangerous,

if not immediate, reaction on the part of the Eritrean Abyssinians. Because the
Unionist Party accepted Ethiopian instructions when it depended on Ethiopian
support, it should not be supposed that the Unionists of yesterday will dance as
happily to Ethiopian tunes tomorrow.41

Trevaskis did, of course, go on to suggest that Eritreans’ ‘reaction’ would be to resort to

unified action with Tigrayans south of the border,42 although even here we can discern an
obtuse and imprecise prediction of the liberation struggle. Likewise, Margery Perham
warned of the ‘cleavage’ between Tigray (by which she also meant highland Eritrea) and
the rest of Ethiopia, particularly Shoa.43 Although again Eritreans are lumped together
with Tigrayans as ‘northern Abyssinians’, Perham warned that Haile Selassie’s claim on
Eritrea had been made

upon grounds that do some violence to history and take insufficient account of
present political and religious facts. The claim is based . . . upon some rather
indefinite references to early history and migrations, almost every sentence of which
cries out for comment or correction.44

Most later scholars, with a few notable exceptions,45 saw no such complexity, nor
would they entertain much ambiguity in their analyses.46 If certain members of the
Four Powers’ Commission and the later United Nations Commission exhibited signs
that they were predisposed to recommending federation, if not unconditional unity,
then later scholars already had their minds made up before broaching the subject with
any vigour. And yet the confusion and diffidence of the Commissions themselves
reflected more accurately the reality on the ground. Eritrea, it was true, was the victim
of burgeoning ‘Big Power’ interests, an idea which nationalists have pursued with great
 The Trans-Mereb Experience 249

energy and have had burned into the Eritrean national psyche; but Eritrea was also, in
some ways, a premature issue in the late 1940s, suffering from being too early an entity
in a colonial world which may have been changing but which was not doing so quickly
enough to facilitate Eritrea itself. What was being asked about, and of, Eritreans at this
time was far in advance of anything happening elsewhere in colonial Africa. At the
same time, the uniqueness of the situation lay in the fact that another African state

and no ordinary state, such was the special role played by Ethiopia both inside the
continent and in the wider world
was actually claiming the territory more or less in
its entirety. Thus the discourse which ensued in this period
the ‘colonial turning
point’
had a dimension to it which was quite exceptional in the context of post-1900
Africa. Nonetheless, the period of the 1940s has remained one of the bloodiest
academic battlegrounds in the war for the understanding and defining of Eritrean
identity.

Wars of Liberation
The Eritrean liberation war began in 1961, a year before the federation with Ethiopia was
formally dismantled and replaced with total union. It reached its climax in the 1970s and
1980s, and can be considered a
if not the
defining moment in Eritrea’s modern
history, a period as critical as the territory’s very birth in the 1890s. It was, ultimately, an
era of Eritrean military success, culminating in the achievement of the country’s
independence. In the course of the struggle, however, Eritreans
inside and outside the
broad liberation movement
were compelled to confront the nature of their relationship
with Ethiopia, and define themselves accordingly. This had a particular relevance for
Tigray, geographically, linguistically and culturally closer to highland Eritrea than any
other part of Ethiopia, but whose own war of liberation was quite different in form and
objective from that of Eritrea. Nonetheless Eritrean and Tigrayan liberation movements
could not have operated in isolation from one another, but rather were compelled into a
relationship. Yet disagreements swiftly appeared, border disputes and other differences
emerging to create sharp tension between the movements. This is a complex subject
which a number of historians, the present writer included, have attempted to tackle, but
which cannot be explored in detail here.47
The whole period of the liberation struggle, again, can be seen from two entirely
different standpoints, from either side of the Mereb River. For Ethiopia, this was a period
in which Eritreans pulled against the forces of history, culture and indeed geography by
seceding from Ethiopia. Moreover, the position of the EPLF with regard to both their own
people and Ethiopia itself (and especially vis-à-vis the TPLF) was simultaneously suspect
and cynical, thus raising the question of the movement’s legitimacy. However, Ethiopia

the weary but ever-forgiving mother
blessed Eritrean independence with such alacrity
that no-one could have doubted the sincerity of the ‘new’ Ethiopia’s wish for lasting peace
and stability in the region. By contrast the Eritrean perspective is predictable, and
understandable, enough: the fervour and determination of the Eritrean people’s war
against colonialism, oppression and historical betrayal was ultimately rewarded with
independence. The cruelties and injustices of the past were redressed and the destiny of
the Eritrean people fulfilled. The EPLF had transformed itself into a kind of secular,
populist ‘keeper of the flame’, the sole guardian of the truth about Eritrea’s past, present
and foreseeable future.
250 R. Reid

Commentators either recognised that the Eritrean struggle was legitimate, or they did
not. Their sympathies may have lain with the pan-Ethiopian struggle (as it eventually
became) of the TPLF, as the latter meanwhile struggled with their own internal paradox
of, on the one hand, advocating democratic-federal revolution, and on the other leading a
resurgence of Tigrayan nationalism which rested heavily on the imagery of a glorious
imperial past;48 or they may have lain with the Spartan, painfully sincere EPLF as it
carved out an anti-colonial, people’s revolution out of the rock in its rear base in the
northern Sahel province, in the process of which threatening a complete explosion of the
‘Greater Ethiopia’ myth which had shaped the region over the preceding century.49 Either
way, intellectual support was political, and largely polarised. At the same time, however, a
great many of these commentators also, implicitly or explicitly, recognised the tensions
inherent in the Eritrean
Tigrayan relationship (as represented by the EPLF and TPLF),
the inevitability of a clash of visions which were held of both Eritrea and Ethiopia by the
two liberation movements. It may be worth noting that most of the people who
recognised these tensions and contradictions, both during and immediately after the
liberation war, and who expressed unease over the consequences of these tensions, were
those who were associated with studies of Ethiopia. Eritrea-watchers tended, in general,
to be a breed apart from those who had ploughed more ‘traditional’ furrows; and they,
like the EPLF itself, apparently had other things on their minds than the future of either
Ethiopia or Tigray. The struggle for independence was, indeed, all-consuming. A few, of
course, chose
at least initially
to largely ignore the struggle altogether, never mind its
implications.50 They did so, one assumes, either because they were ill-informed, or
because the magnitude of the endeavour was not yet clear, or because the struggle itself
was really very inconvenient.
The era of liberation war
whether it was the Eritreans north of the Mereb fighting for
complete independence, or the Tigrayans south of the river struggling for a reformulated
Ethiopia
brought to the fore, but did not resolve, some fundamental questions regarding
the historical relationship. The liberation movements themselves had clashed over military
tactics and strategy, the demarcation of borders, the question of ‘nationalities’ and ethnic
groups, the purposes and objectives of each other’s liberation struggle and the strength of
the popular or democratic element in each other’s movement.51 While much of the
disagreement lacked substance and anything more than a contemporary, transient
relevance, a great deal of it went rather deeper. At the heart of it were competing visions
for the future of the region, the implications for the future shape of the region of such
trenchant Eritrean nationalism, for, in this context, resurgent Tigrayan nationalism
once
it was reworked by the TPLF leadership into the broader Ethiopian framework
hardly
represented anything so dangerous, so revolutionary. In the meantime, the very nature of
the struggle
the intense and deadly arena of combat, the ubiquity of death, the
formulation and reformulation of policy and strategy under the most pressured of
circumstances
meant that issues emerged between the two liberation movements which
had preceded the struggle itself, and would, indeed, outlast it.

An Inconclusive Ending, or, the Battle for Past and Present Rejoined
The EPLF and the TPLF agreed to a truce in 1988, putting aside (though not resolving)
their differences in the interests of a tactical alliance, which held through to and be-
yond the overthrow of the Dergue and the liberation of Eritrea in 1991. The silence after
 The Trans-Mereb Experience 251

the 1988 truce, and even more so after Eritrean independence, was truly deafening.
Silences, of course, speak volumes; they can indicate polarisation as much as any amount
of sound and fury, and indeed can signify much more. For Eritreans, this particular
silence signified, it seems, relief, and perhaps surprise that that to which they had aspired
had been achieved, albeit at great cost, while erstwhile guerrilla leaders were also now
faced with the overwhelming task of reconstruction. The euphoria of independence

which can, indeed, be used to explain away a great deal
that followed the defeat of
Ethiopian oppression was louder, more clamorous, than the eerie silence which lay
beneath it, the crucial question ignored, or at least swaddled in platitudes: what, now, of
Ethiopia? Eritreans might have it that a plot was being hatched in those years of silence;
for Ethiopians, too, the silence must have signified a certain relief, but also surprise at the
actual loss of Eritrea, something which had been on a public policy agenda for several
decades, but which few, perhaps, actually believed would ever come to pass. The silence,
here, had been that of the majority, those not involved in nor particularly sympathetic to
the struggle, and suspicious of the EPLF’s uncompromising stance on independence. To
put it rather more crudely, a big country like Ethiopia does not lose its entire coastline,
together with several million people held to be unequivocally ‘Ethiopian’ to most south of
the Mereb without something of a nervous reaction. This, for example, appears to have
been the very reason why the EPLF delayed the independence referendum until 1993, in
order to help stabilise the Tigrayan-dominated Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary
Democratic Front in Addis Ababa and reconcile certain key groups to the new status
quo. The tension, in this context, was palpable.
The silence, of course, evaporated in the middle of 1998, when everything which had
not been said, and which clearly needed to be, was now said, but, one imagines, with
rather greater virulence than might have been the case had it been said considerably
earlier. The closer we come to the present, the more difficult the task becomes, and indeed
the greater our responsibilities as observers, commentators, scholars. In this immediate
post-struggle period, our last historical scenario, we witness a decade characterised by
the redefining of economic and political relations, leading to another war, and once again
we have two polarised positions in observance. For Tigrayan-led Ethiopia, the 1990s in
general, and the 1998
2000 war in particular, demonstrated the new and sovereign
Eritrea’s inherent aggression and penchant for confrontation, and the EPLF leadership’s
bloody-mindedness and refusal to compromise on any issue, however minor.52 This
attitude manifests itself, ultimately, in the invasion of Ethiopian sovereign territory, and
the conclusion must be that it is impossible to deal with Eritrea in its present state. On the
Eritrean side the perspective is that Ethiopia, unable to accept a sovereign Eritrea, remains
an expansionist empire-state despite all that has happened with the overthrow
successively of Haile Selassie and Mengistu, and despite all the declarations on the
future of peace and stability in the region. Ethiopia, supported tacitly or otherwise by
much of the rest of the world, instigates a war of aggression in May 1998, culminating in
full-scale invasion two years later which clearly has nothing to do with any local ‘border’
dispute, while in the intervening period it demonstrates its hatred for Eritreans by
expelling tens of thousands of them from its territory. It is, clearly, impossible to deal with
Ethiopia in its present state.
At the same time, there was much contradiction in Eritrean attitudes and perceptions.
While much of the 1990s before the outbreak of war was characterised by expressions of
mutual benevolence, or at least stubborn silence, the events of mid-1998 were swiftly
252 R. Reid

followed by a cacophony of ‘remembrance’, as veterans of and commentators on the

Eritrean liberation struggle recalled their unease at early signs of Tigrayan aggression and
unreasonableness.53 On the local level, informants along the Eritrean frontline areas
would simultaneously express contemptuous resignation on the one hand, and shocked
outrage on the other, at the ‘actions’ of the Ethiopian government.54 Farmers would stress
how neighbourly cross-border relations had been, how much Tigrayans had been part of
hearth and home, and then assert that nonetheless they had ‘known all along’ that the
events of 1998
2000 would eventually happen. Most ‘neighbour relations’, of course, and
especially those conducted along borders such as that between Eritrea and Ethiopia, are
historically ambiguous, moving through patterns of conflict and co-operation, cultural
exchange and ethnic hostility, war and peace, sometimes simultaneously. Yet in dealing
specifically the notion of a ‘trans-Mereb experience’, informants frequently stressed that
this war was worse than any in the past. While we must be alert to the possibility of
hyperbole, it seems that the destruction and the violence of the war with ‘Tigray’ and the
TPLF-led Ethiopian government was less acceptable than earlier conflicts with some
distant regime in Shoa. The identification of Tigray at the heart of this conflict is
paramount; the intensity of the ‘trans-Mereb experience’ is unquestionable, however we
choose to characterise the experience itself.
What is certainly true is that, despite occasional apparent confusion in the expression of
ideas, the peoples of the region are very well aware of their own differences, differences
which are clearly of considerable antiquity. Regional or ethnic distinctions have been
expressed through popular and insulting stereotypes, or through the adoption of a haughty
and arrogant attitude, or through angry ‘chip-on-the-shoulder’ rhetoric focusing on
perceived past injustices. All of these identities have been strengthened in the experience of
empire building and through the struggle to assert either independence status, or to lay
claim to that process of empire building and find some dominant place within it.
This was a war which was fought as much over the past as the present; the future was
relevant only insofar as it was the outcome of past processes (or at least it was confidently
assumed that it would be). Indeed, for many Eritreans, the three were scarcely
distinguishable. Old arguments were resurrected; scholars and others breathed life into
them, and once again placed their shoulders to the wheel of contention. Borders
evaporated, figuratively as well as literally; as the war wore on, the ‘issue’ of borders
receded and took its rightful place at the back of the arena of debate. The real matter
was now at hand; this was the crux. The relationship between Eritrea and Ethiopia was
the kernel. The clearest frontiers were mental, the trenches in the mind more deeply dug
and of greater antiquity than the fresh lines which now ran from one end of Eritrea to the
other, or seemed to at any rate. The debate, the battle, was more violent, and more bitter,
than at any time since the 1940s. Career theses hung in the balance; the queue of those
awaiting vindication was long. There was death by pen as well as by sword, although as
ever the victims of the latter far outnumbered the victims of the former. As tens of
thousands of Eritreans were expelled from Ethiopia, many resident there for several
decades, and as Eritrea
although much later and on a rather smaller scale
responded
in kind, it became a cliché to remark how the breakdown of such a close relationship was
an ugly spectacle indeed. As clichés go, it was a profoundly ironic one.

***
 The Trans-Mereb Experience 253

As our four historical scenarios demonstrate, those involved in the region under study

whether as travellers, diplomats, academics, and of course citizens and protagonists
themselves
have been to varying degrees caught up in the ‘trans-Mereb experience’.
People have always felt the need to place Eritrea and Ethiopia in juxtaposition with one
another, either distinguishing them or pulling them together; and doubtless EPLF
nationalism has in recent decades hardened attitudes and polarised positions. These four
scenarios have also presented us with identities and nationalisms, glimpsed, preconceived,
diagnosed, interpreted and reinterpreted, but in reality always in the making. In keeping
with the aims and themes of this edition, we are concerned here with ‘time’, i.e. how the
course of history has altered and influenced the relationship under examination, and
facilitated action and reaction; ‘memory’, namely the process of recollection, perception
and manipulation of the past and indeed of time itself; and ‘space’, i.e. how identities are
defined in terms of physical space, the perception of territory within the context of
‘empire’, ‘state’, ‘sovereignty’, and so on. Ultimately, all of these are brought together
by ‘experience’, experience of past processes (what we can call the ‘actual’), experience of
the interpretation and reinterpretation of those processes (the ‘perceived’), and the
experience of moulding these processes into spatial constructs and physical, political and
intellectual realities (the ‘application’).
In some ways it is uncomfortable to have to write a paper of this kind at the current
time: it is an indication that certain themes which should by now have been consigned to
the realm of anachronism
and this was certainly the hope of a number of observers, the
author included
remain poignant and painful. It has never been clearer that scholars

anthropologists and historians foremost among them
can make a significant difference
in helping to build a greater framework of understanding between two nations. It is true,
of course, that while scholars may indeed take on this kind of responsibility, governments
may (and often do) choose to ignore them; in this context, there is a commonly-held and
time-honoured belief that scholarship, like alcohol, is a good servant but an evil master.
But the quest for the Holy Grail of neutrality and objectivity goes on: research on the
region should wean itself off the need to score political points, which is how so much
scholarship has been constructed, based on the very sources we have surveyed here.

Notes
1
See also Reid, ‘The Challenge of the Past’.
2
Marcus, History of Ethiopia, xiii.
3
Marcus, Life and Times of Menelik II, 20; Rubenson, Survival of Ethiopian Independence, 31.
4
Markakis, Ethiopia, 25; Marcus, History of Ethiopia, 91; Zewde, History of Modern Ethiopia, 84
85.
5
Pateman, Even the Stones, 33
37; Haile, ‘Historical Background to the Ethiopia
Eritrea conflict’, 12
13.
6
For example, see Holcomb and Ibssa, The Invention of Ethiopia.
7
See for example, Reid, ‘Mutesa and Mirambo’.
8
Smith, Warfare and Diplomacy, 4.
9
See for example Reid, ‘Warfare and Urbanisation’.
10
Lobo, Voyage to Abyssinia, 29, 65.
11
Ibid., 28.
12
Ibid., 65.
13
Ibid., 199.
14
Ibid., 200.
15
Marcus, History of Ethiopia, 27, offers the standard statement.
16
See for example Salt, A Voyage to Abyssinia and Travels, 227
29.
17
Ibid., 213.
254 R. Reid
18
The following military chorus, recited by Salt’s Tigrayan companions while travelling in south-central Eritrea,
is worth noting in terms of its reference to alien physical environment: ‘We are now journeying in a desert
country/Surrounded by wild beasts and savages’: ibid., 235
36.
19
Ibid., 488, 491
92.
20
Plowden, Travels in Abyssinia, 25.
21
Salt, A Voyage to Abyssinia and Travels, 307.
22
Gobat, Journal, 37
38.
23
Plowden, Travels in Abyssinia, 8
9.
24
Ibid., 22.
25
Ibid., 39.
26
Berkeley, The Campaign of Adowa, 35.
27
Plowden, Travels in Abyssinia, 24
25, 27.
28
Gobat, Journal, 39.
29
Portal, My Mission to Abyssinia, 81.
30
Ibid., 5
6.
31
Ibid., 7.
32
Ibid., 34.
33
Ibid., 62
63.
34
Ibid., 71ff.
35
Pankhurst, Eritrea on the Eve, ‘Foreward’.
36
Ibid., 59.
37
Longrigg, A Short History of Eritrea, 3.
38
Ibid., 9.
39
Ibid., 169
70.
40
Nadel, Races and Tribes of Eritrea, 71, 78.
41
Trevaskis, Eritrea: A Colony in Transition, 130.
42
Ibid., 131.
43
Perham, The Government of Ethiopia, 358, 377.
44
Ibid., 434
35.
45
A good example is Ellingson, ‘The Emergence of Political Parties in Eritrea’.
46
Zewde, Modern Ethiopia, 107, 181, and Negash, Eritrea and Ethiopia, passim, effectively summarise the
argument on the Ethiopian side. See Iyob, The Eritrean Struggle for the Eritrean case. Alemseged Tesfay,
involved in research at the ruling People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ) in Eritrea, has recently
produced some work on this period which is loyal to the nationalist interpretation. Unfortunately, this work
is written in Tigrinya, making it extremely difficult for Western scholars and observers to evaluate it, although
it has been translated into Amharic and Arabic. Rumours abound that it will be translated into English
eventually. See also Reid, ‘The Challenge of the Past’, passim.
47
See Young, ‘The Tigray and Eritrean Peoples’ Liberation Fronts’; Reid, ‘Old Problems in New Conflicts’.
48
For example, Negash, Eritrea and Ethiopia; Abbay, Identity Jilted.
49
A selection would include: Pateman, Even the Stones; Iyob, The Eritrean Struggle; Connell, Against All Odds.
50
Reid, ‘The Challenge of the Past’, 267ff.
51
Two lengthy documents, held in the Research and Documentation Centre (RDC), Asmara, which are
particularly valuable in assessing the contemporary attitudes of the protagonists are: Publications of the EPLF:
‘The TPLF and the development of its relations with the EPLF’ (c.1984): RDC Acc. No. 05062/Rela/3;
and Publications of the TPLF: ‘The Eritrean struggle, from where to where? An assessment’ (1985): RDC Acc.
No. Rela/10359.
52
Even when the Eritrean government accepted the OAU peace plan in February 1999, immediately following
the Eritrean army’s defeat on the Badme front, it was dismissed in Addis Ababa as disingenuous and
compelled purely by military setback.
53
See Reid, ‘Old Problems in New Conflicts’, 379ff.
54
Interviews were carried out by the author along the former frontline areas on the Eritrean side in the summer
of 2000.
 The Trans-Mereb Experience 255

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