I Didn't Do It for You (12 page)

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

He was a trifle premature. Realizing that Dologorodoc represented a fatal breach, Carnimeo tried repeatedly to recapture the fort, sending wave upon wave of Savoia Grenadiers and native troops unsuccessfully against the position. As bodies piled up at the fort perimeter, Italian morale began to waver. It nearly buckled entirely when the popular Lorenzini, said by the
ascaris
to be immortal, was killed reconnoitring the ground for a seventh counterattack. Italian units were now down to two-thirds of their original strength. But British nerves were also starting to go. On the crests, young men who knew they were about to die penned farewell letters to their parents. Casualties were running so high that drivers, orderlies and mess sergeants were being mustered to form new companies thrown into the fray. ‘There was a nasty moment when one or two people got so-called shell shock and we had to take a very firm line,' remembered Kerr. ‘It started spreading, demoralization is very infectious. There are moments when you simply have to say “Go back where you came from and don't come running down here.” At heart we all wanted to turn away. It was only pride or shame or a sense of responsibility that kept you going.'
¹⁵

In the early hours of March 25, the British played their final
card. Two brigades attacked on either side of Dongolaas Gorge, one unit working its way silently along what proved to be a poorly-barricaded railway tunnel high on the ridge, the other moving up from Fort Dologorodoc. By the morning of March 27, a last desperate Italian counterattack had been repulsed and sappers had cleared the pass. The guns fell silent as white flags shot up from Italian soldiers on the peaks. With his units in tatters, Frusci had ordered a withdrawal, congratulating his soldiers for their heroism in a florid declaration. ‘Our many dead, who include one general and five senior officers, remain in Keren as armed guards and a warning to the enemy. We have left Keren only temporarily,' he promised, unconvincingly. ‘We will soon return there and the sacred flag of our country will once again flutter in the light of our future glory.'
¹⁶

If Platt had fulfilled his pledge to last longer than his opposite number, it had only been by a hair's breadth. The British had come within a whisper of calling off the assault. The general later confessed that in the last three days of the battle, his reserves had shrunk to just three tanks. ‘A company commander said to me when he heard that, “Was that quite sound sir?” No, it was contrary to every book that had ever been written, but it came off.'
¹⁷

The battle of Keren was over and with it, Italy's most spirited military performance of the Second World War. The official Italian tally was 3,120 dead–a total that characteristically omitted around 9,000 Eritrean and Ethiopian
ascaris
who had fallen alongside their European comrades.
¹⁸
British forces, which had pulled off what was as much a quartermaster's as a soldier's victory, had lost between 4,000 and 5,000 men.
¹⁹
Added together, both sides had probably sustained more than 50,000 casualties, averaging out at around 1,000 dead and wounded each day. ‘It was incredibly tough, and it is a source of wonder how we ever succeeded,' an officer in the West
Yorkshire Regiment later recalled. ‘It will never, like some battlefields of the First World War, look small and insignificant, but will stand always, huge and rugged, the gateway to Eritrea.'
²⁰

The feared escarpment had gone from insurmountable threat to just another geological feature. The Pimple, the Pinnacle and the Sphinx were no longer of any interest to the British soldiers who had crouched in the dust, trying to guess what hidden gullies and unexpected ridges–the dips and bumps that held the key to survival or destruction–lay ahead. As instructions were shouted, equipment packed and trucks and tanks jostled, nose to tail, for their place in the grey-green caterpillar working its way up Dongolaas Gorge, past the inevitable anti-climax that was Keren itself, the men were already forgetting a landscape they would never see again. For many, there was a dreamlike quality to the sudden telescopic shift in focus. ‘It always surprised me, in any battle, how limited one's life was while the battle was going on,' remarked Kerr. ‘You knew every stone for the next 50 yards. It always struck me as extraordinary how when a battle ended, like in Keren, how the next day the birds were there, peace reigned, the place was in a bit of a mess, suddenly there were trees and everyone walking about and standing up in daylight and one wondered at how different it was from yesterday, a different world entirely–what had we been doing all those weeks? At one moment somewhere is a battlefield and life is being lost right and left. And the next day, total peace and silence.'
²¹
The convoy roared through Keren–‘a pathetic little town', commented Richard Dimbleby, before putting it out of his mind forever–and ground on to Asmara.

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

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

Strikingly absent from this whole strategic picture–staggeringly absent, indeed, from all the vivid veterans' memories and detailed military reports on Keren–is any mention of the people most immediately concerned by the events of 1941: the Eritreans themselves. The British soldiers who fought in Keren struggle to recall a single encounter with a local, an unsurprising lacuna, perhaps, given that until Asmara, Eritrean towns had either been bombed or marched through by the Allies, but never occupied or administered. Asked about the Eritrean countryside, one officer mused, ‘There was no countryside,
really,' as if he had been marching across a blank vista. What the invaders retained was the impression of a landscape bereft of people, stripped of vegetation, a moonscape so desolate it seemed the ideal setting for a war. As for the Italians, the words they ordered to be carved on the white gravestones erected over the tombs of every Eritrean and Ethiopian who fell at Keren say it all. ‘Ascaro Ignoto'–‘Unknown Ascaro'. The Italians didn't even know the names of the natives who died for them.

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

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

Popular legend has it that a British captain leading his weary men on the march from Keren into Asmara was met on the road by an old Eritrean woman, wrapped in the ghostly white
shroud of the highlands. She was ululating in traditional greeting, celebrating her country's liberation from Italian Fascist rule and the start of a new era of hoped-for prosperity. Perhaps that high-pitched shrilling irritated the captain, extenuated by a campaign he thought he might not survive. In any case, he is said to have stopped her in mid-flow with one throwaway line designed to crush any illusions about why he and his men were fighting in Eritrea. ‘I didn't do it for you, nigger,' he said, before striding on towards Asmara.

There was something very English about the new administration set up in Asmara. Italy's military collapse in the Horn left Britain with a vast area to administer at a time when, with the German army still to defeat in Africa, it could barely spare the men or muster the energy. There could be only one solution: co-opt the defeated enemy, assign a skeleton crew as overseers and move on. Eritrea's first British civilian administration consisted of just nine Sudanese policemen, eight British officers and a former governor from Sudan.
¹
This team issued orders to thousands of Italian officials and civil servants who could theoretically have risen up and overwhelmed it at any time. But most Italians were in no mood for insurrection, and the mutually-agreed fiction of British power held good.
²

The colony did offer some strategic advantages, the new occupiers swiftly realized, isolation coming top of the list. Eritrea's distance from the main battlegrounds of the Second World War meant it was safe from direct Nazi attack. In late 1941, when America was still nominally neutral in the war,
London and Washington struck a secret deal, arranging for RAF aircraft damaged by Rommel's Afrika Korps to be repaired at an American-staffed base in Gura, south-east of Asmara, before being sent into battle once again. Britain also hit upon the idea of using Eritrea as a prison. In 1944, 251 hardcore members of the Jewish underground, which had been assassinating British VIPs in its campaign for a Jewish state in Palestine, were deposited in a camp on the capital's outskirts. Cut off from friends and family in this 1940s version of Guantanamo Bay, the prisoners, who included future Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir, were thought unlikely to escape. In fact, they organized a dozen breakouts, keeping Asmara's police force constantly on its toes.
³

A repair shop, a penal dumping ground: such small benefits could not cancel out the overall British perception of Eritrea as an unwanted responsibility, little more than a nuisance, to be shouldered with grumpy bad grace. British officials who wrote histories of this period would later congratulate themselves for liberating Eritreans, opening up secondary education, allowing political parties and trade unions and encouraging the birth of a free press. But there was always a pinched, parsimonious quality to their relationship with this inherited colony. The Italians had rolled up their sleeves and set to work, falling in love with the country, its golden prospects and–despite all the strictures against inter-racial contact–its women. The British, aware they would not be staying long, content to leave day-today administration in the hands of Italian intermediaries, kept themselves to themselves, a fact that could be measured by one statistic–or rather, the lack of it. ‘By the time Italy's rule had come to an end, there were thousands of
meticci
in Eritrea. I don't know of a single recorded incident of a British official fathering a mixed-race child. Not one,' says Eritrean historian Alemseged Tesfai.
⁴

This aloofness was exemplified in British attitudes to the hated racial laws, which continued to be applied despite protests from Italian community leaders in Asmara who felt their time had passed. ‘This is a very tedious, not an important subject,' was the airy observation of Colonel EJ Maxwell, legal adviser to British headquarters in the Middle East, when the idea of scrapping them was raised.
⁵
The truth was that while London had scoffed at the myth of Aryan superiority and publicly decried Fascism's record on human rights, it had long enforced a system of racial discrimination in its own African colonies. Repealing Eritrea's legislation, much of which seemed pretty unexceptional to British eyes–Brigadier Stephen Longrigg, Eritrea's military administrator, actually considered
strengthening
, rather than diluting it–might set an embarrassing precedent. The foot-dragging ensured that when the post-Mussolini government in Rome itself scrapped the laws in 1943, British officials in Eritrea found themselves in the surreal position of maintaining a set of laws rejected as morally repugnant even by the country that had dreamt them up. Legally-sanctioned racial discrimination only ended in Eritrea a full four years after the battle of Keren. Truly, the British had not ‘done it' for ordinary Eritreans.

One of the reasons the British hung on so long to these obnoxious laws was that they saw the usefulness of being able to ban seditious meetings and deport subversives. They felt they needed such powers, for after the decades of rigid Italian control, Eritrea was in a state of fizzing political ferment. Who would run Eritrea once the British–there purely as caretakers–withdrew? The newly-created UN, set up to replace the discredited League of Nations? Ethiopia–as Abyssinia would in future be known–where Haile Selassie was painfully clawing back sovereign powers from grudging British occupiers? Disgraced Italy? Or the Eritreans themselves? The question
obsessed Eritrea's brand-new political parties, whose manifestos roughly reflected the country's fundamental fault line, its half–half religious divide. Christian highlanders, determined to break the link with Rome and fearful of Arab encroachment, looked to Addis Ababa for their salvation. In contrast, Arabic-speaking Moslems from the lowlands, worried about religious persecution if Eritrea became part of Christian Ethiopia, leaned towards independence.
⁶
The political uncertainty underpinned the activities of the gangs of
shifta
bandits terrorizing the countryside, whose numbers had been swelled by out-of-work
ascaris
, still carrying the weapons issued by the Italians.

In fact, the Eritreans were never going to be left to their own devices when it came to deciding the future. Italy, Britain, the US, the Soviet Union and Egypt: they all thought they knew what was best. But no foreign leader felt a keener interest, no ruler was more convinced he deserved a final say than Ethiopia's Emperor. The reason for that intense focus could be traced to a rubble of ancient masonry, obscured by straggling shrubs and submerged in the sand, lying a couple of miles from the Gulf of Zula.

 

Mention to a highlander that you are planning a trip along the gnarled strip of land that forms Eritrea's southern coastline and he will whistle under his breath, uneasy at the thought of venturing into a mysterious region where the maps may tell one story, but the foolhardy traveller discovers quite another. This is where the Danakil Depression starts, a huge geographical basin scooped into the earth's crust, dipping in places 125 m below sea level. It is one of the earth's hottest zones, a land of volcanic lakes, cracked salt flats and treacherous mangrove swamps, which slurp the cars of unwary drivers down into their sucking embrace. The light here plays strange tricks with
the mind. Plum-coloured peaks float suspended above the plains, rootless as clouds. At times, sheets of water, dotted with islands, seem to flood the lemon-yellow plains, only to evaporate on approach, reverting to sand and scrub. At other times, the horizon dissolves completely, melting away into a throbbing blue glow.

In summer, when the sky turns migraine-white and the heat shimmers ahead, treacly as oil on water, the dunes are left to the ostrich and white-backed antelope. Afraid their tyres will melt on the tarmac, Eritrea's truckers wait for darkness before starting their engines and hitting the long, lonely road that runs to the port of Assab. Even the Afars abandon the stifling inland settlements, moving to bleached little fishing villages in search of fresher air. But the sea offers no real relief: the miles of postcard-pretty golden sands and aquamarine waters are a cheat. Heavy with salt, the Red Sea is as hot as a bath–‘fish soup', they call these waters–and that sticky syrup breeds curious creatures. Abandoned on the beach, like monsters from some medieval nightmare, grin the decapitated heads of fish large enough to swallow Jonah. Pyramids of wet sand, piled above dark burrows, line the waters' edge, dug not by rats or rabbits, but giant crabs. These muggy waters, churning with sleek brown dolphins, turtles and dugong–the beasts sailors of yore mistook for mermaids–are what all Africa's warm seas must have been like before commercial trawlers vacuumed up the shoals and tourists' feet pounded the coral reefs. Just as Eritrea's 30-year war preserved Asmara's architecture, it has protected the Danakil coast. One day, perhaps, cement mixers will set to work on high-rise hotels. Dark Afar warriors will service middle-aged women travellers and empty Coke bottles will litter the sands. But we are not there yet. Assab is a ghost town–its Ethiopian residents fled in the 1998 conflict–and on the once-busy coastal road the loudest noise is usually
the scream of sea birds flocking above a submerged shoal.

Wilfred Thesiger called these deserted areas, dreaming in the torpid heat, ‘blanks in time'.
⁷
But they have known their moments of historical glory. It was from this coastline, anthropologists say, that homo sapiens first left Africa 80,000 years ago, swimming across the Red Sea to what is now Yemen, the start of a long wandering that would scatter mankind around the world. It is also along this stretch, historians believe, that a Semitic people–the Sabaeans–journeyed in the opposite direction in the first millennium BC, crossing from the south Arabian peninsula into Africa and bringing its sophisticated language, metal-working and stone-cutting skills to the indigenous Hamitic dwellers on the plateau. Half an hour's drive north of the modern Eritrean village of Foro lies the evidence of what that Sabaean influx eventually gave rise to: the partially-excavated ruins of Adulis, port of one of the greatest trading nations the world has ever seen.

The Axumite empire spilled over into what is today Yemen and Saudi Arabia, embracing Eritrea, Djibouti, northern Ethiopia and stretching into Sudan and Somalia. It lasted around 1,000 years, although dates are incredibly sketchy: some historians place its birth in the first century AD, some in 300 BC, others as far back as 600 BC. In its day, it was considered one of the most powerful kingdoms on the globe, ranked alongside those of Persia, China and Rome. Sailing from Adulis, its merchants exported myrrh, frankincense, gold dust, ivory and slaves as far as India. The descendants of the Sabaeans developed Geez, precursor of the languages used today in the highlands of Eritrea and Ethiopia; they manufactured glass, minted coins and carved the vast, strangely modern-looking obelisks that still tower over the northern Ethiopian town of Axum. But, for Ethiopian patriots, the Axumite empire has always been more than a merely terrestrial
wonder. It was a kingdom blessed by God himself. They know this because the book which provides Ethiopia with its extraordinary founding myth–the
Kebra Negast
(‘Glory of the Kings') tells them so.

Written in Geez, the
Kebra Negast
was compiled in the 14th century by a group of scribes in Axum, who attempted to lend their work credibility by claiming it was a translation of a pre-existing Coptic text. Their motivation seems fairly clear. Fifty years before they wrote the
Kebra Negast
, Ethiopia's Zagwe royal dynasty had been overturned. Justifying his claim to the throne, the Amhara usurper, Emperor Yekuno Amlak, claimed to be restoring a Semitic bloodline running back to King Solomon of Israel. Just as Virgil wrote the Aeneid to provide the Romans with a made-to-measure legend establishing a link with the heroes of Troy, the Axum clerics provided the King and his descendants with a national epic that both legitimized his rule and united the nation around a glorious destiny. Drawing on the Old and New Testaments, the Apocrypha, Talmud and Koran, weaving in Ethiopian legends handed down by word of mouth, they came up with an exotic composite story. It was the tale of a royal date rape, a radical rewrite of the Bible that substituted Ethiopia for Israel as God's Chosen People. In the process, it offered an answer to the mystery that continues to obsess scholars of the Biblical world: whatever happened to the Ark of the Covenant, the holy vessel holding the tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments?
⁸

The
Kebra Negast
tells the story of the Queen of Sheba, also known as Makeda, a beautiful, pagan monarch who reigned over Ethiopia. Uncertain of her own fitness to rule, she is impressed when word reaches her of Solomon, King of Israel, a man revered for his knowledge. ‘The light of his heart was like a lamp in the darkness and his wisdom was abundant as
sand…Of the speech of the beasts and the birds there was nothing hidden from him and he forced the devils to obey him.'
⁹
She decides to meet this marvel face-to-face, setting off on a long and arduous journey to Jerusalem.

Described as ‘a lover of women', Solomon already has 400 queens and 600 concubines by the time he meets the Queen of Sheba. But she makes an immediate impression, ‘for she was vigorous in strength and beauty of form and she was undefiled in her virginity'. As for the Queen, she is swept away by Solomon's intellect. As ‘she marvelled in her heart and was utterly astonished in her mind', Solomon sets about converting the queen to Judaism. He is soon successful. ‘From this moment,' declares Makeda, ‘I will not worship the sun, but will worship the creator of the sun, the God of Israel.'

With rather more than religious education on his mind, Solomon invites the Queen to complete her instruction. Planning meticulously for the forthcoming seduction, he orders a chamber to be draped in carpets and festooned in purple hangings, perfumed with incense and sprinkled with myrrh. He then arranges for the Queen to be brought ‘meats which would make her thirsty and drinks that were mingled with vinegar, and fish and dishes made with pepper', and once she has eaten, invites her to sleep by his side.

‘Swear to me by thy God, the God of Israel, that thou wilt not take me by force,' demands the anxious Queen, sensing something is afoot. Solomon agrees, but on one condition: she, too, must promise not to take anything of his by force. When Makeda wakes in the night with a raging thirst and reaches for a jug, Solomon grabs her hand: she is about to break her promise, he claims, for what could be more precious to him than water? ‘He permitted her to drink water, and after she had drunk water he worked his will with her,' records the
Kebra Negast
. The strip cartoon paintings that tell the story show first
one female head on the pillow, then a male and a female head together: the relationship has been consummated. If she has been tricked into sex, the Queen of Sheba is usually portrayed as accepting the fact with philosophical resignation–the paintings often show the faintest of post-coital smirks.