I Didn't Do It for You (32 page)

There was a seductive simplicity to this existence, for the
knowledge of your own righteousness brings with it a deep sense of peace. For the 30,000–40,000 students and school graduates who became Fighters in the 1970s, the hardest step was deciding to join. But once that route had been chosen, everything acquired the clarity of absolutism. Choosing the hero's path not only snuffed out the existential questions that torture young people, it put paid to the humdrum tribulations of daily life. The Movement expected you to be ready to die for it, but if you happened not to, it took good care of you. Financial worries became a thing of the past, for Fighters, while never paid, were fed, watered and issued with sandals and uniforms. Anything they owned, or were given, was handed in to central stores for general distribution. Commerce was to become such an alien concept that, on walking into bars in Sudan when on leave, Fighters would be nonplussed when they were asked to pay.

Sex was initially taboo–no Kagnew debauchery here–and men caught breaking the celibacy rule were sent to collect salt in the white heat of the Red Sea shoreline, while the handful of women Fighters who made the mistake of falling pregnant were ostracized. But as the campaign stretched on, the Movement accepted the principle of relationships so long as Fighters submitted them for prior approval to their commanders, who decided whether to issue the woman with the pill. Those bent on marriage were obliged to complete a long form showing they had thought through their choice of partner; the Head of Department retained the right to defer a marriage application. Even in this most intimate of areas, nothing was left to chance, and since the Zero School took care of any resulting offspring, Fighters were spared the domestic strains that usually go with parenthood.

Whether you were a Moslem or Christian, middle-class professional or illiterate peasant was deemed irrelevant, so
there was no room for snobbery or prejudice. All were equal, and if a relative sent a packet of cigarettes, a bag of sugar or tea, it was automatically shared around. Prior claims of parents, fiancées and children gradually faded, as trench companions came to play the roles of friend and confidant, protector and brother. Life at the Front would be hard in terms of physical suffering, loss and privation. But, for the average Fighter, it would not be plagued by squabbles over promotion, worries about school fees, or the pressure to keep up with the Joneses. ‘In a way, we were not fully human,' one former Fighter later ruminated, ‘because all the things you associate with being human–setting up a home, bringing up children, holding down a job–we did none of that.'

There was an androgynous sameness about the Fighters which reflected the Front's rejection of sexual stereotypes. With no time or money to waste on the frivolity of hair-straightening, the women, like the men, let their hair grow into wild Afros. They dressed
not
to impress, for in the era of chastity any hint of flirtatiousness–an undone shirt button, for example–was viewed with disapproval. This egalitarian army, which prided itself on its collective leadership and absence of ranks, adopted the most utilitarian of wardrobes. Each Fighter was issued with a Kalashnikov and a belt with three pockets: one held a Chinese grenade, the second a handful of bullets and the third a folded
netsela
, a thin cotton cloth which served as blanket, shawl, towel, rope and carrier bag. The EPLF could not afford more. Once it lost its Arab backing, the Movement depended on the Eritrean diaspora, exiled professionals in Italy, Sweden, Canada and Washington, to cover its running costs. From shabby offices in Western capitals, EPLF members coordinated the fund-raising, one of the most efficient and sustained tithing operations ever set up by a rebel movement. This was insurrection on a shoestring, and the
Front quite literally cut its cloth to meet its limited budget.

I used to puzzle over the detail of a famous photo taken during the Nakfa years, showing a group of young
tegadelti
striding towards a mountain summit, the EPLF's green and red insignia billowing behind them. The image has become iconic, gracing the walls of Eritrean embassies, stamped on coins, reproduced on posters. In it, the Fighters' shorts end at about the level of a pair of 1960s hot pants, exposing a generous expanse of rippling brown thigh. ‘Why are their shorts so short?' queried a friend. ‘I've never seen any other African force with shorts that length.' Even the British army, which complained of the impracticality of its uniform in Eritrea, wore shorts that fell to the knees. The truth, I discovered, was that the Fighters had made a virtue out of necessity. If shorts were cut high on the leg, EPLF tailors could get that many more pairs out of a length of cloth. In the same spirit, a Fighter sent a pair of long trousers by his relatives was expected to sacrifice them to the Cause. ‘They'd cut off the legs and give you back a pair of shorts, then use the rest to make more,' recalled a former Red Flower. ‘At first it made my heart bleed, to see the nice new trousers my mother had sent me on the backsides of other Fighters, people I didn't even like. When I went home I'd hide indoors, just so that I could feel material on my legs without anyone making fun of me. But then it became a sort of competition, to see who could wear the shortest shorts.' The skimpier the shorts, the braver the Fighter. Ethiopian troops, it was said, paled with fear when they saw the physiques of slain Eritreans, displayed in all their muscular glory. And so the tailors wielded their scissors, and hems inched upwards.

The
tegadlai
's other main item of clothing also came with a story of ingenuity attached. Black plastic sandals were first introduced to Eritrea by Raffaello Bini, a Florentine who arrived in the region as a photojournalist in Mussolini's invading army.
Falling in love with Eritrea, he stayed to set up a shoe company in Asmara. Registering that ordinary Eritreans were in desperate need of footwear but couldn't afford leather shoes, he imported machines and designed a cheap PVC sandal, nicknamed the ‘Kongo' after Hong Kong, traditional source of plastic bric-àbrac. When the Derg regime seized Bini's factories, his workers volunteered for the Front, taking their skills with them. In first Sudan and then Orota, they installed machinery to turn out the Kongo, melting down old car tyres instead of importing PVC. A dirt-cheap sandal that could be rinsed free of grit and repaired over a camp fire suited the EPLF's requirements perfectly. ‘We used to play mind games with the Kongo, because we knew the Ethiopians were reading our tracks. The Sudanese, Orota and Asmara versions of the sandal were all slightly different, so we'd cut them in two or melt them over the fire and leave footprints that would make them think a unit from the Sudan was operating in the area, or that there were only farmers around when, in fact, the district was teeming with EPLF,' remembers an ex-Fighter.

The British explorer Thesiger, drawn to austere vistas, believed that the harsher the landscape, the purer the mettle of those who live off it. Few experiences came harder than the Sahel and it encouraged a puritanical earnestness that lay at the other end of the moral spectrum to Kagnew's drunken japes. Drugs, alcohol and gambling were all shunned. There was a spiritual element to this disapproval. ‘To pick the word freedom, you have to pray, you have to cleanse yourself, in the Biblical sense, wash your sins away,' said one former unit leader. Another commander tried to explain the intensity of focus that developed amongst the Fighters. ‘It's like Pele,' he said. Registering my baffled expression, he expanded: ‘Pele's whole life has been football. He cannot do anything else, he can't suddenly find a new career. Football is what he does. Pele will
always be football, even when he's dead. We were the same.'

It was both the best and worst of times. Looking back, ex-Fighters remember this as a period of supreme happiness, the unthinking happiness of the very young. But it was also a time of tragedy and heartbreak. When the war swung against them, the comradeship that had developed in the trenches made the pain of bereavement unbearable. A readiness to make the supreme sacrifice tipped easily into a love affair with death, an impatience to get the whole tricky thing that constitutes this, our human existence, over and done with. ‘What did you feel when one of your friends was killed?' I once asked an ex-Fighter. ‘Did you think that maybe you had made a mistake, maybe you should not have joined the Front?' ‘No,' he replied. ‘When one of our commanders died you just thought: “I wish I had died alongside him. I don't want to be left here on my own.” The worst thing that could happen to you was to be left behind, alive.' When fathers took time off to visit their offspring at Zero School, their children would sometimes run and hide. ‘It was considered a mark of pride to have had a father who had been killed at the Front,' recalls a former Red Flower. ‘When your father came to visit, you didn't want to be seen in public with him. Why was he there, you wondered, rather than away fighting? Maybe he was a coward.' As each Fighter saw siblings, lovers and friends ‘martyred' around him, the invisible scar tissue formed. There is only so much mourning a human being can perform before emotional numbness sets in. ‘When people now say “I love someone” or “I care for so-and-so”, I just don't know what they mean,' an ex-Fighter once confessed. ‘I don't hate people, obviously. I do an awful lot to help those around me, but I feel nothing. I think it started in the 1970s, when so many people I cared for died. I probably need a psychiatrist,' he said with a laugh, ‘but here in Eritrea we don't do that.'

What takes the breath away is the extent to which the EPLF determined, in these testing conditions, to carry on regardless. The Derg–which, like Haile Selassie, denied the very existence of an independence struggle–hoped to reduce the
shiftas
to the brutish necessities of survival, modern cave men scrabbling for sustenance. Africa teems with rebel movements with portentous acronyms that amount to little more than armed raiding parties. The EPLF would not let itself go down that route. Maintaining the standards of civilized society in this rugged terrain was not only a means of convincing the mass of the Eritrean population that the Movement was fit to rule, it was a way of showing oneself defiant in the face of overwhelming odds. A la Frank Sinatra, they would do it Their Way.

In the early days, the Fighters exhaustively monitored the airways on their short-wave radios, hoping against hope for some indication their Struggle had been noticed by the BBC, Radio France Internationale or Voice of America. Registering the world's total indifference, the Movement decided it would have to provide its own media. The EPLF printed its own newspapers and political pamphlets, researched and filmed documentaries and ran a mobile radio station that broadcast its version of the campaign. Man cannot live by war alone, so cultural activities were always encouraged, with units expected to compose songs, work on poetry and write plays for staging in Nakfa's underground theatre. Education was another priority, for if one day Eritrea was to become a modern state, the peasantry must be made politically aware. In Nakfa, there was little of the jaw-aching boredom associated with most military campaigns, for the Eritreans became experts at keeping themselves worthily busy. Perched in their mountain eyries, former farmers attended adult literacy classes given by their educated comrades and studied the great political thinkers, looking for
lessons that could explain their predicament and reveal the future. If so many Eritreans today show a disconcerting understanding of Henry VIII's clash with Rome and a grasp of the origins of the First World War, it can usually be attributed to those classes. The one luxury the EPLF enjoyed, after all, was time.

No allowances were made for circumstances. One of the Fighters I spoke to had been stationed atop Sulphur Mountain, where putting a foot wrong meant falling to your death. When his unit needed water, the Fighters formed a human chain and, backs pressed against the cliff face, passed the laden jerry cans carefully from one shoulder to another. As there was not enough flat ground for a latrine, Fighters would wrap one arm around a sapling that leant over the void, undo their flies, and relieve themselves into the abyss. ‘Not even a snake or a monkey, not even Jesus Christ himself could have survived there,' he remembers. Yet the unit did not skip its three hours of morning study. ‘One member of the unit would prepare a subject and we would talk about it: the character of war, Mao's teachings, the Irish question and the issue of Palestine. We had to expand our global outlook.'

The very isolation of the Nakfa experience, the absence of worldly distractions, encouraged a clarity of thought the meditating monks of Shangri-La would have recognized. The OAU had labelled the EPLF a secessionist movement, Washington dismissed it as a bunch of Commies, Moscow wanted it to simply go away. Global rejection created a space and distance in which cool analysis could unfold. Eritrea's successive betrayals by Italy, Britain and America were dissected; the hypocrisy of UN resolutions guaranteeing the right to self-determination examined; the legal justification for Eritrean independence logged with bitter calm. Marx was read with an attention to detail normally reserved for Bible classes. ‘We didn't just read
it, we savoured it, we digested it, we mulled over the meaning of every phrase. It had the force of a spiritual conversion. Even today, I find myself applying the mental disciplines I learnt then,' recalls a former EPLF ideologue.

Any movement with pretensions to intellectual credibility must be able to hold seminars and debates. The EPLF did just that, inviting foreign politicians to attend congresses where it articulated its ideological differences with the ELF, debated the shortcomings of classical Marxism and hammered out its blueprint for an independent Eritrea. What did it matter if such events were held at night, in the shelter of crags? The fact that they were held at all was a miracle in itself. Nakfa's constraints were never going to stop the Fighters staging a sports convention, however incongruous it might seem, or inviting delegates to attend a symposium on Third World debt. Visiting in 1979, French journalist Olivier Le Brun described the surreal experience of listening to a piano recital given under a thorn tree by a woman Fighter. The performance was interrupted by a MiG bombing raid, but resumed immediately afterwards. No wonder so many of the Western journalists, left-wing politicians and aid workers who visited the trenches returned True Believers, when such quixotic displays of true grit were on offer.