Landscape and memory in peasant–state relations in Eritrea

Abstract

This paper examines the significance of landscape and memory in peasant–state relations in Eritrea since independence in the early 1990s. During this period, people were being resettled around cultivable land in the western lowlands as a means of recuperating land and society after prolonged warfare. Projects of statemaking in Eritrea, involving both refugee resettlement and agrarian development, have drawn from a national narrative of lost fertility and deforestation caused by generations of colonial extraction and violence. This paper explores how shared memories of environmental change, an ecological nostalgia, become a means through which people from diverse ethno-linguistic, religious, and regional backgrounds come together to imagine a collective future based in creating livelihood from farm land. However, as people reclaim remembered landscapes and face the challenges of rebuilding communities and livelihoods during a time of tense political and economic change, their ideas of a shared future diverge from state-led projects of nation-building. This article argues that ecological nostalgia legitimises state interventions into rural livelihoods but also provides a means for people to speak and critique the state under conditions of increasing fear and silencing.

Keywords:

• Eritrea
• memory
• place
• nationalism
• rural development
• peasant–state relations

Notes

¹For example, see Stewart (2001) and Livingston (2005). Drawing from focus groups and life history interviews with youth and elders in Uganda, Kearsley Stewart (2001) finds that the age of onset for sexual activity was the same for today's youth as it was for previous generations, despite the nostalgia of elders for a more moral time, along with remembered ‘peace’ and ‘freedom’ no longer available to their children in a time of HIV/AIDS. Similarly, in a compelling study of the history of debility in Botswana, Livingston (2005, 20) describes how people in Botswana expressed nostalgia for a past where a clear moral order ensured the common good – a sentiment that was foundational to people's efforts to make ‘historical sense of collective experiences of misfortune’ following times of intense sociopolitical and economic transformation wrought by British colonial rule and neglect.

²This approach follows recent analytical pathways taken by Frederick Cooper (2002, 2005), who advocates detailed historical research in postcolonial locales that pays attention to political imagination and historical contingency, as he explores the possibilities and multiple pathways opened and closed during moments of social upheaval and political transition following colonialism.

³During the course of the independence struggle over a quarter of Eritrea's population, as many as one million people, were displaced as refugees (McSpadden 2000). Of the approximately 500,000 Eritrean refugees that sought asylum in Sudan, almost 200,000 have returned to Eritrea through both organised and spontaneous repatriation (McSpadden 1997).

⁴There is a huge diversity even within the nine officially recognised ethnic groups in the country, but ‘highlands’ and ‘lowlands’ remain a significant source of mapping socio-cultural difference. That said, many of the people I worked with came from the historical Bogos region that spans the highlands and lowlands were Hagaz is located. Bogos, centred around Keren, was settled by Cushitic speaking groups who migrated from Ethiopia during the twelfth century and integrated with local communities to form the Blin ethno-linguistic minority group.

⁵Lack of a comprehensive census at the time of fieldwork meant that population figures varied widely depending on the source and for what purpose the information was collated.

⁶The primary religions in the Hagaz area are Sunni Islam, Eritrean Orthodox Christianity, and Catholicism. However, Evangelical Christianity has become more prevalent, particularly among urban youth in the highlands.

⁷A PROFERI planning document (GoE 1994) notes that by 1994, the population in Hagaz was a diverse mix of Tigre, Blin, Tigrigna, and Kunama along with a few Saho and Ethiopians. By the time I arrived, however, there were no longer Kunama or Ethiopians registered as residents, and while I encountered a few Saho, most of the people belonged to one of the variety of subgroups of Tigre, Blin, and Tigrigna speakers – still a diverse population but one that reflected the regions' longstanding position in the border area between lowlands Habab and Beni Amer, and highlands Bogos and Tigrigna groups.

⁸The UNHCR (2004a) recorded that of the 82,000 Eritrean refugees they planned to return in 2003, only 9,444 had actually been repatriated through the organised programme due to the closure of borders that opened just in time for the rainy season, when people could not easily be resettled. However, just a year before, the UNHCR announced that an estimated number of 200,000 Eritreans still residing in Sudan would lose their refugee status at the end of 2002 ‘because the reasons for them fleeing Eritrea – the war of liberation and the more recent border conflict with Ethiopia – were no longer present’ (UNHCR 2004b).

⁹Shifting agrarian relations around farm and garden land became an important means through which returnees and local landowners negotiated ideas of sociality, person, and community in the context of resettlement and in the wake of instabilities created by war and displacement (Poole 2009).

¹⁰A zoba is the largest administrative region. There are six zobas in Eritrea, created in 1996 when the Government of Eritrea (GoE) reconfigured colonial provincial boundaries.

¹¹The Eritrean state shut down free press in 2001. Although satellite television is available to those who can afford to supplement the national station, print media is restricted to a few state-run newspapers.

¹²Dorman (2005) chronicles the recent research that has emerged to question the concept of exceptionalism in Eritrean national identity. Of particular relevance here, Alexander Naty's (2002) research on environmental management and state-making in the western lowlands of Eritrea suggests the potential for renewed nativism among groups that have begun to make claims via place-based identities in order to critique the re-allocation of land in the region.

¹³Students who had not completed twelfth grade at the remote Sawa military training facilities in the western lowlands were forced to hide from authorities during periodic round-ups in villages and towns, and their families risked imprisonment, fines, or loss of business licenses. Even people who had received demobilisation cards often had little to no choice over the nature and location of employment assigned to them by state ministries, generally at meagre salaries.

¹⁴UNHCR (2007) reported 8,000 asylum seekers entering Sudan from Eritrea in 2006, mostly young men avoiding conscription.

¹⁵Gedaref is a city in eastern Sudan about 120 miles from Kassala – a town on the Eritrean Sudanese border. The first UNHCR refugee camp was opened in Eastern Sudan in 1968. Although most refugees returned to Eritrea and Ethiopia after 1991, UNHCR reports about 136,000 refugees from these countries still residing in camps in eastern Sudan (Allen 2007).

¹⁷Afra was replying to a question about assistance from UNHCR, who was working through the Eritrean Relief and Refugee Commission (ERREC).

¹⁶Event is recorded by Killian (1998).

¹⁸Exploring the dynamics around the dispossession of white-owned farmland in eastern Zimbabwe, Moore (2005) effectively exposes the intricate connections between micropolitics rooted in the land and translocal nationalist projects, discourses of development, and colonial rule.

¹⁹Ferguson draws here from Feierman (1990) who explored the ways in which Tanzanian peasants used a vocabulary of environmental health and decline to talk about the activities of the modern state. In Tanzania and beyond, Feierman points out that ‘the language of healing the land and harming the land has been embedded in actual peasant struggle for much of the past century and a half ’ (1990, 40).

²⁰Local farmers who owned rain-fed farming plots around Hagaz possessed these plots through traditional patrilineal inheritance patterns which land nationalisation had technically overwritten, but been unable to subsume to date. However, these farmers did describe losing key grazing lands to the growth of Hagaz as a resettlement community.

²¹Tronvoll (1999) details the different valuations of borders between highlands sedentary agriculturalists and lowlands groups that depended on more fluid forms of movement and exchange.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amanda Poole

This research was funded by the Social Science Research Council and an Alvord Fellowship in the Humanities. Earlier drafts of this paper were presented at the 2007 American Ethnological Association conference, and the 2008 Comparative Ecological Nationalisms workshop at Yale. In addition to these panel members, the author would like to thank the Simpson Center Society of Scholars at the University of Washington for feedback and support. The author would also like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their critical but helpful comments and suggestions.