by David Hirst
1998-07-18

So how old was this lathe, I asked Seyum Beraki, foreman at the Asmara workshops of Eritrean Railways, pointing to an antique contraption buzzing merrily at the end of strap attached to a motor on the ceiling? Well, he said, it was already quite old when he first began work there. That was in 1940. Eritrea was an Italian colony. Its railway was a triumph of Italian engineering. In less than 50km it rises a spectacular 7,500 feet from the sweltering, Red Sea port of Masawa to the blessed cool of the highland capital, Asmara.

With Eritrea’s fall to the British in 1941, and a decade later its absorption into Ethiopia, the railway kept going until the 70s, when, in the war between Ethiopia and its rebellious province, both sides ripped up every rail and metal sleeper in the land for use in trenches and fortifications.

After victory, in 1991, in the liberation war, the new-born Eritrean state received foreign offers for rebuilding the railway. “It would have cost us at least $200m,” said railway chief Amanuel Selassie. “It was just too damned expensive,” he said, “so we decided to do it for ourselves.” There can be few relics of the steam era like the 49-tonne Giovanni Ansaldo, Genoa 1937, or the 30-tonne Ernesto Breda, Milan 1927, outside museums, and surely none being restored as an integral part of a country’s transport system.

Eritrean Railways boasts some 20 of these quaint machines. Some look totally decrepit; others gleam proudly in freshly painted livery of red and black. The men, like foreman Beraki, who wrought this transformation are older than the locomotives themselves. Meanwhile, younger generations have been scouring former battlefields for rail and sleeper, then laying them anew where they first came from. All told, it will cost Eritrea nothing in foreign expertise, and a few million dollars for a track-laying machine and a special, indispensable type of nuts and bolts.

 Statistically, Eritrea is one of the world’s poorest countries. One can just about believe that in the countryside where farmers still work their rugged little highland plots with yoked oxen and primitive wooden plough. But it’s harder in the towns. It is not necessary to arrive in an Asmara at war, its airport under attack, from the anarchy of supposedly more sophisticated capitals like Cairo or Beirut to wonder at the order and cleanliness of the place, its well-kept public gardens; at the mere existence, let alone functioning, of such services, virtually unknown in the Middle East, as public telephone booths; at the few, unarmed policemen directing well-disciplined traffic ­ it is not necessary, but it does greatly heighten the effect. There are virtually no beggars and virtually no crime.

In much of Africa or the Middle East observers often find themselves searching for something positive, something ­ anything ­ to relieve the gloom. Here one does the opposite. “I scratch my fingers in the dirt,” said a Western ambassador, “but I’ve worn them to the bone and found nothing.” What is the secret of this African miracle? It seems rooted in the fact that Eritrea was both the last African state to win independence and the first one to do so from another African state, and that it did so in one of the most remarkable “people’s wars” ever waged. In that crucible of formidable challenge and ultimate triumph were forged qualities that continue, in large measure, to animate the new-born state.

 “Doing it ourselves” ­ as the railway chief said ­ sums it up: self-reliance, ingrained, passionate, stubborn to the point of masochism, lies at the heart of the “ethics of the bush”. It was inculcated, above all, by the sheer loneliness of that 30-year epic. It has left Eritreans deeply anchored in themselves and their own experience. So it’s almost a fetish of their leadership that, while open to the world, it doesn’t accept “models”, or formulae, of any kind. If anything, in fact, post-colonial Africa has served as a model of how not to proceed with the construction of its own late-comer state.

The country has yet to ratify a constitution. It is typical that the leadership should have taken so long about it, and brought the entire people into a great debate about it. “They sometimes study things to excess here,” said a Western banker, “but it pays off. President Afewerki rightly says that Eritrea is like the tortoise that gets there in the end.”  The Eritrean solution is clearly not ­ not yet, anyway ­ a fully-fledged, functioning democracy by the standard criteria of multi-party pluralism, independent media, civil society. “We think all Eritreans should have the right to establish parties”, said Yemani Gebreab, a presidential adviser, “but we also think that having parties for their own sake is meaningless. More important is to ensure the continuous engagement of the population in political life. If there are no other parties at the moment, that’s because no one feels the need for them.”

Almost anywhere else such discourse would be the deeply suspect, special pleading of a proponent and beneficiary of the existing single-party order. Not here. For a start, the speaker in question leads the most tellingly frugal of personal lives.
 All the former guerilla fighters worked for nothing until 1995 and then took salaries of which the highest ­ the president’s ­ is about $800. “Most African leaders are emperors,” said a Sudanese opposition leader, marvelling at the modesty of Eritrea’s ruling class. A minister makes an appointment to see you in the simplest of lean-to coffee shops outside his ministry; there are no perks, no official cars, and, even in new buildings, no lift to a fourth-floor minister’s office.

 Such a lifestyle is one reason why the regime, if not yet a true democracy, is highly popular and respected. So pure itself, it can demand high standards from others. Afewerki has said that Africa’s curse is not this or that aim or objective but the corruption of regimes that embody them. Another African, Martyn Ngwenya, head of the UNDP in Asmara, bears lyrical witness to the “corruption-free development environment” which Eritrea has achieved. “Here,” he says, “they fight corruption better even than Canada or the US; the convergence between what they say and what they actually do is almost complete.” The country’s youth is assiduously schooled in the “ethics of the bush”. “National service” ­ compulsory for both men and women ­ consists of six months’ military training, followed by a year of “free work” for the state. Every year some 40,000 youngsters not only lay railway tracks, they build scores of micro-dams, repair hundreds of kilometres of hill-side terraces, and plant millions of trees in a country whose forest cover was reduced by war from some 30 per cent of the land surface to less than one per cent.

 Not for Eritreans anything that smacks of the “aid dependency”, the crippling indebtedness, of so many African countries. The government took food distribution out of the hands of foreign donors and sought to shift the country by swift, perhaps avoidably harsh, stages from an internationally relief-based economy to a locally productive one. Insisting that all who could should work for a living, it instituted a programme of “work for food”, then “work for money”; then it stopped distributing aid altogether. It dispensed with foreign NGO’s, and turned down all aid or development projects that it did not control. And if the foreign agencies objected, it simply went without them altogether.

“The work ethic here is amazing,” said the foreign banker, “last year there were two cases of fraud; you probably have fifty a day in Nigeria. And people pay their taxes.”  Paying taxes! Not just easily levied indirect ones, but progressive, personal income tax of up to 49 per cent. In the West that might seem as unremarkable as public telephone booths; here it’s another of the attainments that set Eritrea apart.

David Hirst wrote this article for The Daily Star