Stages of Destruction: From Indigenous Hidmos to Asmera’s Art Deco Buildings

Stages of Destruction: From Indigenous Hidmos to Asmera’s Art Deco Buildings

Karma is back to Asmera! Asmera has become an ona (a ruin) long after it became a garrison city under the occupation of the EPLF government in 1991.  Asmera’s tragedy is that, founded as a garrison town in a little more than a century and having briefly appeared as a relatively industrious and prosperous place in 1960s, it reverted back to the same old function at the twilight of the twentieth century.  Asmera’s other tragedy is that it was one of colonial projects among other African cities launched to prove that Italy was not inferior to the other European powers, while the ghedli’s generation’s intent, and particularly the Asmarinos, was to prove their being superior to the people in the south. What explains its fortunes?

In the 60s and 70s, Asmarinos tended to brag about “their” city and particularly to their cousins that hail from south of the Mereb river. The bemused listeners would quickly say, “La’bey, la’bey l’e Roma”, a phrase that was particularly intended to tell the Asmarinos not to confuse their identity with the Italians, and to emphatically tell them to know their place. Had the discourse stayed there, it would have been harmless; but it did not. Under the leadership of Muslim elite, the low-intensity rebellion in the western lowlands was soon joined by mostly children of the civil servants from the Haile Selassie government in Asmera and other towns. Among them is Isaias Afwerki, the current ruler of Eritrea.

Isaias led a rebellion for many years in the northern mountains of Eritrea and finally conquered Asmera, the city where he once proudly posed for a picture in the down-town area. In the photograph, Isaias was well dressed and seemed proud and sure of himself; the others who joined him in the ghedli sojourn such as Petros Solomon were also from well to do families. That does not mean that all were homogenous, but that didn’t prevent Derg from putting a socialist twist on this. In its penchant for class analyses, the Derg, their adversary at the time, had once described the senior members of the EPLF leadership as sons of feudal chieftains. Certainly, these people did not depart to redress the wrongs and the nepotism of the feudal government, which backward as it was in the rest of Ethiopia did not hamper the development of the city of Asmera. Nonetheless, they embarked for the ghedli journey.

Expo 69

The city had never had it good. As the war in the distant western lowlands of Eritrea remained only a distant rumor for Asmera, the fact that her economy was gradually growing out of the recession from the late fifties proves it. The light textile and beverage industries were booming, producing plenty of goods for itself, the rest of Ethiopia, and the Sudan. For example, the ubiquitous small business sweater factories were working in full capacity that one rarely sees its citizens without the warm golfo. The same product had also a market even in the Sudan, where some people needed it for the few cold weeks in their mostly sweltering country.

All this occurred despite the massive flight of the Italians during the Federation period fearing the return of their former foe, Ethiopia, and the uncertainties resulting from it. Asmera was not left in a void. The city authorities such as Haregot Abay and others- who were ordinary clerks for the past colonial administrations- were farsighted for the times. They devised a plan with the Chamber of Commerce to convene an industrial and cultural exhibition called Expo 69 for the entire province of Eritrea and rallied the business establishments and other notables in the city, including the many stall owners from the Medeber complex. It was an extraordinary achievement, and represented the economic growth of the times in Eritrea.The evidence for it was a graph mounted in the hallways of the Chamber of Commerce, which remarkably was left there hanging until the late 90s [which I was lucky enough to see with my own eyes]. It showed a line graph for the economic performance of the province of Eritrea gradually peaking until the early 70s. The role of the former Santa Familia College, which later became Asmera University, was also remarkable; it assigned its students to staff the gate booths and do the public relations work for the event in the expo.

As the war dragged on, it gradually approached the vicinity of Asmera and undid all the might and enterprising spirit in existence. The factories and business that were the wonders during the Expo 69 had become old, neglected and obsolete during the long years of the nationalist war.  Since its arrival from the mountains, the regime has converted the Expo complex into a propaganda center, an entertainment venue for the diaspora Eritreans and a show place for not that-authentic ethnic dances. It has no resemblance to its former existence and does not look festive anymore despite its being renamed as Expo Festival.

Santa Familia

In the early 60s, Eritrea had no university; nor did the rest of the provinces in Ethiopia, except in Shoa, where the only university named after the emperor was located in its capital Addis Abeba.  Admission to the university was extremely small.  Many students were left with no other option but to join the former higher school run by the Catholic sisters at Santa Familia. These enterprising and dedicated nuns transformed the school into a modest college thanks to the support they obtained from overseas. Faculty members were recruited and new departments were opened with few resources available. In order to obtain recognition for the university, the sisters, were audacious enough to bring Haile Selassie to one of the graduations for the students. This was no easy feat, for the old emperor was already disappointed and bitter with the rebellious college students in the capital city.

The fate of this institution was also the same as the nerve center of the private sector, the Chamber of Commerce. After years of neglect from the current regime, it was finally shut following student protests from the university. The building is now a “shadow” of itself as the fading religious paintings in one of the walls shows. For people familiar with Abyssinian history, the ruins of Santa Familia have uncanny resemblance to the ruins of the Portuguese Jesuit buildings after the fall of Emperor Susyneyos.  Unlike Emperor Haile Selassie, Isaias never attended a single graduation ceremony. Unlike the Eritrean regime, the Derg had not closed the college until even the last few years, when the city was under siege by the guerrilla forces.

Asmera as Nacfa

There is a pattern to the nationalism in Eritrea. In its zenith, ghedli had used the ruins of Nacfa as the embodiment of Eritrean nationalism and a staging ground for the final march towards Asmera.  The only difference is that, while the ghedli capital was destroyed during the long siege leaving only the famous landmark of the badly damaged mosque, which the EPLF exploited in its propaganda war for the West, Asmera is however dying from simply being inhabited by them, or being chew egrom (corrosive) as some of the Asmarinos used to slander the migrant workers from Tigray. The myth of their famous hospitals, factories and schools in the valleys of Sahel was exposed for the farce it was; it did not materialize to satisfy the huge needs of Asmera after the siege.

The city was not totally out of luck, however.  Except for the occasional artillery shells from the EPLF in 1990-1991, which hit a few buildings, it was spared the wrath of the defeated Ethiopian troops, who marched north towards the Sudan without a major damage to the institutions such as St. Familia; and even the office buildings that later housed the Yeakealo cadres were left intact.  Asmera did not burn. The city’s demise is most certainly from the sum total of all the violence, the political and economic extraction policies that accompanied the ghedli venture. The result has been the decline of many self-regulated villages and communities into more poverty and disruption.

The onas that the ghedli fed on and the war environment imposed since the age of Eritrea’s independence on the public: forced mass recruitment to the army similar to the “liberation” times, the war with Ethiopia in 1998-2000 instigated by Eritrea, the war with the youth and the decimation of the private sector are some of the major culprits. No sector was left alone. The urban dwellers were soon to fall into the same tight grip of the conquerors soon after the brief sense of euphoria and the craze to wear the plastic sandals of the fighters.

“The city above the clouds”¹ was an inferno with little public space for its inhabitants to hide, despite the deceptive custom of the famous passegiata in its downtown area. The strollers in this avenue, whose fathers and grandfathers were prohibited to venture by the apartheid rule of the Fascist regime, are oppressed and de-humanized creatures. They are dwellers of a ghetto city who either wait to be picked for as slave laborers and soldiers or have come back shaken and traumatized without any recourse to psychiatric clinics. They timidly share the sidewalks with the affluent diaspora tourists, which evokes the dichotomy of life between the colonial Italians and the wretched natives.

Under Yeakealo’s Hidri

The Art deco buildings from colonial Italy were “intact” wrote many journalists, travel writers, including some of our elite completely oblivious to the onas of thousands of hidmos, and tikuls that were turned into ashes in the long war before the “liberation” of Asmera. The fate of the indigenous architecture, and the people was not an issue at all. Long before the NGOs and refugee agencies coined the word “internal displacement”, the urbanites and the country folk around Asmera took turns to become refugees to the rural areas and then back depending on the vicissitudes of the long guerrilla war and condition of governance.

In the past, that is Italian colonial history, Asmera’s inordinate cost for its building also necessitated the complete neglect and exploitation of many villages and towns in Italy. Carlo Levi, in his book, Christ Stopped at Eboli² described the abject poverty, misery and superstitious peasants of some villages and towns in the Calabria region of southern Italy. Just like the grandiose project of Fascist Italy in its adventures on Africa and elsewhere, the foolhardy plan of “liberation” under the auspices of ghedli required a terrible toll on many villages and towns in Eritrea.

The irony in it is, however, the ghedli generation had first to leave the city for no comprehensible reason only to return to the same location after years of inducing mayhem and destruction in its “glorious” revolution. Ghedli’s reverse journey was to a place built by Fascist Italy for the sole purpose of subduing the native people with the massive buildings and architecture. Mia Fuller’s quote from another writer stated that the colonial architects consciously used the “concept of acting upon the indigenous mentality, impressing it with the isolated grandeur of power.”³ Fifty something years later, the natives’ children from the highland towns, and particularly Asmera, accomplished their long trek “To Asmera”.⁴ The ghedli elite had scandalously compared it as their “Jerusalem”⁵, an act of blasphemy to some of their pious Christian parents, and an improper metaphor that only people under the most inhumane and discriminatory system can use, for instance, the Civil Rights Movement in the United States.

Thanks to Bana from the same city, we have been able to see the neglect and decay of the city from the voluminous pictures obtained at a tremendous risk to his life. The fate of its citizens does not seem to be that different if one looks very carefully at the occasional people in the photographs. They look thin and forlorn. In the same angle, the writings that accompany the pictures are equally sharp and powerful and deserve our most respect and admiration. Nonetheless, the public is wrong to see some conspiracy into it, that is, a sinister plan of Isaias and Co. to destroy the city, or buy in to the theory of the “natives” incompetence to manage colonial legacies as for example in Kinshasa, Congo. The first assertion is not conceivable for the ghedli elite loved and worshiped the city, though in a strange way. The latter is not plausible, because the ghedli generation parents, such as the late Haregot Abay and his cohorts, had done a remarkable work prior to the advent of ghedli in preserving and expanding the same – as  reported by other writers in this website.  The incompetence is in the generation that followed them.

The ghedli elite do not qualify as their Warsay, to borrow the word they use for the enslaved youth.  In their early formative period, though they were urbane and relatively exposed to the modest culture of their ancestors, their early departure to the war periphery zones left them incomplete persons. Nurtured in the barrack mentality of the soldier, without any authentic civil institutions to check it, they remained inured to the habit and refused to drop it altogether. In fact, they planned to turn the whole society as an armed camp upon conquering the country, and have achieved it since.  The evolution of Asmera under the tutelage of two different generations explains it all.

The city, under people such as Haregot was growing from people flocking from the rural areas, attracted by the job opportunities there. On the other hand, a substantial percentage of the housing units in these times have been occupied by people displaced from the frontlines in the south and returnees from the Middle East and the Sudan since independence. In essence, it was abnormal. The regime’s wholesale takeover of the satellite village’s land for the diaspora’s hard currency at the expense of the small land for water bodies, rain-fed, and irrigated agriculture had done a terrible damage to the city’s sustainability. In short, the “urban sprawl” in which villas and other units dominate, states a research done on metropolitan Asmera, as an ill-advised plan that forego the opportunity of vertical growth.⁶ The alarm raised by this study is a precise diagnosis to the acute water, fuel, food, contamination problems and other shortages existing in the city now.

Asmera’s debacle and ruin is most certainly a continuum from the destruction and ruin of the untold number of villages and their inhabitants, which were sacrificed at the altar of the “city in the hill” during the long war for “liberation”. Understandably, the nationalists among us have not mourned in a sincere and remorseful way for these villages and peasant communities during the ghedli’s sojourn. Quite to the contrary, people are still glorifying the ghedli leviathan’s capital which, having sucked the hinterland dry out of its human and other resources, seems to be heading now towards its destruction.

Conclusion

The af’erke’bu now made by Bana for Asmera, though sincere,  rings hollow to this writer because there were no obituaries and accountability for the countless ona villages that preceded the pilgrimage to the city without their own volition.  It is likely that, the highland peasants-where customs on ona houses is deeply felt in their villages- would not give a hoot about the city, for it was mostly alien and has never been organic to them.

References

[1] Wrong, M. I Didn’t Do It For You: How the world betrayed a small african nation. Fourth Estate, 2005.
[2] Levi, C. Christ Stopped at Eboli: the Story of a Year Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.
[3] Fuller, M. Building Power: Italy’s Colonial Architecture and Urbanism, 1923-1940.
[4] Kneally, T. To Asmara. Grand Central Publishing, 1990.
[5] Gebremedhin, N. Asmara, Africa’s Modernist City. 2005.
[6] Tewelde, M. Cabral, P. Urban Sprawl Analysis and Modeling in Asmara, Eritrea. Remote Sen.


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