Oedipus Recommends Self-Blinding for Eritrean Elite

You can see for yourself- the city is like the ship rolling dangerously; it has lost the power to right itself and raise its head up out of the waves of death. Thebes is dying. There is a blight on the crops of the land, on the ranges of cattle, on the stillborn labor of our women. The fever-god swoops down upon us, hateful plague, he hounds the city and empties the houses of Thebes.

-Oedipus the King

Oedipus Recommends Self-Blinding for Eritrean Elite

Rarely have people been faced by a horror so immense, deep and long enduring as the people in the modern nation-state in Eritrea, which one of the profound writers in the cyber space has once compared to Dante’s Inferno. A horror of such scale must certainly be attributed to either God (or gods) or the generation of ordinary political actors that created the hellish place; blaming the former rulers of Ethiopia or the current ruler of Eritrea falls far short of explaining the original political sin.

The major culprits for this immense suffering are none other than the generation born around 1940s and 1950s, town dwelling, better educated and with little awareness of the discrimination of the apartheid type system under Fascist Italy; they were on a mission of another sort of “civilization”. Their hegemony together with the culture of militarism of the pre-colonial and colonial eras¹ and the communist ideology borrowed later was a lethal combination for the ordinary masses. Without this environment, the Sapeurs of Asmera, as Yosief Ghebrehiwet called them recently, would have remained on the margins of the society; swinging their imported fancy little key holders without the keys (most door keys in Asmera were big and heavy then).

Culpability

Responsibility for the catastrophe has so far been almost absent in the Eritrean political sphere; it is instead replaced by numerous tales of heroism, selflessness and dedication allegedly performed by countless people, who either participated in the war for independence or witnessed the repression under the regime of the “liberators”. The outcome is therefore total indifference, confusion and loss with no recourse for some major catharsis.

Any effort to put guilt and responsibility on the generation that played a critical role in the armed conflagration fifty years ago raises the instantaneous ire and vicious attack from people who equate their political opinion as the masses’. They consider the accusation as a revisionist campaign to put blemish and bad publicity to the cause of the war of nationalism, depriving the masses without any means of accounting for the horror of the past. In a similar fashion, this behavior had also manifested in other totalitarian societies.

The historian Adam Hochschild observes an analogous phenomenon among the post-Soviet public.² In his study about the victims of Stalin, he asks numerous people about their role in the Soviet system, but to his dismay none seems to admit their responsibility. While the enforcers and guards blame Stalin and his fellows, the victims, mostly prisoners of the Gulag, limit their narration only to alleged acts of resistance and heroism, which was largely fictional.  Like him, other scholars have written many books on the complex behavior of people that had endured long periods of closed political systems.

Placing Thebes in Eritrea

This paper however takes the easy route. It exploits an old Greek tragedy to address the indescribable “pollution” in the land, whose strongman was once described as one of the leaders of African Renaissance. It looks at the role of the main character in the play in regard to consequence and responsibility to unmask the political elite of Eritrea, where contrary to the situation in Thebes even the representatives of God are weak, and of no consequence. It has no intention interpreting either the plot or the tension in the play, instead it deploys the horror in Sophocles’ play, Oedipus the King, in order to shock readers and help them rise from their slumber, and cringe with horror.

Greek history, culture and trade had left its mark in the civilization of northeast Africa since millennia. Axum and its port city, Adulis, had a robust relation with the Hellenic civilization, until the rise and spread of Islam into the coastal waters of southern Red Sea forcing the kingdom into the hinterland. In the late 19^th century, the colonization project of the Italians resulted in naming the area as Eritrea, a word derived from ancient Greek language. Later, when the Eritrean elite embarked on the long war for independence, naïve and superficial observers looking for something in their own image in Africa thought that they have re-discovered “Sparta” in the region.

This lent much publicity and support for the elite who were tirelessly projecting an image of egalitarian spirit, dedication and self-reliance in the territories under their domain. Even though the legend of Spartan culture is still potent among the supporters of the regime and a dwindling number of foreign believers, Eritrea has in reality more in common with the tragedy in Sophocles’ play³ with some major exceptions. While Oedipus the King blinds himself and chooses exile, the Eritrean dictator has been oblivious to the emptying of the land, and has cared only for his power. While Oedipus is the sole authority (through the hands of the gods) responsible for the tragedy in Thebes, in Eritrea, the elite are the primary responsible party in Eritrea. While the chorus in the play, that is, the public in Thebes is loud and live, the Eritrean public has been mute and silent.

The gods are us

Sophocles’ play embodies the horrendous scene of plague in the land of Thebes, whose king not only killed his father but also married his very mother; subsequently, the crime of parricide and incestuous relationship with his mother brought the wrath of the gods on the land. All this happened, however, unbeknownst to him. Yet, Oedipus inflicted the incommensurable punishment of self-blindness. For Oedipus, ignorance of the crime he committed was not ground for exculpation. The theme of crime and punishment will remain the focus of this article, and more importantly the question of the role of the Eritrean elite in regard to consequence and responsibility will be highlighted. What was the Habesha’s record on subject related to this genre of retribution?

The practice of self-blinding in either mythical or real sense is almost unheard of in the contested areas of the Kebesa frontiers, but the tradition of poking out the eyes of people defeated in the numerous wars of the region is well known. Amputating the arms and legs of victims was also another example of cruelties of the times. Menelik’s native prisoners of war after the famous battle of Adewa can be in this category. In light of these inhumane deeds, would recommending the symbolic act of self-blindness for the dictator and elite in Eritrea be perceived as cruel and insensitive? Doesn’t the culture in the Kebesa region has a lot of blessing words and curses associated with light and blindness? I am afraid, it might.

Punishment

Luckily, the great writer Milan Kundera has come to the rescue of this predicament. Tomas, the protagonist in Milan Kundera’s book, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, has recommended the same punishment for the communist elite of Czechoslovakia, prior to the Soviet invasion of 1968.⁴The character, shocked by the denial of responsibility of the communist elite to the “judicious murder” of the post-revolution years, attacks them in a newspaper article. This is what he writes:

“As a result of your ‘not knowing,’ this country has lost its freedom, lost it for centuries, perhaps, and you shout that you feel no guilt? How can you stand the sight of what you have done? How is it you aren’t horrified? Have you no eyes to see? If you had eyes, you would have to put them out and wander away from Thebes!”

The stigma connected with exile does not seem to trouble some of the elements living in the West. They have become the support base to the horrendous regime in Eritrea, willing to ignore the kidnapping, torture and murder of thousands of refugees in the Sinai triangle and the Sudan. They have become equally oblivious to the not less-horrendous policies upstream, that is, in the country itself. By any standard, the situation in the country in Milan Kundera’s land was mild and less terrible than what occurred in Eritrea in the last fifty years. Kundera’s country was modern and liberal, compared even by some to Paris, except for the brief interlude of German, and Soviet occupation.

Eritrea, however, has the mark of all the symptoms of a realm in complete perturbation, such as mass killings and imprisonment, rape and sexual exploitation for the women and servitude for both genders in the hands of the regime at home. Exile in classic Greece was a choice proffered to some of its citizens, but the situation for the Eritreans in some places, such as Sudan and Egypt has been cataclysmic. Random death, rape, and bondage have been the fate of thousands of Eritreans. Nonetheless, the reaction to this calamity largely engineered by the educated elite from Eritrea has been abysmal.

Vision

For the last decade or more, people have been writing letters and petitions to the dictator of the country to relent, forgive and free his erstwhile friends in his jails. In a like manner, a group of educated Eritreans, commonly known as the G-13, pleaded to the same person and proposed a self-reflection, which has remained ignored to this day. A few among them in the academia wrote books exposing the governance of the regime after “liberating” the country, denoting the country as an African tragedy, though the gedli kitsch (as the communist kitsch in Kundera’s novel) was left intact.

Though sounding different, others have given up on him, and have singled out the dictator for removal from the power center. Clearly, Isaias is the modern Oedipus to them. For the problem that took tens of years and involved a significant percentage of the elite, which some still openly flaunt as the pride of Africa, the endeavor to put the verdict on one of their fellows is totally insincere and irresponsible.

In Thebes, the Greek gods conspired to punish Oedipus, who was fated to commit something immoral, resulting in an apocalyptic plague. The thing is he was not a rational agent. In contrast, the tragedy in Eritrea has been not only socially engineered and carried out by the elite for a long duration, but is taken as a virtue to be proud of and keep for posterity. The slogan is scandalously nekid terah! (Forward). Nor is the opposition trailing behind this Grand March. Hence, they are all culpable. Isaias cannot substitute Oedipus. Clearly, the reason for the so far eluding catharsis cannot be separated from the wish to attribute every crime in the land to Nsu, or the dictator.

Thus, the verdict of a collective self-blinding in a symbolic sense proposed here applies to all of us. The shame and indignity is such that, had such similar event happened in a country such as old Japan, the Samurai elite wound not have hesitated to commit a seppuku, a suicide by disembowelment with a short dagger.

The preferred weapon in our case may be the mesfe, a tool used by our wretched mothers and sisters to both separate their hair and make baskets. This act of contrition and atonement is particularly to the adetat, who habitually put kohl on the eyes of children lest they are harmed in their vulnerable years. Forbidding as this darkness may appear, it is bearable; its likely benefit is the end of the search for the ultimate vision, a task, the chorus of the Eritrean opposition does not seem to stop chanting.

References

[1] Reid, J.R Violent Development: Toward an economic history of African warfare and military organization, August 2012, pp. 10-11.

[2] Hochschild, A. The Unquiet Ghosts: Russians Remember Stalin.

[3] Sophocles Oedipus the King, Simon & Schuster Enriched Classic. 2005.

[4] Kundera, M. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, M. H. Heim trans. (New York 2009) p.177.

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