The Umbilical Chord: Child Initiation Rites in Eritrea

The Umbilical Chord: Child Initiation Rites in Eritrea

If you happen to look at paintings made under the sponsorship of the EPLF during the gedli times, every other piece made by some of the famous artists has some mother and a child on it; clutching her hand protectively from bullets and bombs thrown at them by soldiers of the Ethiopian regime. The hidden message of the harrowing scene is that the revolution had always the welfare of its citizens, and particularly the vulnerable in its heart.¹ Many people have fallen for this, and it has yet to be exposed. If art is exploited for propaganda purposes, it also sometimes inadvertently supplies valuable evidence damaging the intended purpose. The play to be discussed in the rest of the paper is solid evidence.

Things happen in wars. Soldiers, civil servants and particularly bachelors tend to have licit or illicit relationship with the women of the territory, where they happen to be located. The Italians, despite the racist Fascist ideology that prohibited conjugal relationship with the indigenous people in Eritrea, had left by some estimates tens of thousands of mixed-race children. Sex was a weapon of war, but only through the act of segregation. A phenomenon quite to the contrary of what occurred later.

Things happen, nonetheless, even in “peaceful” Eritrea. The culture of war and militarism, a legacy from the war of secession from Ethiopia in the gedli era, had resulted in unprecedented number of children born out wedlock in post-independent Eritrea. The family, which was a highly protected institution prior to the seizure of power by the EPLF, is now in tatters; female-headed households have surpassed the number of the madamas and other women who worked in the sex-industry of the Italian and Derg Era. The causes are complex.

The initial impact of the war that ensued following the dissolution of the Federation in Eritrea was limited, for some of the soldiers and bureaucrats were accompanied with their families. After the fall of Haile Selassie, however, the conflict escalated, and subsequently tens of thousands of soldiers were brought in haste to quell the rebellion. This sudden influx and the terror caused the flight of thousands of male Eritreans and some from the countryside to the mountains. The fact that a big percentage of the Ethiopian recruits were young and single, combined with the increasing number of women of marriageable age and others  with minimal chance of getting married and destitute women resulted in relationships legitimate or otherwise.

More importantly, the Ethiopian troops, who did not entertain any racist ideology, were eager to make it happen. Children from Ethiopian fathers therefore became getting common to the dismay of national liberation fronts, including some of the locale people. The article will explore the role of a guerrilla sympathetic grandmother, who snatched children from their immediate parents in Asmera to the remote hills in Sahel. The woman may have devised this plot independently, but the fact that the culture elite of the EPLF chose to glamorize it indicates the evilness of the organization.

Letiyesus

“I do not know what you are saying about all this, Mother of Christ, but I am doing what I think is right. Help me!” said, Letiyesus, the main fictional character in the play, The Other War.² What she thinks is right is her kidnapping of the two children of her daughter, Solomie and Kitaw from Asmera into the hands of the guerrillas. The irony is that, Alemseged Tesfay’s mother-hero is beseeching the Madonna mother, who is highly associated with the image of the Child Jesus and children in the universe among the majority of the Christian believers. Only a playwright with a strong communist influence would have the temerity to link a kidnapping plot with the Mother of Jesus, whose images of her Son adorn the paintings in numerous churches and millions of households throughout Christendom. Initially, Letiyesus wanted to run with Solomie only, but revised her plan in revenge.

Kitaw

Astier, of Eritrean origin, was unhappily married to an Eritrean, who abused and mistreated her; she was divorced from him, and made a new relationship with Assefa, an Ethiopian cadre stationed in Asmera. The woman had a daughter from her former husband, and bore a son, Kitaw, from her later Ethiopian husband.³ The warrior name given to the child, though improper, was to happen again in his life.

Astier and Assefa were happy couples in the play.  Relationships get sour, when nationalist politics is instigated by the matriarch, (a rebel fighter with the EPLF), Letiyesus, who strongly resented the new arrangement. Her loyalty is only to her son, and by extension to the cause of independence, which often enraged her cadre son-in-law. Although Assefa has the propensity to pull his pistol when perceiving politics of his disliking, he usually looks jovial and happy with his new family. Astier’s former husband was often abusive and a drunk as described in the story. Romance in the context of war is rare, but there is nothing to prove its absence in Astier’s household in the play. It was not to last long.

Awet

Letiyesus, the typical urbanite of her generation had seemingly some links with her village community, which was under some sort of guerrilla control. Out of revenge for the politics of the Ethiopian cadre, and her daughter, who dearly cherished her marriage, the matriarch devised a plan to snatch the children, who were in their impressionable age, to her village of origin, and later to the Sahel, the stronghold of the EPLF. Her affection for her male offspring and his politics is likely the most explosive issue that led to the decision. Women’s liberation propaganda in the front aside, male offspring was the most favorite in the times.

Having arranged a hasty flight with her trusted neighbor, the matriarch re-baptized her grandson with a new name, Awet, leaving the parents in complete despair. The name chosen is a classic example of gedli names as noted by Yosief Ghebrehiwet in his recent articles. The matriarch’s decision to kidnap the children and saw dissension was as deliberate as Assefa’s “sowing his seed in Astier’s womb.” Assefa’s use of sex as a weapon of war was matched by her equally vile act of snatching the children from the “enemy” Assefa and her daughter (whose mother called her derisively as a “mule” [4]) for the same purpose.  Predictably, Assefa goes violent and threatens to kill his wife as a collaborator with his enemies. Outcry and condemnation should have been the reaction to the violence committed on the children; instead, the perpetrator was regarded as a hero.

The public as the audience

The playThe Other War had been watched to a great acclaim by hundreds of thousands of people in both the video format and on Eri-TV; undisclosed number of people have read the book version. If there was any criticism about the play, it was not about the violence on the children. In his book, the playwright wrote an afterword about the controversy surrounding the subject of mixed marriage in his play.⁵ He believes that his critiques have not understood the “context of the war”, which was witnessed by him in the other volatile region of Ethiopia, the Ogaden, before he became a rebel. However, the issue of the snatched children in the play was never raised to this day. The public silence in all these years is a factor for the rampant practice of child soldiers in the past and the boot camps in present day Eritrea.

Anybody, who has watched the play and did not recoil in horror then, has no moral right to be shocked about the prison camps in Eritrea, the kidnappings in the Sudan, and Sinai, Egypt, in which thousands have paid with their lives, and the rest left with indescribable wounds and scars. Anybod, who has read the book and did not feel outrage then has no moral claim to be appalled by the cave writing in Sinai: This shall also pass; made by an unknown victim of the Bedouin kidnappers.

Anyone who considers himself/herself a dissenter and an opposition to the regime, who disregarded the past violence for the sake of the nation-state of Eritrea, has no moral vantage point to feel repugnance about the occurrence of the mass drowning of Eritreans this week, which happened close to the coast of Lampedusa, Italy. In the beloved Red Sea, close to the Gulf of Zula, many Eritreans fleeing the country in similar rickety boats had also perished during the early euphoria period for independence. There was no national mourning then!⁶ What were not absent were, however, the mundane festivals that fill the calendar of the country, in which the public seems to participate diligently. Nor was the Red Sea, the cause of all our tribulations, cursed; to the contrary, songs about it proliferated as in Derg’s times.

For the rampant violence of the EPLF and the regime that succeeded it were as naturally joined as the shocking umbilical cord discovered in the deep waters of Lampedusa recently, attaching the drowned mother and baby. And yet the nationalists lot would not let Eritrea be tarnished. When criticism is made, it is limited only to either Isaias or the regime after 1995, or both, but not to the genesis of the war, or the nation-state; for a proof, the recent call or petition for the burial of the victims in Eritrea is adequate. Belatedly, the regime has also endorsed the proposal.

In a bizarre way, both the opposition and the regime seem to agree on this point, which defies the tradition of some exiles (who abhor having their remains interred in the land they escaped from). There were many warning signs, and the bell had tolled years ago, but the public was deaf and immune to it; including the tragedy of Astier. What explains this spectacle?  This writer thinks it is a classic zombification, defined by the scholar Mbembe as illicit cohabitation, or sharing the same living space.⁷

Did the audience show any sympathy to Astier in the final act of the play?

The scene before the curtain drops says a lot, “Astier follows him out with her eyes. She looks around the room, then at the audience. She looks everywhere. She starts pulling her hair out. Finally, she puts her head in her hands and cries bitterly, shaking all over. No one is there to hear her.⁸

Postscript

The play as Alemseged Tesfai noted is based on a true story. Some people familiar to the story are also knowledgeable about the identity of the real family. There is a gap, however. Where were the little children initiated into, in the Sahel later? If we are to learn from the fate of many others, chances are they were made to join the “Red Flowers”, or camboja (after the child revolutionaries under Pol Pot Cambodia), an alleged nursery for children. A nursery that doubles as a boot camp that communist insurgent groups were always good at camouflaging. In that case, the guardianship that the matriarch accorded herself, and the initiation rites she had in mind, was only a mirage; the true “guardian” or “parent” was the totalitarian organization, EPLF. Alemseged Tesfai’s other book, Two Weeks in the Trenches, has children from the Revolution School fighting and dying at several battles with the troops of Ethiopia. What is the likelihood that Solomie and Kitaw have escaped the same EPLF initiation rite and fate?

References

[1] The cover picture in Two Weeks in the Trenches: Reminiscences of Childhood and War in Eritrea is of the same kind.
[2] Tesfai, Alemseged; Two Weeks in the Trenches: Reminiscences of Childhood and War in Eritrea; p.206.
[3] Ibid, p.174.
[4] Ibid, p.204.
[5] Ibid, p.211.
[6] See Awate.com Editorial’s; October 4, 2013; lament on the subject.
[7] Mbembe, Achille; Provisional Notes on the Post colony; Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 62, No.1. pp.3-37.
[8] Tesfai, Alemseged; Two Weeks in the Trenches: Reminiscences of Childhood and War in Eritrea; p.210.

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