The Tenacity And Resilience Of Eritrea

Tekeste Fekadu's The Tenacity and Resilience of Eritrea chronicles his country's armed struggle for independence from 1979 -1983 from the standpoint of an Eritrean war surgeon, continuing the story he began in his previous, much acclaimed account of the war from 1976 - 1979, Journey from Nakfa to Nakfa. Offering frontline, graphic eyewitness testimony of the massive and unrelenting sacrifice of human lives that the war demanded, Tekeste Fekadu also tells a compelling story of a physician's war to save them. He and his colleagues battled their terrible injuries, diseases and psychological suffering as tenaciously as the vastly outnumbered Eritrean armed forces fought six, large-scale Ethiopian military offensives - yet with as few precious resources. He established what was unprecedented on any previous African battlefield: effective, comprehensive and compassionate medical care - whether it required the setting up or tearing down of hospitals on the frontlines or the most delicate surgery and intensive care in trenches and underground wards under bombardment. Also dedicating himself to combating the array of problems suffered by Eritrea's equally unprecedented dependence on a female fighting force, Tekeste Fekadu fought for the recognition of women's unique health issues, ranging from the reproductive cycle to the challenge of negative sexual stereotypes. In a world in which the annals of war are many and often remarkable, Tekeste Fakudu's personal story of Eritrea's armed struggle is inimitable.

This third edition of Historical Dictionary of Eritrea contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 600 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture.

Northeast Africa has one of the richest histories in the world, and yet also one of the most violent. Richard Reid offers an historical analysis of violent conflict in northeast Africa through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, incorporating the Ethiopian and Eritrean highlands and their escarpment and lowland peripheries, stretching between the modern Eritrean Red Sea coast and the southern and eastern borderlands of present day Ethiopia. Sudanese and Somali frontiers are also examined insofar as they can be related to ethnic, political, and religious conflict, and the violent state- and empire-building processes which have defined the region since c.1800. Reid argues that this modern warfare is not solely the product of modern political 'failure', but rather has its roots in a network of frontier zones which are both violent and creative. Such borderlands have given rise to markedly militarised political cultures which are rooted in the violence of the nineteenth century, and which in recent decades are manifest in authoritarian systems of government. Reid thus traces the history of Amhara and Tigrayan imperialisms to the nationalist and ethnic revolutions which represented the march of volatile borderlands on the hegemonic centre. He suggests a new interpretation of Ethiopian and Eritrean history, arguing that the key to understanding the region's turbulent present lies in an appreciation of the role of the armed, and politically fertile, frontier in its deeper past.

This is a personal account of the war between Eritrea and Ethiopia, fought between May 1998 and June 2000, as well as of the periods immediately preceding and following the conflict. Shallow Graves traces shifting local perceptions of time, the nation and the region, beginning in the mid-1990s and concluding with the peace agreement signed between the two governments in 2018. Richard Reid is a historian who was based in Eritrea during the war, and who continued to visit both that country and Ethiopia for several years afterwards. This personal perspective offers a more vivid, intimate portrait of the experience of the war than can normally be offered by putatively objective academic accounts. As well as providing first-hand reportage and analysis, Reid problematises the role of the historian--and specifically the foreign historian--as the supposedly impartial observer of events. His eloquent narrative, constructed around conversations and interactions with a range of local witnesses, friends and colleagues, explores the impact of prolonged war and its aftermath--both on private and public memory, and on the nature of history itself.

For the first time in their history, Eritreans were engaged in the making of a document by which they would be governed. Seen as the culmination of their struggle for self-determination, the Constitution was written over a three-year period, informed by intensive public debate held in villages and towns throughout the newly liberated country. Written by a scholar who led the process of constitution drafting, this book analyses the process from beginning to end, arguing that the value of a constitution lies in the degree of pubic participation that goes into its making.

This book analyses the historical sociology of state formation in the Horn of Africa. It examines the genesis, trajectories, processes, routes and consequences of the evolution of state formation. Three analytical and explanatory models explain the process of state formation in the HOA: proto-state, colonial and national liberation. The models, heuristically and innovatively, provide understanding, interpretation and analysis of state formation. While the proto-state model explicates an indigenous historical process of state formation, the colonial model refers to an externally designed and imposed process of state formation. The national liberation model concern state formation conducted under liberation movement and ideology. The distinct significance of these models is that collectively they generate sufficient analysis of state formation. They are also unique in that they have never been employed as aggregate analytical and explicative instruments to address the predicament of state formation in the Horn of Africa.

Its journey to independence, etched in the annals of the 20th century, reflects the aspirations of a people who dared to dream of sovereignty and freedom. This exploration begins by tracing the roots of Eritrea's identity, delving into the historical echoes that resonated with calls for...