The sky is the only limit that the Eritrea Dream Recognises

… and that is why I know that the next chapter in the  book on Eritrea is being written as I write the first chapter in my lessons of hope… actually I am not even writing it, it has already been narrated in the voice of every generation of young people who never gave up on Eritrea but defined it in the resolute refusal to give up on a beautiful but stubborn dream. A succession of powers have tried to shape the dream to their liking but the corresponding generation of Eritrean youth have resisted that mould to build the heart of what makes us a people and what makes the nation a reality. A stubborn dream that refused the vision of those that seek to deny the dream or its custodians….

Every time anyone attempted to write a different ending to the chapter on Eritrean history the Eritrea dream comes biting back:

Ethnically disunited and economically non-viable, there is no good reason for preserving it [Eritrea] as an administrative unit…The right solution would seem to be to dismember it along its natural lines of cleavage….(British draft resolution to the UN General Assembly in May 1949)

That was the ending the Brits wanted to narrate for our grandparent’s generation…this was the rationale that eventually led to the still born federation and then annexation and then the liberation struggle and then independence…. The hope at every juncture was that Eritreans would give up and given in to the inevitable…

But the Eritrea dream had seeds in it, that would in the fullness of the realities of May 1991 make a mockery of the assumptions of May 1949… seeds of hope never die and neither does a dream impregnated with such seeds…

We are still a people of hope and custodians of that dream.

The history of the 1940s that led to the Ethio-Eritrean federation is complex but in a nutshell it is a narrative of two mutually exclusive visions. The wishes of the Eritrean public and that of the powers of the time… this dynamics gave birth to the bitter but successful struggle for independence that defined Eritrea. On the one hand we have the assessments of the mighty, their treaties and agreements that sought to define Eritrea and on the other hand we have the cast iron determination of a people armed with an almost intuitive yearning of a dream (no statistical evidence no referendum decision and certainly no powerful treaties and documents to back the dream)…In the very long run the dream won the day!  Against all odds… no less!

But I guess that was a battle (be it a decisive one) that was won in May 1991 the war will continue to be fought by every generation of Eritreans… a dream this precious is worth mounting a fight for… and sadly the contested agenda for Eritrea is what continues to threaten the dream of a free and just Eritrea. The generation that went into the mountains to fight for the dream had its own challenges too… and no one undertakes such a mammoth task without paying a hefty price and lives and resources weren’t the only price that May 1991 cost… war brutalises and to heal takes much longer than to devastate… and as Petros Solomon Poignantly remarks in Dan Connel’s Conversations with Prisoners:

…by the time we realised it, it was too late…

I say that lapse in realisation has taxed Eritrea dearly and that is a reality.  But, too late isn’t the end either… it may be late… it may be too late for much toomuch… but it in NEVER late to give birth… no … to rebirth the dream that was…

A dream that wasn’t hampered by fancy treaties and documents… a dream that wasn’t snuffed out by 30 long years of endless devastation will not be quashed by the visions of a latter day tyrant… it will come back to surprise those that think it is dead and the first to recognise its resurgence will be the generations who never gave up on it… they will see and recognise the fruits of the seed they packed into their dreams and planted into the heart of their offspring… and know for certain that in Eritrea that dream always comes true!

… and now I will go back to watching the smallest but surest sign of a tiny shoot coming to life as sure as the burst of a bright dawn… the sun and I both know the sky is the only limit…

Good Morning Eritrea!

Selam

23/10/2014