Subaltern Agency and Nationalist Commitment: The Dialectic of Social and National Emancipation in Colonial Eritrea

Some sixty-five years ago, in the immediate postwar period, Eritrea was one of the first colonies in Africa to grapple with the issue of decolonization. A self-conscious national movement first emerged in the towns from among the middle strata of teachers, clerks, translators, artisans, and merchants, who were situated in an ambivalent relationship to the colonial state. Its articulation coincided with the development of a subaltern movement of plebeian agropastoralists who had risen against their tributary overlords, and the contingent connection between them created propitious conditions for the elaboration of an anticolonial movement with deep social roots and popular vitality. This study examines the mutually constitutive dialectic between social mobilization and nationalist commitment and the reconstitution of collective subjectivities their conjunctural intersection made possible.