National Identity and Historical Mythology in Eritrea and Somaliland

The 1990s saw the appearance of two new states in the Horn of Africa—Eritrea and Somaliland. Eritrea achieved de facto recognition in 1991 after a 30-year struggle against the central government of Ethiopia, and its existence was formally recognized by the international community two years later.¹ Somaliland also declared itself independent in 1991 after a ten-year struggle against the regime of Siad Barre in Mogadishu; it has yet to be internationally recognized though its existence is widely accepted.

Eritrea's struggle for independence has been largely portrayed as a struggle within the framework of decolonization in Africa, albeit slightly delayed (see Iyob 1995, Sherman 1980, Markakis 1987). Somaliland has used the existence of a five-day period of independence from the colonial power, Britain, to put forward an anticolonial argument for its right to independence from the former Italian Somaliland, with which it was united in the Republic of Somalia from 1960 to 1991 (see Trouval 1963, Contini 1969, Rajagopal and Carroll 1992).

Both Eritrea and Somaliland won their independence by military means, and both have made much of their successes in this area, especially Eritrea. Indeed, it might be argued that the Eritrean emphasis on this contributed largely to the hubris that appears to have been a major cause of its defeat in 2000 by Ethiopia; subsequent events suggest that no lessons have been learnt (see Gilkes 2002). In fact, it was the collapse of the central power in both cases that was the major factor in the guerrilla successes, and while the military victories of the fronts certainly contributed, they were only one among a number of significant factors.

In pursuit of state creation, both Eritrea and Somaliland have embarked, if not always systematically, on the creation of separate histories to buttress their claims to independence. In Eritrea this has involved the invention of a previously unknown Eritrean identity prior to Italian colonialism as well as an equally unacknowledged resistance to the Italian colonial conquest (see Jordan Gebre-Medhin 1989, Okbagzhi Yohannes 1991). It was, in part, a necessity. Three of Eritrea's nine ethnic groups straddle its border with Ethiopia. The largest group is made up of Tigrinya speakers, who constitute about 50 percent of the Eritrean population and have historically been major players, indeed an integral element, in all of the "Ethiopian" empires to the south, from Axum in the first century AD to Haile Selassie and Mengistu in the twentieth century. Eritrea in its entirety was incorporated in the Ethiopian Empire between 1962 and 1993, enlarging the empire to its greatest extent.

The creation of an acceptable history of the new Eritrean state is a process that started, understandably, within the guerrilla struggle before independence. It was an integral part of the propaganda war and military conflicts between the original Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) and the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF). These split the Eritrean liberation movement throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and the divisive process has continued since 1991. The effects have become very clear since Ethiopia's victory in 2000, and to a considerable degree they underpin the divisions within the EPLF, now the ruling People's Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ).

The insistence by the EPLF, the victor in the second Eritrean civil war with the ELF in 1981–1982, on the independence war as an anti-colonial struggle was, perhaps, a necessity at the time, but it was more of an issue for debate than an intellectual certainty. A central problem for the EPLF was that the historic identity of a substantial part of Eritrea's population and land area was identical to that of northern Ethiopia. Eritrea, as an entity in its own right, was given territorial definition by colonialism, and an Eritrean identity was forged during the colonial period. Nevertheless, a significant element in the colony of Eritrea, the Kebessa, has its own potential "motherland" in the Ethiopian empire state of which it had historically been a part for centuries. The Kebessa was where the Christian, highland, agricultural, and Tigrean elements of the population were concentrated...