My nation Eritrea I love for ever.?
April 172010
Eritrea, Africa’s newest nation, celebrated its tenth year of independence in 2001. In May 1991, Eritrean liberation fighters swept the besieged remnants of Ethiopia’s occupying army out of Asmara, the Eritrean capital, ending four decades of Ethiopian control and Africa’s longest continuous modern war. In April 1993, Eritreans overwhelmingly endorsed independence in a UN-monitored referendum. On May 24, 1993, Eritrea declared itself an independent nation and four days later joined the United Nations.
The armed struggle for Eritrea’s independence began in 1962, after a decade of Ethiopian violations of a UN-imposed Ethiopia-Eritrea federation, and following Ethiopia’s annexation of Eritrea as its fourteenth province. In the early 1970s, the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), was organized and, throughout the next decade, emerged as the dominant liberation force. The Eritrean independence struggle became synonymous with "selfreliance"—a 30-year war fought from wholly within the country by a politically mobilized population supporting a large, well-trained army using captured weapons. The historical and political necessity of Eritrean self-reliance forced Eritreans to plan and test—while fighting for—the kind of society they wanted, with education a vital factor in the liberation movement’s success and a key element in the Eritrean model of development.
Country & People: Eritrea is a torch-shaped wedge of land, about the size of Britain, along the Red Sea coast in northeast Africa. Sudan is to the north and west, Djibouti to the southeast, and the Ethiopian province of Tigray to the south. As a former province of Ethiopia, Eritrea formed that country’s entire, 750-mile Red Sea coast. A highland plateau divides the northern half of the country, with lowlands to the west and east. The south is desert. Asmara and major towns are sited in the highlands. Massawa and Assab are significant Red Sea ports.
About 20 percent of Eritreans are urbanized, forming a significant working class. Of the rural population, more than 60 percent are farmers; the rest combine farming and herding, except for the less than 5 percent who lead purely nomadic lives in the far northern mountains and southern coastal desert. Eritreans comprise nine ethnolinguistic groups. The total population of about 3.5 million is approximately equally divided between Muslims and Christians, the religious division cutting across some ethnic lines. The predominant language is Tigrinya, spoken by the group of that name. Arabic is widely spoken among Muslims. English—the language of instruction in post-elementary schools—is increasingly common, especially in the cities.
Early History: Archeological sites in Eritrea have yielded hominid fossils judged to be two million years old. Tools from about 8000 B.C., unearthed in western Eritrea, provide the earliest concrete evidence of human settlement. Rock paintings found throughout the country, dating to at least 2000 B.C., have been assigned to a nomadic cattle-raising people. Between 1000 and 400 B.C., the Sabeans, a Semitic group, crossed the Red Sea into Eritrea and intermingled with the Pygmy, Nilotic, and Kushitic inhabitants known to have earlier migrated from Central Africa and the middle Nile. In the sixth century B.C., Arabs occupied the Eritrean coast, establishing trade with India and Persia, as well as with the pharaonic Egyptians. The ports of Eritrea enjoyed continuous contact with Red Sea traffic and Middle East cultures that fostered a cosmopolitanism unique to the coast.
The powerful Axumite kingdom, centered in the present-day Ethiopian province of Tigray, prospered on trade through Eritrea from the first to sixth century A.D., adopting Christianity in the fourth century, then declined as Beja tribes migrated from Sudan and Arabs gained dominance of the Red Sea. The Ottoman Turks ruled Massawa and its coastal plains from 1517 to 1848, when they were displaced by Egypt. With the opening of the Suez canal in 1869, the Red Sea coast gained strategic and commercial importance. In that year the Italian government purchased the port of Assab from the local sultan. The Italians occupied Massawa in 1885. In 1889 the Ethiopian King Menelik ceded Eritrea to the Italians in exchange for military support against his Tigrayan rivals.
Prior to Italian domination, education fell into two broad categories, religious and local. Christian and Muslim clerical hierarchies replenished themselves by educating—essentially raising—small numbers of children in the tenets of the faith. Local education, as in any society, consisted of training children in practical, productive skills: home construction, traditional medicine, music-making, storytelling, and decorative arts. These practices persist in all of Eritrea’s cultures and can be detected in general in the force of authority, especially generational authority, and the educative functioning of exemplary behavior, demonstration, and imita
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