Customer Reviews

I Didn't Do It for You : How the World Betrayed a Small African Nation

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Michela Wrong's style of writing is captivating as she brings History to life. She develops the personalities of the people involved very thoroughly and it is almost like reading a novel. She picks a relevant theme (not obvious until read) for her chapters to coincide with each pertinent stage of recent Eritrean History. Her book is not only a lesson in History, but also pleasure to read.

I found myself remembering and reminiscing about things I had long forgotten while I lived at Kagnew Station, Asmara, Eritrea in the early sixties. I was married to an Eritrean lady for thirty-three years before I lost her in a car accident eight years ago. Because of my interest in my spouse's heritage I have read many books and reports about Eritrea over the years. The recent History of Eritrea has confused me in the past, even though I had direct accounts and opinions from my in-laws who lived through those trying times. I was never sure of the big picture, i.e., why the Russians pulled out and where the U.S. stood on all that was happening. And I was not aware of the brutal fighting between the British and Italians during WWII at the Battle of Keren. I also did not understand the extent to which the British dismantled the factories and Italian capital investment in Eritrea. Michel Wrong has provided me with answers to many questions I have lived with so long. She also summed up the G.I. lifestyle at Kagnew Station very well. There was a lot of "Aminal House" type behavior at Kagnew Station. But I think the guys she interviewed for this subject probably exaggerated a bit on just how wild a place it actually was.

While this is obviously a book that has meant much to me and my past life, I found Ms. Wrong to be an excellent author. She has written and easy-reading portrayal of events illustrating how many countries have taken advantage of a small east African nation during our time. She did choose a strange and intriguing title for her book, "I Didn't Do It for You". But I know she did it for guys like me who needed clarification about the recent History of Eritrea.
Thank you Michela!!!

After reading Ms. Wrongs book I have mixed feelings about it's content. I lived in Asmara for 2 years and 3 months (71-73)near Kagnew Station.

I enjoyed reading the stories of the few people she spotlighted. She does know how to spin a yarn, keeping my interest, but also there is something missing. Actually, much is missing.

The first thing I will comment on is about the Italians living under Ethiopian occupation in Asmara. I witnessed many abuses by these privileged, spoiled Italians in Eritrea. From the teenage gangs of the sons of the colonialists who hunted down and beat dark skinned Eritreans (much like the brown shirts of Nazi Germany) to the shunning of the mixed blood people (who were called Cafe-latte). I find it hard to believe that any Eritrean would welcome Italians as "belonging to Eritrea".

The antics of the "gross guys" is very misplaced. It is nothing more than the story of a few drunks who were totally insignificant in the history of Eritrea. I'm sure the experience of Eritrea was as varied as the people stationed there.

My experience was much different. My parents enjoyed the Eritrean people and the beauty of the countryside. We traveled often on weekends to Dekemhare, Keren, Masawa and many placed I have forgotten the names of. We visited orphanages, helping to repair windmills, meeting the British families devoted to the easing of suffering in this forgotten part of the world. These were the acts of kindness. Orphanage volunteers, peace corp workers, religious missions....these were ALL staffed by British and Americans....NEVER Italians.

Mrs Wrong quotes "Zazz" in a discussion about GI guilt about not serving in Vietnam. I think of greater relevance is the story of guilt which seems to be a common thread in all who were stationed in Asmara. That nagging feeling that we didn't do enough for the people we left in despair as we returned to our world.

All in all, I enjoyed reading the book because I was surprised that someone actually cared enough to attempt to write the story of this unknown land.

I read this book after travelling to Eritrea less than a year ago. I wish I would have read it before going. It went a long way towards explaining the Eritreans' reserved character and the abundant desolation of its countryside through the history of the powers involved.

I give the book 5 stars. It's not 100% perfect, but the information within it is first rate. Wrong effectively sets the context for all the parties involved from their own perspectives. The reader understands throughout what each player is thinking and how these actions impact the Eritrean psyche.

My nit-picky complaint is I wish Wrong would have placed more narrative emphasis on the Eritrean side of things. Eritrean narrative appears on occasion, particularly with the pharmeceutical director and the gourmet chef from the trenches. It is the exception rather than the rule. She discusses in depth Eritrea's first colonial administrator, a WWII battle, an American base, Ethiopian history, the Soviet Union and the roles each respective country played in shaping Eritrea. Anecdotes from the Eritrean side, however, are compartively limited.

Also, the end of the book, the section which discusses the latest war and Eritrea's current political climate, felt hurried.

Overall, this is an excellent background read for anyone hoping to learn more about Eritrea and its wars. It has a few very minor shortcomings, but the book completely achieves its goal of introducing the reader to Eritrean history.

This is in some ways a good and necessary book. It spotlights a nation and a set of problems that most of the world doesn't pay much attention to. But there is a problem. Michela Wrong is too close to the subject and her emotional attachment at times results in the book not being as objective or as good as it might have been. In particular, she seems to have been far too close to Eritrean rebel groups and their leaders.

Eritrea's history isn't about "betrayal". Its about the same problems that most African nations have faced. Rather than face the fact that the problems of Eritrea today are largely self-inflicted wounds, she falls back into blaming colonialism and cold-war politics in really unconvincing ways.

In her coverage of Italian colonial rule, she confuses events in Eritrea with those in Ethiopia. She is also willing to judge Italy to a far higher standard than she applies to the pre or post-independence governments of both countries. She is also more than a little unwilling to understand the role that Italy played in creating Eritrea.

The lowest point in the book is her coverage of Britain's wartime rule of Eritrea. She advances a theory that the british were racist than the italians because their rule produced fewer multiracial children. Somehow she sees superior morality in men who promoted widespread prostitution and produced children which they abandoned. It makes no sense to me. Her logic is also full of wrong assumptions about the number of British in the country and the nature of the occupation.

She also isn't very good about the details of the war. The war in East Africa and in particular the victory at Keren was not a British victory, but a victory of the British Indian Army. Somehow she misses the basic fact that much of the army that conquered and occupied East Africa was Inidian.

The British wanted out of Eritrea and got out of it seven years after the war ended (1952). As they got out, the issue of Ethiopia's historic and economic claims to Eritrea came to the surface. Wrong wishes to blame the united nations for betraying the people of Eritrea. But its not that simple. Eritrea's national identity has no particular good historical basis and arises mostly from the period of Italian rule and the money Italy spent on their colony. Furthermore, its independence results in two weak states in East Africa rather than one. Eritrea and Ethiopia need each other. Economically, independence is a disaster for both.

The war for Eritrea's independence was a pointless waste of lives for everyone involved. Wrong wishes to see it as a justified noble struggle for "freedom", but as events since independence have proved, it was anything but that.

After the overthrow of the Ethiopian government in 1976, horrible things were done in Eritrea and the author gets that part of the story right. Then she goes on to show the bright future Eritrea had before it in 1993 at independence and how everything went so terribly wrong.

But she can't bring herself to hold the right people accountable. She can't bring herself to admit that the rebels she had admired so much once in power turned to be little better than a criminal gang. A gang that destroyed the economy of the country, introduced a dictatorship and then threw the country into a disasterous war with Ethiopia. The world didn't do these things. The world's "betrayal" didn't make these decisions. It was the rebel "freedom fighters" who are responsible.

And thats the fatal flaw in the book. The author wants to give critiques of colonialism and the UN from on high. But the truth is that the country's problems are not a matter of "I didn't do it for you", they are "we did it to ourselves".

The end result of the great "struggle" for Eritrean independence has been an economic disaster for both Ethiopia and Eritrea. The political result is a government running Eritrea that is as bad (or worse) than what the author claims were the "repressive" Ethiopian governments of the 1950s and 1960s. Eritrea's government budget is wasted in preparations for more war with Ethiopia. The country is trapped in a situation where things will never get better. Its not a situation that outsiders should be credited or blamed for.

When the author says things like: "the national character traits forged during a century of colonial and superpower exploitation were about to blow up in Eritrea's face.", she in engaging in massive political self-deception. Her (dated) anti-colonial/anti-imperialism rhetoric leads her to excuse every bad decision made by an African as someone elses fault.

She also goes out of her way to make the American soldiers stationed in Ethiopia in the past look like they were exceptionally bad. Having worked and travelled in Africa, she must know how soldiers behave in most countries. Go to the area around any military base (including those on American soil) and you will find all sorts of unpleasent things going on. I'm not trying to excuse the behavior of anyone, but the selective moral outrage in the book is of little value to anyone.

I wanted to like this book and I want to see the author write more books about Africa. But she needs to put her political ideology to the side and report on Africa as it is. She did a far better job in "In the footsteps of Mr. Kurtz" than she did in this book.

This book attempts to answer the ongoing debate about who is at fault for the social, cultural and most importantly economic suffering of Africa. Michela Wrong's latest book illustrates the problems seen in Eritrea to make some kind of sense of whats going on. The book essentially spends the greater part of the book pointing fingers at former Italian and British colonialists, the UN and the cold war superpowers. She also mentions the failures of Haile Salisse and Mengistu did more bad than good. The point of the book was struck by making the basic point that all those who came into contact with Eritrea were only looking out for their own interest, which seems to be a repeating theme throughout the rest of Africa. The only complaint I have with the book is that it would have been better if the author interviewed more ordinary Eritreans and Ethiopians because there was not much of a voice from the civilian point of view. The book is not meant to answer all the questions about Africa's fate, but rather look at it from a different perspective.

"I didn't do it for you"
Michela Wrong

An excellent addition to the number of recent books on African history.

Eritrea gained independence from Ethiopia in the early nineties, and the two countries fought another war in the late nineties. These conflicts, and the growing authoritarianism of the government of Eritrea, are the recent events covered. But the bulk of the book is a survey of the nineteenth and twentieth century history of Eritrea and neighboring Ethiopia, focusing on Italian colonization, then British occupation, and then the involvement of the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

The self-serving cynicism of Italy, Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union is made abundantly clear, but Wrong is not an anti-Western dogmatist. There is plenty of blame to go around for the Eritreans themselves, and the other countries of Africa, especially Ethiopia, in this case.

And, it is not all about blame. This is not a hopeless lament. Among the images of hope that Wrong describes is the reconstruction, by Eritreans, of an abandoned railroad originally built in the early days of the Italian occupation.

In other words, it is a complex story, with no simple conclusion.

This is clearly the work of a journalist - she likes to present history by telling the stories of interesting people who she has actually met. The frequently flippant tone can be a little grating, but I think that is just Wrong's Britishness - she is serious and uncondescending through-out.

This is a great book. It is well researched and well written. Wrong begins with hope, only to demonstrate how this tiny African nation seems to be facing an impossible task of overcoming conflict and exploitation and establishing a thriving democracy in a part of the word not familiar with such structures. I found myself pulling against all odds for a happier ending, but of course the truth does not provide such an ending. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the effects of the developed world's exploitation of the developing world. It is a clear example of our obligation to others.

I was directed to Michela Wrong's "I Didn't Do It For You" via my recent reading of Adrian Hartley's outstanding memoir "The Zanzibar Chest" (he dedicates the book to Ms. Wrong with a brief "Now it's my turn"). As the offspring of an Italian mother and a British father, Wong is uniquely qualified by heritage (in addition to her obvious journalistic talents) to tell Eritrea's story. We get an expert and detailed (and downright fascinating at times) accounting of this small country's sinuous path through two colonial masters, the rules of Haile Selassie and Mengistu, its machinations with the superpowers during the Cold War (mind-boggling complex because US-funded Ethiopia and Soviet-funded Somalia actually 'dance past each other' and switch sides), the long battle for Independence and - almost incredulously - another war after independence had already been won. If even there was a country that 'punches above its weight', Eritrea is it.

The title of the book is really a great choice. I don't want to give it away, but I'll note that it's a derisive quote uttered by a British soldier and it's not the entire quote. One key word has been left off the end, and it's that word that encapsulates the attitudes that have delivered the short end of the stick to this beleagured country time and time again.

Also worth noting: the 'P.S.' section in this paperback edition is outstanding. There's a great interview with Ms. Wrong and some excellent book selections recommended by both the author and the publisher.

Even in a continent full of doomed revolutions and post-colonial misery, the story of the plucky Eritreans is a fascinating and tragic one. As an experienced world news correspondent on Africa, Michela Wrong has the chops to give us an informative history of this tough and self-sufficient people who endured centuries of colonial exploitation and a 30-year struggle against their Ethiopian overlords, before finally becoming independent in 1993. The author does just that throughout most of the book, starting with a strong examination of the national character and unique cultural traits of the Eritreans, then later ending the book on a melancholy but instructive note as their inspiring struggle for self-determination went sour.

The problem here though is with the middle sections of the book, which devolve into disconnected snippets and vignettes that highlight persons and events of interest but detract from the historical and political narrative. (This is the same problem that afflicts Wrong's other major book, the nearly-masterful Congo study "In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz.") The worst example is a useless tangent in Chapter 10 into stories of debauchery by American servicemen in Eritrea in the 1960s. Also, Wrong has a hard time effectively separating the histories of Eritrea and Ethiopia, and while that's surely difficult with so much historical interaction between the peoples, the Eritreans are missing from large parts of this book that is supposed to be about them.

Fortunately, Michela Wrong finishes strongly with useful examinations of the historical lessons to be learned from the long and still-ongoing struggle of the Eritreans. Based on the book's title, I'm not convinced that the world betrayed Eritrea, but the world certainly ignored that small nation's unique struggle through centuries of historical ignorance and political myopia. The hard-working Eritreans deserve the tribute delivered by Wrong in this book. [~doomsdayer520~]

Wrong provides a readable history of a fascinating country that - as she illustrates in her foreword - many people in the world aren't even aware of. Eritrea (northeast of Ethiopia) was first claimed by the Italians in the late 1800s. Wrong brings us from there up to the present day.

Eritrea's history is scintillating in its own right, from the Italians to the British to brief federation with Ethiopia to incorporation into Ethiopia to...independence. Wrong's account, however, provides insight far beyond Eritrea itself. She deftly illustrates the machinations of the United States and the Soviet Union in Africa during the Cold War. Each superpower in its turn propped up a terrible Ethiopian government (which sought to quell Eritrean rebellion). Africa has many such tales from the Cold War, and this example illustrates the phenomenon well.

Wrong's picture of the disciplined, Spartan Eritrean revolutionaries during the 70s and 80s is inspiring. Africa (and the rest of the world) has seen so many opportunistic warring forces over the years that reading what everyday Eritreans were willing to sacrifice for their dream of independence inspires hope and courage.

Finally, Wrong here contributes yet another chapter to the growing account of nations who have sought help from the United Nations only to find deaf ears (Rwanda being another notable example).

My only complaints are that Wrong occasionally omits what seems like a key episode and includes some gratuitous detail. For example, she glosses over how one independence movement (the EPLF) triumphed over the other major independence movement (the ELF) but includes extensive detail on the bawdy activities of U.S. soldiers stationed in Eritrea during the Vietnam War. Also, the "journalistic" tone sometimes gets tired, with detailed physical descriptions of each and every new setting and person.

Those minor critiques aside, Wrong effectively makes her case that Eritrea's story has something to teach the rest of the world. Hopefully we'll learn from it.