Customer Reviews

Eritrea: Even the Stones Are Burning

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I came new to this subject but became rivetted by Pateman's engaged and engaging style. He writes in an easily, understandable but profound way about one of the most significant struggles for nationhood in the XX century. He covers many centuries of history but convinces me that Eritrea is indeed a special place. An enduring sense of nationhood developed during the liberation struggle a sense which has deepened during the cowardly Ethiopian attacks of the last few months. Pateman has helped me understand why the Eritreans have survived and why thay may become very important actors in Africa in the next century.

Pateman says in his intro that Eritreans almost universally like his book, and it's easy to see why. This is a highly uncritical, almost cartoonish look at the Ethiopian-Eritrean conflict, in which the Eritreans are always brave and enlightened, the Ethiopians cowardly and villainous. Eritrea is "an oasis of peace and energy... a place of hope for all fair-minded men and women." Why, it's practically the Switzerland of east Africa. It's particularly irritating that Pateman chides Western academics for uncritically supporting Ethiopia throughout the conflict, then describes Eritrea in the same propagandistic terms. Pateman is clearly too close to his subject to evaluate it objectively. For a more sophisticated and nuanced look at this topic, check out Robert Kaplan's "Surrender or Starve".

For a definitive summary of Eritrean history and social knowledge, you can't ask for much more than this magnum opus from Pateman. Eritrea's 30-year struggle for independence from Ethiopia, finally achieved in 1993, is a remarkable story which deserves much more attention from the outside world, and Pateman is just the sympathetic and personally knowledgeable expert to tell the story. While this book is a treasure trove of all sorts of useful information on all aspects of Eritrea, it is mostly written as a never-ending list with few overall insights or analysis. The early parts of the book show some unprofessional sour grapes toward other writers on the subject, and for some reason Chapter 1 devolves into a useless dissertation on Marxist theories of nationalism which is straight from disconnected professor-land. Most importantly, history has made this book's ongoing usefulness a shaky proposition. The most immense event imaginable for Eritrea - their independence - happened right after this book's first edition, making much of it outdated. This spectacular historical development should have encouraged a significant re-write, or even an entire new book, from this admitted expert authority on the country (though a lack of resources would be forgivable). Thus, Pateman's quick and sketchy epilogue on post-independence developments in this second edition does not do full justice to the remarkable story of Eritrea and its hardworking people. [~doomsdayer520~]