Asmara, Eritrea: Beneath the paving stones

Beneath the paving stones, the beach — Situationist slogan, Paris student revolt, May-July 1968

1. The death and endless life of colonialism

Asmara, capital city of Eritrea, 2015.

The dateline is a reluctant concession to the tropes of journalism. Time, more than one Asmarino tells me, means nothing in Eritrea.

2. The art of the car crash

During a thunderstorm on a recent Thursday afternoon, a man and his bicycle are crushed beneath the wheel of an ancient lorry. The cyclist’s body, removed just minutes before we arrive, leaves a ghostly smear in the grit. Twenty yards away, there is a second accident: two cars melded into a single heap of metal.

We are on the outskirts of colonial Asmara, heading into the old 'native' neighbourhoods, where smooth boulevards give way to roads of blood-red mud.

Our destination is a house belonging to a man named Daniel. By the time we arrive, his wife has already lit the coals for the coffee ceremony.

There are almost no traditional coffee shops in Asmara; restaurants are instead outfitted with gleaming Gaggio espresso machines, often inoperable because of frequent power outages. Given that the coal braziers on which traditional coffee is brewed are by nature 'off-grid', the old method would seem preferable to the new.

When I share this observation with Daniel, he shrugs inscrutably. The Italians colonised Eritrea in 1890. The United Nations and the Big Western Powers betrayed Eritrea in the early 1950s, allowing Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia to annex (read: colonise) the country under the guise of a federation.

Which is the old method, his gesture seems to ask? Which is the new?

3. Winged Victory of Samothrace

On 15 October, 1908, the Egyptian-born Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, swerved his Fiat in order to avoid a cyclist, and ended up in a ditch. Upside-down, leaking fuel, he invented Futurism:

We want to sing about the love of danger, about the use of energy and recklessness as a common, daily practice. Courage, boldness and rebellion will be the essential elements of our poetry.

Two Asmarinos stare with resignation at the broken cars steaming in the afternoon rain. Marinetti considered just such a situation more beautiful a work of art than the Winged Victory of Samothrace, the greatest extant masterpiece of the Hellenic era, and one of the finest sculptures ever carved by human hands.

The drivers do not appear to share his outlook.

4. Speed

There is much of Marinetti’s ethos in the colonial-era architecture in the centre of Asmara. There is probably no city on Earth with so many examples of rationalist, modernist and Futurist architecture. But Marinetti’s ethos has not weathered well. Quite the opposite: here, the buildings race backwards into a future belonging to the past.

Isn’t this is what the Surrealists tried to magic: a hole in the space/time continuum, a portal between the waking world and a dreamscape?

Asmara no longer belongs to the Futurists. It is the capital of Surrealism — a melted clock hanging from the bough of a dead tree.

5. Tinker, tailor

The photographs are carefully removed from an old folio, and placed on wax paper before me. They depict President Isaias Afwerki smiling amid a gaggle of his subjects.

The year is 1994, and Afwerki is watching a car race. The president is a tall man. He smiles in one photo, and laughs in second. He does not stand in front of the crowd, but behind it.

As far as presidents-for-life go, Afwerki doesn’t do grand gestures. There are no billboard-sized portraits in Asmara celebrating his achievements. He doesn’t give fiery speeches in front of the military on Independence Day. There are no stadiums named in his honour.

This doesn’t render him invisible. On the contrary, his absence registers as a vast, indomitable presence — it allows those who cannot see him to conjure him, to build him.

He reminds us that the strength of the powerful is derived from the imagination of the powerless. His information ministry inhabits the highest point in town, staring down at the city, ceaselessly watching.

6. Soldier, spy

The photos of Afwerki at the car race belong to a man named Giovanni Mazzola. They are among the greatest treasures stored in his spotless tailor shop nearby the great St Mary’s Catholic Cathedral on Harnet Avenue (once called Viale Mussolini).

Mazzola is the son of an Eritrean mother and an Italian father and an insabbiati, “one who has been immersed in the sand”, as the Italians put it. Mazzola and his family were left to fend for themselves when his father fled at the end of the Italian era. By day he learned how to be a tailor, by night a bicycle racer.

Mazzola, in his mid-70s, is very much on the ball. He still crafts suits by hand, using imported British linen. His store, full of bike and car race memorabilia, functions as a reliquary for Eritrean velocity.

I ask Mazzola if Afwerki enjoyed the race.

“Very much,” he says, smiling. “Everyone enjoys such things here.”

Afwerki. Man of the People.

7. Centuries

Unlike many poor countries, the poverty in Eritrea doesn’t hit you in the face, but creep up on you — an insidious scourge that peeks out from behind all the rotting modernism. By your third day in Asmara, you can’t help but have noticed how many thin, frail-looking kids are pushing delivery bikes laden with jerry cans, building material, cases of Coke. Outside the city, outside the bars where the 'middle class' drive what exists of the consumer economy in the bars, restaurants, and internet cafes, any pretext of a functional state disappears.

The poverty is brutal, medieval.

Indeed, it’s tempting to say that the people living on the Massawa Road or in the countryside live in the past, and that the beAfro-ed hipsters in Asmara dwell in the present. But that would be getting it backwards. The Asmarinos are the residents of a Gilded Age belonging to a distant past. The rangy kids on bikes, and their shoeless counterparts in the mountains, are the true representatives of the 21^st century.

8. From Pyongyang to Havana

Eritrea is often described as the North Korea of Africa, but this is a lazy analogy. Afwerki’s country has almost nothing in common with the successive regimes that have kept Pyongyang preserved in formaldehyde, except perhaps an appreciation for secrecy, insularity, silence, and military detention.

There is no bomb here, no sabre rattling at the Great Satan and his Western handmaidens. No, Eritrea does not resemble North Korea.

It resembles Cuba 15 years ago.

This is the sort of country in which every page in every menu bears an official stamp and signature; where the only brand of beer is unlabelled; where there are no billboards, no advertisements, no obvious concessions to commerce.

Like Cuba before the Americans cancelled the embargo, everyone in Eritrea is waiting.

This waiting results in an untethering from time. When the Jurassic-Age internet finally downloads a Twitter page, the site reveals itself to be an obscenity, an affront to the pace of life here.

Does this make Eritreans happier, better adjusted? I have no idea. Some insist that it does. Others laugh off the question. Although I suspect that time has been transformed into the wrong type of narcotic — a sleeping pill that does nothing to bring sleep.

Havana was once the same way. Now, old neon is making way for golden arches.

9. Exodus

Three thousand Eritreans flee the country every month, most into scorching Sudan, and then out north, across (or into) the sea. Most of them, if we are to believe the news reports, are escaping compulsory military service, which in some cases has dragged on for decades. The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) calculates that as of December 2014, there were 416,857 Eritreans on the hop — almost ten percent of the country’s 4.5-million citizens.

Everyone is waiting, but almost half a million have chosen to wait somewhere else.

10. Radio City

Eritrea’s colonial-era treasure cannot be seen, nor can it be touched; it cannot be pumped, or mined, or sold on a bourse in Belgium.

Up here on the Hamasien plateau, 2,400m above sea level, out of reach of the tropical storms that rage along the Red Sea littoral, it became clear to American spooks during World War II that Asmara was probably the best place on the planet from which to receive and transmit radio signals. A natural phenomenon called 'ducting' sends waves bouncing off the troposphere and down through invisible tubes to hit the plateau thousands of miles from their source.

The Americans built a facility here, and called it Kagnew Base. It was so strategically important during the Cold War that there was almost nothing Washington wouldn’t do to keep Eritrea’s Ethiopian masters in the fold. “No other military base in black Africa would ever be deemed as vital to American national security,” Michella Wrong writes in I Didn’t Do It For You: How The World Used and Abused a Small African Nation.

You can likely guess how this story ends. Satellites were launched into space, Kagnew was mothballed, the Derg junta overthrew Selassie, the Americans lost Ethiopia, the Soviets bought the Derg, the Soviets lost the plot, Ethiopia lost Eritrea. And in 1991, Independence was declared. Kagnew is now Den Den, a low-income housing compound near the centre of town.

The radio waves are still around, bouncing off the troposphere worthlessly. The whole world yammering away incessantly, while Eritrea pretends to be distant.

11. Beneath the paving stones

Beneath the Parisian paving stones, insisted the Situationalists, lay the beach. Underneath the city, something else. Those early psychogeographers understood that planned urban space functioned much as a prison did — a fact that was especially true in Asmara’s case, considering a number of the town’s planners were actual Fascists.

Asmara’s distinct character is derived from erasure — the wiping away of the old 'native' neighbourhoods in order to build the new. The centre of town was during colonial times called the campo cintato, the closed area, off-limits to Eritreans after work hours “for reasons of public order and hygiene”,

When Afwerki disappears and the economy liberalises, will it matter to Asmarinos that the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation is scrambling to preserve the city as a living museum? Or will the locals wipe the colonial structures away, in order to forget the forgetting?

Beneath the paving stones, more paving stones.

12. Walls

“Sadly, the oppression that marks so much of Asmara’s recent history has provided a negative impact on the city, which needs to be redressed. During the years of the Derg regime, people retreated into their homes and fortified their properties with high perimeter walls, often topped with barbed wire of broken glass. Many of these still exist today, though many have also been replaced by shrubs and bushes such as bougainvillea—a more pleasant solution in providing a barrier between public and private property.” — Asmara: A Guide to the Built Environment.

13. Reel

The effect of leaving one of Asmara's cinema palaces and emerging onto the rain-slick streets. Every afternoon in August, the storms come in from the mountains. The rain is often accompanied by a lightning show — huge cracks of sky-splitting electricity leaving garish, acid-trip burns on the retina.

One evening, I stand out on my balcony, it's going to be a long time before the storm peters out.

DM