I belong to a generation whose political awareness took shape in post-independence Eritrea, under a state that gave us little say over our own lives. The questions that shaped that awareness were immediate: Could I speak freely? Could I choose my work? Could I plan a future? What could I do if an official abused his authority?

These questions began with the power exercised over me. I did not initially understand them through the relationship between Christians and Muslims, highlanders and lowlanders, or Hamasien, Seraye, and Akele Guzai. I knew those identities existed. They were not the framework through which I understood what was wrong with Eritrea.

When I later encountered Eritrean political debate outside the country, I found a conversation in which those categories often carried considerable explanatory weight. Historical grievances, communal anxieties, and the legacies of earlier political struggles supplied a background that established participants seemed to know almost instinctively. I had to learn it.

That encounter is the starting point of this essay. I want to examine the distance between the political experience I brought into the discussion and the inherited terms through which that experience was often made intelligible. I also want to ask what happens when those terms become so familiar that we stop examining their influence on the people entering the conversation.

The experience I brought

My political formation took place under the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ). The history I learned was selective, public discussion was constrained, and much that might have helped me understand other Eritreans’ experiences remained inaccessible.

This matters when describing what was unfamiliar to me. Silence under dictatorship cannot establish the absence of grievance. Someone from another community, or even another household, may have experienced forms of exclusion that I failed to recognize. I cannot make my upbringing representative of an entire generation.

Nevertheless, that upbringing produced a political experience of its own.

At Sawa, I encountered people from different parts of the country. I heard occasional complaints about favoritism toward people from particular localities. Regional attachments were present, as were religious and cultural differences. But these did not become the central explanation through which I understood our predicament. What most directly confronted me was an authority that could determine the course of our lives without answering to us.

I would not claim that we had already developed a coherent philosophy of citizenship. We had not necessarily worked out the institutions or principles a different Eritrea would require. But our questions concerned the lives we could lead, the decisions we could make, and the power we could not challenge.

Looking back, I understand those questions as claims to citizenship. They arose from our experience before we had acquired the historical vocabulary through which much opposition politics was discussed.

That experience should be able to contribute something to the discussion. It should also be capable of questioning its assumptions.

Entering a conversation already underway

The unfamiliarity I felt abroad was not simply a lack of information. It was an encounter with a different way of organizing political meaning.

In conversations about Christian and Muslim relations, highland and lowland grievances, or the legacies of Jebha and Shaabiya, particular histories were often doing explanatory work before the immediate question had been examined. Established participants could move through those references with an ease that newcomers lacked. They knew what a term implied, which anxieties lay behind it, and which earlier dispute a present argument recalled.

There is nothing inherently wrong with a conversation having a history. Nor am I suggesting that Awate, or Eritrean public debate generally, prohibits people from speaking without a communal affiliation. People plainly do contribute across these categories.

My concern is about the background understanding that a discussion takes for granted.

A newcomer can be entirely free to speak while still encountering a settled expectation about what an informed interpretation should recognize. Their experience is heard, but the established framework supplies its deeper meaning. If their account does not follow that framework, the difference may be understood mainly as something they have yet to learn.

Sometimes that judgment is justified. We all arrive with gaps in our knowledge. But it can also prevent a different possibility from receiving adequate consideration: perhaps the newcomer’s experience raises a question about the framework itself.

This is the sense in which I am concerned about gatekeeping. It operates through the assumptions that give an argument weight and make an interpretation appear politically mature. No one needs to demand an affiliation. Familiarity with an inherited account can become the unspoken measure of seriousness.

What newcomers learn to see

I became more conscious of this process when I noticed changes in the political language of people I had known in Eritrea.

Some friends began to explain the country primarily through regional, religious, or ethnic divisions that had occupied little space in our earlier conversations. In some cases, I saw an attraction to Agazianism. I was struck by how differently people with backgrounds similar to mine had come to interpret our experience.

These observations cannot establish a general pattern, much less explain every individual’s development. People may have learned about genuine injuries that had been concealed from them. Some may have found language for experiences they previously struggled to express.

But learning about an injury and adopting a comprehensive political interpretation are distinguishable developments. Someone can acquire historical knowledge while also being persuaded that a particular identity provides the most meaningful account of who they are, what happened to them, and where their political interests lie.

The discourse they encounter helps shape that interpretation.

Those who write, organize, and sustain our political platforms therefore exercise an influence that extends beyond the positions they explicitly advocate. They help establish which questions recur, which histories appear indispensable, and which explanations newcomers learn to regard as fundamental. These are the people I mean when I refer to political elites. I include myself to the extent that my writing participates in this work.

Their influence does not require manipulation or bad faith. A framework can be transmitted precisely because its established users find it persuasive and necessary.

The question is whether it remains open to revision when a new experience enters the discussion, or whether that experience is mainly absorbed into the existing account.

If younger participants eventually adopt the familiar categories, we should not automatically assume that this proves those categories were always the underlying truth of their lives. Their adoption may also tell us something about the explanations available to them and the authority those explanations possess.

The question this framework raises for me

My unease becomes clearest when discussions of communal grievance turn toward political protection.

I encounter the argument that Muslims, Christians, or particular ethnic communities must have assured representation because they cannot otherwise feel safe within a future political arrangement. From within a history of exclusion or persecution, the reasoning is understandable. People want protection against a repetition of what they fear.

Yet when I approach this argument from my own experience of post-independence Eritrea, a different question presses itself upon me.

The problem that shaped my political awareness was the inability to challenge those who exercised power over my life. How would the presence of someone from my community resolve that problem?

This was the concern behind my earlier question about why we must be represented by someone from our group to be safe. I was questioning the conception of power underlying the proposed protection.

If our safety depends on having someone of our own inside the governing arrangement, we appear to be treating power as something whose danger is managed primarily through the identity of its holders. We seek a share in its exercise because we cannot trust what it might do without us.

I describe this as a survivalist conception of power. Its immediate concern is securing a protector within an arrangement understood to be threatening.

That response may be rational under conditions of insecurity. My concern is what happens when it becomes the organizing principle of the political future we propose. It can leave us negotiating over who occupies power without sufficiently changing the relationship between power and the person subject to it.

A representative from my community might defend my interests. They might also disregard them, bargain them away, or abuse their position. If I cannot challenge their decisions or obtain a remedy against them, my political vulnerability remains.

From the experience I bring, the central question is therefore how a person acquires enforceable claims against authority, including authority exercised by someone considered their own.

This is where my post-independence perspective meets, and questions, the inherited discussion. The answer I seek concerns the limits of power. The answer I sometimes encounter concerns the communal composition of those exercising it.

Those answers can overlap. They are not interchangeable.

What changes when the citizen comes into view

This distinction does not make communal grievances unreal. It changes what we require of a proposed solution.

If a community has experienced religious discrimination, exclusion from education, dispossession, or restrictions on its language, those injuries must be examined in their particular form. An appeal to national unity or abstract equality cannot dispose of them.

But neither can the presence of a communal representative, by itself, establish that they have been addressed.

We still need to know what practice will change, what protection will become enforceable, and how affected people will challenge failures. We also need to know whether the remedy protects those who disagree with the people claiming to represent them.

Consider a demand for education in a community’s language. Addressing it requires decisions about provision, funding, teachers, and participation in school governance. It also requires room for parents and teachers to question those decisions. A political seat may help advance the demand, but it does not substitute for the arrangements through which people actually exercise the right.

A citizen-based approach can therefore recognize shared injuries and support collective remedies. Its essential commitment is that people retain political standing and rights independently of their relationship with a communal leadership.

This is the contribution I want my experience to make. Having lived under an authority I could not hold accountable, I am reluctant to locate my future safety in the presumed loyalty of another authority. I want to know what happens when that loyalty fails.

The answer must reach the person whose life is at stake.

Why the inherited framework persists

Many participants in our political debate would agree that equal citizenship is the eventual goal. They might also agree that shared identity cannot guarantee accountable government.

The disagreement concerns the political work we believe must come first.

One view holds that communal fears and historical grievances must be settled before a civic order can become credible. There is force in that argument. People who have been excluded have reasons to distrust assurances that everyone will henceforth be treated equally.

But a difficulty appears when the framework used to prepare for citizenship continually reinforces communal identity as the primary basis of political security.

New participants learn that understanding Eritrea requires beginning with these divisions. They then reproduce the same terms, helping preserve the framework’s authority. Citizenship remains the agreed destination, while the discussion that is supposed to lead toward it keeps returning to the categories through which people are expected to seek protection.

This is the contradiction I want us to examine.

It cannot be resolved by declaring grievances obsolete. It requires showing how the discussion moves from an injury to an accountable remedy, and how that remedy strengthens people’s ability to act without permanent dependence on communal intermediaries.

Otherwise, we may mistake the continued prominence of a category in political discourse for proof that it must remain the indispensable basis of political organization.

The discourse itself may be contributing to that prominence.

The authority of historical continuity

The historical centeredness of Eritrean politics can reinforce this process.

When the present is understood chiefly as the continuation of earlier struggles, the people most familiar with those struggles understandably acquire interpretive authority. They can situate events within a longer account and explain connections others miss.

That knowledge is valuable. The difficulty begins when the continuity of the account becomes so persuasive that a different experience appears mainly incomplete.

A person formed after independence may approach the state through compulsory service, constrained choices, or the absence of recourse against officials. Those concerns have historical causes. But understanding their causes does not require assuming that their political meaning is exhausted by earlier organizational conflicts or communal alignments.

History can explain how an institution emerged while leaving open what people living under it now make of their situation.

I worry that our discourse sometimes gives too little space to that distinction. Younger participants are expected to catch up with an established conversation, while the conversation faces less pressure to reconsider its starting points in light of their experience.

This may place a burden on participation even where everyone is formally welcome. A newcomer must acquire the background, understand the references, and anticipate the historical implications of their language before feeling able to make an ordinary political claim with confidence.

I cannot say how much this explains my generation’s participation in public debate. But I recognize the burden, and I think it deserves examination.

Learning from those who came before us should make our judgment better informed. It should also leave room for us to change the conversation.

A voice that can change the conversation

I am offering neither a generational innocence nor a claim that unfamiliar grievances are unimportant. My experience was limited, and some of what I did not understand reflected the restrictions under which I grew up.

But that experience also brought a question into focus: what standing does a person have against those who exercise power over them?

I want that question to help organize our politics now. It should shape how we interpret grievances, evaluate representation, and imagine the institutions of a future Eritrea.

The challenge for those of us who contribute to public discussion is to let unfamiliar perspectives do more than supply new examples for established arguments. We must allow them to expose assumptions, revise priorities, and sometimes change the account through which we understand the problem.

A younger Eritrean may learn why a communal fear persists and still question the political arrangement proposed in response. They may understand the history of Jebha and Shaabiya without making that division the starting point of their own political judgment. They may recognize a collective injury while insisting that its remedy must protect each person’s capacity to disagree.

These positions can express an informed political perspective of their own.

The conversation I hope for would make such contributions ordinary. It would treat historical understanding as a resource for judgment, examine representation through the rights it secures, and ask whether our explanations remain adequate to the lives they claim to describe.

I bring the experience of having lived under power I could not challenge. I want to help build a politics in which no one’s safety depends on the goodwill of a protector, and no generation’s experience arrives with its meaning already decided.

A voice of our own must be able to change the conversation it enters.