Tag: Eritrean society
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The Elephant in the Room
I. The Meteor We Pretend Fell From the Sky There is a comforting story circulating in Eritrean political discourse – a story repeated so often, and with such ritualistic conviction, that it has become less an argument than a reflex. It tells us that the dictatorship is an alien force, a meteor that crashed into
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The Day After: Preparing Eritrea for its Most Dangerous Transition
There comes a moment in the life of every nation when denial becomes a luxury it can no longer afford. Eritrea is approaching such a moment. Tick‑tock. The eventual death of President Isaias Afwerki—whether tomorrow or years from now—is not a political prediction but an unavoidable biological certainty. What follows will determine whether Eritrea survives
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OUR NATIONAL UNITY: Why Eritrea’s Political Imagination Fails Reality
I. The Illusion We Keep Rehearsing In recent weeks, I have been reading a series of essays on awate.com – thoughtful pieces by Semere Habtemariam and Saleh Ghadi, attempting to stitch together a moral vision for Eritrea’s political future. They speak of unity, sacrifice, institutional maturity, historical awareness, and the enduring hope that principled action
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The Normalization of Self-Censorship in Eritrea
When self-censorship becomes pervasive, a society forfeits more than the right to open dissent; it forfeits the very conditions that make common knowledge possible – the shared awareness of what others know, think, and believe. In such an atmosphere, individuals can no longer reliably gauge the convictions of their peers or distinguish private doubt from
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The Three-Nakfa Gaze: When Poverty Is Put on Display
“Once deprivation is renamed ‘culture,’ it becomes protected from criticism. What appears as heritage can quietly function as camouflage, transforming material constraint into identity and turning urgency for change into an act that looks like disrespect. When citizens encounter one another primarily as curated displays, the relationship shifts from shared political belonging to observation, and…
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Nepal: A Lesson for the PFDJ and the Youth
Every era popularizes certain names—mainly names of rulers and prominent people of the time. Since the nineteen-forties and fifties, the name of a famous person that was often repeated in newspapers and radio bulletins has become popular; parents adopt the name for their babies. My aunt, (who is my cousin, but I called her aunt
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A Shepherd, A Tiger Cub, and A Village
A shepherd boy, bored while tending his goats on the edge of a village, cried, “HELP! A tiger is attacking me!” The villagers rushed, swords in hand, to save him—only to be mocked when he admitted it was a joke. Angrily, they returned home. He repeated this again and again. But the fourth time, when