I recently came across a song by Meron Estifanos, freshly uploaded to YouTube and already making its way through Eritrean diaspora timelines with the usual warm momentum. A few thousand views. Comments full of pride. People tagging each other. I watched it the way one watches something familiar, half-present, until the chorus stopped me.
ኣይበል ኣይበል፥ ኣብ ጸገምኪ ደው ዘይብል
ኣይበል ኣይበል፥ ኤርትራዊ’የ ኣይበል
Let him not say, let him not say, he who does not stand with you in your difficulty.
Let him not say, let him not say, that he is Eritrean.
I stayed with those lines longer than I usually would. Not because they were new, but because they were so ordinary. That ordinariness is the problem. The song is not exceptional. It belongs to a much older Eritrean political grammar. Open any playlist of nationalist Eritrean songs from the last thirty-five years and you will hear the same structure again and again. The melody changes. The verdict does not.
There is a correct way to be Eritrean, and those who fail the test may not use the name.
Here are the fuller lyrics that stopped me:
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ዋላ ሽግር ይኮመር፥ ቅድም ሃገር
ዋላ ዝኾነ ይኹን
ቅድም ሃገር
ይጽናሕ ናይ ኩራ ነገር
ደሓር ዝምከር
ቅድም ሃገር ዩ ሃገር
ንሃገር ስመር
ኣይበል ኣይበል፥ ኣብ ጸገምኪ ደው ዘይብል
ኣይበል ኣይበል፥ ኤርትራዊ’የ ኣይበል
ኣይበል ኣይበል፥ ኣብ ሓጊስኪ ዘይጽንብል
ኣይበል ኣይበል፥ ኤሪትራዊ’የ ኣይበል
Even if hardship piles up, country first. Whatever happens, country first. Let anger wait; it can be discussed later. Country first, always country. Unite for the country.
Let him not say, let him not say, he who does not stand with you in your difficulty. Let him not say, let him not say, that he is Eritrean. Let him not say, let him not say, he who does not celebrate in your joy. Let him not say, let him not say, that he is Eritrean.
Read that again slowly. Notice the kind of claim being made. The song is not saying that someone has failed a duty. It is not saying that someone has acted irresponsibly. It is not saying that someone has broken a law. Those would be civic or legal claims, and they could be argued over. What the song does is more dangerous. It turns conduct into identity. It says that if you do not stand, celebrate, endure, or comply in the approved way, you may not call yourself Eritrean.
This is not merely patriotic excess. It is civic vulgarity.
By civic vulgarity, I do not mean vulgarity in the sense of bad manners. I mean a crude and immature understanding of political life. A mature civic culture knows how to distinguish between a citizen’s legal status, moral conduct, political opinion, and civic responsibility. A vulgar civic culture collapses all of these into one question: are you with us or against us?
That is the grammar we have inherited. And that is the grammar the Eritrean government has cultivated.
This is my central claim: the Eritrean government has not only damaged our political life through repression, censorship, imprisonment, indefinite national service, and the absence of constitutional rule. It has also damaged our political consciousness. It has trained people to think about politics through loyalty rather than law, belonging rather than citizenship, and identity rather than argument.
That damage may outlast prisons. It may outlast the current political order. Because institutions can be rebuilt more quickly than civic habits. A constitution can be written. Ministries can be reorganized. Laws can be revised. But a people trained for decades to treat disagreement as betrayal cannot suddenly become a civic public simply because power changes hands.
This is why nationalist songs matter. They are not just entertainment. In Eritrean political culture, songs educate. Songs carry memory. Songs shape feeling. Songs tell people what to admire, what to fear, whom to honor, and whom to suspect. They do not merely reflect our civic grammar. They reproduce it.
And the grammar being reproduced is childish.
A child’s moral world is often organized around belonging and exclusion: you are my friend or you are not my friend. You are with me or against me. You are inside or outside. Civic maturity requires a more difficult language. It requires the ability to say: you are wrong, but you still belong. You broke the law, but you remain a citizen. You oppose me, but you still have standing in the political community. You failed in your duty, but your identity is not mine to revoke.
This is the language Eritrean political culture has not learned.
Eritreanness, at the civic level, is not a reward for obedience. It is not a title granted to those who celebrate correctly, suffer quietly, or support the government loudly enough. A person does not stop being Eritrean because he criticizes the state. He does not stop being Eritrean because he leaves the country. He does not stop being Eritrean because he refuses a political ritual. He does not stop being Eritrean because he fails, disobeys, disappoints, or dissents.
Depending on what he does, he may be accused of breaking a law. He may be called irresponsible. He may be criticized morally or politically. Those arguments can be made. But they must remain arguments about conduct, not rulings on belonging.
This distinction is not a technicality. It is the foundation of civic life.
A state has laws. A loyalty club has conditions of belonging. In a state, a citizen can be wrong, unlawful, angry, dissenting, or irresponsible and still remain a citizen. In a loyalty club, belonging is the prize one wins through compliance and loses through disobedience. The tragedy is that Eritrea, supposedly a state, has often been governed and narrated as if it were a loyalty club.
And here the government’s contradiction becomes very clear.
The Eritrean government already claims enormous legal power. It can make acts illegal. It can punish border crossing. It can punish refusal of national service. It can punish dissent. We can argue about whether those laws are just or unjust, whether the punishments are lawful or unlawful, whether the entire system is legitimate or illegitimate. But at least those are legal and political debates.
What the government does through propaganda, and what many nationalist songs help normalize, is something additional. It does not stop at saying, “This is illegal.” It encourages the public to say, “You are not Eritrean.”
That is the added crime against civic consciousness.
When a government can already criminalize behavior, why must it also attack belonging? Why is it not enough to say that someone violated the law? Why must the person’s Eritreanness also be put on trial?
The answer is that authoritarian power is rarely satisfied with controlling action alone. It wants to control the categories through which people understand themselves. A citizen who thinks in legal and civic terms asks: Is this law just? What are my rights? What are my obligations? What does the state owe me? What do I owe others? But a citizen trained in the grammar of loyalty asks a much smaller and more fearful question: Am I Eritrean enough?
That question is politically devastating.
Once citizens are trained to ask whether they are Eritrean enough, the state no longer has to defend every policy. It only has to make criticism feel like betrayal. It only has to make hesitation feel shameful. It only has to make silence appear safer than thought. The burden moves from the government to the citizen. Instead of the state justifying its authority, the citizen must constantly justify his belonging.
This is how civic life is hollowed out.
The armed struggle narrative has made this worse. Eritrea was born through war, and war produces a powerful but dangerous moral language. In war, unity matters. Discipline matters. Sacrifice matters. Betrayal can be fatal. The grammar of the armed struggle was built around survival, sacrifice, secrecy, obedience, and loyalty. That grammar helped a liberation movement endure. But a grammar that may serve a military campaign can deform a civic society.
The campaign ended in 1991. The grammar did not.
Thirty-five years into independence, we still speak to each other as if we are in the trenches. We still treat political disagreement as betrayal. We still treat sacrifice as the highest form of citizenship. We still treat criticism as contamination. We still reach for the same ultimate weapon: you are not truly Eritrean.
This is one of my deepest indictments of the government. It failed to help Eritrea transition from a liberation movement into a civic state. Instead of building a legal and civic language appropriate for a post-independence society, it kept the emotional grammar of struggle alive because that grammar served its power. A citizenry is difficult to rule. A permanently mobilized people is easier to command.
So we remained mobilized. We remained suspicious. We remained trapped in the moral vocabulary of war.
That is why we cannot communicate across political divides. A government supporter and a government critic often cannot begin a real conversation because the disagreement is already poisoned before it begins. The supporter sees criticism as betrayal. The critic sees support as moral blindness or complicity. Each side questions the other’s Eritreanness. Each side reaches for exclusion. Each side uses the only grammar it has inherited.
But no civic conversation can begin unless both sides recognize one another as belonging to the same political community.
This does not mean all positions are equal. It does not mean all actions are defensible. It does not mean we should avoid judgment. A person can be wrong. A person can be morally compromised. A person can defend injustice. A person can betray democratic principles. But even then, the argument must remain political. The moment we turn disagreement into a question of who is allowed to be Eritrean, we destroy the ground on which politics becomes possible.
This is the mess in our civic grammar.
And because the mess is grammatical, it appears everywhere. It appears in songs. It appears in Facebook comments. It appears in government speeches. It appears in opposition rhetoric. It appears in diaspora festivals. It appears in family conversations. We have inherited a language that does not know how to distinguish between the country, the state, the government, the people, the ruling party, the martyrs, the military, and the citizen. Everything collapses into “Hager.” Everything becomes “country first.” And once everything is called country, nothing can be questioned without appearing anti-country.
“ቅድም ሃገር.” Country first.
The phrase sounds noble. Sometimes it can be noble. But in our political culture, it often functions as a command to postpone thought. Let anger wait. Let criticism wait. Let grievance wait. Let justice wait. Let rights wait. Let accountability wait. The country comes first.
But who is the country?
Is the country the government? Is it the party? Is it the army? Is it the martyrs? Is it the territory? Is it the people? Is it the citizens who left? Is it the mothers who waited? Is it the prisoners? Is it the youth crossing borders? Is it the families silenced by fear?
A mature civic culture must be able to ask these questions. A vulgar civic culture treats the questions themselves as betrayal.
This is why the line “Do not say I am Eritrean” is so dangerous. It does not simply demand loyalty. It claims the authority to distribute belonging. It gives the singer, the listener, the government, or the crowd permission to decide who may stand inside the national name and who must be expelled from it.
That permission is poisonous.
A country is not strengthened when its people are made to compete over who is more entitled to belong. A nation is not built by turning citizenship into a test. A people cannot mature politically if every disagreement threatens to become an identity trial.
The government should have corrected this. That is what a serious state would do. A serious state would educate citizens into civic maturity. It would teach the distinction between government and country, law and loyalty, criticism and betrayal, citizenship and obedience. It would understand that the public must learn how to disagree without destroying the shared ground of belonging.
Instead, the Eritrean government has benefited from the confusion. It has used the language of sacrifice to avoid accountability, the language of unity to suppress pluralism, and the language of national survival to postpone the development of a civic public. It has allowed the country to remain emotionally organized around war because war grammar makes obedience feel patriotic.
This is why the damage is so deep.
A people can overthrow a government and still keep its grammar. A people can change flags, offices, ministers, and laws while continuing to treat disagreement as betrayal. A people can enter a post-authoritarian era with authoritarian reflexes still alive inside its language. That is the danger before us.
If we do not confront this civic vulgarity now, we may carry it into whatever comes next.
We may build new institutions with old instincts.
We may speak of democracy while still asking who is a real Eritrean.
We may speak of justice while still denying standing to those we dislike.
We may speak of national healing while still using belonging as a weapon.
That is why this is not a small matter of lyrics. It is about the kind of political people we are becoming.
The song says: do not say you are Eritrean if you do not stand with the country in hardship or celebrate with it in joy.
I say: be careful.
A country that must deny the name of its own citizens in order to demand loyalty has already weakened the meaning of citizenship. A government that cannot distinguish between law and belonging has already failed in its civic duty. And a public that applauds every identity verdict because it arrives wrapped in melody has already been trained away from politics and toward obedience.
Eritrea does not need more songs that tell us who deserves to belong.
It needs a civic language mature enough to say that we all belong, and precisely because we belong, we must argue seriously about law, power, justice, duty, memory, and the future.
Until we learn that language, we will continue singing about unity while rehearsing exclusion.
We will continue saying “country first” while postponing the very civic maturity without which no country can truly be built.
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