PART I — The Birth and Death of the Tegadalai: From Moral Agency to Organizational Panic
Eritrea’s liberation struggle is often remembered through the heroism of its fighters, but beneath the familiar narratives lies a deeper moral history—one shaped first by voluntary sacrifice, communal ethics, and later by organizational desperation. This first part traces the rise of the tegadalai as a moral category and the gradual erosion of that ethos as coercion seeped into the ghedli. What emerged was Dqalaghedli—a hybrid formation of voluntary and coerced fighters, a moral compromise born of necessity, lack of unity, lack of foresight, and misguided power struggle.
The Birth and Death of the Tegadalai
Eritrean history has produced many kinds of fighters: the farmer‑warriors and pastoralist‑warriors who rallied behind kings and chiefs to the beat of the negarit; the ascari who served in the Italian colonial army; the shifta who lived by the gun, by the precarious ethics of the frontier, and by a notorious culture of vendetta—an ethos often justified through the Biblical and Qur’anic injunction of an eye for an eye; the soldiers of the Ethiopian imperial and Derg armies—especially the Komandis; and finally, the tegadalai, the voluntary freedom fighter whose moral agency and individualism came to define the very meaning of the ghedli.
Each embodied a distinct “moral grammar,” a historically situated set of expectations about duty, honor, and legitimacy. What they shared was a reputation for being formidable fighters—steadfast, resilient, brave, and reliable to a fault. But heroism, in the full moral sense of the word, belongs exclusively to the tegadalai.
And without rendering any judgment, it is worth acknowledging a simple truth: Eritrea, in all its diversity, carries a deeply rooted warrior culture. One need not look far for evidence; the swords, sticks, and shields that adorn our wedding rituals are ceremonial remnants of a long martial inheritance. We are a people who have not yet learned—despite thousands of years of kuinat, wg’ee, zemecha, mekhete, imbagaro, gazo, and wirra—to “beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.”
Our political imagination has long been shaped by the figure of the fighter—whether fighting for the cross or the crescent, for land or king or tribal chief—rather than by the figure of the thinker. The only thinker in our intellectual heritage who confronted perennial human questions with philosophical rigor was Zera Yacob, the author of the Hatata. He taught that harmony—within a society and between societies—is the natural outcome when human beings act according to reason, reject injustice, and refuse to harm one another.
It is time for humanism to take root in our intellectual soil—not to displace our religious and cultural heritages, but to complement and enrich them. Humanism offers a moral vocabulary that deepens our traditions by grounding them in reason, dignity, and the universal ethics of coexistence.
For Zara Yacob, reason, ethics, and mutual respect are the true ingredients of peace. Peace is not the mere absence of war; it is the presence of moral clarity. It is humility to recognize human limitations, and the understanding that tolerance and acceptance are the bonds that sustain life in diverse societies.
In this spirit, our forefathers taught a simple but profound truth: ካብ ዝኣመነ ዝተማራመረ፣ ካብ ዝተማራመረ ዝተራጠረ—better the inquirer than the believer, and better the skeptic than the inquirer. Inquiry and skepticism cultivate tolerance and acceptance; tolerance and acceptance open the path to reconciliation; reconciliation makes harmonious coexistence possible; and harmonious coexistence is the foundation of unity.
This is why the Awate Foundation’s mission is to inform, inspire, embolden, and reconcile. These are the essential ingredients—the quiet architecture—of our moral, intellectual, and political aspirations for a united, peaceful, prosperous, and democratic Eritrea.
The Emergence of a New Type
But in the second half of the 1970s and early 1980s, something unprecedented emerged: a fighter produced not by conviction but by coercion, not by political awakening but by organizational necessity. His arrival marked the beginning of the end of the decade‑and‑a‑half‑old ghedli as a popular, voluntary, and morally coherent national project. The struggle became a hybrid of volunteer and conscripted tegadelti, and the old moral grammar could no longer capture the new realities.
Political theorists of revolution — from Frantz Fanon to Amílcar Cabral — warn that liberation movements lose their soul the moment they abandon persuasion for coercion. Fanon called voluntary participation the “cleansing force” of anti‑colonial struggle; Cabral insisted that the legitimacy of a movement rests on the conscious commitment of its fighters. Once coercion enters, the fighter becomes an instrument, not a witness.
Eritrea’s ghedli crossed that threshold in the late 1970s and early 1980s—first the ELF in 1977, and later the EPLF in 1983 after the Sixth Offensive. The contrast between the two fronts is telling. The EPLF marked its milestones through military events—the First, Second, and Third Offensives, Selahhta Werar—a reflection of its deep internalization of Eritrea’s martial culture. The ELF, by contrast, marked its milestones through political congresses—Qedamai Hagerawi Guba’e, Kalaay Hagerawi Guba’e—signaling a different organizational ethos. One front measured progress through battlefield victories; the other through political deliberation.
And our people measure it by the calamities that befell them: gezie Igerger, qdmi Igerger, Dhri Igerger, gzat Turki, gzat Tlyan, gzat Amhara, zemene Mengistu, Zemene Isaias.
Both the ELF and EPLF, however, eventually succumbed to the same logic of necessity—the old, tired call to put “all hands-on deck,” without discretion, discernment, or foresight. The tragedy is that the struggle did not need all hands; it needed the right hands. The distinction proved decisive—and tragic to boot.
We have never managed to exorcise this malady from our political bloodstream. Even today, loud voices in the diaspora opposition continue to preach the same all‑hands‑on‑deck mantra, urging us to focus solely on ridding Eritrea of Isaias and his regime with an intensity of conviction—feigned or otherwise—that leaves no room for a healthy dose of skepticism.
The tegadalai, once defined by voluntary sacrifice, moral agency, and individual conscience, was gradually replaced by a new figure whose entry into the struggle was compelled by giffa (ግፋ). This hybrid fighter — neither tegadalai nor shifta, neither soldier nor ascari — represented a profound transformation in the nature of the liberation movement. He embodied the moment when the ghedli ceased to be a covenant between people and fighters and began to harden into an organizational machine.
It is also important to note that although the official giffa was implemented after the Sixth Offensive, the EPLF had already been forcing Eritrean youths and adults fleeing toward Sudan to join its ranks. As early as 1979, teenagers and adults were intercepted along escape routes and compelled either to attend bet temherti sewra or to join the fighting. The same pattern existed within the ELF. In both fronts, coercion began informally—through local commanders, field units, and ad hoc decisions—long before it was formalized as organizational policy.
As time wore on, a quiet resentment began to brew among the tegadelti: why should they alone bear the full weight of national responsibility? Beneath that resentment lay a deeper, unspoken impulse to ensure that misery had company. This is the dark force we call Hisdi (ሕስዲ).
What this reveals is that the erosion of voluntary participation did not begin with a single decree; it seeped gradually into the bloodstream of the struggle—first through necessity or misguided power struggle, then through habit, and finally through institutionalization.
The story of the tegadalai—his rise, his moral grammar, and his gradual eclipse—captures the soul of the early ghedli. It was a covenant built on conscience, not compulsion; on solidarity, not fear. But as pressures mounted and necessity began to masquerade as strategy, the foundations of that covenant started to crack. The next phase of the struggle would test not only the endurance of its fighters, but the moral architecture of the movement itself.
Part II will be published next Sunday.
To contact the author: weriz@yahoo.com
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