The Wound and the Cure: How Nehnan Elamanan Damaged Eritrea’s National Unity — and What a Truthful Manifesto Could Have Built Instead
Introduction: The Shadow of a Document
There are moments in a nation’s history when a single document bends the arc of its political culture. Sometimes it elevates; sometimes it distorts. Nehnan Elamanan belongs to the latter category. Written in 1971, it did more than justify a factional split. It rewrote the moral grammar of the liberation struggle, replacing complexity with caricature and national solidarity with sectarian suspicion. For decades, its narrative has lingered like a wound that never fully healed, shaping how Eritreans remember their past and how they mistrust one another in the present.
To understand how we arrived here, we must return to the beginning—not to reopen old wounds, but to understand how they were made. As our elders say, ነገር ኣብ ምጅማሩ፡ እኽሊ ኣብ ምኹማሩ። Only by revisiting the origins can we reclaim the truth that was buried beneath polemics and fear.
I. Returning to the Beginning
Many serious Eritrean thinkers—Woldesus Ammar, Ismail AA, Saleh G. Johar, and others—have long warned about the insidious impact of Nehnan Elamanan on our liberation struggle and our national cohesion. Few documents in Eritrean history have cast a longer or darker shadow. It introduced a sectarian reading of the struggle that was historically inaccurate, strategically harmful, and socially corrosive. It planted seeds of mistrust that later hardened into fractures within Eritrean society, and it helped normalize a political culture in which suspicion, ideological absolutism, and the erasure of alternative narratives became routine.
II. The Foundational Misdiagnosis
Its central flaw was disarmingly simple: it misread the nature of Eritrea’s internal conflicts. It cast the ELF as a Muslim organization and interpreted the fractures within it as the inevitable consequence of religious marginalization. The narrative carried emotional voltage, but it was historically untrue. The ELF’s early Muslim majority reflected geography, timing, and patterns of political exposure—not ideology, not theology. Christians were present from the 1960s onward, and their numbers grew steadily as the movement expanded into the highlands, until both organizations were, by the mid‑1970s, predominantly composed of Christian tegadelti.
If the question is whether sectarian affiliation compounded political differences, every indication suggests that it did. Identities and inherited suspicions inevitably colored perceptions and sharpened disagreements. But to mistake these influences for the essential or determining cause of disunity is to misread the record. Sectarian currents were present, yet they were not the engine of fragmentation. They were accelerants, not origins—forces that could deepen a rift but could not create one on their own.
III. What the Splinters Actually Reveal
This becomes clearer when we look at the very groups that broke away. The Semhar group, drawn largely from Muslim coastal communities; the Maria/Obel group, rooted in the Muslim communities of the eastern Sahel; and Selfi Netsanet, emerging from predominantly Christian highland youth—all went their own way. Their departures reflected political frustrations, generational impatience, and competing visions of organization and discipline. Sectarian identity shaped their social bases, yes, but it did not dictate their political choices.
Their eventual convergence into the EPLF was not the triumph of a sectarian bloc but the meeting point of three disillusioned factions seeking a more centralized, modern, and ideologically coherent revolutionary project. Meanwhile, the ELF that remained—stripped of its splinters—stood as the most diverse political organization Eritrea had ever produced, a mosaic of regions, faiths, and social backgrounds held together by a broad nationalist ethos rather than a single identity.
The real forces that shaped the splits were generational impatience, leadership rivalries, regional grievances, and competing visions of military organization. These were political tensions, not religious ones. To elevate sectarianism from a contributing factor to the master key of Eritrea’s internal conflicts is to replace complexity with caricature. As Mark Twain warned, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
IV. Evidence That Collapses the Sectarian Narrative
The emergence of PLF‑1 and PLF‑3—both Muslim‑led, Muslim‑majority formations—collapses the sectarian framing advanced in Nehnan Elamanan. Had the ELF been a religious organization in any meaningful sense, these groups would have splintered along the lines of Selfi Netsanet, not in defiance of it. Coalescence under an Islamic or Christian banner has never guaranteed unity; the Eritrean Muslim League and later faith‑based jihadist currents show that shared faith alone cannot resolve ideological or organizational fractures.
The first civil war between the ELF and Harekat (ELM) further exposes the fallacy. It was overwhelmingly Muslim‑on‑Muslim fratricide, driven not by theology but by ideology, organizational contradictions, and competing visions of revolutionary structure.
V. The Demographic Reality of the 1970s
By the mid‑1970s, both the ELF and EPLF had Christian majorities and significant Muslim participation. If numerical dominance were the measure of sectarianism, then both organizations would have to be judged by the same standard. But history does not bend to arithmetic. The truth is simpler and more dignified: both fronts were national movements, drawing from all communities, shaped by geography, mobilization, and political reality. Neither was a religious organization. Neither fought for a sectarian agenda.
VI. The Weaponization of Fear
Sectarian anxieties existed, and opportunists exploited them. The author of Nehnan Elamanan stands as the clearest example of how personal ambition can weaponize communal fears. But his narrative cannot be mistaken for the history of the fronts themselves. The demographic reality, the cross‑regional recruitment patterns, and the shared sacrifices all point to a different conclusion: Eritrea’s liberation struggle was not a religious war, and its movements were not sectarian armies.
VII. Honoring the Founders of the ELF
The founders of the ELF deserve to be remembered for what they actually accomplished: they built an inclusive national liberation movement at a moment when the easier path—the path laid down by the Eritrean Muslim League and reinforced by the political climate of the 1950s—would have been to organize along communal and confessional lines. Everything around them pointed in that direction. Yet they chose the harder road, the principled road, the national road. For that, they should be honored, not maligned.
Nehnan Elamanan attempted to tarnish their enormous contribution. It tried to recast a national project as a sectarian one, to reduce a generation’s sacrifice to the narrow ambitions of a few, and to impose a retrospective logic that simply does not withstand scrutiny. The men who established the ELF did not build a religious front; they built a national one. Their achievement stands.
VIII. Kidane Kiflu and the Manifesto Eritrea Should Have Had
Kidane Kiflu understood something essential: a national liberation movement must remain national above all else. He warned against importing ideologies that would force Eritreans into borrowed battles. He envisioned a front spacious enough to hold Eritrea’s full diversity—regional, religious, cultural, and political—without demanding uniformity of thought.
His critique of the ELF was structural, not sectarian; political, not religious; reformist, not accusatory. He sought to correct, not condemn. His letters remain the manifesto Eritrea should have had: sober, principled, inclusive.
IX. What Nehnan Elamanan Destroyed—and What It Prevented
Kidane’s vision shows what Eritrea could have built: a political culture rooted in dialogue, shared responsibility, and mutual respect. Instead, Nehnan Elamanan became the ideological blueprint for a culture that equated unity with uniformity, loyalty with obedience, and dissent with betrayal. It hardened factional lines, deepened mistrust, and laid the foundation for the authoritarian state that later emerged.
The tragedy is not only what the document said, but what it prevented: a pluralistic nationalism, a shared ownership of the struggle, a civic identity large enough for all Eritreans.
X. Rejecting the Old Mistakes—From Both Directions
Today, some attempt to portray the regime in Asmara as “Christian‑backed,” just as Nehnan Elamanan portrayed the ELF as “Muslim.” Both narratives are wrong. Both are simplistic. Both reach for identity instead of grappling with the true drivers of Eritrea’s modern history: power, ideology, organizational culture, and unresolved legacies of the liberation era.
The Cure Begins With Truth
To reclaim Eritrea’s national unity, we must confront the legacy of Nehnan Elamanan honestly—not to reopen wounds, but to understand how they were made. A new national narrative must reject sectarian shortcuts and embrace a truthful account of our history. Muslims and Christians fought together, suffered together, dreamed together. No single region, no single organization, no single community owns the Eritrean story.
Unity cannot be built on myth or distortion. It must be built on truth.
The first step is simple: we must stop repeating the mistakes of the past. We must learn to see our history not through the lens of factional propaganda, but through the lived experiences of the people who carried the struggle on their backs. Only then can Eritrea begin to heal. Only then can we build the inclusive, pluralistic national identity that the liberation struggle deserved—and that the Eritrean people still deserve today.
To contact the author: weriz@yahoo.com
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