Why Alemseged, Why? In Context
“History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history.” James Baldwin
Every Eritrean family carries an unwritten epilogue. A grandfather’s half-told story, a photograph hidden in a drawer, a grave unmarked but remembered by the path to it. These fragments form our private archives. They are what we inherit in the absence of open books, the spaces where memory survives without permission. To speak about historiography in Eritrea, then, is not to weigh only the texts that make it into print but also the silences, the omissions, and the unrecorded words that hover in every household.
In the study of history, context is never ornamental. It is the ground upon which interpretation either gains or loses its balance. To read Dawit Mesfin’s recent critique of Alemseged Tesfai’s An African People’s Quest for Freedom and Justice is to enter into a field where history, memory, and the politics of voice intersect in tense and uneven ways. His essay raises important concerns about omission, about selective narration, and about the responsibilities of historians who lived through the very events they describe. Yet it also risks collapsing complexity into judgment, forgetting that history in Eritrea is not written under open skies but within the shadow of surveillance.
Alemseged’s five-page epilogue is, by any measure, unsatisfying. Its tone drifts perilously close to state editorial. Its focus is uneven, returning repeatedly to the faults of the ELF while sparing the EPLF and offering almost nothing about the post-independence years whose legacies still bind us. It is not unreasonable to expect more from a historian who both lived through and wrote about the struggle. The sheer compression of those final pages feels almost like an erasure, as though decades of trauma and responsibility were folded into a single gesture of closure. For those who came to the book seeking an honest reckoning with the unfinished burdens of independence, the epilogue offers only the outline of a conversation that should have been pursued at length. (See Reference below for more on this.)
The disappointment is palpable, and it belongs to all who expected a fuller reckoning from Alemseged’s pen. His earlier volumes demonstrated a rare command of archival fragments and firsthand testimony, drawing together the scattered record of the 1940s and 1950s in ways few others had attempted. That effort deserves recognition. Yet precisely because those works stand as cornerstones of Eritrean historiography, the imbalance of the epilogue feels heavier. To omit the wounds of the post-1991 period is not only to leave the record incomplete but also to risk sanctifying silence.
And yet disappointment alone does not absolve us of the duty to situate his voice. Alemseged writes from within Eritrea, where history itself is treated as state property, guarded by a Ministry of Information whose minister polices the narrative as fiercely as it polices its citizens. To remain and still write, even selectively, is to inhabit a paradox in which omission is not only failure but also survival. His silence on certain decades may not be innocent, but neither can it be read as wholly voluntary. To critique him without acknowledging this custodial leash is to risk injustice of another kind. In Eritrea, the act of publishing history itself is inseparable from the reality of watchful eyes, confiscated manuscripts, and a state that fears memory as much as dissent.
That fear extends beyond books. In Eritrea, memory is often preserved through songs hummed in secret, coded phrases at weddings, or even the act of reciting a lineage at a burial. Oral memory has become the subterranean archive where censored history takes refuge. When the written record narrows, the spoken record deepens. The contradiction is sharp: the same state that suppresses archives also relies on collective memory to fuel its nationalist myths. This tension makes the historian’s task both urgent and perilous, for every omission risks being read as either capitulation or betrayal.
It is here that Dawit’s position must also be examined. He writes in exile, with choices of venue and audience that Alemseged does not have. Freedom expands responsibility. When Dawit chooses to publish on Martin Plaut’s platform, he signals not only his critique but also the venue through which it is delivered. That venue carries its own baggage, its own contested credibility. Just as Alemseged’s omissions are not neutral, Dawit’s choices are not without consequence. To write in exile is to be unshackled from state censorship, but it is also to be vulnerable to charges of speaking only to foreign audiences or rehearsing grievances for external validation. Freedom permits critique, but it also demands discernment.
To pit the two against each other, the historian who stayed and the critic who left, is to flatten the very terrain they embody. Both occupy compromised positions. Alemseged’s compromise is written in silence, Dawit’s choice of platform. Alemseged’s three volumes remain among the most important Eritrean historiographies of the last two decades, and that achievement cannot be wished away. At the same time, Dawit’s reminder of their silences is equally valuable. Neither is the full record. To imagine otherwise is to confuse fragments for wholeness.
What does this mean for us who read and inherit their words? It means the burden of writing Eritrea’s unfinished story cannot rest solely on one who writes in fear nor on one who writes in freedom without care for the venue. It falls on us, collectively, to take up the fragments and insist on continuity. That continuity may come in the form of exile testimonies recorded in living rooms, or underground archives smuggled across borders, or even the fragile threads of oral histories whispered at funerals and weddings. The custodianship of memory cannot be outsourced to one pen, no matter how accomplished or disappointing. It is a collective duty to hold together what has been fractured by war, state, and exile.
In the end, both voices are part of the same inheritance. One preserved what could be written under watchful eyes. The other spoke what could be said from afar. If read together, they do not give us a definitive history, but they do remind us that our history remains under siege. The task is not to cancel one with the other but to insist that both are incomplete and to keep pressing forward until our historiography is no longer on a leash or in exile but free.
And this struggle is not unique to Eritrea. Across the world, societies that have endured repression wrestle with the same dilemmas. In Chile, memory was carried by mothers of the disappeared when the state denied their existence. In South Africa, truth commissions tried to convert silence into testimony. In Eastern Europe, samizdat writings preserved what official history erased. Eritrea belongs in this continuum, not because our suffering is identical, but because the stakes of memory are universal. To protect history from erasure is to defend the dignity of those who lived it.
This is why the question “Why Alemseged, why?” cannot be answered with a verdict alone. It must be answered with recognition of the conditions under which he writes and with a demand that those of us who are freer write with equal courage and care. History in Eritrea is not simply the work of the past. It is an ongoing struggle over what may be remembered and what must be silenced. That struggle does not end with a five-page epilogue or a sharp critique from abroad. It ends only when Eritreans, wherever they are, weave together the fragments until the record can no longer be owned by the state or outsourced to exile.
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Milan Kundera
Related Readings:
Amar, W. (2025). Alemseged Tesfai: Is that all what you are? https://awate.com/
Negash, B. (2025). Epilogue: History on Custodial Leash. https://awate.com/
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