Seldom has time been fair and accountable to history. Usually great events and people are great long after they are no more. Time has rarely captured history while unfolding leaving a big opportunity to historians to hijack history in to books, depriving people interested in the present the virtue of experience. And when time catches history on the making, rushing after shallow events it denies history the necessary analysis and fair interpretation it deserves. The world is full of such remarkable historical events that were missed by and buried in the memories of individuals who either made or witnessed them and history books.
On the night of September 11 2009 I was lucky enough to be in one of the remote villages of Eritrea and witness one of the marvelous episodes of history riding underneath of time. It was a holiday to celebrate the end of the rainy season and the coming of the harvest season- one of the happiest religious holidays and festive occasions in the Eritrean Christian culture. Besides, it was the middle of the Ramadan fast, with Ed Al-Fetir two weeks away. The ritual to celebrate this holiday includes songs, dances, special meals and torch lighting on its eve. It is a bright day in which family members gather in their respective homes as much as they can and where people should visit, at least the remotest neighbor to say bouna festa, congratulations on the advent of the harvest season about each other’s wellbeing.
On such evening the teenagers and youngsters gather in the house of one of their friends and sing and dance throughout the night until they get overwhelmed with tiredness. I went to bed and finally slept accompanied by the sounds of drums and traditional flutes. When morning set in, I woke up to the sound of drums but this time it was not for dances. The same teenagers who danced the whole night were waking up Ramadan fasters for Al-Fajir prayers and Futur. I have witnessed this happen throughout my life. But I never tried to read what lies beneath this ordinary seeming ritual. For being too natural and too often, its peculiarity remained veiled from most observers and its practitioners for centuries.
This particular event doesn’t represent any miraculous historical record but rather the culmination of the making of a unique social history of a people, which has been in process for more than a millennia. Christianity and Islam were introduced in Eritrea in the 4th and 7th century respectively. Ever since both religions have co-existed peacefully, their followers have lived in a spirit of tolerance and mutual respect. But more importantly they developed ties that cut across ethnic and religious lines. As a result of intermigration among different communities, they are a hybrid of different ethnic groups and social history. In Eritrea, it is quite common to find people of two different religions and speak different languages but swear on one ancestor. Or people who adhere to one religion but speak two different languages or vice versa.
The event that amazed me most on the night of September 11, 2009 is a reflection of this intricate social relationship that has been on the making for more than 14 centuries. Nowhere has Eritrean history recorded any faith or origin based on violence that has left an intractable scar on the relationship of the various communities. In most traditional societies, conflicts that usually give rise to massacre or killings in large numbers start as resource-based petty local clashes. When they get out of hand and people feel threatened, they seek shelter on primordial identities like ethnic origin but usually on religion, these fueling the fire through groveling it an ideological dimension.
Eritrean society has never been free from such recourse based conflicts, as the Eritrean people are predominantly peasants and pastoralists. However, they have never sought sanctuary in faith in times of conflict. Rather, they relied on the highly sophisticated and just conflict resolving institutions they have developed in line with their peculiar social network.
Taking into consideration the fact that Eritrea has yet to attain developed ecological environment, one would expect to hear a lot about ethnic and religious strife triggered by disputes arising out of pastureland and access to water that escalates to religious animosity and eventually mass killing. Except for some negligible instances (even the ones that were escalated due to the deliberate interference on the part of colonial administrations that thought would help them exercise control and domination over the unusually resistant people), there is no one incident in the recorded history of Eritrea that narrates about conflicts which turned over social relationships among the Eritrean communities.
Whenever I hear of some sort of intra-religious or intra-tribal conflicts that have disrupted social order disrupting communities or leading to state failures, I usually ask why such conflicts never took place in Eritrea, at least between followers of two religions or different ethnic groups with such magnitude and scope. Conflict is the most natural phenomenon in human relations. What makes a difference as regard the outcome of the conflicts is the degree of social ties and level of refinement of the institutions of the concerned belligerent communities.
Most of the communities that usually face a conflict situation are neighbors who have lived for centuries without any visible problem but having minor relations among themselves and with no means of managing interaction in any prospective future. And that is where the Eritrean people differ from other African or third world communities in general. The peculiar social makeup and dynamics of the Eritrean people have been a real guarantee against destructive conflicts arising out of petty local quarrels. The fact is that the level of harmony and unity among the various ethno-linguistic and religious Eritrean communities is beyond the grasp of our commonsense. In this respect, the teenagers I had come across on that memorable night are a living testimony of such a state of affairs.
