Shallow Graves: A Memoir of the Ethiopia-Eritrea War

by Richard Reid

This is a personal account of the war between Eritrea and Ethiopia, fought between May 1998 and June 2000, as well as of the periods immediately preceding and following the conflict. Shallow Graves traces shifting local perceptions of time, the nation and the region, beginning in the mid-1990s and concluding with the peace agreement signed between the two governments in 2018.

Richard Reid is a historian who was based in Eritrea during the war, and who continued to visit both that country and Ethiopia for several years afterwards. This personal perspective offers a more vivid, intimate portrait of the experience of the war than can normally be offered by putatively "objective" academic accounts. As well as providing first-hand reportage and analysis, Reid problematises the role of the historian--and specifically the foreign historian--as the supposedly impartial observer of events. His eloquent narrative, constructed around conversations and interactions with a range of local witnesses, friends and colleagues, explores the impact of prolonged war and its aftermath--both on private and public memory, and on the nature of history itself.

Genres: Eritrea, Africa, Ethiopia

296 pages, Paperback

Published May 1, 2020

Reviews

[Mulubrhan Balehegn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought the kindle version of the book after I saw a matter-of-factly review on BBC-Tigrinya. Maybe it is because the book was about a place very close to home and a war that has dominated most of my childhood, or maybe because it is such a readable book, I read it at a stretch and with excitement and curiosity all along. Approaching the end of the book, I kept telling myself, here is a man who has truly understood what many have failed to understand- the true colors of PFDJ and Eritrea's dictator. Kudos to the Author on that!

But, I have to admit, the first two or three chapters of the book were very worrying. Though the author made it clear from the beginning that this wasn't a history book in its conventional sense, I did not realize, until I read the first couple of chapters, that he meant he recorded whatever people told him without the slightest effort to try to ascertain what he heard. By chronicling the toxic and hate-filled narratives from seemingly his everyday acquaintances, in the crudest and rawest language possible, I can't help but think that he is going to add to the live seeds of ethnic hatred and division that the Italian 'Ferenjis' sown long before him. One can only hope that this was only unintentionally. He even wrote considerably from his interviews with Ethiopian POW in Eritrea, made in the presence of Eritrean officers, and presented these without any commentaries-the nerve!

In his defense though, he has, on very few instances, admitted that some of the responses he got, for instance, a very small portion of responses from the Ethiopian POW, seemed rehearsed. The final chapters also seemed to imply, though unfortunately, never implicitly, that most of what he heard and learned in the early years after the war, was the dictator's effective propaganda at deflecting Eritreans' attention by scapegoating Tigray and the Woyane. And yet, he did not even bother to make any effort to tell the reader that the accounts he recorded were what his informants thought and not the truth or the facts on the ground. At times, also in his own admittance, he seemed to write as if what he heard were his own thinkings, leaving the reader wondering if these were 'facts' reached through some sort of verification and not just the words of the author's informants. He seemed to go with the flow of hate and toxic propaganda that portrays an ancient people of culture, the Tigrians, as inherently evil. Mostly, he seemed to be agreeing and at best indifferent with all the hatred and obvious hate-propaganda he recorded.

As someone from an area immediately on the other side of the border, and having lived through the war and with plenty of personal and family stories of mistreatment in the hands of the EPLF and PFDJ, I can only say that the presentation was not only unfair but also insensitive to the misfortunes of hundreds of thousands of victims on the other side of the border and probably also an inconvenient influence to the precarious scholarship on the history of the region that is already marred with ethnic bigotry and what not.

And yet, I still believe the author has truly understood the Eritrean dictator and his elusive ways. I recommend it to anyone interested in understanding the war and the narratives around it be them rooted in fabrications or truth.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whether the war of 1998–2000 was a hiccup, an unfortunate aberration, or whether it was a critical turning point in the region’s history, it certainly served to reify particular histories and memories, notably of the liberation struggle and the political vision of blood-forged Eritrean nationhood. It reified the history of the armed struggle, and hardened particular histories of Abyssinia and its constituent parts—notably Tigray and the Amhara-speaking heartland.

This work is a personal recollection of a time spent in Asmara by a historian in the making. At the time, he taught at the University, met many locals and travelled the country extensively. This book however is also much more than that. In hs many interviews and discussions with locals he gives a voice to the ex fighters, their families and friends and also Ethiopians across the border. He puts the country solidly back on the global consciousness map, and in many ways up to his analysis of the plight of Eritrean refugees in the UK, this is a love letter for so many lives lost destroyed forgotten. In this respect, it is definitely a piece of writing worth reading for anyone who is passionate about this area of the world, and its many complex intertwined histories.

[David]

In the good old days, any self-respecting Africanist had to serve his time on the continent teaching at an African school for a few years