Fetsum: Author of From Feminist to Rapist and The Curse of Being and Living It. You can find the books at Amazon Books.

Announcement: I am going to do my one man band musical show on May 2 in DC and expose my original music and you are all invited to attend it spiritually if not physically. My special guests happen to be Yemane Barya, Usman Abdulrahim, Tewelde Redda and Teddy Afro. I believe art has to reflect human condition in a given society and these true artists in my opinion have been serving the Eritrean cause for independence and its current quest for freedom and democracy. As for Teddy Afro, I respect his artistic contribution in building peace between Moslems and Christians, and the Ethiopians and the Eritreans.

Narrative: Trying to spot the best Eritrean minds and collecting them to act for practical change in the country with a well defined strategy does not allow you bypassing Yosief Gebrehiwet who has relentlessly been assisting this resistance way before we started speaking out openly. Today, I feel comfortable discussing his latest article at Asmarino and hopefully we will start working together in the process. I will challenge Yosief Gebrehiwet on something special at the end of our exchange of opinions on this article only if he calls me. Enjoy the show!

Yosief: “Given the 50 years of hell that they have gone through, … one that renders [the Gedhli generation] superfluous to the society, is their adamant refusal to adapt to the emerging reality. So what seems to be activity under superfluous description remains to be total inactivity under relevant description. That is, they were willing to go through hell in order to stay “relevant” through irrelevant attributes only.”

Comment: Yosief’s mind is sometimes hard to figure out because it makes you think deeper than the norm eventually landing you in whatever way you may understand the real point. It is from this angle that I am taking a shot at his intellectual radiation. I have a little problem with said activity under said superfluous description because the first imposed Ethiopian contact with the Eritreans after the Italian colonialism that caused the struggle (activity in this context) was not based on superfluous imagination but rather on rationally describable facts so to say, for the Eritreans had to react to the Ethiopian interference one way or another. I believe there was a rational reason for the Eritrean struggle despite the disgusting result while I agree that today’s Eritrean reality with said Gedhli generation has been said inactivity under relevant description. Inactivity in this context being the regime’s uncultured mentality of sticking to absolute dictatorship and ignorance while the relevant descriptions of today’s interconnected universe remain to be education, democracy, freedom, development and civilized governance under the rule of law. I could have misunderstood your articulation and please reverse me if you think so.

Yosief: “Wings on a rabbit, flapping or not, wouldn’t make it soar high up in the sky; to the contrary, it would mercilessly pin it down to the ground that it wouldn’t even be able to move, let alone run. Education has provided the African elite with such superfluous wings; yet, whenever the occasion arises, they love to show them off by flapping them while rendered immobile by the sheer weight of those epiphenomenal wings. And when a nation is taken under their wings, a whole population finds itself pinned down to the ground – as Eritrea finds itself now.”

Comment: A scholar can achieve degrees after degrees but one remains useless to society and a parasite as well if the knowledge is only advertised on the living room walls through well framed certificates without positively affecting the society in relevance. Capsulating knowledge within the self is a terrible thing to do. Interesting is that useless intellectualism is a heavier burden to society than anything else can ever be because a given society, the universe at large pays dearly to educate an individual to PhD level of the academic stratum (probably more than 20 years in time and millions of dollars in expenditures). One can then imagine the waste and the parasitic relationship between a quietist scholar and the society/societies that molded one to be scholarized. The universal investment on a quietist intellectual produces zero output or sheer uselessness in this situation.

To make it worse, opportunist scholars in a given society always serve the oppressors becoming part of the collective social problem. The parasitic relationship intensifies in this situation from uselessness to dangerousness because opportunism as such does not stop at uselessness point of the relationship but also explodes against the society by serving the enemy at the brain level of its system. An opportunist scholar should then be the heaviest burden of society for simultaneously attacking it with the lethal curse of uselessness and dangerousness.

Yosief: “In a rather haunting déjà vou scenario, the going away and the coming back of the ghedli generation had the same structural similarity in their superfluity that makes us question the relevance of the time in between. When they went to Sahel, they went armed with their urban elite experiences (that “modern” attribute they thought essentially distinguishes them from the Other) but found no use for it in the new environment; instead, they had to do everything through sheer brutality to stay relevant. In the process, whatever “modern values” they had cherished before gave way to new values acquired at mieda. That is, temekro muhur had lethally metamorphosed into temekro mieda, with superfluity as the enduring common characteristic that ties them both in their deep family resemblance. Thus, when they reentered Asmara in triumph, they came back armed with the most superfluous attribute that would find no currency at all in modern day Eritrea: temekro mieda. And here is the crux of the matter: both temekros could be sustained only by rendering the ghebar invisible – a precondition for the brutalities to follow.”

Comment: Brilliant and interesting summary: It just seems like the Eritrean people have been sandwiched between the two seemingly inappropriate applications to their concrete realities: temekro muhur during the struggle andtemekro mieda after independence. The two temekuros like you put it very well appear similar in contradictive relationship with the two Eritrean realities in their respective eras; the ultimate result on the society being exactly the same in quality: misfit and destructive! The other constant element in your analysis of this topic was that the two misplaced theories had to be implemented by violence. Violence is the only means of implementing a misfit ideology in society as you clearly taught it in your magnificent work, meaning that the Eritrean people twice suffered the liberators’ violence as the consequence of said gedli generation’stheoretical and practical flip-flopping in inverse relationship to their realities in the respective eras on discussion.

Yosief: “As in the case of the Russian gentry, the “liberators” adamantly refused to adapt to the new reality because it would require giving up their privileged status. Instead, not only had they been trying to do everything through temekro mieda, they went as far as attempting to recreate it nationally in the form of national service. The sheer incompatibility of temekro mieda to modern day Eritrea, one that has brought the nation nothing but one monumental disaster after another, is a result of this strange belief that this epiphenomenal experience could accomplish miracles on its own. “

Comment: The concept of liberation was all together misplaced for strictly territorial independence in view of the leader/s of the struggle while misunderstood for having been for freedom and democracy in view of the people. Liberation starts right at the home base within the liberator’s inner individuality. How can a confined individual liberate others? A person that is not mentality free cannot understand the meaning of freedom nor can one cause the freedom of others. In so saying, individualism is the most obvious symptom of a confined mind and Mr. Afwerki failed to secure freedom for Eritreans because he is a chronic sufferer of the syndrome: too precarious a man to himself to hardly help other human conditions in his environment.

I believe your detailed work on the golden age of Asmara, Asmara and the Gedhli generation, and Interrupting Asmara’s growth, were outstanding in quality. I was surprised how detailed you infiltrated into the elements that constitute your highly educational material. You have a special capacity of delivering so much information in exceptionally compressed volume, extraordinary talent in creative-description of subject matters needless to say that you have defined a reference mark for philosophical excellence, in my opinion. I appreciate and thank you for sharing your mind with us Eritreans in such a fearless and intellectual fashion. I was even more fascinated by your analysis inPurifying Asmara based on the relationship between the Khmer Rouge and the Shabias in villagizing the city by sucking out the elite class to SAWA for ultimate refugee life and between North Korea and the Shaebias in changing its demographic face making it the home of predominantly women and PFDJ members. Your input was an excellent effort that clarifies a lot of complex issues about our predicament. Although the entire content of your article was important I found the following worth repeating here for people to briefly understand what has been going on. People who read the article can bypass this portion.

Yosief: “Purifying Asmara: No government has done a better job of the displacement policy than the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia. The total empting of the capital city – with more than two million inhabitants – within a day or so after their arrival was mainly motivated by the fierce hatred and resentment the Khmer Rouge guerrillas had developed for ghebar while they were “struggling against the oppressor” in the bush.

The Eritrean situation has never gotten as bad as the Khmer Rouge’s mainly because of the country’s porous borders¹⁹, but the anti-intellectual drive, and the venomous spite against ghebar that goes with it, that sent the Khmer guerrillas on a rampage to empty entire towns and cities of their inhabitants is the very same drive that made Shaebia empty the cities and towns of their youth. The entire youth population has been systematically emptied from the cities and towns and cordoned off in “mieda” under the name of national service; and, in due time, defending the nation and developing a “self-reliant” economy are meant to turn these internal exiles into the next generation of “Shaebia men” – all trademarks of the Khmer Rouge.

The question of purity doesn’t only deal with those targeted to be evicted, but also with those selected to remain in the city. Looking into this purification process, it would be revealing to check the inhabitants of North Korea’s capital city, Pyongyang, for that is what Asmara is increasingly looking like. Two of the demographic groups that mainly make up the population of Pyongyang are party members and women. The similarities with Asmara are rather striking.

Similarly, let’s ask: where are the adult men of Asmara to be found? They are either in the national service serving the army or outside the country, in refugee camps and beyond. “

Comment: Wow!

Yosief: “The coloinial mind of the urban elite: Sometimes I think that Asmara has done more psychological damage than good to the Eritrean elite, given that all their sense of betterment came from owning that city and all their revolutionary zeal from wanting to be the sole owners of that city. If so, that by itself would have been enough to trace the colonial mind of the ghedli generation.”

Comment: Very interesting thought entertainment! It seems to me that Asmara was taken by many Eritreans as a symbol of civilization compared to other societies and specially the Ethiopians. Before we knew it, something fallacious was installed into our psych in relation to beautiful Asmara as if we made it ourselves. As time went on, we grew believing that we constructed a better city than the rest in Ethiopia and framed a comparative psychological reference to all others based on this imaginary theory by which we cased in point as the most civilized people in the region and the continent at large. That is where we faced the contradiction between our assumption of the self (society) and reality.”

I also think we used Asmara as psychological defense mechanism against Addis Ababa which was growing at a faster rate. The imaginary Eritrean superiority to the Ethiopians was unconsciously radiating through extreme urge of eternally keeping Asmara better than Addis. The psychic connotation behind the urge for Eritreans to signify their importance vis a vis the Ethiopians through Asmara’s betterment than Addis was an interesting reality to confront because I was one of them. Although most of our people were modest enough to never have been affected by this complex psycho-phenomenon, I think it was very visible on those that lived highly exaggerating the essence of Asmarino and undermining the rest based on. The concept of Asmarino at a point in the experience appears having had the tendency to discriminate or to at least undermine the entire Eritrean population for backwardness (This may be common in many societies).

What we proved after independence was that we could not even keep the resources we inherited from colonialism forget about developing them ahead. We actually deteriorated everything inherited in Eritrea from education and economy to technology at home court: One inherited university gone and one inherited beach (Gorgussom) barely surviving. In the contrast, what the educated member of the society in Diaspora proved was even more troublesome to me. It was actively participating with remarkable conformist determination to the fronts during the struggle for independence but so inactive and terrified it has been in this resistance for freedom and democracy.

Our performance after independence proved that Asmara as a city and the rest of Italian made Eritrea do not represent the Eritrean reality in terms of capacity and maintenance. We still have to show that we were capable of leading a healthy nation as the fruit of our independence through our own home based development instead of through the colonial legacy in Eritrea. Sadly, we did not get the chance to challenge this predicament because of the unexpected absolute dictatorship and we are not working hard to reverse the situation Out scholars with all their capacities could not collectively take a project and put a transitional formula on paper, something the least they could, to the disgrace of the Eritrean society. I hope they will do it from now on but the motion is still very slow compared to the time sensitive Eritrean situation.

Yosief: “All that I have been trying do in this posting is to remind readers that life in both urban and rural Eritrea was normal before it was interrupted by ghedli, thereby attempting to debunk the great lie that the ghedli romantics have been feeding the masses: that the case of Eritrea is that of colonial oppression. “

Comment: Colonialism as something related to the Eritrean experience had been an over exhausted subject matter by both Eritrean and Ethiopian elites since the start of the Eritrean struggle for independence. This subject cannot be precisely figured out. Any intruder is a colonizer to me, immaterial what others may call the situation. It is not a direct phenomenon that can be mathematically answered or proven. I think colonialism is effectuated mainly due to capacity to finance it and to hold it by force which both the Italians and the Ethiopians had in relation to Eritrea irrespective of their difference in race, technology and treatment of the people under control.

The concept is open for philosophical entertainment by any thinker. Back in the days, the Ethiopian students’ movement lived trying to categorize whether the Eritrean question was colonial or national. To me it was both, though of course the topic is beyond this discussion which I did in detail in my book (the curse of being and living it). The fact remains that it does not matter anymore 23 years after the Eritrean independence was actualized and in front of its universally accepted sovereignty. The unique African experience, the Southern Sudanese independence needless to say totally over justifies the Eritrean independence that was caused by European colonialism at the root point of the matter. The Southern Sudan independence is to date the only exceptional happenstance in Africa: evolution of a society to nation hood through the foundation of a NATIONAL question. This was so because the former Sudan was colonized by the British as a whole piece and thus the southern part succeeded from the Sudan without the conventionally understood colonial justification (associated with the Arabic Sudanese) merely on the basics of NATIONAL QUESTION. This is unprecedented in Africa if I am correct.

Yosief: “Paradoxically, it is the ghedli generation that has been displaying all the characteristics of colonists – that is, starting from the very Cause itself, not as caused by colonial oppression but by colonial inspiration. If there is anything that could define colonialism as it occurred in Africa and elsewhere, it is the fact that it was an unparalleled interruption in the way of life of the colonized people. “

Comment: To me, conditioning the Eritrean political system under the Ethiopian monarchy by itself signified Ethiopia’s daily interference in the Eritrean life of the time. We were forced to learn Amharic as a national language and Ethiopianized in very controversial circumstances. We were made to tax to the Ethiopian central government and our ports utilized by the Ethiopian navy and shipping lines needless to say that the people suffered a lot as the consequence of the struggle which you tried to see in isolation from its root cause, Emperor Hailesselassie’s interference in the Eritrean socio-political life. The struggle would never have taken place at least in its actual form and focal point without the Ethiopian interference in the Eritrean society’s private business. We may never have experienced Afwerki’s dictatorship without the root cause of the struggle which was Ethiopia’s imposing contact with our society. The truth remains, however, that we suffered more intensely under this regime as you clearly put it with convincing authority. The Gedli generation is a colonizer in view of the current Eritrean situation. Colonialism cannot do worse damage in any society than what the Shabias did to our society.

I believe the Eritrean question having been colonial or national is outdated as a result of Eritrea’s nationhood. The argument has died out without concrete resolution 50 years after the confrontation between the two camps (national or colonial) as a consequence of the Eritrean independence which is legally actualized forever. I don’t see any advantage in discussing these issues at this stage in our experience where the independence has completely closed the topic leaving it for historians and social scientists to write books on ahead and the Ethiopians accepted our sovereignty without any visible complication.

“In philosophy’s realm of the spirit there is no objective certainty and no confirmation. Communication is the path to truth”, said Jaspers; whatever the truth may be relative to the particular conditions that cause its existence. The truth in this situation being whether the Eritrean question was colonial or national.

The question of right and wrong or that of true or false is so elusive, it can force one into conscious or unconscious breaching of other people’s perceptional territories. At the bottom line, however, there is no such thing as objective truth or reality in the socio-philosophical spectrum of life for no human nature can measure a concept or an outlook in pieces: it can only deal with it through elucidations or subjective truth. The moment we freely exhaust all possible constants and variables of something without bias to our individual opinions we have relatively reached the best limits of absolute truth only in relative scale in that regard. The fact remains that subjectivity cannot always represent objectivity nor can it be fully expressed by a person’s individual feelings and preconditions for the universe does not revolve around an individual’s concept of reality. Objective reality is achievable by arresting individual interest in favor of universally valid standards. No subjective outlook focused on making objective impact can succeed without appreciating the notion that human beings react to different situations differently by natural fabric. Arguing about whether something is true or not does not change the real nature of a subject matter in examination for nothing satisfies everybody else equally. “People may keep looking for the right answer, but there is no right answer. Everything is relative rather than absolute. That is the answer”, says LAMA SURYA DAS in Awakening the Buddha within.

What I think is that philosophy as open ended phenomenon has never had and can never have a precise answer. Human beings have never completely agreed on a concept that cannot be empirically proven, they only compromised. No one can prove whether the Eritrean question was colonial or national with absolute authority for the terms themselves cannot define the associated reality in complete format. But every commonsense can agree on a reality that materially projects itself in concrete existentialism. We cannot deny the existence of a rock displayed in front of our eyes nor can we deny that Afwerki was the president of Eritrea. By the same token, no one can deny the sovergnity of Eritrea immaterial whether its question was colonial or national. What matters most is what we need right now to have a better society and how!

History must locally move forward positively impacting a society for further universal impact which our immediate priority in our case is democratizing the country and then moving on forward resiliently confronting whatever may come in the way in relation to the continental development as a family with all other African societies (Pan Africanism, Regional Integration, etc.). Right now, however, everything including our history is secondary to our freedom. We need to concentrate on our immediate priority TRANSITIONAL GOVERNMENT TO DEMOCRACY full-fledged ahead because this challenge is our concrete reality leaving our account overall for social scientists to write books on for future generations.

In conclusion, the momentous universal truth is that there is a dire need to clean the so said Gedhli temokro poison replacing it with a normal society that conforms to the sociopolitical and technological realities of the universe through the power of intellectual intervention. There is an independent nation called Eritrea suffering from the worst form of absolute dictatorship that needs the immediate attention of its intellectuals to transit it to democracy irrespective of what the cause of its struggle for independence had been. There is a nation called Eritrea that must independently move on forward from here on immaterial what happened in the past with external forces and regardless of how it achieved independence.