Aksum, the Red Sea and the Italians
The Eritrean highlands were part of the world of Aksum, the great trading empire that from the early centuries AD linked the Red Sea to the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, minted its own coins and adopted Christianity in the 4th century. The coast, meanwhile, faced Arabia across a narrow sea and was drawn into the Muslim world; the port of Massawa was ruled at various times by Ottomans and Egyptians.
The country as a unit is an Italian creation. Italy seized the coast in the 1880s, named the colony Eritrea after the Latin for the Red Sea, and made it the base for its wider Horn of Africa ambitions. Italian rule built railways, factories and, above all, Asmara — a highland capital remodelled in the 1930s in dazzling Modernist and Futurist style, now a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Federation, annexation, war
After Italy's defeat in the Second World War, the United Nations federated Eritrea with Ethiopia in 1952 — a compromise that satisfied no one. Ethiopia's emperor Haile Selassie steadily dismantled Eritrean autonomy and in 1962 simply annexed the territory as a province. Armed resistance had already begun.
The independence war lasted thirty years. Leadership passed from the Eritrean Liberation Front to the more disciplined, Marxist-influenced Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF), which built an extraordinary guerrilla society in the field — underground schools, hospitals and factories, and a striking degree of gender equality among its fighters. In 1991 the EPLF, together with allied Ethiopian rebels, brought down the Ethiopian Derg regime. A 1993 referendum confirmed independence almost unanimously.
The state that closed
Isaias Afwerki, the EPLF's leader, became president and has held the office ever since. A constitution was ratified in 1997 but never implemented; promised elections have never been held. A brutal 1998–2000 border war with Ethiopia over the town of Badme killed tens of thousands and hardened the regime, which used the "no war, no peace" stalemate that followed to justify permanent mobilisation.
The crackdown came in 2001, when senior officials who called for reform — the "G-15" — were arrested and disappeared, along with independent journalists. Eritrea has had no private press since. It is routinely ranked at or near the bottom of global indices for press freedom.
National service and the exodus
The heart of the system is national service. Introduced as an 18-month duty, it became in practice open-ended — conscripts, men and women, can serve for years or decades at low pay, in the army or assigned to state farms, mines and ministries. Rights groups have compared it to forced labour. It is the single biggest reason young Eritreans leave: for years Eritreans were among the largest groups of people crossing the Mediterranean and Sahara, fleeing not war but conscription.
A surprise peace with Ethiopia in 2018, when Ethiopia's new prime minister Abiy Ahmed accepted the border ruling, briefly reopened the frontier and raised hopes of change. Little followed inside Eritrea; the border closed again, and Eritrean troops were later drawn into the devastating war in Ethiopia's Tigray region. The country remains, as one common phrase has it, the "North Korea of Africa".