The Trans-Mereb Experience: Perceptions of the Historical
Relationship between Eritrea and Ethiopia
A 2007 article published in the Journal of African Studies and is freely accessible for research, teaching, and private study purposes
RICHARD REID
ABSTRACT
This article offers an exploration of the
historical relationship between Eritrea and Ethiopia. This has been a problematic
relationship, as demonstrated by the degree of conflict in this region, and, in
the abstract sense, insofar as analysis of the history of the relationship has
been both polemical and polarised. The region’s pre-colonial history has been
used either to demonstrate Ethiopia’s legitimate historical control of much of
what is now Eritrea, or to refute this older, more ‘traditional’, perception
and to prove that Eritrea was at no time an integral part of a ‘greater
Ethiopian/Abyssinian empire’. This latter, revisionist approach to the
pre-colonial past is still in its infancy, the offspring of a recent and potent
Eritrean nationalism. Perceptions of key periods in the region’s
twentieth-century history are similarly polarised. By way of illustration, the
article considers four historical scenarios, key snapshots in the history of
the relationship: (i) the pre-colonial era; (ii) the period of British
administration in the 1940s; (iii) the Eritrean liberation struggle; and (iv)
the more recent war between the two countries. Each scenario is looked at in
three ways: first, for what we might call the ‘factual indisputability’ of the
scenario, in other words presenting as neutral and objective a view of the
period as is possible; second, the ‘standard Ethiopianist’ interpretation of
the period in question; and third, the ‘Eritrean revisionist’ understanding of
the scenario. Introduction Few peoples in Africa have had either a closer,
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