Tag: Colonial Legacy
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From Martini to Isaias Afwerki
This is edited and contextualized as a reflective opinion essay inspired by the book “Through the Eyes of a Colonizer” by Renato Paoli and translated by Ruth Tewelde There is something I keep running into whenever I read colonial-era books, and it never fails to surprise me. It’s the numbers. At the turn of the
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Muslim and Catholic Fatimas
Most Eritreans do not know about the Eritrean Black St. Mary, but many have heard of Mariam Daari, the Black icon of St. Mary. I’m not sure whether it was carved from black stone or molded from some other material. The beautiful icon lives in a vast, hollowed baobab tree on the banks of the
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Horn of Africa: A Unity Deferred: Between Memory and Possibility
The Horn of Africa remains one of the world’s most fragile political landscapes. State legitimacy is contested, nation-building is stalled or unraveling, and war routinely eclipses peace. Ethiopia and Sudan, its two largest states, are engulfed in civil war and political upheaval. Somalia continues to fracture, with little more than nominal central authority. Eritrea and
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Revolution: from Zanzibar to Zufar to Eritrea
The young may not know Tanganyika or Zanzibar, but they know Tan-Zan-ia. Tanganyika was the mainland country, and Zanzibar was an island off the coast of East Africa. In April 1964, just after the Revolution and Genocide of Zanzibar, the two entities united to form Tanzania: a name formed by connecting the prefixes of the
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The River Remembers (Part II): The Archive of the Unsaid
In this installment of The River Remembers, the author dives beneath the surface of colonial history to explore its psychic and linguistic aftermath—what remains unspoken, untranslatable, and unresolved. Through a reflective reading of Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, the essay examines how colonialism embeds itself not only in roads and records but…
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The Disease the Colonizers Left Behind – The River Remembers Series*
This first entry in The River Remembers series lays the foundation for a postcolonial reckoning across Sudan, Eritrea, Somalia, Djibouti, and Ethiopia. Blending historical analysis, cultural memory, and theoretical insight, the essay examines how different colonial powers left behind not only borders but ways of seeing—and mis-seeing—ourselves. With reference to thinkers like Fanon, Bhabha, and…