Eritrea

• 1. A Name Meaning Red

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  Eritrea takes its name from a Greek word for red. Ancient Greek speakers called the Red Sea the Erythraean Sea, and the country at its southern end borrowed that old label. Italian colonial officials made the name official in 1890, when they formed Colonia Eritrea.

  The country sits in the Horn of Africa, covering about 117,600 square kilometres. Ethiopia lies to the south, Sudan to the west and Djibouti to the southeast. Its capital and largest city is Asmara. A long Red Sea coastline runs along the northeast and east, and the country includes the Dahlak Archipelago and several of the Hanish Islands.

  Few places hold so many layers in so little space. There are fossils far older than any written record, a trading empire that a prophet named among the great powers, colonial boomtowns and a war for self-rule that outlasted a generation.

  This documentary asks how a land that appears in ancient Egyptian trade records became a recognized nation only in the 1990s. It asks why the capital is filled with buildings drawn up by foreign architects. And it asks why a country that fought so hard to govern itself has never held a national election.

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• 2. Deep Roots

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  A fossil known as Madam Buya, found at an Eritrean site by Italian anthropologists, has been dated to 1 million years old. Researchers rank her among the oldest hominid fossils discovered so far, and the oldest skeletal find of her kind. Some see her as a possible link between Homo erectus and an archaic Homo sapiens. The Danakil Depression is believed to have been a major site of human evolution.

  Between roughly 130,000 and 115,000 years ago, early anatomically modern humans lived along the Red Sea coast here. Some scholars suggest this shoreline sat on the route out of Africa that people used to colonize the rest of the Old World.

  In 1999, the Eritrean Research Project Team found a Paleolithic site near the Gulf of Zula, south of Massawa. The team combined Eritrean, Canadian, American, Dutch and French scientists. Its stone and obsidian tools are more than 125,000 years old. They were probably used to harvest clams and oysters from the sea.

  Tools from the Barka Valley, dated to 8,000 BC, offer the first concrete evidence of human settlement. Near Agordat, excavations uncovered the pre-Aksumite Gash Group, whose ceramics date between 2,500 and 1,500 BC.

  Around 2,000 BC, parts of Eritrea were likely included in the Land of Punt, a kingdom first mentioned in the twenty-fifth century BC. Punt was known for gold, aromatic resins, blackwood, ebony, ivory and wild animals. Egyptian records document an expedition there in approximately 1,469 BC, soon after Hatshepsut began her rule as pharaoh. She was reestablishing trade routes that had been disrupted.

  At Sembel, in the greater Asmara area, artifacts from between 800 BC and 400 BC point to one of the oldest farming and herding communities in East Africa. Then came Dʿmt, a kingdom that lasted from the tenth to the fifth centuries BC across what is now Eritrea and northern Ethiopia. A massive temple complex at Yeha suggests it was the capital.

  Qohaito and Matara were important cities in the south. Dʿmt built irrigation schemes, used plows, grew millet and made iron tools and weapons. After it fell in the fifth century BC, smaller kingdoms dominated the plateau. One of them, Aksum, finally reunited the area in the first century.

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• 3. Aksum and After

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  Mani, the founder of Manichaeism, counted the Kingdom of Aksum among the four great powers of the world. It was a trading empire centered in Eritrea and northern Ethiopia, lasting from about 100 to 940 AD. Its roots reach back to an Iron Age period around the fourth century BC.

  The medieval Liber Axumae, or Book of Aksum, says that Itiyopis, son of Cush, built the first capital, Mazaber. The capital later moved to Axum in northern Ethiopia. The kingdom was using the name Ethiopia as early as the fourth century.

  The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea describes Aksum as an important market for ivory, which was exported across the ancient world. Zoskales ruled at that time, and he also governed the port of Adulis. Aksumite rulers made trade easier by minting their own currency.

  The Obelisk of Aksum is a granite column standing 90 feet tall, the largest structure of its kind in the world. Aksumites raised many such stelae for religious purposes before Christianity arrived. Under Ezana, who is dated to 320-360, the kingdom adopted Christianity around the middle of the fourth century.

  Christianity was the first world religion adopted in modern Eritrea. The monastery of Debre Sina, the oldest, dates to the fourth century. Debre Libanos was built in the late fifth or early sixth century in the village of Ham. It was later moved to an inaccessible spot on a cliff edge below the Ham plateau. Its church holds the Golden Gospel, a metal-covered bible from the thirteenth century, when the monastery was a seat of religious power.

  In the seventh century AD, companions of the Prophet Muhammad crossed to Aksum to escape persecution by the Quraysh. Islamic history calls the journey the First Hijrah. They reportedly built the first mosque in Africa, the Mosque of the Companions in Massawa.

  The 11th-century Zagwe king Tatadim left an obscure land grant that gives the earliest record of a highland governor called the Bahr Negash. Tatadim counted him among his seyyuman, or appointed ones. The land was first called Ma'ikele Bahri, meaning the land between the Red Sea and the Mereb river. It was later renamed Medri Bahri, or Sea land in Tigrinya.

  Emperor Zara Yaqob strengthened imperial presence by lifting the Bahr Negash above other local chiefs. He also founded a military colony of settlers from Shewa and forced the Muslims on the coast to pay tribute. By then the country had four regions with little contact between them. Tigrinya-speaking Christians held the highlands, and the Tigre and Beni Amer clans roamed the western lowlands. Arabic-speaking Muslims lived around Massawa and Dahlak, and Afar herders lived in Dankalia.

  In 1520, the Portuguese explorer Francisco Álvares became the first Westerner to document a visit. He described a principality ruled by the Bahr Negash, with three key cities and Debarwa as capital. He also noted the border at the Mereb River with the province of Tigray, and the difficulty of moving certain goods across it.

  In 1541, Cristóvão da Gama landed troops at Massawa. His campaign eventually defeated the Adal Sultanate at the battle of Wayna Daga in 1543.

  By 1557, the Ottomans held all of northeastern Eritrea, from Massawa to Swakin in Sudan. They organized it as the Habesh Eyalet with its capital at Massawa. When Massawa lost economic importance, the administrative capital moved across the Red Sea to Jeddah.

  An Ottoman push into the highlands in 1559 failed, pushed back by the Bahri Negash and highland forces. In 1578 they tried again, helped by Bahri Negash Yisehaq, who had switched sides after a power struggle. Emperor Sarsa Dengel led a punitive expedition in 1588, and by 1589 the Ottomans were apparently forced back to the coast. They kept the seaboard until a new colonial power arrived in the late 1800s.

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• 4. Italian Eritrea

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  On the 15th of November 1869, a local chief sold the lands around the Bay of Assab to the Italian missionary Giuseppe Sapeto, acting for the Rubattino Shipping Company. The site served as a coaling station on the shipping lanes opened by the recently completed Suez Canal.

  The Khedivate of Egypt had ruled much of the coastal lowlands since May 1865. After Egypt withdrew in February 1885, Italy added Massawa and most of the coast to Assab, which its government had taken over from the company in 1882.

  Emperor Yohannes IV died in 1889, leaving a power vacuum. General Oreste Baratieri then occupied the highlands, and Italy proclaimed the colony of Italian Eritrea. The same year, Menelik II of Shewa signed the Treaty of Wuchale. He recognized the Italian occupation of Bogos, Hamasien, Akkele Guzay and Serae, lands held by his rivals. In return he received promises of financial help and continued access to European arms. His later victories over rival kings made him emperor and made the treaty binding across the whole territory.

  Italian development projects began in 1888. The Eritrean Railway reached Saati that year and climbed to Asmara in 1911. The Asmara-Massawa Cableway was the longest line in the world in its day, and the British dismantled it during World War II. Colonial authorities also invested heavily in farming and urban amenities in Asmara and Massawa. Many Eritreans found work in the police and public works departments.

  Thousands of Eritreans were enlisted in the Italian army. They served in the Italo-Turkish War in Libya and in both Italo-Abyssinian Wars.

  By 1939, about 2,198 factories were turning out buttons, cooking oil, pasta, building materials, packed meat, tobacco and hides. Most of their employees were Eritrean. The Italian population jumped from 4,600 to 75,000 in just five years. Some plantations were owned by Eritreans.

  Benito Mussolini's rise to power in 1922 brought deep changes to the colonial government. In May 1936, il Duce declared the birth of the Italian Empire. Italian Eritrea, enlarged with regions of northern Ethiopia, was merged with Italian Somaliland and just-conquered Ethiopia into Italian East Africa. The Fascist government chose Eritrea as the industrial center of this new territory.

  After 1935, art deco architecture spread across Asmara. Italian designers drew up more than 400 buildings in a construction boom that halted only when Italy entered World War II. The Fiat Tagliero Building marks the peak of Futurism, just as that style became fashionable in Italy. The Cinema Impero opened in 1937 and is considered a leading example of Art Deco. The Africa Pension shows Cubist influence, and the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary is neo-Romanesque. Asmara also has an eclectic Enda Mariam Cathedral, an opera house and a neoclassical city hall.

  Planners, architects and engineers were largely European, and local people were mostly used as construction workers. Even so, Asmarinos identify strongly with the legacy of their city. On the 8th of July 2017, the whole capital was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site during the 41st session of the World Heritage Committee. UNESCO called it an exceptional example of early modernist urbanism, applied in an African setting.

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• 5. Road to Independence

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  At the 1941 Battle of Keren, the British expelled the Italians and took over the administration of the country. Their decade in charge reshaped the economy. Until 1945, British and American forces relied on Italian equipment and skilled labor for wartime needs, and the economy boomed.

  Then the war ended, and recession and depression followed. War factories that had employed thousands shut down, and Italians began to be repatriated. Many small plants founded between 1936 and 1945 closed under competition from factories in Europe and the Middle East.

  The Allies could not agree on Eritrea's fate, so British military administration lasted until 1950. In the postwar years, Britain proposed dividing the territory along religious lines, with one part going to Sudan and another to Ethiopia. After the peace treaty with Italy was signed in 1947, the United Nations sent a Commission of Enquiry.

  Emperor Haile Selassie pressed Ethiopia's claim to both Eritrea and Italian Somaliland, including in a letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt. The British and Americans preferred to give Ethiopia all of Eritrea except the Western province, as a reward for wartime support. The Independence Bloc of Eritrean parties kept asking the General Assembly for an immediate referendum.

  The commission reached Eritrea in early 1950 and returned to New York after about six weeks. It produced two reports. The minority report, from Pakistan and Guatemala, proposed independence after a period of trusteeship. The majority report, from Burma, Norway and the Union of South Africa, called for incorporation into Ethiopia.

  In December 1950, United Nations Resolution 390A(V) federated Eritrea with Ethiopia, under prompting from the United States. The link was a loose federal structure under the sovereignty of the emperor. Eritrea received its own administrative and judicial structure, a new flag and control of domestic affairs, including police, local administration and taxation. The federal government, in practice the existing imperial government, handled foreign affairs, defense, finance and transportation. The resolution ignored Eritrean wishes for independence, though it did guarantee democratic rights and some autonomy.

  In 1958, a group of Eritrean students, professionals and intellectuals founded the Eritrean Liberation Movement. It worked in secret to build resistance to the centralizing policies of the imperial state. On the 1st of September 1961, the Eritrean Liberation Front, led by Hamid Idris Awate, began an armed struggle for independence. In 1962, Haile Selassie dissolved the Eritrean parliament and annexed the territory.

  The war that followed lasted 30 years against successive Ethiopian governments. In 1991, the Eritrean People's Liberation Front, a successor of the Front, defeated Ethiopian forces in Eritrea. It also helped a coalition of Ethiopian rebel forces take control of Addis Ababa. During the 1980s, a non-government group called the Eritrea Inter-Agency Consortium had aided development projects for the liberation movement.

  A referendum supervised by the United Nations, dubbed UNOVER, produced an overwhelming vote for independence. Eritrea declared independence and won international recognition in 1993. On the 28th of May 1993, it was admitted to the United Nations as the 182nd member state. The victorious liberation front seized power, set up a one-party state along nationalist lines and banned further political activity.

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• 6. Land and Wildlife

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  Emba Soira, the highest point in the country at 3018 metres above sea level, rises in the center of Eritrea. A branch of the East African Rift nearly bisects the country, and at the southern end of the Red Sea Eritrea holds the fork in that rift. The Afar Triangle, or Danakil Depression, is the probable location of a triple junction where three tectonic plates pull away from one another. In 2011, Nabro Volcano erupted in the volcanic southeast.

  The land splits into three ecoregions. A hot, arid coastal plain is narrow in the west and widens toward the east. Cooler and more fertile highlands, a northern extension of the Ethiopian Highlands, climb as high as 3,000 metres. Western Eritrea belongs to the Sahelian Acacia savanna, which stretches across Africa south of the Sahara all the way to Senegal.

  Filfil Solomona holds a sub-tropical rainforest and receives over 1,100 millimetres of rain a year. A steep escarpment forms the eastern edge of the highlands, while the western slope descends gently. The Atbara River drains the southwest and flows northwest to join the Nile. The Barka River flows north into Sudan and empties into the Red Sea.

  Because of its physical variety, Eritrea is one of the few countries where people say they can experience four seasons in a day. In the highlands, May is usually the hottest month, with temperatures near 30 C. December to February nights can drop to 10 C. Lowland summers run from June to September, with heat that can reach 40 C. Asmara stays temperate all year.

  The country has recorded 560 bird species, 126 mammal species, 90 reptile species and 19 amphibian species. Among its large mammals are Soemmerring's gazelle, warthogs, spotted hyenas and the endangered African wild ass in the Denakalia Region. Lions are said to live in the mountains of Gash-Barka. The African wild dog, once found here, is now considered extirpated.

  Between 1955 and 2001, nobody reported seeing a herd of elephants, and they were thought to be victims of the War of Independence. Then, in December 2001, observers spotted a herd of approximately 30 elephants, including 10 juveniles, near the Gash River. They seemed to have formed a partnership with olive baboons. The baboons use water holes that the elephants dig, and the elephants treat baboon calls from the treetops as an early warning system. About 100 African bush elephants are estimated to remain.

  The coastal waters hold dolphins, dugongs, whale sharks, turtles, marlin, swordfish and manta rays. About 500 fish species have been recorded. Dahlak Marine National Park, Nakfa Wildlife Reserve, Gash-Setit Wildlife Refuge, Semenawi Bahri National Park and Yob Wildlife Reserve are all protected.

  In 2006, Eritrea announced that it would become the first country in the world to make its entire coast an environmentally protected zone. The plan covered 1,347 km of mainland coastline and another 1,946 km around its hundreds of islands.

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• 7. Many Peoples, One Table

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  Nine ethnic groups are officially recognized in Eritrea, and each has its own language. Tigrinya is the most widely spoken. The country has no official language, because the constitution declares the equality of all Eritrean languages. Tigrinya, Arabic and English work as the three practical working languages, and English is used in university education and many technical fields.

  The Tigrinya people make up roughly half to 55 percent of the population, depending on the estimate, and the Tigre about 30 percent. The Rashaida, an Arabic-speaking people who came from the Hejaz region in the nineteenth century, are about 2 percent. The Kunama and Nara are Nilotic groups who speak Nilo-Saharan languages in the west and northwest.

  No official census has ever been held, so population estimates range from 3.5 million to 6.4 million. The last count before independence was the 1984 Ethiopian census, which recorded 2,621,566 people.

  The 1931 Italian census found 4,188 Italians among 600,573 inhabitants, about 0.7 percent. By 1941, around 70,000 of Eritrea's roughly 760,000 inhabitants were Italians. Most left after independence, though as many as 100,000 Eritreans are estimated to have Italian ancestry. Some Eritreans once spoke an Italian-Tigrinya pidgin called Eritrean Italian. The Scuola Italiana di Asmara, an Italian government school, was shut down in 2020.

  Pasta is now one of the main foods eaten in Asmara. Common dishes include pasta al sugo e berbere, which is pasta with tomato sauce and berbere spice, and cotoletta alla Milanese, a veal dish. The classic Eritrean meal is injera with a spicy stew of beef, chicken, lamb or fish. Eritrean cooking uses more seafood than Ethiopian cooking because of the coast, and it is lighter, with less seasoned butter and more tomatoes, as in the dish tsebhi dorho. Sowa, a bitter drink of fermented barley, and mies, a fermented honey wine, are local favorites.

  Counts of the faithful vary widely. The Pew Research Center reports 62.9 percent Christian and 36.6 percent Muslim. The U.S. State Department estimates 49 percent each, and the World Religion Database reports 47 percent Christian and 51 percent Muslim for 2020.

  Since May 2002, the government has recognized four institutions. These are the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church, Sunni Islam, the Eritrean Catholic Church and the Evangelical Lutheran church. All other groups must register and hand over personal information about their members. Jehovah's Witnesses were stripped of citizenship and basic civil rights by presidential decree in October 1994. Three named members are known to have been imprisoned since that year, along with 51 others.

  The coffee ceremony is one of the most recognizable parts of Eritrean culture. Coffee, called buna in Ge'ez, is offered to visiting friends, at festivities and in daily life. It is served in three rounds. The first is awel in Tigrinya, meaning first. The second is kalaay, meaning second. The third is bereka, meaning to be blessed.

  The best-known Tigrinya musical genre is the guaila. Traditional instruments include the krar, kebero, begena, masenqo and wata. Helen Meles is noted for her powerful voice and wide range, and Dehab Faytinga is a prominent Kunama singer.

  The Kunama have four dances with ritual meaning. Tuka marks rites of passage, indoda is a prayer for rain, sangga-nena is peaceful mediation, and shatta showcases endurance and courage.

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• 8. Rule and Silence

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  In May 2001, a group of senior officials and prominent members of the ruling party, known as the G-15, wrote an open letter to President Isaias Afwerki. They urged him to implement the ratified constitution, enact democratic reforms and establish the rule of law. In September 2001, the government arrested 11 of the signatories and held them incommunicado. The crackdown also hit independent media and several independent journalists. All of them remain imprisoned without charge or trial.

  The People's Front for Democracy and Justice is the only legal party. The Constitution of 1997 provides for multi-party politics but has never been implemented. The National Assembly has 150 seats. In 1993-75 representatives were elected and the rest were appointed. A United Nations Human Rights Council report put it this way: "No national elections have taken place since that time, and no presidential elections have ever taken place."

  Afwerki has held the presidency since independence in 1993 and has spoken with disdain of what he calls Western-style democracy. In a 2008 interview with Al Jazeera, he said that "Eritrea will wait three or four decades, maybe more, before it holds elections. Who knows?" The 2023 V-Dem Democracy indices rank Eritrea second lowest in the world and lowest in Africa among electoral democracies.

  After the independence war, Eritrea and Ethiopia settled into cautious mutual tolerance that lasted until May 1998. Then came a war that ran until 2000, claimed approximately 70,000 lives and cost hundreds of millions of dollars. It began over a border conflict, notably around Badme and Zalambessa. The border dispute was not resolved until 2018.

  A peace treaty was signed on the 9th of July 2018, and a joint declaration the next day formally ended the border conflict. In 2020, Eritrean troops intervened in the Tigray War on the side of the Ethiopian government. Eritrea confirmed in April 2021 that its troops were fighting in Ethiopia.

  A national service law took effect in 1995. Officially, conscripts of either sex serve at least 18 months, with six months of military training and 12 months during their final year of high school. Since the 2000s, however, service has been open-ended, and since 1998 everyone under 50 is enlisted until released. In a study of 200 escaped conscripts, the average service was 6.5 years, and some had served more than 12.

  A major outflow of emigrants left in 2015, with conscription a major factor. At the end of 2018, the United Nations refugee agency estimated that about 507,300 Eritreans had fled the country.

  In June 2016, a 500-page United Nations Human Rights Council report accused the government of extrajudicial executions, torture, indefinitely prolonged national service and forced labour. The Eritrean Foreign Ministry called the report's claims "wild allegations" that were "totally unfounded and devoid of all merit". The government says Western media stories are decontextualized and designed to build a regime change narrative.

  Eritrea also describes itself as self-reliant. Since 2005 it has rejected foreign aid, which it sees as a hindrance to economic development. In 2006 alone, it walked away from US$200 million in aid and refused a US$100 million loan from the World Bank. In 2007, it banned female genital mutilation.

  All independent media have been banned since September 2001, and the state-owned news agency censors news about outside events. The journalist Dawit Isaak has been imprisoned since 2001 without legal process, and he was awarded the 2024 Edelstam Prize. In 2025, Reporters Without Borders rated Eritrea last of 180 countries for press freedom. The BBC has noted that it is the only African country with no privately owned news media.

  Eritrea is a member of the African Union and the United Nations, and an observer in the Arab League alongside Brazil and Venezuela. It was one of only four countries, not counting Russia, to vote against a General Assembly resolution condemning Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The others were Belarus, Syria and North Korea. In December 2025 it withdrew from the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, accusing the organisation of "becoming a tool against" countries like itself.

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