One Civilization Taught to See Itself as Two

Eritrea and Tigray were made politically separate, but they were never made civilizationally foreign to each other. Eritrea can stand as Eritrea, and Tigray can stand as Tigray. Two flags can remain. Two political realities can remain. But beneath them, one people can recover the organic bond that history never fully destroyed. They can learn again to respect and trust each other, to work from what they share, and to see their dignity, security, survival, and future as connected rather than opposed. What is needed now is not nostalgia and not forced unity. It is an honest reckoning that frees both peoples from the lies that made them strangers, and opens the road toward partnership, common survival, and a shared destiny.

Eritrea has just marked thirty-five years of independence. For many Eritreans, this is a moment of pride, and that pride is not without foundation. The liberation struggle was real. The cost was enormous. The determination was extraordinary. As Tegaru, we watched it and we understood it, because we know what it means to fight for the right to define yourself.

But thirty-five years is also enough time for honest reflection. Not the kind that comes from outside, dressed as judgment. The kind that comes from people who share a language, a culture, a church, a set of ancestors, and a very long river. I have been asking myself what these thirty-five years mean, for Eritrea, for Tigray, and for what we were before either of those names carried the weight they carry today.

There is a moment I have carried for thirty years.

It is 1996. I am on the staff of the Arid College of Dryland Agriculture and Natural Resources in Mekelle, the institution that would later grow into Mekelle University. It had only been a couple of years since it was established. One morning, without announcement, a tall figure walks onto campus. You do not need to be told who he is. The height alone tells you. Isaias Afwerki, President of Eritrea, has come to see what is being built south of the Mareb River.

He goes to the Dean’s office. I watch him arrive. I watch him leave.

The expression on his face when he walks out, I still see it. Thirty years later, I still see it.

I did not know then what it meant. I think I know now.

*   *   *

Two years after that visit, his army crossed the border at Badme.

*   *   *

That same 1996 summer, the college organized a staff excursion to Asmara and Massawa, to see the other side of the river that divides people who share everything. We were stopped at Zalambessa. Cameras required special permits. And here is a detail that tells you everything about the relationship as it was actually lived: goods transported by Eritreans moved freely across that border in both directions. The same goods, carried by Ethiopians, were inspected and sometimes even taxed unofficially. It was not about what was being carried. It was about whose hands were carrying it. We waited two hours before organizers managed to get us through.

We were guests who needed permission. They were traders who moved as if the road already belonged to them.

That is not brotherhood. That is a hierarchy that has learned to wear brotherhood’s language.

*   *   *

I tell you this not as an outsider.

My family’s roots are close to the Mareb River, on both sides of it. My mother’s father came from across it, from the Eritrean side. And he was not unusual. This was not a border phenomenon. Before independence, Eritreans and Tigrayans lived among each other across the length of both territories, in cities, in highland towns, in the lowlands. They worked together, built businesses together, raised families together. Many women in my family, as was natural across this whole shared world, married men from the Eritrean side. The same was true going the other direction. The Mareb was an administrative line, not a social boundary. Families wove themselves across it the way people do when they share everything that actually matters.

This is also where ጸምዶ, the concept of organic reunion, comes from. Not from theory or political design, but from the lived reality of a whole people who shared everything and were divided by a line they never drew. Generation after generation, across cities and highland towns and family homes on both sides of the Mareb, people kept finding their way back to each other. Something that cannot be permanently severed by politics because it was never created by politics.

This is also where the wound shows itself most quietly. In the diaspora, two people hear each other speaking Tigrinya. They recognize the language before they know anything else. And then one of them asks: ትግራዋይ ዲኻ/ዲኺ? ኤርትራዊ/ት ዲኻ/ዲኺ? Are you Tigrayan, or are you Eritrean?

Notice what the question does. It places two categories side by side as if they are the same type of thing. But they are not. Tigraway/Tigraweyti/Tegaru is an identity of civilization, ancestry, and language, one that exists on both sides of the Mareb. Eritrean is a state identity. A citizenship. A modern political identity shaped by colonial rule, hardened by liberation war, and consolidated through statehood. To ask someone whether they are Tigrayan or Eritrean is like asking whether they are a person or a citizen. The categories do not belong in the same sentence.

It would have been enough to ask: are you from Tigray, or from Eritrea? Because ተጋሩ, the deeper identity, the civilizational one, is what both could claim without contradiction. The fact that we no longer ask it that way is not an accident. It is the border, still working, long after the checkpoint.

I say this so you understand the ground from which I speak.

*   *   *

Italy drew that line in 1890. It colonized Eritrea, built roads, railways, a handsome city called Asmara. And in doing so, it created something more durable than infrastructure: a particular social psychology.

In the colonial order, Tigrinya-speaking highland Eritreans were placed in a privileged position, as Ascari soldiers, administrators, urban workers. The city of Asmara, and the highland towns around it, carried a certain colonial modernity. And when Italy left, that feeling stayed, concentrated mostly in those highland centers, feeding the feeling that the people north of the river were more modern than the people south of it.

The people on both sides of the Mareb shared the same language, the same church, the same ancestors, the same songs. But the line was made to mean more than geography. It was made to mean a threshold.

You can see this psychology most clearly in the question of language.

Eritreans have invested in Tigrinya with discipline and purpose that is, genuinely, something to respect. For them, language is not just communication; it is a nation-building project. They teach it to their children in the diaspora with a discipline that Tigrayans would do well to observe and learn from. They have developed it, standardized it, and made it a living instrument of collective identity. This investment did not begin with statehood. Long before independence, Eritrean intellectual and cultural circles had already begun organized efforts to promote and modernize Tigrinya. The discipline that later shaped schools, churches, music, theater, and the diaspora had already begun there. For thirty-five years, Amharic has been kept out of Eritrea, even culturally. This reflects a people who understood, with unusual seriousness, that language is not secondary to identity. It is one of the ways identity survives.

Eritrean church life also gave Tigrinya a stronger public and sacred presence than it had in Tigray, where Geʿez remains dominant in formal liturgy. The result is that Tigrinya in Eritrea is embedded in the sacred, not just the secular.

In Tigray, Geʿez remains the official language of church ceremony. This is historically significant; Geʿez is an ancient liturgical and literary language of the northern Horn, and its documentation and scholarly preservation at institutions like Axum and Mekelle universities is important work that must continue. But scholarship and liturgy serve different purposes. One preserves. The other transmits living faith to living people. When a young Tigrayan sits through a church service and understands very little, that is not the preservation of tradition. It is the slow erosion of the connection between a people and their own sacred life. The Eritrean church showed that this does not have to be a choice between Geʿez and the living community. It is a lesson worth learning.

The same was true in the arts. Through theater groups in Asmara, through revolutionary arts troupes, and through a strong tradition of music, drama, theater, and literary production, Tigrinya in Eritrea entered public life with unusual force. Tigray also taught in Tigrinya through the early grades, but it did not build the same cultural infrastructure around the language, and that gap showed. Even in the digital environment, Eritrean usage shaped many early habits of Tigrinya typing, spelling, pronunciation cues, and word choice.

Tigray, however, was not passive. During the armed struggle, the TPLF also built a cultural front that used written Tigrinya, revolutionary songs, poetry, and drama to awaken a people whose language had long been pushed to the margins of official Ethiopian life. Artists such as Eyasu Berhe and Gebretsadik Woldeyohannes did more than sing for a movement. They helped give modern Tigrinya in Tigray a public voice of resistance, dignity, and collective memory. This was also a language renaissance, even if it came later and with weaker institutions than Eritrea’s. The difference is not that Eritrea had culture and Tigray did not. The difference is that Eritrea built a longer and more deliberate public infrastructure around Tigrinya, while Tigray’s revival came through struggle, sacrifice, and later social media acceleration.

The next step should not be competition over whose Tigrinya is pure. It should be cooperation to strengthen Tigrinya for the digital age, in keyboards, archives, subtitles, search tools, educational platforms, and artificial intelligence, while preserving the richness of both traditions.

The same logic of deliberate differentiation expressed itself in other ways. When Eritrea achieved independence, it adopted the Gregorian calendar, not for administrative efficiency, but as a statement. The Julian calendar, shared with Tigray and rooted in the same Orthodox tradition, was too much of a reminder of what the border was supposed to have ended. And yet even here the deeper continuity survived. Eritrean Orthodox followers still observe the religious calendar of fasts, feasts, tabot celebrations, and saints’ days according to the same older rhythm. The state could change official time, but it could not fully change sacred time. Even time itself had to be made different, but not everything could be separated.

And yet the same Eritreans who guard Tigrinya as a sacred project will tell you, if you let them, that they speak the correct Tigrinya. The pure form. The standard. That the Tigrayan dialect is somehow provincial, not quite the real thing.

This claim does not survive examination. Eritrean Tigrinya has been shaped by a century of Arabic and Italian contact. It carries their loanwords and rhythms, as all living languages carry the history of those who speak them. There is nothing wrong with that. But to call the Italian-and-Arabic-inflected highland dialect the pure form, while the Tigrayan dialect is the lesser one, is not linguistics. It is the colonial hierarchy speaking through the mouth of language.

Now look at the Tigrayan side. Tigrinya is Tigray’s language, the root and record of its civilization. And yet too many Tigrayans have treated Amharic as the language of modernity. Speaking it in a certain way signals education. Amharic music remains an essential habit. Tigrinya is for home; Amharic is for the world.

This is a wound Tigrayans have inflicted on themselves, and it has weakened exactly the cultural ground that Tigray has needed most since 2016, when the assault on Tigrayan identity began in earnest. The erosion was already there before the war. The war only made it visible.

Tigrinya in Tigray is catching up. Social media, new written material, a generation writing in their own language, all of this is accelerating something real. But intention still needs to be built. Language is the unique ID of an identity. When you do not protect it, you hand something away that takes generations to recover.

*   *   *

There is a history that belongs in this story, and it is one that is rarely told in full.

When Eritrea achieved independence in 1991, something happened that most Eritreans do not speak of openly. In the years immediately after independence, large numbers of Ethiopians, including many Tigrayans and Eritrean women married to Ethiopian men and their children, were expelled from Eritrea. They were forced to leave their property and their belongings behind. Families that had lived in Eritrea for generations were bused across to camps in Adigrat, Adwa, and Axum.

At the same time, hundreds of thousands of Eritreans continued living in Ethiopia. They voted in the 1993 independence referendum. They built businesses, accumulated wealth, held dual identity, served in institutions. They were not rounded up. They were not expelled.

The asymmetry was total from the first day of Eritrean independence.

When the 1998 war began, Ethiopia revoked the citizenship of Eritreans and expelled tens of thousands. Ethiopia’s action was also wrong. But it occurred in the context of war, after Eritrea had already established a harsh precedent of expulsion and dispossession. Wrong actions must still be judged in their sequence. What Eritrea did in response was something else entirely.

Despite official declarations that Ethiopians were welcome to stay, Eritrean authorities imposed an eighteen-step bureaucratic maze requiring back-taxes calculated from the entire period of residence before anyone could obtain an exit visa. Tigrayan workers were specifically targeted. In Massawa, neighborhood watch groups attacked the residential area where Tigrayan day laborers lived. Some were killed, and others were injured. Later, Ethiopians were forcibly expelled toward the frontline and made to walk through rain, cold, and minefields before reaching Ethiopian lines. Some never made it.

A mother of four who had lived her whole life in Assab, whose house, small grocery, and business were confiscated, told a reporter: “When things went well in Eritrea they treated us well, but when things went badly, they treated us like dogs. Now we don’t know who we are, whether Eritreans or Ethiopians.”

She did not know who she was. That is what this psychology costs real people.

*   *   *

There is one more instrument of this psychology that must be named: Sawa.

Since the early years of independence, PFDJ has required Eritrean youth to pass through a national service program centered on the Sawa Defense Training Center. Officially it encompasses military training, vocational skills, and civic education. In practice it has functioned as something more specific: a structured program of national indoctrination, well documented by researchers and human rights organizations, through which the exceptionalism psychology is transmitted to each new generation before they are old enough to question it.

The content of that indoctrination, as documented and as reported by those who passed through it, included a specific orientation toward Tigrayans: a cultivated sense of Eritrean superiority, a trained suspicion, a psychology of hierarchy dressed, again, in the language of national pride. Many Tigrayans experienced the political culture produced through Sawa as deeply anti-Tigrayan. Whether Eritreans describe it in those terms or not, that perception became part of the wound between the two peoples.

There is a question here that every Eritrean deserves to sit with. In 1991, there was no credible military threat from Tigray. Ethiopia had just accepted Eritrea’s path to a referendum, and the TPLF had been Eritrea’s closest ally through the liberation struggle. So against whom, exactly, was this generation being trained? The answer is not strategic. It is psychological. The army was being built against the identity that PFDJ needed Eritreans to separate themselves from. Sawa was the institution through which that separation was made permanent, generation after generation, in the bodies and minds of the young.

When EDF soldiers entered Tigray in 2020, they did not arrive as neutral actors who made bad choices under pressure. They arrived carrying decades of prepared psychology. Sawa is part of the explanation for what happened in Axum, and after Pretoria, and in the systematic patterns that investigators documented with names and dates. The reckoning must include this.

*   *   *

In 2018, for a few months, the border opened.

Eritreans who had never been to Tigray, whose entire image of what lay south of the Mareb had been shaped by thirty-five years of PFDJ indoctrination, crossed it. They drove as far as Mekelle, 160 kilometres from the border, on the first day. They came to the market. They walked the streets.

They found modern cafes. Multiple banks with ATMs. New residential neighbourhoods. The look and manner of a new generation that carried itself with quiet confidence. This was not what PFDJ had taught them to expect. It was not a remembered Tigray they were encountering. It was a Tigray that had been built while the border was closed and the narrative was being maintained.

Many chose not to go back.

The closed border had not been protecting national security. It had been protecting the narrative.

I think about what Isaias saw when he walked around that small campus in 1996. There were no extraordinary buildings. No material marvels. The college was young, modest by any external standard. What was present, and what I believe he recognized, was something harder to dismiss than infrastructure: the collective determination of a people who had decided they would build their own future with their own hands. The self-reliance, the conviction, the quiet certainty that destiny was not something that happened to Tigrayans but something Tigrayans would make happen.

The mid to late 1990s were the years when Tigray was doing the hardest, least visible work. After decades of war, famine, and the systematic destruction of human and environmental capital, the task was not yet to build; it was first to think clearly about how to build. Whatever human capital had survived, and much had not, was being gathered and directed toward one question: how does a society that has lost so much begin to define its own future? The strategies came before the structures. The thinking came before the buildings. What Isaias saw in 1996 was a people in the middle of that work, not yet arrived, but already certain of the direction. What has been achieved since, modest as it may appear in absolute terms, carries the full weight of what had first to be overcome. I think that is what I saw in his face when he walked out of the Dean’s office.

*   *   *

Let me say plainly what must be said.

For millennia, before any modern border existed, these two communities were the custodians of the Red Sea corridor together. The safety of that sea lane and the stability of the northern Horn have always depended, in large part, on these two peoples finding a way to act together. The geography did not create this truth. It only keeps confirming it. Eritrea’s ports and Tigray’s hinterland need each other, yes, but that is a footnote to something far older. These are not two economies that happen to be adjacent. They are one civilization that was taught to see itself as two.

And yet here we are. Eritrea has emptied itself into exile. Tigray is now being pushed toward the same road. Two peoples are losing their young, their workers, their families, and their future. If this continues, it is not only politics that will fail. The societies themselves will be emptied. This is not a metaphor. It is arithmetic.

This is not the fate of peoples who chose it. It is the fate of peoples whose leaders chose it for them.

*   *   *

I want to use one word carefully. Reckoning.

Not a trial. Not an external verdict. Not a demand for performance. A reckoning happens when a people finally allows evidence to challenge the story they have been told about themselves. It is the moment when memory, politics, and identity are forced to face reality.

For Eritrea, the reckoning has specific content. It means acknowledging that the army crossed the border at Badme in 1998. A court at The Hague found this without ambiguity, and the finding has been denied for over two decades. It means acknowledging that EDF soldiers committed documented atrocities in Tigray between 2020 and 2023: in Axum, after Pretoria, in the systematic looting that investigators documented with names and dates. It means acknowledging the 1991 expulsions, and what was done to Tigrayan workers and families during the 1998 war, and what the woman from Assab meant when she said she no longer knew who she was. It means acknowledging that hundreds of thousands of Eritreans in exile are not a product of Western conspiracy but of a political system that has spent thirty-five years speaking about the world while emptying the country.

None of this asks Eritreans to surrender their identity. Their language, their liberation struggle, their cultural persistence, their remarkable discipline in building a national consciousness, all of it is real and worth defending. The reckoning asks only that they free their identity from the lie attached to it: that exceptionalism requires no accountability, that brotherhood can coexist with hierarchy, that the camera at Zalambessa was protecting something worth protecting.

If that reckoning comes, and if open borders follow, something will begin that no political declaration can begin: the sustained, ordinary encounter of people who can see each other clearly. The market, the university visit, the wedding across the Mareb, the grandchildren of families that were separated by a colonial line finally meeting each other in the places their grandparents knew. Stories about other people do not survive the meeting of actual people.

*   *   *

But reckoning cannot remain a theory. It has to be practiced somewhere, by someone, starting now.

I live in the United States. What I see among Eritreans and Tigrayans in the diaspora is not complete separation. Families still meet. Old relationships still survive. There are weddings, friendships, neighbourhood ties, and quiet forms of recognition that politics has not fully destroyed. But these connections remain too private, too scattered, and too fragile. They have not yet become the shared churches, festivals, cultural platforms, and public spaces that a people with the same language, the same ancestors, and the same songs should be able to build together. The political separation has followed us across the ocean, even where the human bond has not disappeared.

This does not have to continue. Eritreans are Eritrean citizens. Tigrayans carry their identity within the Ethiopian federal structure, whatever that structure becomes tomorrow remains to be seen. These are real and different citizenships, and no one is asking anyone to surrender them. You can stand under an Eritrean flag and a Tigrayan flag in the same room and that is not a contradiction. It is simply the truth of where history has placed two branches of the same people.

I should also be honest about a complication. The Eritrean diaspora is not one community. It is divided, deeply and sometimes violently, between those who support the PFDJ regime and those who oppose it. These are not small factions. Both are substantial. The clashes at Eritrean diaspora festivals in Europe, Canada, and elsewhere, widely reported by international media, are not aberrations. They are the visible surface of a fracture that runs through the entire community. Sometimes the two groups cannot share a church. The reckoning I am calling for is therefore not only between Eritreans and Tegaru. It is one that many Eritreans are already demanding among themselves. The Eritreans in the diaspora who have rejected the PFDJ narrative are not waiting for Tigrayans to tell them something is wrong. They already know. Any platform for genuine encounter must honour their courage in naming what their own government has done, and join their voice to ours.

What is missing is not political unity. What is missing is a shared public space for the ordinary encounter that already survives privately. The festival where children grow up knowing the same song has two homes. The church where two communities pray in the same language and do not pretend that is a coincidence. The conversation platform where people discuss their shared history honestly, not to resolve it politically, but to stop being strangers to each other. ጸምዶ, as it has always existed, happens through proximity and recognition. In the diaspora there is no river to cross. There is only the choice to turn toward each other or away.

If the diaspora makes that choice, if Eritreans and Tegaru in Washington and Stockholm and Riyadh build the platforms that their governments never built for them, they will do something more durable than any peace agreement. They will hand their children a common identity that no future border crisis can fully take away.

*   *   *

The road from here is not closed. But it requires a choice.

Eritreans, and especially the generation that will inherit what PFDJ leaves behind, face a decision that history will not wait for them to make slowly. They can choose to confront and outgrow the psychology that has masqueraded as national identity: the hierarchy dressed as brotherhood, the exceptionalism that silences accountability, the narrative that needed a closed border to survive. They can choose genuine partnership with the people across the Mareb, partnership built not on “one people” sentiment but on honest reckoning with what has passed between these two communities and what both of them need in order to survive.

Or they can leave the burden to the next generation.

There are Tegaru on both sides of the Mareb. There are Eritreans who carry Tigrayan blood, and Tigrayans who carry Eritrean blood, in ways that no border was ever able to fully untangle. The families that were divided, expelled, bereaved, and scattered across two wars and three decades did not produce a clean separation. They produced a wound that runs through both peoples simultaneously. If the reckoning does not come in this generation, that wound will be handed forward, still open, to children who will inherit the consequences of what their parents could not bring themselves to face.

My mother’s family, and the many families like ours on both sides of the river, did not build their lives across the Mareb because of political vision. They did it because it was natural. Because the river was never the boundary it was made to be. Because one people, divided by a colonial line, will always find its way back to itself if it is allowed to.

If the reckoning comes, many Eritreans in the diaspora may begin to see a road home. Many Tigrayans scattered across the world may also return to rebuild. Two peoples will become what the Horn of Africa needs them to be: not rivals, not hierarchies dressed as partners, but a pillar, together, for the stability of the Red Sea and the civilization that was always theirs to keep.

The reckoning is not a punishment. It is the road home, for both sides of the Mareb.

ትግራይ ትስዕር！ሰላም ንህዝብና！