From Guerrillas to Government: The Eritrean People's Liberation Front

David Pool. From Guerrillas to Government: The Eritrean People's Liberation Front. Eastern African Studies. Athens: Ohio University Press/Oxford: James Currey, 2001. xvi + 206 pp. Maps. Notes. Abbreviations. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. $42.95. Cloth. $22.95. Paper.

In recent years the appearance of rigorous works on Eritrea have signaled the demise of what Patrick Gilkes once rather acidly referred to as "the guerrilla groupie syndrome." While that epithetic description has not necessarily characterized David Pool's work, his latest book on the Eritrean Peoples Liberation Front (EPLF) nevertheless proves that scholars who have developed close relationships within the Eritrean struggle can produce incisive, critical analyses. Indeed, Pool's intimacy with his subject emerges not as a liability here but as a key that helps unlock the more guarded histories of nationalist movements and narratives. At the same time, he conducts his analysis with a dispassionate respect that evidences both his years of familiarity with Eritrea and the maturity of his knowledge. Pool's volume is a timely contribution to understanding the intricacies of nationalist production and mobilization that continue to shape the Eritrean nation-state.

The book contains three parts. In part 1, chapter 1, Pool provides a detailed, yet concise view of prenationalist Eritrean sociocultural and political-economic patterns. Chapter 2 offers an overview of changing administrative structures and how these interacted with prenationalist patterns and shaped the emergent nationalisms of the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) and later the EPLF. In part 2, Pool takes a closer look at how the EPLF emerged as an organization and configured its nationalism. Here his major focus is demonstrating EPLF's "autonomy" from prenationalist patterns and the fragmented politics of the British and Ethio-Eritrean Federal administrations. That autonomy, he argues, was reflected in both the front's structure as well as in the nationalist identity it produced and mobilized. This is a contrast with the ELF, which he portrays in part 1 as more deeply embedded in prenationalist ethnolinguistic, regional, and religious identities and relations. Finally, part 3 examines how the EPLF carried the moral economy of the liberation struggle and the internal structure of the front, which functioned like a state throughout the latter part of the war, into the postindependence nation-building era. Here he examines how values like self-reliance, national unity, and multiculturalism, and practices of centralism, discipline, and women's rights, have been unevenly enshrined in state policy and social practice. Pool devotes equal attention in these final chapters to continuities between the liberation struggle and the state as well as ruptures and contradictions. The result is a rich and provocative portrait suggestive of different possible trajectories and numerous topics for further study.

The strengths of this book are multiple. Pool offers one of the finest analyses of Eritrean prenationalist relations and postcolonial politics available. He deftly deconstructs the complexities of lowland communities in particular, and illustrates the shifting tensions between ethnolinguistic, religious, kinship, and regional identities in an illuminating and engaging manner. Rather than treating nationalism as a decisive break with these patterns, he examines the enduring relationships between them. His suggestion that ELF and EPLF effectively produced different kinds of nationalism is extremely useful, and his approach to independent Eritrea is refreshingly nuanced, realistic, and open-ended.

The book's only real weakness is paradoxically tied to one of its strengths. Pool's argument that EPLF sought to establish itself as autonomous or removed from prenationalist patterns is not incorrect but perhaps incomplete and undertheorized. When he notes in the conclusion that "whereas the EPLF instilled nationalist sentiments and values in its members, unreconstructed sub-national loyalties lurked in the hearts of broader Eritrean society" (196), he highlights the inchoateness of his own analytic formulation. For EPLF's nationalism and structure were no less embedded in Eritrean society and culture than ELF's; the EPLF simply configured those patterns differently. Had Pool engaged some current anthropological and sociological models of nationalism and identity, he might have converted a flaw to yet another strength.

Tricia Redeker Hepner

Michigan State University

East Lansing, Michigan

Copyright African Studies Association Sep 2003
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