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extraordinary tranquillity, it breathed peace in time with the cicada’s rhythmic rasp. Asmara was certainly the only African city in which not only was I regularly offered lifts by strangers, but I accepted them without hesitation. I joined diners who gestured me over to their tables in restaurants and cleared a seat for customers who decided, off their own bat, that they fancied sharing a coffee. As for begging, it was regarded as below Eritrean dignity. I saw a persistent beggar boy being given a reproving cuff round the ear from an ex-Fighter mortified by the impression he was making on a visitor. One’s expectations were always being turned on their head. ‘Have you got any local money?’ a handsome Eritrean student who had shared my flight asked as we were about to leave the airport terminal. Before I had time to mutter a refusal, he had extracted a banknote from his wallet: ‘Here, take this for the taxi. You can pay me back later.’ It was a typically Eritrean moment: in one of the world’s poorest nations, I had just become the scrounger.
    Journalists are mocked for using their taxi drivers as political barometers. But the conversation between airport terminal and city centre can prove more insightful than any diplomatic briefing. I was accustomed to the standard African taxi man’s dirge. It started with a whinge about economic hardship, moved to a caustic assessment of both the president and opposition’s shortcomings, and climaxed in a prediction–usually horribly prescient–of just how awful things were about to get.In Eritrea, the first taxi driver I met turned out to be one of Eritrea’s longest-serving ex-Fighters. Ministers booked for interview strode past me in reception to knock shoulders with him and pat him on the back. He not only thought the president was a hero, he knew exactly what needed to be done to rebuild a war-shattered country. But then, so did every Eritrean I met. In truth, conducting a range of interviews began to feel like an exercise in futility. Whether minister, businessman, waiter or farmer, everyone seemed to think along identical lines. But this didn’t sound like regurgitated propaganda. The need for self-reliance, the miracles that could be worked through discipline and hard work, the importance of learning from Africa’s mistakes: such beliefs had been hammered out during committee meetings and village debates, for the EPLF was passionately committed to grassroots discussion. I had the uncanny feeling that I was speaking to the many mouths of one single, Hydra-headed creature: the Eritrean soul.
    By God, they were impressive, though it has to be said that one rarely experienced a fit of uncontrollable giggles. The self-deprecating, surreal hilarity I had come to appreciate in central Africa as the saving grace of lives lived in grotesque disorder was absent here: Eritreans did dour intensity better than they did humour. Their wiry physiques–the result of not years, but generations of going without–spoke of iron control. Their personalities were as starkly defined as the climate itself, stripped of fuzzy edges. If you made the mistake of flippantly challenging one of their black-and-white certainties, you could feel the shutters coming down, as they withdrew into prickly, how-could-you-expect-to-understand-us censoriousness.
    A refrain kept running through my head, a catchphrase from a British sitcom of the 1970s. ‘I didn’t get where I am today…’ a beetle-browed magnate would intone at the start of every sweeping pronouncement. Eritrea, it seemed to me, had itsown, unarticulated version of the uncompromising mantra. ‘I didn’t spend 10/20/30 years at the Front to be patronized by a foreigner/kept waiting by a bureaucrat/messed around by a traffic cop,’ it ran. Extraordinary suffering brought with it, I guessed, a sense of extraordinary entitlement that easily tipped over into