Eritrea and Ethiopia. the Federal Experience by Tekeste Negash

Such an examination provides a better understanding of the background to the conflict and it is an important part of Eritrean political and social history. The author looks closely at the impact of the British period on Eritrean society. The attempts of the Eritrean Moslem League to defend and maintain the federation were frustrated by internal contradictions, by the Unionist party, and by misconstrued perceptions of the division of powers between Eritrea and Ethiopia. The UN-imposed federation, together with its accompanying constitution, were doomed to fail, as these were foreign to Eritrean and Ethiopian conceptions of political power. Negash maintains that the federation was abolished by Eritrean social and political forces rather than by Ethiopia. Based primarily on archival sources at the Public Record Office in London, Eritrea and Ethiopia argues that no other group in the region has repeatedly succeeded in shaping its political destiny as the Tigreans of Eritrea have. The work includes a short account of the war between Eritrean nationalist forces and the Ethiopian government, which led up to the emergence of Eritrea as a sovereign state. This central theme is placed in context by a reconstruction of Eritrean political organizations during the crucial postwar years. The primary objective of this book is to examine the rise and the fall of the federation in the nght of present-day realities. Their efforts had a tremendous influence on the overall trajectory of nationalism among both League leaders and the orgamzation’s general membership.The Ethiopian-Eritrean federation, a product of a United Nations resolution, came into existence in 1952 and was abolished ten years later. Using Muslim League publicaüons, personal testimonies, British archival sources, and secondary literature, tfús article will show that throughout the period in question, proactive members of the intelligentsia helped strengthen Muslim civil society while they engaged in broader struggles aimed at achieving social reform and establishing cooperative relationships within the broader nationalist constituency.

It argues that many of the leading members of the pro-independence Muslim intelligentsia, defined in thh article broadly as the fluid group of waters, Eritreans within the former Italian colonial civil service, and religious scholars serving within or associated with the Eritrean Muslim League, contributed to the naüonaUst movement by taking advantage of the extensive 'Islamic social capital' across the region. This article discusses the rise of Eritrean nationalism in the context of Muslim intellectual acüvism during the later penod of the Bntish Military Administration (BMA).

Eritrea and Ethiopia. the Federal Experience by Tekeste Negash