Product Description

One small East African country embodies the battered history of the continent: patronised by colonialists, riven by civil war, confused by Cold War manoeuvring, proud, colorful, with Africa's best espresso and worst rail service. Michela Wrong brilliantly reveals the contradictions and comedy, past and present, of Eritrea. Just as the beat of a butterfly's wings is said to cause hurricanes on the other side of the world, so the affairs of tiny Eritrea reverberate onto the agenda of superpower strategists. This new book on Africa is from the author of the critically acclaimed In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz. Eritrea is a little-known country scarred by decades of conflict and occupation. It has weathered the world's longest-running guerrilla war, and the dogged determination that secured victory against Ethiopia, its giant neighbour, is woven into the national psyche. Fascist Italy wanted Eritrea as the springboard for a new, racially-pure Roman empire, Britain sold off its industry for scrap, the US needed headquarters for its state-of-the-art spy station and the Soviet Union used it as a pawn in a proxy war. Michela Wrong reveals the breathtaking abuses this tiny nation has suffered and, with the sharp eye for detail that was the hallmark of her account of Mobutu's Congo, she tells the story of colonialism itself. Along the way, we meet a formidable Emperor, a guerrilla fighter who taught himself French cuisine in the bush, and a chemist who arranged the heist of his own laboratory. An arresting blend of travelogue and history, 'I Didn't Do It For You' pierces the dark heart of our colonial history.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #66127 in Books
• Published on: 2005-07-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 464 pages

Review
Praise for I Didn't Do It For You: 'Contemporary history on the grand scale. I was entertained, informed and angered. Wrong has given us another essential contribution to the post-colonial scramble for Africa.' John le Carre 'Vivid, penetrating, wonderfully detailed. Michela Wrong has written the biography of a nation and more -- she has excavated the very heart and soul of the Eritrean people and their country.' Aminatta Forna 'If you thought Eritrea was some exotic flower you heard mentioned on a gardening programme this book will tell you something different. It tells the tale of a small group of Africans so despised and trampled by successive foreign occupations that they fought back and after 30 years of war, they became a nation. It is an astounding story packed with tales of the worst -- and the best -- of human behaviour.' Richard Dowden, President of the Royal African Society 'This is a wonderful, readable and illuminating book. Michela Wrong is an enormously talented writer!thoroughly researched and deeply engaging and honest.' Clare Short -- New Statesman 'Impressive ! Wrong offers an uplifting testament to the resilience of the human spirit. Eminently readable and full of fascinating detail, this is a book that deserves and needs to be read' Guardian '[A] corker ! fascinating and tragic. Wrong's writing flows so smoothly that it is only after 100 pages or so that you notice how much legwork she has put in [and] she tracks down a startling array of characters' Daily Telegraph 'A lyrical, intensely intelligent and wonderfully readable history of Eritrea ! beautifully written' Independent

Justin Hill, The Guardian
'Eminently readable and full of fascinating detail, this is a book that deserves and needs to be read.'

TLS
'a wonderful book'

Customer Reviews

How outsiders devastate Africa.
Funnily enough,my first knowledge of Eritrea's liberation struggle is mentioned in this book-BBC World Service news items on the war between the EPLF and Ethiopia in the 1980s.
Michela Wrong writes a wonderfully readable book about how outsiders(Italy,the UK,Ethiopia,USA,USSR,even Cuba)interfered in and almost destroyed Eritrea from the late 19th century onwards.The total amorality and cynicism of the outside world towards Eritrea is well documented in the mid-section of the book,roughly from 1974 to 1978,when the superpowers changed sides in the regional conflict in the Horn of Africa-the US swapped Ethiopia for Somalia as allies,and the USSR did the opposite,and the Eritreans,on the verge of a victorious offensive against Ethiopia,were forced to retreat and the war continued till 1991.
Wrong justly points out that other African countries hardly covered themselves with glory during the Ethiopian occupation of Eritrea.Even those states that came to independence throgh liberation wars found the Eritreans an embarrasment,and the OAU(based in Ethiopia's capital)couldn't bring itself to denounce one African country for occupying another.The fear of post-indepeenence boundaries being altered,and potentially every African country's borders being open to revision,was a nightmare Africa's leaders couldn't face.
After victory over Ethiopia,Wrong's depiction of the Eritrean leadership's attitude towards the tyrants,kleptocrats and corrupt incompetents who made up most of Africa's leadership cadre in the early 1990s is very well done.Also well done is the story of how the arrogance of Eritrea's new leaders led them into a disastrous war with Ethiopia(what,again?)in the late 1990s.This also led to the hope of a homegrown democracy in Africa giving way to an increasingly authoritarian government within Eritrea.
Wrong correctly points out that,post-independence,most outsiders romanticised Eritrea as a possibility of an African country following a path of good governance and respect for human rights,rather than as the messy outcome of decades of war and internal struggle.The war with Ethiopia and the internal clampdown caused such disappointment amongst western well-wishers because it led to the smashing of their own illusions about Eritrea.
The heroes of this book are the ordinary Eritrean men and women who endured so much in the independence war,only for independence to lead to yet more war and repression,this time from their own government.Wrong correctly salutes their feats,but seems to try too hard to look for a silver lining and a happy ending.She obviously knows more about Eritrea than I do, but I can't be so optimistic.
In short,a great,readable book about a part of the world that is,despite the constant meddling of the outside world,largely unknown in Europe.

Good but very sketchy on some important issues
This is a book full of contradictions, if not just for its content, then for the approach to the subject, namely Eritrea, by Michela Wrong. It is about the journey of Eritrea throughout history - from colonial time to present day. The scars that foreign occupation left on Eritreans - the experience of a people whose nation was betrayed by the world, most notably, by the United Nations. It is a story of a brave and resolute people who, irrespective of all obstacles, abandoned and disparaged, succeeded to realise their destiny. Wrong has put in a great deal of research into exploring the Eritrean colonial experience and its legacy - a good effort indeed.

But when it comes to present day Eritrea, the book's most fatal shortcoming comes to the fore. The discussion of the current Eritrean state of affairs, for the most part, is entirely based on anecdotes and lacks in in-depth analysis. Had Wrong applied the same level of commitment in constructing a well-rounded picture of the struggles of a young nation as that of the colonial period, we would have been talking about a brilliant work. On the contrary however, Wrong seems to have glossed over the most important period of Eritrean history and thereby constructed a very sketchy picture of present day Eritrea.

A fabulous African journey
This is an extraordinary, many-layered book and I challenge anyone to remain unmoved by its epic tale. I began it ignorant about one of Africa's least known countries, and ended it enraged, inspired ... and much wiser, not only about Eritrea but about the West's grotesque use of African statelets as political footballs.

The book is an impassioned travelogue through landscape, history and politics, with an author at once caustically funny, thoughtful and wry. If you like intelligent travel writing, you will love ms wrong's work, with its vivid landscapes and incisive human portraits. A cast of characters at times Pythonesque move against a back-cloth of tragedy - like the Italian Victor Meldrew, who sits, cursing in his rusting Eritrean scrapyard, or the bored GIs who hold farting competitions and smear their pants with peanut butter to horrify fastidious locals.

Underlying it all is the author's meticulous research, but it is a tribute to her writing that the reader never notices that they are being educated as well as entertained. I finished the book with that feeling of regret that only exceptional works give you.