ANOTHER VOICE

The country where the 1990s hit the 1950s

MATTHEW PARRIS

See Massawa by night, if you can. If you can, see Massawa only by night. Heat and darkness are a heady mix. The warm wind blows in from the Red Sea, dim light bulbs swing their pools of soft yellow light from trailing wires, the shadows dance, the muezzin calls and a million crickets quietly scream.

You can smell the charcoal fires, the hot, sweet coffee, the incense, cinnamon and sandalwood; you can smell the rot. You can hear the ships unloading at a dock where blizzards of moths sweep the floodlights. You can hear children laughing among ruins of mosques and winter palaces.

And, if you stand quite still in the dark where beggars scuttle and roaches strut, You can feel Massawa not as a point in time, but as time itself: 2,000 years of Ottomans, Christians, negroes and Arabs; of dhows and schooners, tankers and freighters; of feasts, famines, sieges, treaties and terrible wars. In the dark, Mas- sawa becomes an age unified within a moment.

Daylight breaks the spell. The rubble of war is everywhere. Two ships are sunk in the harbour. Whole buildings have been mortar-bombed into dust. Walls are blasted away, wood shutters torn from their hinges, Palms snapped like matchsticks, doorways and windows sprayed with bullet-holes. Across the causeway on the African main- land, Russian tanks lie shattered into pieces nobody has bothered to collect.

And crueller even than war is the recon- struction. Cranes, concrete, pylons and new tarmac come marching in. Eritrea is emerg- ing from 30 years of almost continuous bombardment, first from Haile Selasse, then from the Marxist Mengistu and his Derg.

. In 1952, in what appears to have been a fit of inattention, Britain and the United Nations handed this former Italian colony to Ethiopia, a handover the peoples of the territory never accepted. From the early Sixties to 1991 they mounted a desperate struggle for independence. They fought against all odds. The vile Mengistu was joined by the Soviet Union, which sent advisers, weapons, tanks, Migs, bombs, napalm and money — and the West mostly looked away. Eritrea fought with immense heroism, Ethiopia and the USSR with colossal incompetence. In the end, Mengis- tu collapsed. In 1993 Eritrea emerged as Africa's newest nation. All at once, the 1990s have hit a country all but petrified in the 1950s. It is as though Eritrea has proceeded from 1957 to 1997 without passing through the Sixties, Seven- ties and Eighties between. Beneath a slowly revolving fan on the verandah at Massawa post office, Eritreans are learning to use telephone kiosks . . .

Dear Customers, please use cards of 25, 50 and 100 nakfa to telephone by Pay Phone. Use for local calls only. Victory to the masses!

Nowhere do the strands of hope and agony, the ruins and the modernities, tan- gle into a stranger knot than here in Mas- sawa. One of the country's two Red Sea ports, the harbour was known to the Egyp- tians, occupied for three centuries by the Turks, developed with enormous energy by the Italians under Mussolini, and shot to pieces by the Ethiopians. After the second world war, facilities were substantially dis- mantled by the British and sold to Pakistan for scrap. During the struggle against Ethiopia the magnificent palace once occu- pied by the Italian governor and used by the Emperor Haile Selassie as a winter home was mortared into a ruin, its great moorish dome smashed like an egg. The railway was ripped up, its sleepers used to reinforce trenches.

Yet the Massawa retains its character. Even now you can sense what a raffish and stylish place this became in the days of Ital- ian colonialism. The ancient Fiats, the arches of the Hotel Savoia, the green shut- tered windows of the Hotel Torino, offer witness of Massawa's former glories. Peo- ple still say 'ciao' and the coffee is still good. The Mellotti Brewing Company has survived the war. The vineyards the Italians planted in the hills are coming back into production. Imagine an Italian version of what Singapore was before the Sixties, strip away air-conditioning and Singapore's boom, and superimpose in its place 30 years of war, a battery of mortar bombs and one huge famine, and you have the picture.

I have just returned. Foreign Office advice is to register immediately with the British consulate in the capital, Asmara; in no circumstances to leave the main roads; and never to camp out. You should on no account venture out after dark, says the note. I have invariably found such advice an unfailing indicator that there is absolutely nothing to fear in a country.

So it proved. Eritrea must be the safest, friendliest, most honest place in Africa, marvellous for camping — and there seemed to be about 30 other tourists in a country the size of England. I sometimes wonder what Foreign Office advice on visit- ing Glasgow would be.

Rooms in my Massawa hotel, the Savoia (two single pallet-beds in the middle of a big floor 30 foot square, one huge ceiling fan dangling precariously from a ceiling 20 feet above, a collapsed wardrobe and noth- ing else), cost £3.50. Or you can sleep out on the vast verandah for £1.

We drank beer (in unmarked bottles; the labelling plant has yet to be repaired) in a bar where a gecko and his wife had installed themselves at each end of the flu- orescent tube light, waiting for moths. A garish quartz clock hung from one wall and the box it came in had been hung as a deco- ration upon the other. We ate fish samosas then found a restaurant where the waiter disappeared down the road to buy us more beers then asked what we would like: fish?

`Only fish?'

`Only fish.'

`What kind of fish?'

`Fish.'

The seven of us were served with seven enormous grilled fishes, none less than 18 inches long, and a plate piled with hot unleavened bread. Later, drinking sweet coffee outside in the mud street, we placed bets on cockroaches racing up the wall as the barmaid brought a little tabletop bra- zier of incense smoking on some glowing coals.

Incense cost 50 pence a pound in the market. In Britain (I have enquired) it is £8 a pound. In Eritrea a Toyota Land Cruiser costs about £50,000. In Britain they sell at around £20,000.

So if I buy a Toyota in Derby and take it to Massawa, I could swap it for 40 tons of incense, which I could bring back here and offer to the 'flying Bishop' of Ebbsfleet in exchange for 36 Toyota Land Cruisers, which I could take to Massawa, and . . . I must buy a dhow.

Matthew Parris is parliamentary sketchwriter and a columnist of the Times.