Michela Wrong - I Didn’t Do It For You - How the World Used and Abused a Small African Nation

He was as ravaged and pitted as the port itself. Massawa is a town with two faces. At the setting of the sun, when everyone heaves a sigh of relief, it becomes a place of hidden recesses and mysterious beauty, the lights playing softly over warm coral masonry. Tiny grocery shops, their walls neatly stacked with shiny metallic packets of tea and milk powder, soap and oil, glow from the darkness like coloured jewels. As the cafés under the Arabic arcades spring into life, naval officers in starched white uniforms sit and savour the cool evening air, watching trucks from the harbour chugging their way along the causeways, taking grain back to the mainland. Crouched in alleyways, young women sell hot tea and hardboiled eggs, the incense on their charcoal braziers blending with the pungent smell of ripe guava, the nutty aroma of roasting coffee and an occasional hot blast from an open sewer. But in the squinting glare of daytime, when only cawing crows and ibis venture out into the blinding sun, Massawa is just an ugly Red Sea town, scarred by too many sieges and earthquakes.

The town’s geographical layout – two large islands linked to the mainland by slim causeways built by the 19th-century Swiss adventurer Werner Munzinger – always meant it was an easy town to hold, a difficult place to conquer. In the Second World War, a defiant Italian colonial administration had to be bombed into submission by the British and the port was then crippled by German commanders who scuttled their ships in a final gesture of spite. When the EPLF guerrilla movement first tried to capture Massawa from the Ethiopians in the 1970s, its Fighters were mown down on the exposed salt flats. Thirteen years later, the rebels succeeded, but the town took a terrible hammering in the process. Pigeons roost in the shattered blue dome of the Imperial Palace, shrapnel has taken hungry bites out of mosques and archways, walls are pitted with acne scars. Near the port, a plinth that once carried a statue of the mounted Haile Selassie, pointing triumphantly to the sea he worked so hard to claim on Ethiopia’s behalf, stands decapitated. The Marxist Derg regime that ousted him tried to destroy the statue, the EPLF made a point of finishing the job. Occasionally, you’ll come across a building in the traditional Arab style, its intricately-carved wooden balcony slipping gradually earthwards. But some of Africa’s most grotesque modern buildings – pyramids of glass and cement – leave you wistful for what must have been, before the bombs and artillery did their work on the coral palazzi. The handwritten sign propped next to the till of a mini-market round the corner from Cicoria’s workshop captures what, in light of Massawa’s history, seems an understandable sense of foreboding. ‘Our trip – long. Our hope – far. Our trouble – many’ it reads.

Cicoria had lived through it all, surviving each military onslaught miraculously unscathed. ‘Once, they were shooting and one person dropped dead to the left of me, one was killed to the right and I was left standing in the middle. I’ve always had the devil’s own luck.’ He’d come to Massawa in the 1940s, a 15-year-old runaway escaping an unhappy Asmara home. ‘My mother had died and I never got on with my dad. I hated my father terribly. He was an ignorant peasant.’ His grandfather had been one of the area’s first settlers, a constructor dispatched by Rome to build roads and dams in an ultimately fruitless attempt to win the trust of Abyssinian Emperor Menelik II. ‘My family has a chapel in Asmara cemetery. You should visit it.’ Cicoria must have inherited from his grandfather some technical skill that drew him to the shipyards, where Italian prisoners-of-war and Russian, Maltese and British operators – ‘the ones who’d gone crazy in the war’ – were repairing damaged Allied battleships. After the machinists clocked off, the boy would sneak in and mimic their movements at the lathes. ‘I learnt how to make pressure gauges, spherical pistons and starter machines. No one ever taught me anything, I just watched and learnt. I can make anything, just so long as it’s black and greasy,’ he boasted.

This was the talent that had allowed him to play the inglorious role of Vicar of Bray, adapting smoothly to each of Eritrea’s successive administrations. When Massawa’s other Italians were evacuated, Cicoria’s skills meant he was too valuable to lose. Under the British, he worked on the warships, under the Ethiopians he was summoned to repair damaged artillery and broken domestic appliances. ‘All the Derg officers used to bring me their fridges to repair.’ When the Eritrean liberation movement started up, he claimed, he turned fifth columnist and joined an undercover unit, using his privileged access to sabotage the Ethiopian military machine. ‘I’m one of theirs. I’m Shabia , a guerrilla.’ But his eyes darted shiftily away when I pressed for details.

One quality his survival had certainly not relied upon was personal charm. As his Eritrean wife, a statuesque woman of luminous beauty, prepared lunch, I began to grasp what lay behind the hesitation in my Italian friend’s voice. Cicoria, it turned out, was good at hate. During a career in which I had interviewed many a ruthless politician and sleazy businessman, I had rarely met anyone, I realized, harder to warm to. His malevolence was democratically even-handed – he loathed just about everyone he came into contact with, the sole exception being the British officials who had recognized his skills all those decades ago. The American officers he had worked for had been ‘crass idiots’, the Ethiopians hateful occupiers. He despised his contemporaries in Asmara – my friend, it emerged, was a particular object of scorn – for not bothering to learn Tigrinya (‘a bunch of illiterates’). Modern-day Eritreans were useless, cack-handed when it came to anything technical. His life had been a series of fallings-out with workmates and relatives, most of whom were no longer on speaking terms. Perhaps they’d been alienated by Cicoria’s weakness for drink, or his habit of taking a new wife whenever he tired of an existing mate. ‘It’s not legal, but if you knew my life history, you’d understand.’ Leafing through a smudged photo collection he pointed to a first wife (‘as black as coal – can’t stand the sight of me’), a daughter (‘that bitch’), a brother (‘a real shit’) and a son (‘nothing in his head’). The 16-year-old son running errands around the yard scored little better. ‘Look at him. Strong as an ox,’ he shook his head pityingly. ‘But he’s got no brain, no brain at all.’ Even the muscovy ducks were viewed with jaundiced eyes. ‘My fondness for them only goes so far. Then I eat them.’ Only the latest of the many wives, whose face lit up with extraordinary tenderness when it rested upon him, won grudging praise. ‘She’s a good woman. Incredibly strong,’ he said, watching admiringly as she manoeuvred a fridge out of the house. ‘But she’s too old for me now. What I really need is a nice 19-year-old.’ Most depressing of all, Cicoria really did not seem to like himself – ‘I’ve always been a rascal, a pig when it comes to women, and I drink too much’ – while clearly finding it impossible to rein in a fury that kept the world at bay.

His view of Eritrea’s future was bleak. ‘This war is never ending. Believe me, these imbeciles will be fighting each other till the end of time.’ Ill-health had deprived him of his one pleasure – his joy at hearing the stalled and obsolete revving back into life – and gravity pinned him at sea level. With the loss of his beloved lathes, which lay exasperatingly out of reach, something had died. ‘I used to have high hopes,’ he muttered, ‘but this fall has been the last blow. Now I can’t see things improving.’ He had been to Italy for hospital treatment the year before and the trip, his first to the ancestral motherland, had been a revelation. He was now planning a permanent move there, he said, once he found a buyer for the scrapyard. I nodded, but found it impossible to imagine. The insabbiati do not travel well. Transposed, too late in life, to Europe’s retirement homes, they fade away, pale and diminished, smitten by the syndrome Italians call ‘ mal d’Africa ’. Far better to sit sweltering in this Red Sea cauldron, king of all he surveyed, compliant family at his beck and call.