Date: Thursday, 30 June 2016
BOOK REVIEW
Author: Girmai Bokre Kahassai
June 27, 2016
The book is about the life of one of the Eritrean Liberation Front’s (ELF) iconic figures. Melake was one of the nine-member Executive Committee (EC) of the ELF. Elected in 1975, he served as Security Office chief until his death in March 1982. He was murdered by the direct order of another member of the EC, Abdella Idris, at a place called Rasai in Sudan. Rasai had been “chosen” as the location for an organizational conference after the ELF had been pushed out of Eritrea by the combined forces of the EPLF and TPLF a year earlier. But Rasai was also the base camp for Abdella Idris and his followers who had remained armed after withdrawing to Sudan.
The book deals mainly with Melake’s childhood and education. Melake was born in 1949 in the village of Adi N’amin (TaHatai Anseba), Hamasien. He went to the village school until the fourth grade before he moved to the city of Asmara for his fifth to ninth grade education, attending various schools including Itege Menen, AKria, and Arbaete-Asmara, Bet-Gergish, and Santa Familigia. At the latter, he was one of the students who questioned the suitability and quality of the education of School compared to others. They demanded to be sent to the “real” university in Addis Ababa instead. In that regard, Melake and his friends even went to the Ministry of Education and demanded unsuccessfully to see the governor of Eritrea, Asrate Kassa. Melake was, by all accounts, an outstanding student. After being promoted to the tenth grade, he moved to the town of Keren to attend the high school there, because schools in the capital were closed, due to student demonstrations. Later, he moved back to Asmara again and attended Luel Mekonen for his eleventh grade. His senior year was spent in the Ethiopian capital at the new school Luul Biede-Mariam, Laboratory school of Addis Ababa. Although the latter was considered part of the university and the students there did not need to take the school leaving examination (Matric), Melake and his fellow students demanded that they take the exam. Because, apparently some of them, including Melake, had decided to join the Eritrean struggle for independence and they wanted to have the results/marks in hand in case they needed it in the future to continue their education. The administrator of the school attempted to dissuade them from taking Matric, explaining that they need not bother to take Matric because they had already taken the entrance examination to the Laboratory School; but to no avail. They took the exam and all of them passed it.
Melake joined the ELF in 1971. He had not told any of his university friends. Four years later, in 1975, he was elected as one of the 41 member National Council (NC), and then as a member of the EC. The latter led the ELF between the regular meetings of the NC. They run one department each. Melake was chief of the Security Office.
The book includes testimonies from those who personally knew Melake well at every stage: in his early childhood, while he was a student in high school and university, as well as during his ELF years.
One of the momentous events that occurred in his tenure in the ELF was the organizational conference at Rasai that ended up in his murder at the hand of Abdella Idris. His death also brought about the death of the ELF itself, because the ELF splintered into many groups after Melake was murdered and never recovered from it. The book does not deal with this momentous event in the history of the ELF. That is unfortunate. The book identifies the perpetrators as the “Rasai Group,” in general, not Abdella Idris, who ordered the killing, and his collaborators. It would have been a much greater contribution to a critical chapter in Eritrea’s history, had the book explained who the Rasai Group were? Why Melake had become a target? What was the situation at the time? What brought such tension? Was the “civil war” between the EPLF/TPLF against the ELF a catalyst? Or was it simply a power struggle between two of ELF’s powerful men?
Nevertheless, to the many fans and fellow freedom fighters of Melake Tekle as well as the general Eritrean public, the book is still an excellent contribution to our understanding of who Melake was and where he had come from. He was popular with the rank and file fighters of the ELF. He had a reputation for physical courage and a blunt speaking manner. He was physically imposing: tall and strong. He was admired for standing up to Abdella Idris, the chief of the military bureau, years before the ELF was forced to retreat into Sudan.
However, Melake also had his detractors. Many considered him naïve, politically or otherwise as a person. Some also suggested that he should never have gone to Rasai. But what was he supposed to do? Refuse to attend
the organizational conference of the ELF while he still was one its the leaders? But the book tells us the opposite. He was exceptionally bright. For example, he wrote a very thoughtful piece in English in a school newsletter when he was in tenth grade at the high school in Keren. Titled, “How Can We Reform Our Minds?” he wrote, “Ignorance being darkness, what we need is intellectual light. ‘”Time and tide wait for no one.”’ This proverb expresses all that we are expected to do to satisfy the hunger of our minds…Let us be the master of ourselves, and rule only ourselves. This can be done simply through study, thought, and efforts to strive to reach only the first stairs of improvement in our mind...”
But because he was a country boy, he might have been Looked at by Asmara city kids as unsophisticated and even worse. His contemporaries however testify to the contrary. Melake was not only courageous and very bright. He was also kind and caring. The author remembers when he first saw Melake five years later in Eritrea, the first thing Melake had asked him was whether or no he had graduated. Melake had not told any of his friends at the university when he left to join the ELF, and the author speculates that that might have been intentional: that Melake wanted his friends to finish their education so that they would become leaders of future, independent Eritrea. Many civilians who encountered Melake around Asmara in the seventies also remembered his kindness and caring for his people, especially the youth who would be trying to join the struggle. Melake would send them back home saying ‘not all of us needed to be in the field.’
Melake was not to see independent Eritrea. He left too early (he was only 33 years old when he was murdered). But he left behind a reputation unmatched by many of his fellow “leaders,” for courage and dedication to cause. His characteristic bluntness and directness may have cost him his life, but he gained eternal adulation and good name. As our ancestors say, “a human being does not stay, it is the name that stays behind forever.” Thirty-four years hence a book that remembers him and celebrates his life, dedication to cause, and service to his country and his fellow countrymen and women, is indeed a good start.
Paulos Natnael
