The Conscript. Gebreyesus Hailu

1927, a decade that saw major Europhone and indigenous African fiction (as well as poetry) enter into print. Black South African authors were especially active, producing such Anglophone novels as Sol Plaatje’s 1930 novel Mhudi (written in 1920) and R. R. R. Dhlomo’s 1929 novel An African Tragedy, as well as Thomas Mofolo’s 1925 Sesotho novel Chaka and John Dube’s 1930 Zulu novel Jeqe, Shaka’s Body Servant. Of these four, only Dhlomo’s has a contemporary setting; the other three are historical novels set in the early nineteenth century. In comparison, Hailu’s work is startling for its openly anticolonial stance, modernist style, and international subject matter, Italy’s use of Eritrean soldiers in its war of Libyan conquest.

      Hailu paints a devastating portrait of European colonialism. As well as exposing the operations of foreign domination, he confronts the obstacles to liberation for which the colonized Eritreans themselves are responsible, highlighting both their material and subjective collusion with their own exploitation. At the same time that he develops this critique, Hailu celebrates the potential for resistant consciousness, which he sees as already present, albeit embryonically, in existing Eritrean social, cultural, and spiritual formations.

      Hailu’s approach to colonialism anticipates the midcentury thinkers Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire. Like them, Hailu is concerned less with imperial history than with its contemporary expression; the Italian empire is in medias res, like the protagonist Tuquabo himself at the start of the novel. The details of how Italy came to colonize Eritrea and to declare war on Libya are immaterial to the narrative; instead, Hailu simply remarks, “This was a time when there was war going on in Tripoli, and it was deemed fitting for the people of Habesha to be willing to spill their blood in this war” (7). The passive construction is interesting. Italian agency is missing here, and this absence becomes all the more glaring when the next sentence reads, “The youth were singing, ‘He is a woman who refuses to go to Libya,’ and small children in return sang, ‘Come back to us later, Tribuli . . . give us time to grow up,’ dispersing their poisonous words” (7). Hailu chooses to emphasize the prowar activities of local Eritrean youth, children, and also “those Habesha chiefs” who pray for war on the grounds that “the exercise might help trim their fattened bodies” (7). (Sixty years later, in Ken Saro-Wiwa’s novel Sozaboy, the decision of the eponymous Sozaboy to enlist in the Nigerian Civil War is likewise influenced by a cross-generational spread of local men who promote a particular brand of masculinity.)

      Like Fanon and Césaire, Hailu highlights the dehumanization at the core of colonial domination. Césaire emphasizes the dehumanization of European perpetrators: “the colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal” (177). Hailu complicates this equation by featuring both colonizer and colonized as animals. In chapter 2, as the ascari prepare to board the train that will take them to war, the military police beat the crowds “with a whip (yes, with a whip like a donkey).” It is the train carriages, the apparatus of empire, that are explicitly bestialized: “the black trucks . . . roared like starving lions, hungry to swallow the Habesha people in their beastly bellies” (12). After the soldiers have entered combat and protected the Italians’ access to water from other thirsty conscripts like themselves, they resemble servile “dogs,” in the narrator’s estimation, “whose eyes, while one is eating, are raised and lowered following the movement of one’s hand” (46). From dogs they sink still further, in the view of the Italian general who abandons them in the Libyan desert, fearful that they will turn against and kill him: “For the Italian, the Habesha was like a weak donkey, which you couldn’t kill for meat or hide and therefore would leave behind to die in the field under God’s hand. The cowardly Italian, who gained his pride and fame from the strong young Habesha, thus escaped when he knew that they were weakened and dying of thirst” (47).

      When the few survivors return to Eritrea by train, the same crowd that gathered to bid them farewell now gathers to welcome them, again enduring beating by the station’s clerks and guards. By this time, the crowd itself is likened to animals: “When, after a while, the conscripts came out lined up on one side of the train, they were flooded by the crowd. The crowd seemed like growling sheep or goats which ran about to fetch their little ones, bucking and hitting anything on their way, while the little lambs moaned and jumped to find their mothers. There was noise, chaos, tears, and calling out of names on all sides as people fought to find their loved ones” (54). Colonialism creates a chaos of atomization among the colonized; Hailu uses animal epithets here in order to underscore the loss of human collectivity, which is also a loss of Eritrean national and local community. The self-destructive outcome of this dehumanization is demonstrated again and again, through the stampedes that feature in the first train station scene (12) and most violently in the desert (48), when desperate soldiers discover water.

      However, neither atomization nor collusion wholly defines Eritrean people under Italian rule. Hailu represents resistance as emerging in sync with the war itself. If Eritreans have passively acquiesced in Italian colonization of their nation, the international export of their people as cannon fodder triggers an opposition that takes strength from long-standing social and cultural formations. Tuquabo’s parents lament his decision to become a soldier, seeing in it a rejection of sacred family ties: “We feel orphaned. Why do you wish to fight for a foreigner? What use is it for you and your people to arm yourselves and fight overseas?” (8). His community augments this by cursing him for his betrayal of this familial-social contract: ‘What a cruel son! How could he leave his old parents behind” (8). And there are martial precedents for insurgent consciousness: the Habesha are said to “have pride in their history and land, . . . [and] a long history of resistance” (28).

      In themselves, the resources of historic martial valor, patriotic pride, and communitarianism may be necessary, but they are not sufficient to successfully counteract the Italian empire. These belong to an ethos and an era that is, Hailu suggests, inadequate to the violence of colonial modernity. Only the battlefield experience can dialectically bring forth an anticolonial awareness sufficient to translate, potentially, into a liberationist practice. Modern resistant consciousness begins to take form as a mysterious “anonymous, internal voice,” which arises when the conscripts first set up camp in the Libyan desert and attempt to sleep, and warns them that “the Arabs are not your enemies. Will you be able to recognize your true enemy?” (21). It does not take much time after that for soldiers such as Tuquabo to arrive at a fuller understanding that builds on this intimation. This anonymous voice is an intriguingly original device through which Hailu synthesizes contemporary psychology and a more archaic mode of divine intercession.

      The nativist sociocultural formations that Hailu invokes combine progressive and regressive impulses. Among the latter, Hailu points to xenophobia and antiblack color prejudice as directed against the Sudanese. Hailu draws selectively upon the progressive elements while rejecting the regressive, a practice theorized and recommended by anticolonial activist Amilcar Cabral, in such speeches as “National Liberation and Culture”. He does this to clear the space for a multiethnic, multifaith African political community, founded upon global humanist understanding and shared opposition to European empire. This understanding develops dialectically through the course of the novel, as the soldiers travel across Eritrea by train, along the Red and Mediterranean Seas by ship, then by foot across the Libyan Desert. Hailu’s vision is simultaneously national and international, then, and as such confirms Fanon’s radical argument about their interdependency: “The building of his nation . . . will necessarily lead to the discovery and advancement of universalizing values. Far then from distancing it from other nations, it is the national liberation that puts the nation on the stage of history. It is at the heart of national consciousness that international consciousness establishes itself and thrives. And this dual emergence, in fact, is the unique focus of all culture” (180). Some thirty years later, writing from within an antinationalist academic environment, Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism echoes this analysis: “There is . . . a consistent intellectual trend within the nationalist consensus that is vitally critical, that refuses the short-term blandishments of separatist and triumphalist slogans in favour of the larger, more generous human realities of community among cultures, peoples, and societies. This community is the real human liberation portended by the resistance to imperialism” (217).

      Hailu’s