The Nakfa Cadre School - By Biniam Yohannes

When the PFDJ central office started its cadre courses in the Sawa military training center in 2003, the unpopular place was not helping their desired aims. Understanding that all Eritreans recognized Nakfa as a national symbol of patriotism, they moved the cadre course to the mountain town. Understanding that most of the population had already been fed up with Marxist and revolutionary terminology they named the school ‘School of Social Sciences’. For the few people that might visit the town the name is a joke at best. The school has no classes except for one huge amphitheater that can hold more than two thousand people at any given point. Lodged onto the side of a mountain, the amphitheater is covered by a dome like iron sheet roof that gives it the appearance of a turtle back, the name by which it is recognized among PFDJ circles.

The cadre school’s highest educated staff members are three or four BA holders in political science from the University of Asmara. These civilian staff helps with arranging discussions and other activities that the party cadre might not feel like doing themselves. Cadre courses are usually held during the summer when most students and workers in Eritrea can be taken for training. The summer is also the time when the streets of Asmara are filled with youth form the Middle East, Europe and North America, and many of them visit Nakfa for the training. 

A self-taught intellectual Zemhret Yohannes has masterminded ‘Nakfa Cadre School’

Since 2006, for two months on every course, trainees are preached by powerful cadre including Zemhret Yohannes (Research and Documentation PFDJ), Hagos Gebrehiwet (Economic Affairs), PFDJ head office members, General Sibhat Efrem and similar other cadre. The president usually gives a very lengthy lecture on the day of the closing ceremony. The school has no definite academic curriculum; no academic staff, and no status as a registered school of any sort. The center has a collection of a few hundred books which is considered to be the library. No Social Sciences or any other disciplines are taught at the huge amphitheater. The name ‘School of Social Sciences’ explains nothing about the cadre center. No grade reports or transcripts are issued to students during or after the course. The two month stay at Nakfa is not put in as part of the official resumes the Ministry of Defense keeps on every national service recruit. The center is owned and run by the party office. Only the Ministry of Education is responsible for education in Eritrea, and the PFDJ has neither the mandate nor the capacity in that area.

The classes can be thought more as intensive seminars, and the curriculum shifts with every new batch of trainees to accommodate current situations. The students are fed arguments and information, sensible or not, that can answer currently hot issues in public debate. This enables the PFDJ cadre to reach the society indirectly. The weeks long seminars raise all the questions that might be raised by the public and provide answers that might appear logical after being repeated for hours every day for two months.

This is to create a brainwashing platform and to make the trainees feel close to the core of the PFDJ without knowing anything in particular. The course also includes heated and amazingly open free political discussions. This helps the resident trainers to collect data on how the youth think and how to create 'smart' answers for those questions in the next course. It also helps the gossip spinning agents inside the society to formulate their ideas more effectively. At the end of the course trainees are taken to the trenches and spend a day or two living like struggle era fighters and discussing more issues. The whole setup is more of initiation and rites of passage than active recruitment. It's also a laboratory setting to intensively collect detailed understanding on how the youth think. Recruitment is absent in the traditional sense. But ardent believers initiated into such a cult will automatically do the job. Those that are recruited are contacted by other agents in their home settings, usually before or after going to Nakfa.

To understand the symbolic power that the tiny mountain town holds in Eritrean culture, one has to look back in to its history in the second part of the 20^th century. Present day Eritrean society, at least in the political sense, defines itself through its struggle for independence from Ethiopia. Being the most important center in that struggle, the town of Nakfa in the northern highlands of Eritrea holds a central place. It is called the 'Medina' of the Struggle for Independence, the Center of Steadfast Struggle, and so on. If PFDJ is a religion, Nakfa is the holy city for that political cult, not unlike Mecca for Muslims or Jerusalem for Orthodox Christians. Its importance came as the culmination point of Eritrea’s search for independence that started since Italy’s defeat in WWII in 1941. During the armed struggle it held the hope of freedom, and became the common political origin story for the political nation.

Nakfa was the longest standing symbol of the resistance from where that miracle of independence was realized for Eritreans. The people had decided to fight in the absence of any substantial help from outside forces. The West, the Soviet bloc, and the OAU all recognized Ethiopia’s claim to Eritrea. Even the exiled South African ANC had not recognized Eritrea’s right to independence.

After independence the first EPLF congress in free Eritrea was held in Nakfa. The list of names of the Martyrs for Independence was broadcast on the radio from Nakfa. The first ever national military trainees were taken to Nakfa to experience what their older brothers went through to bring independence. After independence Nakfa had become the single most powerful symbol that united the Eritrean people in their patriotic nationalism. In 1997, when Eritrea printed its own currency for the first time as a free nation, the currency was named Nakfa although at least nine other traditional currency names were available. The town itself is still a forgotten corner of Eritrean history.

What had been a question of national dignity IN THE 1950s had become a question of national survival by the early 1960s when the Ethiopian emperor abolished the federation and annexed Eritrea as the fourteenth Ethiopian province. As the Ethiopian empire did everything to crush the opposition with violence the late 1960s saw the formation of the first well organized military front against Ethiopian domination and by early 1970 a new organization was born out of the pre-existing ELF. The roots of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front, which would later liberate Eritrea in 1991, were founded near Asmara hoping to revolutionize the struggle for independence already started in the 1960s. By mid 1970s the EPLF was becoming popular and gaining momentum in the armed struggle as the more organized and efficient front for liberation. Centers around the capital were easy for Ethiopian forces to attack, and they were especially vulnerable to air attacks from Asmara. By mid 1970s, Nakfa in the northernmost part of the highlands had become the epicenter of the armed struggle.

Nacfa : a forgotten corner

In 1974 a military coup had ousted the Ethiopian emperor and set up a Marxist government in Ethiopia which lost the backing of the Americans almost automatically. In 1978, when the new military government found the backing of the Soviet Union which didn’t recognize Eritrea’s right to independence the Eritrean armed struggle had to withdraw to the inaccessible mountains in the inaccessible mountains around the small town of Nakfa. In campaign after campaign of Soviet backed Ethiopian attacks, Nakfa stood as the only town that stayed longest in Eritrean hands. Hundreds of kilometers of continuous trenches stretched from the mountains in the east of the town down to the Barka plains in the west. From the late 1970s till 1991 Nakfa stood as the symbol of the Eritrean quest for freedom, small and forgotten, but always fighting for the right to exist. In those years hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians and tens of thousands of EPLF fighters perished in the northern mountains of Eritrea. The ‘People’s Front’ led the Eritrean people in those difficult years and created as many symbols as possible for the struggle to hold on to.

By mid 1980s Nakfa had become the eternal symbol of the Eritrean fight for freedom. As the Ethiopian military government weakened and Soviet perestroika meant it no longer had the foreign support it so heavily relied on, the success of the struggle grew exponentially. Regardless of the external factors that influenced the success of the armed struggle, Nakfa was seen as the center of Eritrean miracle making steadfastness by the late 1980s. In late May 1991 the Ethiopian military government’s leader Colonel Mengistu Hailemariam escaped to Zimbabwe, and Eritrean and Ethiopian opposition fighters controlled the Ethiopian capital. Asmara had been liberated a few days before the Ethiopian capital. For most Eritreans, the struggle was a quest for dignity, and not something that was expected to win anytime within two or three decades. Ethiopia always had the full diplomatic and military support of cold war super powers, while Eritrea only had friends in few adventurous western journalists.

Mount Denden, the highest landmark in the Nakfa area, is one of the major places trainees visit. The steep and high mountain had been a major defense against Ethiopian forces. Its inaccessibility and size made it into a symbol for the fighters. In the struggle era psyche Mount Denden had become an equivalent of what Mount Olympus was to the ancient Greeks. The indefatigable heroes for Eritrea’s freedom lived in those trenches and mountains, and they were miraculous and powerful beyond anyone and anything the children of the struggle knew. Many fighters, now in their fifties, still talk about how they imagined the heroes of Mount Denden, the keepers who never slumber. Even before independence religious symbolism was used to attract the deeply religious society to the struggle.