The Archives of the Municipality and the High Court of Asmara, Eritrea: Discovering the Eritrea “Hidden from History”

Abstract

Eritrean independence in 1993 raised fundamental questions regarding the Eritrean past. Inevitably, scholars initially focused their analysis on the history of the Eritrean nationalist movement and liberation struggle. The long guerrilla war against the Ethiopian regime attracted the interest of numerous researchers, not only because of its implications for the redefinition of the political landscape of the Horn of Africa, but also because of the ways in which it had mobilized and reorganized Eritrean society. While this literature has shed much light upon interesting aspects of the political history of independent Eritrea, further investigation of the precolonial and colonial past is still required to gain a deeper understanding of the formation of Eritrean national identity in all its intricate facets.The question of Eritrean national identity is intimately connected to its colonial history, which in many ways remains marginalized in the analysis of Eritrean past. The Italian colonial period between 1890 and 1941 was a crucial moment in the definition of those social and political transformations which contributed to the formation of Eritrea-as-a-nation. Nevertheless, this historical phase remains underexplored. The colonial past has been an issue that European powers to varying extents have had to confront since the end of empire. Both historians of colonialism and Africanist historians have collaborated in the reconstruction of the past of colonized societies. In Italy this process remains in embryonic form. Many Africanist historians, such as Irma Taddia and Alessandro Triulzi, have already addressed the problem concerning the gaps left by Italian historiography on both the colonial past and the history of the colonized societies in its various aspects. As Triulzi points out, both practical and political reasons slowed the development of those debates that were emerging in the historiographies of other excolonial powers.