Since the independence of Eritrea in 1991, all young adult citizens are obliged by law to serve eighteen months as part of the program hagerawi agolgolot (national service). After having received military training, they get assigned either as soldiers or as workers in the governmental ministries where they have to carry out a wide array of tasks ranging from construction work, teaching at schools, or office work in ministries. This generation of Eritreans who had not been born or were too young to actively participate in the liberation struggle (1961-1991), are now obliged to defend the “heritage of independence”. They are referred to as warsay (successors) by the state authorities and are assigned to secure the economic development of the country and to continue its reconstruction. Liberation fighters (tegadelti) and warsay are the main actors of this reconstruction; they also occupy the entire state-system positions, including the party and para-state agencies.
Next to state laws, officials and politicians make use of the state media to generate discourses on what it means to be a warsay man or woman. Using military language, these discourses keep up an image of ongoing war, fighting and sacrifice, articulating a specific idea of national identity and unity with the purpose to link the new generation to the sense of nationhood constructed by the liberation struggle. In the context of a guerilla that came into power and exercises a strong state control, statehood is often presented as encompassing nationhood or the other way around.
In a first step, I will present the rhetorical ways in which these discourses operate and the images of the nation-building they generate. In a second step, I will focus on the warsay´s own perceptions and strategies to show how they feel ambiguous about their status: What does it mean for them to be warsay? How do warsay men and women resist or refuse to be involved in this program? Why do some of them agree? How do they perceive their position within the Eritrean state and how they feel about the nationhood the state’s elites promote? And finally, how do these perceptions shape their living strategies?
I will refer to ethnographic material I gathered during fieldwork carried out between 2004 and 2006 under a 36-months fellowship provided by the Swiss National Science Foundation.