Alemseged Tesfai’s An African People’s Quest for Freedom and Justice traces Eritrea’s political history from the collapse of Italian colonial rule in 1941 to its annexation by Ethiopia in 1962. A lawyer turned historian, Tesfai draws on British and American diplomatic records, United Nations proceedings, Ethiopian government papers, and Eritrean oral histories to construct a detailed chronology of contested institutions and competing visions of sovereignty. His central argument is that Eritrea’s exclusion from independence was not the result of political immaturity or internal division but due to constitutional manipulation, Cold War geopolitics, and the strategic interests of global powers. Law itself became the mechanism through which sovereignty was denied.
Tesfai recovers Eritrean political voices and rejects the myth that Eritrea was “unfit” for independence. He challenges imperial, international, and Ethiopian nationalist narratives that denied Eritreans agency by portraying their nationalism as externally driven or regionally destabilizing. Tesfai links Eritrean political consciousness to the social and economic realities of Italian colonialism, rejecting “attempts to attach specific dates and events to the rise of Eritrean nationalism” (2) and treating it as a historical process shaped by memories of exploitation, dispossession, humiliation, and endurance. The society he describes was politically vibrant: organizations such as the Muslim League, the Unionist Party, trade unions, teachers’ associations, student movements, and civic groups produced distinct yet coherent visions of self‑government. These groups challenged narratives that portrayed Eritrean nationalism as either absent or purely externally engineered.
The book is divided into three main sections. The first, “The British Period,” covers the twelve years of British Military Administration from 1941 to 1952. Tesfai shows how early hopes of self-determination faded when British officials, who had “promised [Eritreans] the right to fly their own flag” and “encouraged them to dare consider themselves a nation” (13), dismantled industries and restored privileges to Italian settlers. The second section, “The Federal Years,” is the strongest. His legal training is evident in his close reading of constitutional drafts, federal acts, and judicial rulings. The Eritrean Constitution, “hailed as democratic, progressive, and fashioned after the US Constitution,” established a balance of power among the three branches of government but was fundamentally incompatible with Ethiopia’s autocratic monarchy. He concludes that the “two incompatible systems” were “bent on a collision course right from the outset” (193). Tesfai’s reconstruction of the removal of the Eritrean flag, the dismissal of Chief Executive Tedla Bairu, and the subordination of the judiciary traces how legal and administrative actions closed the remaining avenues for peaceful political redress. The final section, “The Road to the Eritrean Revolution,” follows the collapse of constitutional politics and the rise of armed resistance. In 1962, Ethiopian soldiers surrounded the Eritrean Assembly and forced members to vote for annexation; afterward “armed soldiers flanked us on both sides and escorted us out of the Assembly Hall like a flock of sheep” (414). The epilogue situates the independence war within a history of constitutional betrayal and unfulfilled promises.
Earlier works by Ruth Iyob, (The Eritrean Struggle for Independence, 1995), Tekeste Negash, Italian Colonialism in Eritrea (1987), and Redie Bereketeab, Self-Determination and Secession in Africa (2014) examined Eritrean nationalism through political and sociological lenses. Tesfai moves beyond these by placing international law and constitutional reasoning at the center of his account of decolonization’s failure. He interprets Eritrea’s loss of self-determination as both a failure of the postwar international order and an act of legal manipulation, where international law, conceived as guarantor of justice, became an instrument of exclusion. His argument unsettles the familiar binary between “externally driven” and “indigenous” nationalism, by showing how Eritrean political actors operated within legal and global hierarchies of power that constrained them at every turn.
The book’s limitations follow from its strengths. Tesfai’s moral clarity, while persuasive, sometimes narrows his analytical scope. Internal divisions within Eritrean politics, including tensions between Muslim and Christian communities and between highland and lowland regions, are noted but not examined in depth. A fuller engagement with these divisions would have shown how sovereignty was contested not only from outside but also within Eritrea. A comparative dimension would have sharpened the analysis. Many dynamics Tesfai traces, legal dualism, the instrumentalization of constitutional arrangements, and the subordination of local claims to geopolitical interests, operated in other African cases. Biafra, Western Sahara, and Somaliland each involved international legal processes that overrode or deferred local aspirations for self-government. Placing Eritrea alongside these cases would have clarified what was distinctive about the constitutional path Tesfai reconstructs and what belonged to a wider pattern of decolonization’s failure.
These limitations do not undercut the book’s core achievement. Tesfai has produced a carefully documented reconstruction of how constitutional and diplomatic processes were used to deny Eritrean independence, and of how Eritreans organized, argued, and resisted within and against those processes. The book reframes Eritrean decolonization as a study in how law, rather than securing justice, became the means by which it was withheld. Historians of the Horn of Africa and of African decolonization will find here an account that places legal reasoning where it belongs: at the center of the story.
