Eritrea

From the Red Sea ports of Aksum to Africa's longest war of independence and one of its most closed states.

Eritrea occupies the southwestern shore of the Red Sea, a corridor where Africa, Arabia and the Mediterranean world have met for three thousand years. Its highlands and coast formed part of the heartland of the Kingdom of Aksum, whose port of Adulis carried ivory, gold and incense to Rome, India and Arabia, while the Dahlak Islands and Massawa became centres of Red Sea and Indian Ocean trade. After Aksum's decline the coast passed through Beja, Muslim and then Ottoman hands, and in the nineteenth century through Egyptian control, before Italy proclaimed Eritrea its 'first-born colony' in 1890 and built Asmara into a modernist colonial capital. Italy used Eritrea as the springboard for its invasions of Ethiopia, including the army shattered at Adwa in 1896 and the conquest of 1935-36. British forces ended Italian rule in 1941; in 1952 the United Nations federated Eritrea with Ethiopia, only for Emperor Haile Selassie to annex it outright in 1962. That act opened a thirty-year war of independence, waged first by the Eritrean Liberation Front and then by the Eritrean People's Liberation Front, which captured Asmara in 1991 as the Derg fell in Ethiopia. A referendum in 1993 brought formal independence under Isaias Afwerki, but a ruinous 1998-2000 border war with Ethiopia and decades of one-party rule have made Eritrea one of the most isolated countries on earth.