Eritrea’s Longstanding Memory: The World’s Rediscovery of Its Strategic Geography

 Red Sea Beacon (Abridged)

For centuries, the coastline of what is now sovereign Eritrea has occupied a consequential position between Africa, Arabia, the Mediterranean, and the Indian Ocean. Adulis connected commercial networks across the Red Sea, while regional and imperial powers recognized the value of Massawa, Assab, the islands, and surrounding coastline. The Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates, Portuguese, Ottoman, and Egyptian powers reached these shores. European powers followed.

Italy incorporated the territory into its Red Sea strategy. Britain administered it after the Second World War. Cold War powers calculated their interests around it. Eritreans fought for three decades to recover sovereignty. The actors changed. The strategic calculation did not.

A recent main stream media analysis framing Eritrea through renewed strategic relevance reflects a broader analytical problem: presenting a historical constant as a contemporary development. Strategic attention may rise and fall, but strategic geography does not.

Understanding Eritrea’s place in the Red Sea requires three things: history, sovereignty, and perspective. History explains its enduring importance; sovereignty determines political and legal authority today; perspective prevents the Horn from being viewed solely through the ambitions of larger powers.

The Coastline Empires Never Ignored

The Bab el-Mandeb Strait, linking the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and wider Indian Ocean, is one of the world’s most consequential maritime chokepoints. Eritrea’s significance in this geography long predates today’s crises.

Long before the modern state system, the Adulis corridor linked the Horn of Africa to commercial networks across the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. Successive powers recognized the value of Massawa, its islands, and surrounding coastline.

When Italy formally established the Colony of Eritrea in 1890, Massawa and Assab became central components of its Red Sea strategy. Colonial administration consolidated boundaries, infrastructure, institutions, and administrative structures that profoundly influenced the formation of modern Eritrea. But colonial rule did not create the territory’s strategic importance.

When Geography Became Sovereignty

In the Cold War era, the United States and other major powers were reassessing their military, political, and communications interests across the Horn and the Red Sea. Eritrea’s future was therefore never merely a constitutional question. It was also a strategic one.

Indeed, controlling Eritrea also meant control of an extensive Red Sea coastline, Massawa, Assab, and a strategic position along one of the world’s most important maritime corridors.

Thirty Years to Reclaim Sovereignty

The Eritrean armed struggle for independence, launched in 1961 and culminating in liberation in 1991, became Africa’s longest liberation wars.

For Eritreans, the struggle represented more than political self-determination. It was also a struggle to recover sovereign authority over territory whose coastline, ports, islands, and strategic position had repeatedly been controlled or exploited by others. Eritrea’s sensitivity to sovereignty is rooted in this history of outside powers making decisions over its territory.

Landlocked states routinely secure port access through bilateral agreements, transit arrangements, and infrastructure partnerships with coastal states. Such arrangements are normal in international commerce. But port access does not confer sovereignty. Economic necessity does not create territorial title or a right to another state’s coastline, islands, territorial waters, or jurisdiction.

When History Becomes a Weapon

One of the most troubling features of contemporary regional discourse is the growing effort to convert selective or revisionist readings of history into claims of present-day territorial entitlement.

The historical relationships among the peoples of the Horn are undeniably deep and complex. Communities crossed boundaries long before modern borders existed. Trade, warfare, migration, intermarriage, religion, language, and cultural exchange shaped the region over centuries.

Be that as it may, ancient interaction cannot be misconstrued and converted into modern legal ownership.

Once that line disappears, history ceases to be a discipline for understanding the past and becomes an instrument for manufacturing claims in the present. Maps, memories, migrations, dynasties, and place names then become ammunition for political ambition. Historical scholarship becomes strategic weaponry.

The Cost of Historical Amnesia

Forgetting Eritrea’s history is not merely an academic mistake. It carries practical consequences.

The Red Sea is layered with history. Every port carries memory. Every border has a political history. Every territorial claim can awaken an older dispute. The Horn of Africa has already experienced the consequences of confusing strategic aspiration with sovereign right, economic necessity with legal entitlement, and historical narrative with modern international boundaries. Those lessons were written in decades of war and extraordinary human sacrifice. The region should not have to learn them again.

The Strategic Constant

The renewed global focus on the Red Sea has once again placed Eritrea in the headlines.

Massawa and Assab did not become important because international shipping became vulnerable; military planners rediscovered the map; or coastline did not acquire strategic meaning.  

The critical question is therefore not whether Eritrea matters to the Red Sea. Geography has already answered that. The question is whether that geography will be interpreted through the principles of sovereignty and international law or through the more dangerous logic of strategic convenience and geopolitical entitlement.

Stop Rediscovering Eritrea

The Red Sea does not suffer from a shortage of history. It suffers from a shortage of memory. Again and again, outside powers arrive at the same coastline, calculate the same maritime advantages, recognize the same ports, and describe the same geography as though it had suddenly become important. Empires did it. Colonial powers did it. Cold War strategists did it. Regional and global powers are doing it again. But Eritrea is not strategically reborn each time someone notices Massawa or Assab. It was there all along.

The Red Sea will remain consequential long after today’s crises fade. Governments will change, alliances will realign, wars will end, rivalries will emerge, technologies will evolve, and great powers will come and go. Massawa, Assab, the Dahlak Islands, and Bab el-Mandeb will remain, as will Eritrea’s geography that has shaped every cycle of international attention and neglect.

So, the question is not why Eritrea has suddenly become important, but why the world keeps forgetting that it always was. Eritrea does not need to be rediscovered. Its history needs to be remembered, its sovereignty respected, and its geography understood without turning it into somebody else’s entitlement.