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    I Didn't Do It for You: How the World Betrayed a Small African Nation
    Unavailable
    I Didn't Do It for You: How the World Betrayed a Small African Nation
    Unavailable
    I Didn't Do It for You: How the World Betrayed a Small African Nation
    Ebook515 pages10 hours

    I Didn't Do It for You: How the World Betrayed a Small African Nation

    By Michela Wrong

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Scarred by decades of conflict and occupation, the craggy African nation of Eritrea has weathered the world's longest-running guerrilla war. The dogged determination that secured victory against Ethiopia, its giant neighbor, is woven into the national psyche, the product of cynical foreign interventions. Fascist Italy wanted Eritrea as the springboard for a new, racially pure Roman empire; Britain sold off its industry for scrap; the United States needed a base for its state-of-the-art spy station; and the Soviet Union used it as a pawn in a proxy war.

    In I Didn't Do It for You, Michela Wrong reveals the breathtaking abuses this tiny nation has suffered and, with a sharp eye for detail and a taste for the incongruous, tells the story of colonialism itself and how international power politics can play havoc with a country's destiny.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 13, 2009
    ISBN9780061860669
    Unavailable
    I Didn't Do It for You: How the World Betrayed a Small African Nation
    Author

    Michela Wrong

    Michela Wrong is a distinguished international journalist, and has worked as a foreign correspondent covering events across the African continent for Reuters, the BBC and the Financial Times. Based on her experiences in Africa, In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz, won the PEN James Sterne Prize for non-fiction. I Didn’t Do It for You builds upon her shocking experiences, and focuses on Eritrea. In 2015, she published Borderlines, her first novel.

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    Reviews for I Didn't Do It for You

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      Wrong has a gift for explaining the history and circumstances of African countries in a readable, accessible way. I couldn't put this down.
    • 5/5
      This book was clearly a labor of love. An impassioned view of what life has been like historically for the Eritrean people...simply marvelous
    • 4/5
      A fascinating piece of journalism and history: a reporter who really gets to know the country, and talks with representative figures along the way. Except for an overlong section on American troops stationed in Eritrea during the Cold War, the book was consistently interesting, and engagingly written.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      One day, several months ago, I wandered for the first time into the small African history section of my local used bookstore and ended up buying "I Didn't Do It For You", mostly because the attractively designed cover caught my eye. Even if I bought it for shallow reasons, I'm so glad I did--this was a fantastic, eye-opening read.Wrong details the odyssey of Eritrea, the youngest country in Africa, and the subtitle of the book is depressingly accurate. Eritrea was basically invented by the Italians in the late 19th century so that they could have their own colonial empire, carved out of the northern bit of Ethiopia and the southern bit of Egypt. The country was subsequently ransacked by the British during WWII, illegally annexed by Ethiopia while the UN looked the other way (no surprise there), ignored by the entire Western world as it fought an ultimately successful 30-year-long guerilla war for independence (with first the U.S., then the Soviet Union, then Israel supplying Ethiopia with billions of dollars worth of military equipment and training), only to stumble back into war with Ethiopia after only six years of peace and prosperity as the poster-child for a possible African renaissance. The book was written in 2004 and I immediately looked up Eritrea's Wikipedia article to see what had happened in the last four years, only to find that, among other indictments, Eritrea is currently ranked dead last on Reporters Without Borders' Worldwide Press Freedom Index. Despite the horrible effect that the Eritrean government (ironically composed of some of the very freedom fighters who liberated the country in the first place) has had in the last 10 years, Wrong still holds out hope that the dogged pride and determination of the Eritreans will help the country bounce back. It was a nice note to end on, and the book itself is incredibly interesting and well-written, but the emotional effect of reading it can be summed-up by one of Wrong's own comments: "And you were left in a sulky gray fug of ambiguity, sure of only one thing: everyone had behaved badly, everyone was to blame."