British Eritrea

A military occupation that became a decade-long administration and ended by handing the territory to the country it had been taken from. Britain drove the Italians out of Eritrea in 1941 at Keren, one of the harder battles of the East African campaign, and then governed the colony under military administration for eleven years while the Allies argued about what to do with it. The administration was provisional by definition and behaved accordingly: it dismantled and shipped out a good deal of the Italian industrial plant, including the Massawa port equipment, while also permitting political parties, a press in Tigrinya and Arabic, and trade unions - freedoms Italian rule had never allowed. Eritrean politics formed in those years and formed divided, between a largely Christian highland movement favouring union with Ethiopia and a largely Muslim lowland and urban movement favouring independence. No option could command a majority. The United Nations settled it in 1950 by federating Eritrea with Ethiopia under its own parliament and flag, a compromise driven substantially by American interest in the Kagnew signals station at Asmara. Britain handed over in September 1952. Haile Selassie dismantled the federation piece by piece, banning parties, replacing Tigrinya with Amharic in schools, and annexing Eritrea outright in 1962. The war that answer produced lasted thirty years and ended with Eritrean independence in 1993. Asmara's Italian modernist architecture survived the dismantling and is now a World Heritage site. Massawa never fully recovered its port equipment. The Kagnew station operated until 1977. Eritrea's independence referendum in 1993 returned a vote of over ninety-nine per cent.

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