The Shot That Changed Eritrea

by David Yeh

On September 1, 1961, a single shot announced that Eritrea’s struggle had entered a new and irreversible chapter.

It was fired not by an army backed by a state, supplied by a foreign power, or protected by international recognition. It came from Hamid Idris Awate and a small band of Eritreans possessing little more than a handful of weapons, knowledge of their land, and the conviction that a people denied peaceful avenues to determine their future had the right to resist. From that modest beginning emerged a thirty-year armed struggle that would transform Eritrean history and culminate in national liberation.

The man who fired that historic shot had been shaped long before September 1961 by the turbulent history of Eritrea’s western lowlands.

Born in 1915 in the Gash-Setit region, Awate grew up amid colonial rule, shifting political authority, insecurity, and the demanding realities of frontier life. During the Italian colonial period, he acquired experience with weapons, horsemanship, local security, and the difficult terrain that would later become crucial to guerrilla warfare.

Following Italy’s defeat in World War II, Awate refused to serve under the British Military Administration, whose policies he deeply detested. He remained among his people and increasingly became a respected local figure, mediating disputes and protecting communities where formal authority was often weak. In the Gash-Setit area, where cross-border raids threatened lives, livestock, and property, he pursued Tigrayan bandits who raided local communities.

By the time Eritrea’s political crisis reached its breaking point, Awate was already known for his marksmanship, intimate knowledge of the terrain, personal courage, and ability to navigate the complicated social and political realities of the western lowlands. These experiences were not incidental episodes preceding his revolutionary life. They were the crucible that formed the leader who would eventually take the first irreversible step toward armed resistance.

When Peaceful Resistance Reached Its Limit

By the late 1950s, Eritrea’s political situation had deteriorated dramatically. The federation established by the United Nations was being systematically dismantled as Ethiopian authorities progressively eroded Eritrea’s autonomous institutions and tightened their control over the territory.

Eritreans had not immediately turned to armed resistance. Political parties, civic organizations, workers, students, intellectuals, and nationalist activists had attempted to defend Eritrean rights through political organization, demonstrations, petitions, diplomatic appeals, and appeals to international institutions. Yet the political space within which those efforts could operate continued to shrink. Awate witnessed this erosion firsthand.

The question confronting Eritrean nationalists was becoming increasingly stark: what remained when peaceful political resistance could no longer protect the country’s autonomy or determine its future?

For Awate, the answer eventually became unavoidable. Political aspiration without the means to defend it was insufficient. Someone had to cross the line between protest and resistance. Someone had to act first.

Bahti Meskerem (September 1st, 1961)

On September 1, 1961, Hamid Idris Awate, accompanied by a group of seven pioneering fighters, raised his weapon at Hademdemi and fired into the air, heralding the beginning of Eritrea’s armed struggle for independence. That shot carried a message far greater than the weapon from which it came.

To Eritreans, it was a call to join the struggle for national liberation. To the forces imposing Ethiopian rule, it was a warning that resistance had entered a new phase. After years of petitions, political appeals, and peaceful opposition, Eritreans would no longer entrust the fate of their country to peaceful means alone. They would take responsibility for their national destiny into their own hands. September 1—Bahti Meskerem in Tigrigna—therefore became the symbolic birthday of Eritrea’s armed revolution.

Twenty-five days later, on September 26, 1961, Awate and his fighters confronted pursuing Ethiopian forces at Mount Adal in the first military engagement of the armed struggle. The battle was small when measured by the enormous battles that would characterize later decades, but history does not always measure significance by the number of combatants involved. At Mount Adal, declaration became confrontation.

A small group of poorly equipped fighters had challenged the military authority of a vastly more powerful state. What mattered was not that they possessed the strength to defeat that army in 1961—they clearly did not. What mattered was that they had acquired the determination to begin.

The geography itself favored the kind of resistance Awate envisioned. The rugged western terrain provided concealment, mobility, and access to rural populations from whom the fighters could obtain information and support. Awate knew this landscape intimately. Mountains, valleys, villages, pastoral routes, and borderlands that might have appeared peripheral to conventional armies could become strategic assets for guerrilla fighters.

Thus began a revolution from the countryside, initially dependent not on sophisticated military infrastructure but on mobility, local knowledge, popular support, and extraordinary endurance.

From a Handful of Fighters to a Liberation Army

Awate understood that bravery alone could ignite a rebellion but could not sustain a revolution. Armed resistance required organization, discipline, training, political purpose, and ultimately the participation of the people.

Under his leadership, the Eritrean Liberation Army (ELA), the armed wing of the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF), began taking shape as the military instrument of the independence struggle. Its beginnings could hardly have been more modest.

The first dozen or so men who rallied around Awate were not members of a conventional national army. They possessed few weapons, meager supplies, no secure logistical system, and initially little meaningful external military support. They were ordinary Eritreans who had accepted an extraordinary responsibility. Yet the significance of those first fighters lay precisely in the disproportion between their resources and their objective. They were attempting to liberate an entire country with scarcely the material means to sustain themselves. What they possessed was conviction.

News of the uprising spread, and additional Eritreans began joining the movement. Among them were Eritreans who had acquired military experience while serving with British forces in the Sudan. They brought useful training and battlefield knowledge to the emerging liberation army. Gradually, the handful of pioneers around Awate became the nucleus of something much larger.

But no guerrilla army can survive for long without a population willing to sustain it. The armed struggle therefore increasingly became inseparable from popular mobilization. Rural communities supplied food, shelter, information, recruits, communications, and protection. Political organization expanded alongside military activity. Villagers were not simply spectators watching armed men fight on their behalf; increasing numbers became participants in the infrastructure that made continued resistance possible.

The relationship between fighter and population would become one of the defining characteristics of the Eritrean revolution.

The Revolution Outgrows Its Founders

Awate would not live to witness the extraordinary transformation of the movement he helped initiate. But the struggle unleashed in September 1961 continued to expand after his death.

The Eritrean Liberation Front developed military and political structures, training systems, administrative mechanisms, and wider networks of mobilization. Its history was not without serious internal difficulties. Regional tensions, sectarian politics, ideological disagreements, organizational conflicts, and eventually divisions challenged the movement. Yet armed resistance had become a permanent fact of Eritrean political life.

From divisions within the liberation movement eventually emerged forces that developed into the Eritrean People’s Liberation Forces (EPLF) in 1970. Over time, the EPLF renamed Eritrean People’s Liberation Front in 1977, constructed a highly organized military and political structure distinguished by discipline, self-reliance, mass mobilization, and the participation of women at virtually every level of the struggle.

In liberated and contested areas, the revolution became more than an army. Schools educated children under wartime conditions. Clinics treated fighters and civilians. Workshops repaired equipment and manufactured necessities. Political and administrative structures governed communities. Women served as fighters, commanders, health workers, teachers, organizers, and political cadres. The struggle had evolved far beyond the small guerrilla band of 1961. So had its military capabilities.

The fighters who had begun the struggle with only a handful of rifles eventually confronted successive Ethiopian governments fielding one of Africa’s largest armies and backed, at different stages, by major international powers. Battles at Nakfa, Afabet, and Massawa revealed just how dramatically the balance of military power had shifted. By then, the Eritrean People’s Liberation Army (EPLA) had acquired BM multiple rocket launchers, 130 mm and 122 mm artillery, mortars, tanks, anti-tank missiles, and other heavy weaponry—much of it captured from defeated Ethiopian forces and turned against the army that had originally deployed it. In one of the remarkable transformations of the liberation struggle, battlefield victories became a major source of arms and ammunition for subsequent campaigns. A movement that had begun with scarcely enough rifles for its first fighters had, through organization, discipline, self-reliance, and captured enemy weaponry, transformed itself into a formidable conventional and guerrilla force capable of confronting—and ultimately defeating—one of Africa’s most heavily armed armies.

That transformation did not diminish Awate’s place in history. It magnified it. He did not command the armies that fought the decisive battles of the 1980s and 1990s. He did not live to see Massawa liberated, Asmara entered by victorious Eritrean forces, or an independent Eritrean flag raised over a sovereign state. His historical distinction is more fundamental. He helped begin what others would finish.

From One Shot to a Nation

There is a vast distance between Hademdemi in September 1961 and the liberation of Eritrea in May 1991. That distance was measured not merely in thirty years, but in sacrifice. From Ras Qesar to Ras Dumera, across mountains, plains, villages, towns, and the shores of the Red Sea, successive generations carried forward the struggle that the pioneers had begun. Farmers and workers, students and teachers, women and men, young and old became part of a national effort whose cost would be immense.

Families lost fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters. Fighters endured hunger, bombardment, displacement, injury, imprisonment, and death. Civilians endured the destruction and hardship of prolonged war. Yet the struggle survived every attempt to extinguish it. That is why Bahti Meskerem (September 1st) occupies a distinctive place in Eritrean national memory. It commemorates beginnings.

It reminds Eritreans of the moment when the enormous distance between what existed and what was imagined did not prevent a handful of people from acting. Awate and his companions possessed neither the army that would eventually win the war nor the institutions of the state that would emerge from victory. They could not know how long the struggle would last, how many lives it would consume, or whether they themselves would survive it. They knew only that someone had to begin.

The First Step on a Thirty-Year Road

September 1, 1961, should therefore be remembered not simply because a rifle was fired, but because of what that act represented. It marked the passage from political frustration to armed resistance, from appeals to action, and from the hope that others would determine Eritrea’s future to the conviction that Eritreans themselves had to determine it. Awate’s first shot did not liberate Eritrea. It did something history sometimes demands before liberation becomes possible: it broke the silence. From that moment came a struggle. From that struggle came an army. Around that army mobilized a people. Through three decades of extraordinary sacrifice, setbacks, internal crises, endurance, and battlefield victories, that struggle ultimately produced liberation. Those who began it did not all live to see its conclusion.

The martyrs who fell throughout those thirty years are therefore inseparable from the meaning of September 1. Their names are known; countless others remain known principally to their families, comrades, and communities. But their collective sacrifice is written into Eritrea’s national history—in its mountains and valleys, its villages and cities, its eastern escarpments and western plains, and along the Red Sea coast for which generations struggled. They did not sacrifice so that future generations would merely remember their deaths. They sacrificed so that those generations could inherit a country.

That inheritance carries an obligation: to remember the price at which sovereignty was achieved, to preserve the history of those who struggled for it, and to transmit that history accurately from one generation to the next.

On Bahti Meskerem, Eritreans remember Hamid Idris Awate and the pioneers who dared to begin when victory seemed impossibly distant. We remember the fighters who carried their unfinished mission forward. We remember the civilians who sustained them. We remember the generations that endured thirty years of war. Above all, we remember the martyrs who paid the ultimate price.

The road from September 1, 1961, to May 24, 1991, was paved with blood, sweat, tears, courage, endurance, resilience, and an extraordinary refusal to surrender.

It began with a handful of fighters. It began with a shot. It ended with a nation. From Ras Qesar to Ras Dumera, Massawa to Tessenei, Eritrea is one nation.

Eternal glory to our martyrs.
Victory to the masses.
Never forget Bahti Meskerem.