What the Music Kept: How Music Made Eritrea

By Raymok M. Ketema, PhD

The arena was full. Selali’a stood at the center of the Bologna stage, straight-backed and unhurried, in a red button-up and black pants — the kind of posture that doesn’t need to announce itself. Behind him, the backup singers and musicians caught the light in golden-yellow tops, some wearing them long and belted at the waist, others tucked in. The koboro players and backup singers kept the energy surging — traditional drums driving the rhythm forward, hands clapping in unison, bodies moving. And then, from somewhere in the crowd, a woman pressed through to the stage and decorated his face with a paper bill, another tucking one into his lapel — then another, and another, some reaching the stage to place it on his forehead, others tossing bills from the floor where they stood, too overcome to wait.

This was August 1991. Eritreans had gathered in Bologna, Italy, for the festival’s first liberated edition, still catching their breath from a historic milestone — just months earlier, on May 24th, Eritrea had finally broken free from a grueling thirty-year revolutionary struggle for independence. The liberation had been fought on many fronts: on the ground in Eritrea, through the blood, sweat, and tears of soldiers who gave their lives and those who survived to tell the story — alongside the doctors who saved them, the artists who documented and gave creative voice to the struggle, and the civilians who supported it in countless ways. But independence was never only a local fight. It was sustained, too, by a fast-growing diaspora scattered across Europe, North America, the Middle East, and the African continent itself.

Emblazoned across the stage backdrop was a declaration: ጸሓይና መሊኣ በሪቓ — tseHayna melia beriQa — “our sun is fully shining.” Above the words, a gerbera daisy, Eritrea’s national flower, burst free from its chains. It was the perfect visual distillation of the moment. And then came the music.

An array of singers performed that night representing all nine ethnic groups, capturing the new nation’s diverse culture — now bonded by the sacrifices required to reach this point. Haileab Bereketeab — widely known as “Selali’a,” meaning undefeatable — took the stage and, in Tigrinya, gave voice to what words alone could not hold. Behind him, a full band filled the air: a drum-kit and traditional keboro drummers laying down the rhythm, a keyboardist, a krar player, guitarists, a bass player, and a trumpeter weaving melody through the mix. Three women and three men rounded out the ensemble as backup singers, their voices punctuated by rhythmic clapping that pulled the crowd deeper into the performance. 

What he sang that night would echo for years:

But to understand why that room felt the way it did — why a song could do that to a crowd — you have to go back. Music has always been the language through which Eritrean people speak their inner lives — whatever those lives hold. And in the thirty years leading up to that Bologna stage, it did something more than reflect feeling. Music didn’t just document the Eritrean liberation struggle — it helped cause it, centralizing the emotions of a generation of young people and pulling them toward action, while simultaneously archiving history as it unfolded. I wasn’t born yet when most of this happened — but I grew up inside its aftermath, in songs my parents knew every word to without needing to be reminded.

Popular sounds started in the city of Asmera. The music of Mahber Teyatr Asmera (Ma.Te.A) in the 1960s captured the attention of Eritreans across the country — and more importantly, it captured their frustration. Tebereh Tesfahune wrapped coded critiques of Ethiopia’s annexation of Eritrea in catchy melodies; Alamin Abdelatif sang about romance, heartbreak, and the disorienting pull of modernity. Together, the music of Ma.Te.A held up a mirror to young Eritreans and showed them their own restlessness looking back. For many, that recognition was a door — one that, once opened, led them out of their homes and toward the liberation front, despite the precarity of what waited on the other side. Listening to it now, decades later, I can still feel what it must have done to a young person in 1960s Asmara.

Within the liberation struggle itself, the freedom fronts understood what Ma.te.a had already demonstrated: music moves people. They wielded it as a deliberate instrument — of war, and of nation-building. Radio was a critical vehicle for this, as it was across many African liberation movements, but it found its sharpest form with the establishment of Dmtsi Hafash (Voice of the Masses) in 1978, with its first broadcast in 1979. Through its airwaves flowed not just music, but poems, political dialogue, philosophical discussions, and frontline war reports — a kind of revolutionary cultural programming that reached people across the country and beyond. Under the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), music cassettes were produced in significant numbers, deliberately drawing from the musical traditions of Eritrea’s many ethnic groups. These weren’t merely cultural artifacts; they were acts of definition — an emerging nation reaching toward an identity that was explicitly pluralist, insisting that Eritrean-ness was not monolithic but woven from many distinct threads. 

And what the fronts were building, the songs were simultaneously preserving. The Eritrean Liberation Front’s (ELF) musical troupe immortalized the launch of the armed struggle with ሓደ መስከረም / Hade Meskerem (September 1st), commemorating the first shot fired under Hamid Idris Awate. On a more intimate register, Bereket Mengisteab composed “መለይ/Meley” in 1970 — ostensibly a pining love song for a girl by that name, but understood by every Eritrean ear as something else entirely: a song for Eritrea itself:

The substitution of “Eritrea” with “Meley” was quiet, and precise, and devastating in the way that only music can be — a whole nation’s longing folded into what sounded, to the wrong ears, like a simple love song. In a 2009 interview with Voice of America (VOA), Bereket named “Meley” as his favorite song from his extensive catalog. “Meley” opened a door. For decades after, Eritrean artists would walk through it — writing love songs that were never only love songs.

Not all the music that followed was celebratory — though some of it had every reason to be. The liberation of Naqfa (often spelled “Nakfa”) in 1977 was a landmark moment: the first town freed from Ethiopian control, it would go on to become the EPLF’s headquarters and a rare sanctuary in the midst of war. Martyr Uqbagabr Gebretensae captured the significance in “ፍልማዊት ኣደ/Filmawit Ade” — a song that speaks directly to the town, acknowledging its destruction while proclaiming its destiny:

The triumph, however, was short-lived. Soviet-backed Ethiopian forces recaptured most of Eritrea in 1978, deepening the fractures between the ELF and EPLF and ultimately forcing ELF members into exile by 1981 — leaving the EPLF as the sole remaining liberation front. Yet Nakfa held. Despite relentless attacks, the EPLF maintained its stronghold on the town, and it remained what the song had already declared it to be: a symbol of resilience, and an example to the others.

Then came the moments of triumph that demanded their own songs. On May 21st, 1984, sixteen highly trained commandos stormed the Ethiopian-occupied airbase at Senbel, in the heart of Asmara. It lasted just eighteen minutes. In that time, they destroyed 33 Ethiopian military aircraft, among them 16 MiG fighter jets. One life was lost. The operation became known as ቅያ 18 ደቓይቕ / qya 18 deQayQ — “the 18-minute feat” — a name that needed no further explanation. The following year, Habte Geriesus (Wedi Shawl) and martyr Mekonen Sereqe (Bitibito) answered with “ኮማንዶ / Komando”, a lighthearted tribute to the commandos who had pulled it off. 

What made “Komando” so infectious wasn’t just its energy — it was its tone. In a genre of songs celebrating collective struggle, Wedi Shawl and martyr Bitibito did something unexpected: they told the story the way a friend would, vivid and almost gleeful, like someone who had just witnessed something unbelievable and couldn’t wait to tell you about it. The opening is practically a chant — “come commando, commando, commando, if they stand against you, hit them, hit them” — less a solemn tribute than a rallying cry with a grin behind it. And then comes the sworn testimony: “I swear on Saryam, my brother Geriesus — they annihilated them at the airport.” The use of a personal oath, the naming of a real person, the almost casual delivery of something extraordinary — it’s the language of street-corner storytelling, not a formal memorial. The commandos weren’t being bronzed into monuments. They were being talked about, the way legends get made among friends.

Six years later, the EPLF launched Operation Fenql (often spelled “Fenkil”) — a decisive three-day offensive from February 8 to 10, 1990, that culminated in the liberation of the strategic port city of Massawa from Ethiopian Derg control. Tekle Kiflemariam (also known as “Wedi Tkul”) enshrined it in song with “ባጽዕ ስየ/BatsE sye”, ensuring the battle would live not just in military history, but in memory.

“BatsE Sye” moves differently — less a celebration than a chronicle. Wedi Tkul maps the offensive almost geographically, moving from the sea to the shore to the valleys inland, as if the land itself needed to be named as witness. For anyone with roots in Eritrea, these aren’t abstract place names — they’re the landscape of inherited memory, heard first in songs before ever being seen on a map. And in one line, triumph and grief collapse into each other: “Let the valley of Salina be the witness, for it holds our martyrs.” Victory and loss, held in the same breath. It was a reminder that no Eritrean triumph came without its cost — and that the music always knew this, even when the crowd was dancing.

Not all the music of this era was celebratory. When the Border War between Eritrea and Ethiopia broke out in 1998 — just seven years after independence — it threatened to fracture a people still finding their footing as a nation. It was in this charged moment that Abrar Osman stepped forward with “ሻማ በል / Shama Bel”. A former ELF member, Osman carried a particular credibility: he had lived through the painful divisions of the liberation era and understood, intimately, what disunity cost. His message now was the same as it had always been — but the stakes made it hit differently.

The lyrics don’t mourn division — they argue against it. Whatever political or philosophical differences existed among Eritreans, Osman was insisting they were secondary to something larger: the sovereignty of a people who had bled for thirty years to exist as a nation. Standing united wasn’t sentiment. It was strategy. The message carried a weight that no official declaration could match. 

Not every song was a battle cry or a celebration. Running quietly beneath all of it — through the years of fighting, through the exile, through the losses that mounted on every front — was a steady current of mourning. Songs written for fallen soldiers. Songs sung by comrades, later martyred. Even after independence, artists kept returning to this act of devotion, as if the music understood what the living needed: not to move on, but to carry the dead forward with them. It was so central to the national consciousness that grief itself was institutionalized — June 20th enshrined as Martyrs’ Day, a reminder that the nation’s birth was inseparable from its losses.

Some of this grief is personal. Released on Martyrs’ Day 2024, ሰንበት ምሸት / Senbet Mshet (“Sunday Evening”) is one of the more recent songs to carry that weight — and it nearly brought me to tears sitting on my grandmother’s couch in Asmera when the music video first premiered. The song tells its story through two siblings: Selihom, a younger sister waiting at home, and Senay, her older brother who left for war and never came back. Sung by Meron Estifanos and Soli Jon, each takes a voice — and what emerges is less a dirge than a conversation across an impossible distance.

It’s Senay, the dead brother, who does the comforting:

There is no such thing as death for heroes. It’s a line that could read as propaganda, but in Senay’s mouth — gentle, intimate, addressed to his little sister by name — it lands differently. It’s a brother trying to make leaving bearable. And it reflects something deeply embedded in how Eritrea understands its martyrs: not as the fallen, but as the foundation. The nation was built on that belief, and the music has never stopped saying so.

These are only a handful of examples — a few measures of a much longer song. But they point toward the same truth: that music was never incidental to the Eritrean liberation struggle. It was load-bearing. It held the feelings of a generation until those feelings became action. It named the battles as they were fought and carried the dead forward when the living had to keep moving. It told a people who they were — and who they were becoming — at the exact moment they needed to hear it.

That night in Bologna, 1991, a crowd packed an arena and gave everything they had to a man in a red shirt standing at a microphone — bills pressed to his forehead, tossed from the floor, the room barely able to contain itself. They weren’t just celebrating independence. They were celebrating everything that had moved through music to get them there — every coded love song, every battle chant, every lament sung into a radio in the dark. The sun was fully shining. Music, as it always had, bore witness; music made Eritrea and continues to make Eritrea.