The Making of Elite Women within Revolution and Nation Building—The Case of Eritrea.” Paper presented seminar at the African Studies

The Eritrean revolution was the combination of a national revolution coupled with a social revolution (Hermassi, 1976; Selbin, 1993). Even though it unfolded at a historical moment in time often referred to as post-modern or post-developmental (see for example the discussion in Sachs, 1996), the Eritrean revolution belongs to the tradition of revolution as a modernising project, inspired by (socialist) notions of “economic, social and cultural progress ” (Cabral, 1980:150). But far from being an anachronism, it is argued here that the Eritrean revolution – in combining a developmentalist orientation with a concept of women’s rights – was, like other revolutions before and possibly in the future, in various ways a successful attempt to “improve the human social condition ” (Dunn, 1989:20) of the Eritrean people.1 As such it puts the usefulness of labels such as ‘modernity ’ versus ‘post-modernity ’ into question (see Kolakowski, 1990). The line taken here and within the ideology of the Eritrean revolution is to conceive of modernisation in its most basic sense, resting on the idea of “progress ” as a “near-universal aspiration ” (Edwards, 1999:19), albeit without assuming that a standardised way ‘forward ’ exists to mov