Insurgent Contaminants: Corroding U.S. Military Infrastructure in Eritrea

• In Event: Seepage: Viscous Readings of African Diasporic Archives

Description for Program

“We were told that the water in the hotel where we stayed was unsafe to drink so we would lug gallon bottles of Gatorade from Kagnew Station back to the hotel to drink and brush our teeth.”
–Visitor to Kagnew Station, c. 1970

Kagnew Station was a secret U.S. military communications base in Asmara, Eritrea that operated from 1953 to 1977. Its purpose was to transmit and receive radio relays, navigating trans-Atlantic air travel, fielding communications, and intercepting messages from the Middle East and Soviet Union. It even briefly dabbled in space observation. To operate from Eritrea, the U.S. Army had signed a lease with Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie– only possible because Eritrea was at the time a federated territory of Ethiopia. Employing declassified U.S. state records, oral histories, and Eritrean and Ethiopian periodicals, this paper presents several episodes of the eruptive tensions and moments of anti-military destruction at Kagnew Station made possible through liquids, grains, and waterways. Examples include a rumor that a U.S. grain shipment to Eritrea had been intentionally infected after the Army boycotted Eritrean milk and meat on suspicion that 80% of its cattle were infected with Tuberculosis, as well as a water shortage in 1969 that critics leveraged to blame Kagnew and indict U.S.- and Ethiopian-imperialism. I argue that to wage insurgency against a military base that imagined itself as hermetically sealed from its locality–with its own water system, microwavable food, and criminal code–combatants against U.S. and Ethiopian empire found (at times, mite-sized) openings to corrode and critique one of the most looming structures of U.S. militarism in the Horn of Africa during the early Cold War.

Author

• Amsale Alemu, Howard University