Africa’s most secretive dictatorship faces an existential crisis

If the past is a foreign country, its name is surely Eritrea. Residents of Asmara, its capital, pootle around in ancient Fiat 500s, wistfully gliding past art-deco cinemas, ornate villas and grand colonnades. These are (or were) the architectural triumphs of long-vanquished Italian colonists, whose peeling walls seem poetical in their decline. Equally anachronistic, if rather less endearing, is Isaias Afwerki, Eritrea’s dictator since 1991. Soon to be 80, he still regularly denounces the “misguided policies” of John Foster Dulles, a former American secretary of state, as if Dwight Eisenhower were still president.