Eritrea's culture: nine peoples counted by name and never by number

Which peoples the Eritrean government recognises

The list of nine is the government's own. Eritrea's Ministry of Information published it in 2014, taking it from a tourism information booklet of 2013, and gave each group a line on where it lives, how it lives and, for all but one, what it believes. Wikipedia's account keeps the same count and pairs each group with a language: Tigrinya, Tigre, Saho, Kunama, Nara, Afar, Beja, Bilen and Arabic, the last spoken by the Rashaida. Most of these belong to the Afroasiatic family, on its Ethiopian Semitic or its Cushitic branch. Kunama and Nara are Nilo-Saharan, spoken by Nilotic peoples in the west and north-west.

Even the names move. Britannica calls the highland majority the Tigray and notes that linguists read the -nya of Tigrinya as an Amharic suffix meaning "language of"; the ministry writes Hidarb for the Beja herders of the west, and Wikipedia writes Hedareb.

Sizes are a matter of estimate. The last count of the territory was the Ethiopian census of 1984, which recorded 2,621,566 people, and the estimates of the present population cited in Wikipedia's account of 2026 run from 3.5 million to 6.4 million. That account puts the Tigrinya at about 55% and the Tigre at about 30%, and Britannica has the Tigray at about half and the Tigre at nearly one-third. Minority Rights Group's profile, which gives no year, has the Tigre at 16%, and lists the Beni Amer, or Bedawi, at 3.1% as a group of their own.

The government's position is that the nine form one nation. The Bertelsmann Transformation Index, in its 2026 report, records the official doctrine as "one people, one heart" and says the government denies that tensions between the groups exist. The same report finds the administration, the schools and the army dominated by the Tigrinya and describes structural discrimination against the other eight groups, which are predominantly Muslim; Freedom House recorded allegations in 2024 that the Kunama and the Afar are excluded from poverty programmes. The government has dismissed the human rights allegations made against it as politically motivated.

Which languages Eritrean children are taught in

What the state guarantees and schools teach

Eritrea has no official language. Article 4 of the 1997 constitution guarantees "the equality of all Eritrean languages", and that constitution has never been implemented (how Eritrea is governed). In practice the government works in Tigrinya, Arabic and English, and English is also the language of university teaching and of many technical fields. Britannica describes schools in which children are taught in their native languages and take Arabic and English in the higher grades.

The language of the classroom has been contested since the territory first had a constitution. The constitution adopted under the federation in 1952 made Tigrinya and Arabic official and let local communities choose the language of education for their children. Under Ethiopian rule Arabic was eliminated from state education first, and the later ban on Tigrinya in state schools, by Britannica's account, helped turn an entire generation of Christian students toward nationalism (the federation and its end).

The argument continues. The Bertelsmann report of 2026 says Muslims feel discriminated against because Arabic, their lingua franca, is suppressed in educational institutions and is not used in the state administration. The UN special rapporteur on Eritrea, reporting in May 2026, was "deeply concerned" about efforts to restrict Arabic-language education, among them its removal from public school curricula and limits on its use in religious teaching. The mother-tongue primary schools sit mostly in remote rural areas, and the Bertelsmann report finds them short of staff and facilities and taught largely by unpaid national-service teachers.

Which script Tigrinya and Tigre share

Tigrinya and Tigre, the two major indigenous languages in Britannica's phrase, are written in the same script and are both related to Ge'ez, yet they are mutually unintelligible. The script has a long history on Eritrean ground: Hawulti, a pre-Aksumite obelisk at Matara, bears the oldest known example of Ge'ez writing, in Wikipedia's history of Eritrea. Minority Rights Group reports that the use of Tigre is declining under the impact of Tigrinya.

Italian holds no recognised status, though a few monolingual speakers keep it, and the Scuola Italiana di Asmara, a school run by the Italian government, was shut in 2020.

How the Eritrean state recognises and registers faith

Both faiths arrived early. Christianity was established on the coast in the fourth century and soon afterwards on the plateau, Britannica says, and Wikipedia dates the monastery of Debre Sina to the same century. Muslims fleeing persecution in Mecca reached Eritrea in 613 or 615, in the migration known as the First Hijrah, and reportedly built the Mosque of the Companions at Massawa.

How many Eritreans are Christian or Muslim

Britannica describes the division by way of life: Islam claims nearly all the pastoralists and Christianity is dominant among the cultivators, while Muslims are prominent in the trade of every town. The published shares differ by more than fifteen points.

What registration means for the other faiths

Since May 2002 the government has recognised four religious bodies: the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church, Sunni Islam, the Eritrean Catholic Church and the Evangelical Lutheran church. Every other faith must go through registration, which requires a group to submit personal information on its members before it is allowed to worship, and Freedom House noted in 2024 that religious practice is prohibited in the military. The Bertelsmann report describes a state defined as secular that still accepts Sharia and the customary law of the Orthodox Church in civil disputes and mediation.

The Orthodox Church took its present form with the state. Before 1993 about half of Eritrea's population belonged to the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church; after independence Eritrea appealed to the Coptic patriarch for autocephaly, and the Eritrean church became autocephalous in 1993 and was raised to a patriarchate in 1998. Its patriarch Abune Antonios was deposed in 2006 and expelled for "heresy" in 2019, and he was under house arrest until his death in February 2022, which Freedom House cites as state interference in a recognised faith.

Jehovah's Witnesses, outside the four, were stripped of citizenship by presidential decree in October 1994, and Human Rights Watch counted 64 of them in prison in April 2025. Freedom House recorded the arrest of 30 Christian worshippers in a house in Keren in March 2023. The recognised faiths are not exempt, and the special rapporteur's report of May 2026 records the closure of Qur'an memorisation centres and of Islamic institutes at Agordat, Anseba and Ghinda, and the release of 100 Christians in May and June 2025 and 177 more in November and December, releases that, by the reports it cites, required the detainees to sign documents renouncing their faith.

What Eritreans pour for a guest and eat

How the coffee ceremony is poured

Coffee is offered on a visit, at festivities and as part of every day. The green beans are roasted over hot coals in a brazier and each person present is offered the smoke to waft toward themselves. The beans are then ground, traditionally in a wooden mortar, and boiled in a jebena, a clay pot with a round base, a neck, a spout and a handle where the neck joins the base. A filter of horsehair or another material in the spout holds back the grounds. The host pours over a tray of small handleless cups, the finjal, moving from cup to cup without stopping, so some coffee always misses, and one extra cup is poured each time.

The same grounds are brewed four times, into rounds called awel, kale'i, bereka, which means "to be blessed", and dereja, the last poured mostly when elders are present. A guest who declines coffee is usually given tea, shahee. Food is refused at least three times, until the host says "bezay kelalem", so that a guest does not seem too eager to eat in another household.

What goes on the table

The meal is injera, a large flat sourdough bread, with stews called tsebhi made from meat or vegetables. It is eaten without utensils, tearing off a piece of injera with the right hand and scooping up the stew with it. Many dishes are vegetarian because most of the population fasts at some time in the year. Eritrean cooking resembles that of Ethiopia, and Wikipedia's account names what separates it: more seafood, because of the coast, less seasoned butter and spice, and more tomato, as in tsebhi dorho.

Italian settlers brought a second set of dishes. Pasta is now one of the main foods eaten in Asmara, commonly as pasta al sugo e berbere, pasta in tomato sauce with berbere spice, beside lasagna and cotoletta alla milanese. Espresso is made on original Italian machinery, the cafes serve cappuccino and gelato, and pizza is a favourite of Asmara's young. At home people brew suwa, a beer of roasted corn, barley and other grain flavoured with the buckthorn leaf gesho and often made for celebrations, and mies, a honey wine.

How Eritrea's peoples dance and dress

Each of the nine groups has its own music and its own dances, and the drum is common to many of them. The best-known traditional genre among Tigrinya speakers is the guaila. Folk musicians play the strung krar, the kebero drum, the begena, the masenqo and the wata. The dances differ in their figures. Bilen and Tigre dancers shake their shoulders and, towards the end, stand and rotate in a circle; Tigrinya dancers first circle anticlockwise, then quicken the pace and stop circling.

The Kunama repertoire is the one the sources describe in detail. The Ministry of Information credits the Kunama with more than 25 dance forms, and Wikipedia names four with ritual purposes: tuka for rites of passage, indoda as prayers for rain, sangga-nena for peaceful mediation and shatta as a display of endurance and courage, often fast and danced to drums. Among singers Wikipedia names Helen Meles, who sings in Tigrinya, the Kunama singer Dehab Faytinga and the late Abraham Afewerki.

Much of the literature is spoken. Wikipedia describes an oral and literary tradition across all nine groups of poetry and proverbs, songs and chants, folk tales, histories and legends, alongside theatre and painting, and the Ministry of Information singles out the Tigre for their folklore, legendary war cries and riddles. The private press has been banned since 2001, the Bertelsmann report notes, and the state media answer to the Ministry of Information.

Dress varies by group and by setting. In the larger cities most people wear jeans and shirts. Christian Tigrinya highlanders traditionally wear white, gowns called zurias for women and a white shirt and trousers for men, while Muslim women in the lowlands traditionally dress in bright colours. Colour once marked faith closely enough to serve as cover. Minority Rights Group records that the Bilen, on becoming Christian, adopted clothing in the colours Muslims wore so as not to be easily recognised, and that about a quarter of the Bilen are Roman Catholic today.

Why UNESCO inscribed Asmara as a modernist city

What the listing says the plan was for

UNESCO inscribed Asmara: A Modernist African City on the World Heritage List on 8 July 2017, at the 41st session of the World Heritage Committee. The listing describes a capital at over 2,000 metres that grew from the 1890s as an Italian military outpost and after 1935 went through a large building programme in the Italian rationalist idiom of the time, applied to government offices, houses, shops, churches, mosques, synagogues, cinemas and hotels. The property is the city produced by phases of planning between 1893 and 1941, together with the unplanned indigenous neighbourhoods of Arbate Asmera and Abbashawel.

The statement of value is plain about the plan. It says colonial planning in Asmara was "based on functional and racial segregation principles", and it records that the town "has come to be associated with the struggle of the Eritrean people for self-determination". It names the Impero, Roma, Odeon, Capitol and Hamasien cinemas, Harnet and Sematat avenues and the Mai Jah Jah park. Wikipedia adds the Art Deco Cinema Impero of 1937 and the futurist Fiat Tagliero Building, and many shops keep Italian names, Bar Vittoria and Pasticceria moderna among them.

Who built Asmara and who protects it

The Italian census of 1931 counted 4,188 Italians among 600,573 inhabitants of Eritrea, and by 1941 there were about 70,000 among some 760,000. Most left after Italian rule ended; the Italian Eritrean community that remains in Asmara is generally not given citizenship except through marriage.

The protection rests on the building code of 1938, the Regolamento Edilizio, on a moratorium since 2001 on new construction inside a Historic Perimeter, and on the Cultural and Natural Heritage Proclamation of 2015. The listing notes that some buildings suffer from lack of maintenance, and the Bertelsmann report of 2026 says no action has been taken to halt the decay of the historic centre. Eritrea ratified UNESCO's convention on intangible heritage on 7 October 2010; its page under that convention marks the periodic reports due on 15 December 2016 and 15 December 2023 as not submitted.

How the independence war shapes the calendar

Timeanddate lists 16 public holidays in Eritrea for 2026. Lidet, Christmas, on 7 January and Timket, Epiphany, on 19 January are kept by the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church; Good Friday and Easter, Arbi Siklet and Fasika, fell on 10 and 12 April and are observed by all Christian denominations; and the list adds the Ge'ez New Year on 11 September, Meskel on 27 September and Christmas Day on 25 December. Three are Muslim, on dates that move from year to year: Eid al-Fitr, Eid al-Adha and the Prophet's Birthday, which fell on 20 March, 27 May and 25 August in 2026. New Year's Day, Women's Day on 8 March and May Day are civil.

The other three come from the war. Revolution Day, Bahti Meskerem, on 1 September marks the first engagement of the armed struggle in 1961. Independence Day, Maelti Natsinet, on 24 May celebrates independence from Ethiopia in 1991, in the words of Wikipedia's table, and formal independence followed on the same date in 1993. Martyrs' Day, Maelti Siwuat, on 20 June remembers those who gave their lives in the struggle. The preamble of the 1997 constitution offers "Eternal Gratitude" to martyrs it numbers in "the scores of thousands", Wikipedia's account says modern Eritrea "is also defined by the struggle for independence", and the Bertelsmann report describes an official ideology that puts "martyrdom for the nation" before spiritual values.

Where Eritrea's young finish school and serve

Education is officially compulsory from the ages of 6 to 13. All students spend their twelfth school year at the Sawa military training camp, by the accounts of the Bertelsmann report and Freedom House, inside a national service that has had no term limit since 1998 (national service). The University of Asmara opened in 1958 and is not operating; the Bertelsmann report dates its closure to 2006 and notes that law has not been taught since. Tertiary study is now limited to colleges such as the Eritrea Institute of Technology near Mai Nefhi, which opened with about 5,500 students in the 2003 to 2004 academic year, and the Bertelsmann report says they do not confer internationally recognised degrees and that about 2% of each age group reaches them. Adult literacy was 76.6% in 2018 by Wikipedia's figure, which the Bertelsmann report gives for 2019, and 93.3% among people aged 15 to 24.

Many leave. The UN refugee agency estimated at the end of 2018 that about 507,300 Eritreans were refugees, and the diaspora's cultural life has become contested in its own right. The special rapporteur's report of May 2026 describes cultural festivals as platforms for mobilisation and oversight by groups linked to the government, and records violent clashes connected to Eritrean festivals and political gatherings in Giessen in 2022 and in Stuttgart in 2023 and 2024. The Bertelsmann report attributes protests against pro-government festivals in Europe, North America, Australia and Israel, some of them violent, to Brigade N'Hamedu, an opposition movement that emerged around 2023.

Why cycling took hold in Eritrea

Cycling came to Eritrea in the colonial period. The Tour of Eritrea, a stage race that often starts in Asmara, was first held in 1946 and last held in 2017, and Wikipedia's account of 2026 counts more than 500 elite cyclists, men and women, and more than 20 riders who have signed professional contracts with international teams. The men's national team won the African continental championship eight times between 2010 and 2022, and the women's team won it in 2013, 2015 and 2019. Daniel Teklehaimanot and Merhawi Kudus rode the Tour de France in 2015, Biniam Girmay won Gent-Wevelgem and a stage of the Giro d'Italia in 2022, and Mossana Debesay, three times African champion, rode for Eritrea at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.

Running has a record of its own: in 2015 the marathon runner Ghirmay Ghebreslassie became the first Eritrean to win gold at a World Championships in Athletics.

Football is followed as widely as cycling, by Wikipedia's account, and the national team has never qualified for the World Cup or the Africa Cup of Nations. Between the qualifying rounds for the 2008 and the 2027 Africa Cups it entered none, after several players defected and sought asylum during away matches, and it played no international match between January 2020 and March 2026, which took it off FIFA's world ranking.