In this article I trace various people's memories of Berhe Mesgun's play Zehalefe Nebret Ertra – ‘Eritrea's Past Property’ or simply ‘Eritrea's Past’ (following its Italian title, Il Passato dell'Eritrea) – performed in the Eritrean capital Asmara in 1947. These memories are often shifting, at times contradictory, renderings and are set against the narrative of three periods of ‘Eritrea's past’ and present: first, the 1940s when the fate of the country was suspended between the remnants of Italian colonialism (1890-1941), a ‘care-taker’ British administration (BMA, 1941-1952) and a relatively unknown political future, eventually decided by a UN Four Power Commission which opted for the federation with Ethiopia (1952); second, the 1998-2000 Eritrean-Ethiopian ‘border war’ and its immediate aftermath which marked the end of the first post-liberation period in Eritrea (1991-8); and, finally, the period since the end of 2001 (Reid, 2009: 213) which has been characterised by more overt militarisation and repression, but lately also by a new openness towards exploring Eritrea's theatrical past.

Drawing largely on oral accounts, private archive material and historical scholarship, I will interweave these narratives of Eritrea's past and present with my research experience from 1999-2008. In the process I reflect on what the various archives suggest about contemporary theatre research in a context that is politically complex, partly oral, in cultural style, and thus not focused on the kind of material documentation that often characterises western theatre historiography. I also reflect on the implications of these factors for the researcher trying to make meaning as an outsider from fragments.