About Dan Connell

Dan Connell was born at the Turo Infirmary in New Orleans, La., in 1944 and grew up in Chicago and suburban New York before moving to New England in the early 1970s, where he now lives with his wife, graphic designer Debbie Hird. His two children by an earlier marriage—Joanie (b. 1965) and Laura (b. 1968)—live with their families in California and Florida.

After finishing an M.A. in English at the University at Buffalo in 1968, Dan worked as a carpenter, art & music librarian, farm-hand, house painter, inner city science teacher, alternative-high-school administrator, book seller and freelance copy editor—exploring the social landscape and participating in a range of organizing campaigns and political movements.

In 1975, on the heels of a divorce, he set out for Africa with a back pack, a notebook, a few dollars, and a burning curiosity about people’s struggles for liberation and democracy—and the U.S. role in opposing many of them—arising from his experiences in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements. His life has never been the same.

Hitchhiking across Europe and riding third- and fourth-class on trains and boats, he made his way from Cairo to Khartoum and then to Addis Ababa. After months puzzling over the contradictions in Ethiopia's brutal anti-feudal revolution and the continuing role of the U.S. there, he was drawn to investigate the long-running but largely-hidden war for independence in Eritrea, a former Italian colony that Ethiopia had annexed after World War 2. Talking his way onto a government supply convoy, he crossed guerrilla lines to reach the besieged Eritrean capital, Asmara. There he witnessed the assassination of a high-ranking Ethiopian official and its bloody aftermath—the execution of dozens of innocent civilians. His report on this massacre appeared on the front page of The Washington Post. It is also the basis for the opening chapter of his book, Against All Odds.

Next, he flew to Sudan, where he contacted the two rival nationalist movements—the Eritrean Liberation Front and the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front—and traveled into guerrilla-held Eritrea with them. Over the next five years, he returned frequently, writing not only for The Post, but for the New York-based Guardian, the BBC, AP, Reuters and more than a dozen other print and broadcast media in Europe and North America—often as the only reporter covering the conflict. Eritrea has remained a central focus of his work ever since, though he has also written on the civil wars in Sudan, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, and the social and political movements in Nicaragua and the Philippines, among others.

In 1983, after a stint with Oxfam America in Lebanon, Dan founded and directed the Boston-based development agency Grassroots International, initially to provide material aid to social movements in Eritrea, Lebanon, and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and later to work in South Africa and the Philippines.

In the 1990s, Dan returned to freelancing and wrote several books, starting with his narrative of Eritrea’s liberation, Against All Odds. His main research and writing project over this decade, supported by a MacArthur Foundation grant, was a multiyear investigation into post-cold war social and political movements in Eritrea, South Africa, Palestine and Nicaragua that led to his second book, Rethinking Revolution: New Strategies for Democracy & Social Justice. He also consulted for several international development agencies and researched the arms trade in Sudan for Human Rights Watch, during which he toured rebel-held areas and debriefed defectors from Sudan’s armed forces and from Osama bin Laden’s emerging terrorist network.

After war broke out between Eritrea and Ethiopia in 1998 over their undemarcated border, among other issues, Dan took an assignment with Eritrea’s Ministry of Information to write a semi-official country handbook and to train journalists in the public and private press. However, when President Isaias Afwerki squelched all debate over the conflict and the slow pace of democratization by arresting his former comrades and shutting down the independent press, Dan published a paper titled "Enough! A critique of Eritrea's post-liberation politics" and became one of the ruling party’s leading critics. His last visit to Eritrea came in September 2002.

Since 2003, Dan has held the position of Distinguished Lecturer in journalism and African politics at Simmons College in Boston, Mass. During this period, he has written and spoken extensively on the roots of Eritrea's slide into despotism as well as on the new country's belligerent behavior in the Horn of Africa. His latest work has focused on what the Obama administration should do to promote peace and stability there. He has also taken student groups to South Africa to study and write about human rights.

Dan is the author of six books:

• Against All Odds: A Chronicle of the Eritrean Revolution (1993, 1997).
  
• Rethinking Revolution: New Strategies for Democracy & Social Justice
• Eritrea: A Handbook (2002).
• Taking on the Superpowers: 1976-1982( 2003)
• Building a New Nation: 1984-2002 (2004).
• Conversations with Eritrean Political Prisoners (2004).

His next book is a revised and expanded edition of A Historical Dictionary of Eritrea, co-authored with Tom Killion and due out from Scarecrow Press in November 2010. He is also the editor of three books:

• The Proceedings of the 20th Anniversary Conference of the National Union of Eritrean Women (2002).
• Women to Women: Young Americans in South Africa (2006).
• Old Wrongs, New Rights: Student Views of the New South Africa (2008).

Shortly after 9/11, Dan founded the Cape Ann Forum in Gloucester, Mass., which he continues to chair. He also sits on the board of Grassroots International and maintains strong ties with Middle East Report whose board he once chaired and for which he is now a contributing editor. He continues to write and speak frequently on the Horn of Africa.

Updated July 2010