About Dan Connell

Dan Connell was born in New Orleans in 1944 and grew up in Chicago and suburban New York before moving to New England in the early 1970s. Since 1995, he has lived on Cape Ann with his wife, graphic designer Debbie Hird. His two children—Joanie (b. 1965) and Laura (b. 1968)—live with their families in California and Florida.

After earning a masters 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 copy writer—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.

He made his way across Europe to Cairo and on to Khartoum and Addis Ababa. Struck by the brutality of Ethiopia's anti-feudal revolution and the anomalous role of the U.S., he set out to investigate the long-running but largely-hidden war for independence in Eritrea, a former Italian colony that Ethiopia annexed after World War 2.  Hitchhiking into the war zone on 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 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 Against All Odds.

Next, he flew to Sudan, contacted the two rival nationalist movements—the Eritrean Liberation Front and the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front—and traveled into 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 post-apartheid rights issues, and the social and political movements in Nicaragua and the Philippines.

In 1983, after a stint with Oxfam America in Lebanon, Dan founded and directed the Boston-based development agency Grassroots International, first 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, he left Grassroots to write a narrative of Eritrea’s liberation, Against All Odds. Next came an 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 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.

With the renewal of war between Eritrea and Ethiopia in 1998-2000, Dan worked 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 debate over the conflict and the slow pace of democratization by arresting former comrades and shutting down the independent press, Dan turned critic and was ousted from the country. Afterward, he published "Enough! A critique of Eritrea's post-liberation politics."

Since 2003, Dan has held the position of Senior Lecturer in journalism and African politics at Simmons College in Boston, Mass. During this period, he has written extensively on Eritrea's slide into despotism and the new country's belligerent behavior in the Horn of Africa. He has also taken student groups to South Africa to study and write about human rights.

Dan is the author or editor of ten books:

• Against All Odds: A Chronicle of the Eritrean Revolution (1993, 1997).
• Rethinking Revolution: New Strategies for Democracy & Social Justice
• Eritrea: A Handbook (2002).
• The Proceedings of the 20th Anniversary Conference of the National Union of Eritrean Women (2002).
• Taking on the Superpowers: 1976-1982 (2003)
• Building a New Nation: 1984-2002 (2004).
• Conversations with Eritrean Political Prisoners (2004).
• Women to Women: Young Americans in South Africa (2006).
• Old Wrongs, New Rights: Student Views of the New South Africa (2008).
• Historical Dictionary of Eritrea (2010), coauthored with Tom Killion.

Shortly after 9/11, Dan founded the Cape Ann Forum in Gloucester, Mass., which he now chairs. He also remains involved with Grassroots International and Middle East Report, for which he is a contributing editor, and he continues to write and speak frequently on the Horn of Africa.

Updated February 2011