London

It’s Saturday night in Dahlak, a club on Brixton Road, and the place is heaving with young Eritreans and Ethiopians. The African states have been locked into a bloody conflict for decades, but here in a sweaty club they dance and drink alongside each other to songs sung in Amharic (the ancient semitic language of the region).

‘It’s very lively, it really makes you jump,’ said 42-year-old Surafiel Yacob, an Eritrean cab driver and a Dahlak regular. ‘The main thing is that we don’t hate each other, it’s just the government that causes problems.’

But in 1994, when Yacob arrived in London, the thought that he would end up dancing with a sworn enemy that a few years previously he had been shooting at must have been inconceivable. Born in Asmara, Eritrea’s capital city, Yacob endured a childhood clouded by conflict as the fledgling state sought independence from neighbouring Ethiopia. At the age of 13 his parents sent him and his 14-year-old brother Kiflemaria to the newly liberated city of Keren to escape the encroaching Ethiopian forces. Once in Keren, swept up by the nationalistic fervour, both brothers joined the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), the guerrilla group fighting for Eritrean independence. Alongside 8,000 other children, he and his brother slept, ate and studied in an underground city of tunnels and bomb shelters. Feature continues

‘It was very harsh. I was from a middle-class background and never experienced such conditions,’ says Yacob. ‘At night it was freezing and there were no blankets; in the day it was boiling and there was little water.’ Eventually his brother was sent to the front. Yacob never saw him again. Years later, he learned that Kiflemaria had been killed in battle in 1982. Meanwhile, Yacob was sent to launch a literacy campaign in various towns and villages. ‘It was very dangerous. I always carried my Kalashnikov. I even slept with it. It was the same as having a mobile on you now.’

Yacob was then given a job painting propaganda posters and sent out to sketch soldiers on the frontline. Finally, in 1991, a peace charter was signed with Ethiopia and Yacob was reunited with his parents in Asmara – the first time he had seen them in almost ten years. But the new Eritrean government proved increasingly autocratic. In 1993, Yacob and other ex-guerrilla fighers participated in anti-government protests, which were followed by mass police arrests . Under threat of imprisonment, Yacob fled to London.

However, London was not the haven he expected. He was held in detention centres in Gatwick and then in Oxford. On his release he stayed with cousins in Ladbroke Grove and was then rehoused by the council in his present flat in Clapham. ‘I am very grateful for that,’ he says.