The Eritrean People's Liberation Front was not supposed to win. They were outnumbered, outgunned, and operating against a Soviet-backed Ethiopian military that in the 1980s was the largest army in Africa. But the EPLF understood their terrain. The Sahel range around Nakfa is a jumble of small hills, hundreds and hundreds of low ridges rolling in every direction from any given observation point. You cannot see one mountain here; you see a corrugated landscape that offers ambush positions everywhere. The EPLF carved trenches into the sandstone, stocked them with supplies, moved between them at night, and held the ground around Nakfa through every major Ethiopian offensive. When Eritrean independence came in 1991, the fighters who had survived those hills walked down to the capital and became the government of a new country. The currency they issued in 1997 took the name of the village that had sheltered them, and every nakfa note still carries symbols from that struggle.

Nakfa is almost ten hours by taxi from the Eritrean capital of Asmara, but only if you can get a travel permit, which at present you generally cannot. The route if it were open would go from Asmara to Keren, then by village van to Afabet on the next day, then from Afabet to Nakfa on a narrow, winding road that takes roughly a day and requires patience: transport is available from Afabet but you often wait one or two days for it. The van loads with people, cattle, and baggage until it bulges; the comfortless ride takes you through a landscape that has been shaped equally by erosion and by war. There are no buses on top of the mountain. But you do not need them. At 1,780 meters above sea level, perched on the top of the Sahel ridges, Nakfa is a village for walking - if you stay on the beaten tracks. The hills are still salted with land mines.

The people of Nakfa live in small single-room stone huts without plaster, with corrugated iron roofs. Each house sits on its own hillock. There is a small enclosure outside each building that serves as a bathhouse. Domestic chores happen in the open air. In the evening the cattle are simply put outside the hut without ropes, fences, or identity tags - the animals know where they belong. Water is scarce. A few tanks and seasonal streams hold what the rains provide; in summer even those dry up, and the camels of Nakfa turn to eating cactus stalks, working their jaws carefully around the thorns with a precision that is oddly graceful. The village has no electricity. A generator keeps a few things running. A solar-powered telephone works on sunny days only. When you do get a call through to Asmara, the signals are weak and there is no guarantee your voice is reaching the other end. The telephone booth in Nakfa stays crowded all day with people who will wait the whole day for one connection.

Nakfa is one of the few villages in Africa where shifting cultivation and nomadic herding are still in practice. The tribal population moves from one hilltop to another in search of better pastures, abandoning a settlement when the soils exhaust or the grazing thins. The people here are Muslim, living in small communities that remember every recent conflict. The markets are vibrant and worth a walk around for their ordinary vitality. The hillocks reward exploration provided you stay on the beaten paths - land mines remain a genuine hazard in the area. Once a month, a Coca-Cola truck makes its way up the spiral roads from Asmara to Nakfa. There is celebration when it arrives, and the villagers insist on finishing the entire load within a few hours. If you are driving down the switchbacks from Asmara on the right day you can see the truck climbing up toward Nakfa. It is strange juxtaposition - global soft drink logistics improbably reaching the most remote village of Eritrea - that captures something about what modernity can look like in places the outside world does not quite reach.

The food at Nakfa is sumptuous for the price. Ten nakfa buys you injira and zigni, the traditional sourdough flatbread and spiced meat stew that Eritreans and Ethiopians share across the border. The hills in every direction, the hundreds of small mounds rolling away to the horizon, are what the village is really about. If Nakfa is not beautiful, one observer asked, what is beauty? The question reads differently when you know what these hills cost. The people who built the village and who fought from it are the same people who live in it now, tending their cattle, waiting for the monthly Coca-Cola truck, speaking to Asmara through an unreliable solar phone. Nakfa is a small place that holds a large story, and the weight of what happened on these ridges presses against every ordinary thing you see - the stone huts, the children, the camels eating cactus - in a way that is hard to shake.