National Agenda : Civic Pride Blooms in Eritrea : The extraordinary is commonplace in Africa’s newest nation. Government officials are even punctual.

“Kefela,” the American said as he left the U.S. library on Alula Street for the last time, “take care of the books.” With that the man was gone, joining the exodus of Americans expelled by Ethiopia’s Marxist government from the northern province of Eritrea nearly 20 years ago.

No one would have dared imagine how seriously Kefela Kokobu would take those words. For single-handedly, and at considerable personal risk, Kefela ensured that an entire generation of young Eritreans would be raised on Hemingway instead of Mao, would have better access to Jefferson than to Lenin.

Ethiopian officials raged at Kokobu upon finding shelves devoted to O’Hara and Fitzgerald and a record cabinet featuring music by the Boston Pops and the Harvard Glee Club; they sent him the collected works of Communist authors by the box load. Kokobu put three or four of the books on display to appease the authorities and packed the rest away in storage.

Traces of the American presence in Eritrea disappeared fast under the Marxist regime that overthrew Emperor Haile Selassie: The U.S. Consulate was taken over by the Ethiopian navy, and Kagnew Station, a U.S. army communications facility, became a base for the murderous Ethiopian army. But Kokobu’s beloved American Library remained just a library--indeed, Asmara’s only public library--though operated under the auspices of the local municipality, not the U.S. Information Service.

“I wanted my people to be educated, and I did not believe Mao and Lenin could provide that learning,” said Kokobu, 55, who dumbfounded the returning Americans last year by escorting them through a spotless library where every volume had been kept safe and even the list of overdue borrowed books was up to date.

But if the Americans found Kokobu’s diligence stunning, they would soon learn that in Eritrea--which just celebrated its first anniversary as Africa’s newest country--the extraordinary is commonplace. As one American diplomat put it recently: “Eritrea reminds me of what Israel must have felt like in the ‘50s. There is an obsession with a single goal--to make it work.”

The 3.5 million Eritreans, about evenly divided between Muslims and Christians, are keenly aware after winning a 30-year guerrilla war for independence that many people are echoing the diplomat’s sentiments. They smile and give a knowing nod when told that what is happening here doesn’t seem very, well, African.

Across a continent where concern for shared well-being often plays little role in national life, cities are decaying, social services crumbling, political foundations wobbling. But here in Eritrea’s 7,000-foot-high capital, a kind of new African model is emerging, and common people like Habte Freizghy are helping create it.

“If I do not do my job right, if I do not show up for work on time,” he said, “then Eritrea is worse off because of me.” Freizghy is a street sweeper and, together with a legion of other elderly men who wield their brooms with unusual energy, he has helped make Asmara an immaculate city. His salary is $30 a month plus a daily ration of food.

No beggars are allowed in Asmara; they are sent to a training and schooling center outside the city. Western business people are stunned to learn that government officials are punctual and do not accept bribes.

Out by the airport, where minefields have been cleared, men and women work side by side tending rows of wheat--a rare sight in Africa where farm labor is usually left to women. A U.S. Embassy briefing packet for visitors contains this notation under the heading Security Awareness: “None.” There is no fear of physical harm or crime anywhere in the country, it says.

Eritrea’s guerrilla army--30% of whose combat troops were women--captured Asmara from Ethiopia and its Soviet advisers in May, 1991. But even before the celebration died down, Issaias Afewerki, then rebel leader and now president, had one last request to make of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF): Return to the countryside as unpaid volunteers for two years and build schools, repair roads, staff clinics, terrace the hills for farming.

Though not without grumbling that they already had sacrificed enough and been gone from their families too long, the 95,000 soldiers obeyed.

“The odds were stacked against us during the war, and very few thought we could succeed,” said former combatant Yemane Ghebreab, now a senior party official. “But the EPLF united the people because our leaders stayed inside the country. They lived the same as the rest. They suffered like the rest. And therefore they were sensitive to the sacrifice of the people.”

During the colonial era, the ruling Italians built one of Africa’s most industrialized colonies in this outpost that resembles the Badlands of South Dakota. There were factories, railroads, citrus plantations. Eritrea became an important export partner for the Middle East and southern Europe.

Britain took control of Eritrea in 1941. By 1952, Eritreans expected to be granted independence, like other European colonies. Instead, they were swallowed up by Ethiopia. Regardless of “the point of view of justice,” U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told the United Nations at the time, America’s strategic interests dictated that Eritrea “be linked with our ally, Ethiopia.”

Treated by the Ethiopians as colonial subjects, denied equal education and jobs, the Eritreans went to war in 1961, first against the emperor, then against a cabal of violent Communists. Never before had Africa seen such a resourceful, self-reliant band of guerrillas take to the bush.

With virtually no outside backing, the EPLF and two other rebel groups carved factories, schools and offices out of rock caves. Solar panels cooled their blood-bank refrigerators. Disposable hypodermic syringes were turned into light switches, shards of shrapnel into scythes.

Soldiers moved at night and carried blackboards into the trenches, to study by candlelight. But even when Ethiopia adopted communism and the Soviet Union joined the war against Eritrea, in the late 1970s, Western governments kept their distance. The EPLF’s rhetoric sounded like it had been written in Albania.

“It’s true that in the ‘60s and ‘70s we, as young fighters, embraced the school of Marxism,” said Kidane Woldeyesus, head of the Americas section of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “But I think Africa in that era called for that kind of radical thinking.

“Then came the Soviet intervention in ’78. Those MIGs tried to wipe us out. I mean, really wipe us out! It gave us the opportunity to rethink things. Since the ‘80s, we’ve clearly stated that we were going to a multi-party, democratic system.”

This year, having defeated black Africa’s largest army and won Ethiopia’s blessing to secede, Eritrea observes its first anniversary of independence--formally proclaimed on May 24, 1993--with a palpable self-esteem that brings thousands of neatly dressed residents onto Liberation Boulevard each evening to stroll under palm trees and sip espresso in cafes.

The Peace Corps is coming back, and U.S. firms are exploring for oil and natural gas. The Ethiopian Airlines office now houses Eritrea Airlines, though no such company yet exists.

Daunting tasks remain, however.

“Observation alone will tell you that 30 years of war brought devastating suffering,” said Saba Issays of the National Union of Eritrean Women. Agriculture was crippled by the war, the industrial sector destroyed. Per capita income is only $130 a year.

But Eritreans have only to look across their borders at the economic ruin, widespread wars, tribal animosity and official corruption that torment Africa to know what the alternative is. In few African countries could anyone say, as the Foreign Ministry’s Kidane did the other day: “Being newcomers, we have had the opportunity to learn from history.”