The African state that fought Ethiopia for independence was Eritrea.
Eritrea’s war of independence began in 1961 after Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie’s government dissolved the federation linking Eritrea and Ethiopia and annexed Eritrea. The conflict is commonly described as a 30-year war, although some accounts refer to it as lasting 31 years depending on how the endpoint and calendar years are counted.
The Eritrean Liberation Front initially led the armed struggle. During the 1970s, the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front became the dominant independence movement. Fighting continued against both the imperial government and the later Marxist military regime known as the Derg.
Eritrean forces achieved de facto independence in 1991 when the Derg government collapsed. A United Nations-supervised referendum followed in 1993, in which Eritreans overwhelmingly voted for independence. Eritrea became an internationally recognized sovereign state that year, with Asmara as its capital. This conflict should not be confused with the separate Eritrean-Ethiopian border war of 1998–2000.