I Didn't Do It for You

by Michela Wrong

  The single most expensive public project undertaken by the Italians in Eritrea, Martini’s railway was emblematic of his rule. Its construction marked the time when Eritrea, exposed to Western influences and endowed with the infrastructure of a modern industrial state, started down a path that would lead its citizens further and further away from their neighbours in feudal Abyssinia. Yet, as far as Martini was concerned, this gathering sense of national identity was almost an accidental by-product. Like so many colonial Big Men, he was haunted by the need to tame the landscape, to carve his initials into Eritrea’s very rocks. Literally hammering the nuts and bolts of a nation into place, he was more interested in the mechanical structures taking shape than what was going on in the heads of his African subjects. This colony was being created for Italy’s sake and if much of what he did improved life for Eritreans, it was motivated by an understanding of what was in Rome’s long-term interests, not altruism. No one could accuse Martini of remaining aloof–he toured constantly, setting up his marquee under the trees and receiving subjects whose customs he recorded in his diary. He knew the ways of the lowland Kunama and the nomadic rhythms of the Rashaida. But these were more the contacts of a deity with his worshippers than a parliamentarian with his constituents. This was the interest a lepidopterist shows in his butterfly collection–cool, distant and with a touch of deadly chloroform.

  The approach is at its clearest when Martini writes about the two areas in which intimate contact between the races was possible: sex and education. Racial segregation had been practised in the colony since its inception. In Asmara, Eritreans were confined to the stinking warren of dwellings around the markets, while the Europeans, whose most prominent members donned white tie and tails to attend Martini’s balls, lived in villas on the south side of the main street. Public transport was also segregated: Eritreans would have to wait another half-century to share the novel experience of using a bus’s front door. But the races still mingled far more than the prudish Martini felt comfortable with. He disapproved of prostitutes, but was also repelled by the widespread phenomenon of madamismo, in which Italian officials took Eritrean women as concubines, setting up house together. The practice, he warned, raised a truly ghastly prospect. ‘A black man must not cuckold a white man. So a white man must not place himself in a position where he can be cuckolded by a native.’22 If the offspring of such unsavoury unions were abandoned, it would bring shame upon ‘the dominant race’; if decently reared, it could ruin the Italian official concerned. Either outcome was to be deplored, so the entire situation was best avoided. It was an attempt at social engineering that enjoyed almost no success. By 1935, Asmara’s 3,500 Italians had produced 1,000 meticci, evidence of a healthy level of interbreeding.23

  But it is for his stance on education that Martini is chiefly resented by Eritreans today. The former education minister violently rejected–‘No, no and once again, no’–any notion of mixed-race schooling. His justification was characteristically quixotic, the opposite of what one might expect from a man who had embraced the credo of racial superiority. ‘In my view, the blacks are more quick-witted than us,’ he remarked, noticing how swiftly Eritrean pupils picked up foreign languages.24 This posed a problem at school, he said, where ‘the white man’s superiority, the basis of every colonial regime, is undermined’. No mixed-race schooling meant there would be no opportunity for bright young Eritreans to form subversive views on their dim future masters. ‘Let us avoid making comparisons.’ The natives must be kept in their place, taught only what they need to fulfil the subservient roles for which Rome thought them best suited. It was a variation of the philosophy Belgium would apply to the Congolese in the field of education: ‘Pas d’élites, pas d’ennemis’ (‘No elites, no enemies’).

  In 1907, Martini asked to be recalled. He had pulled off a final diplomatic coup, travelling to Addis to pay his respects to an ailing Menelik II–‘one of the ugliest men I have ever seen, but with a very sweet smile’. It was a nightmarish journey during which the mules plunged up to their stomachs in mud and Martini, vain as ever, fussed constantly over the size of the ceremonial guard each provincial ruler sent to meet him.25 His work on the railway was not complete. It would never, in fact, be completed to his satisfaction, for Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in the 1930s would interrupt construction of a final section intended to link the Eritrean line to Sudan’s network. But Rome’s procrastination had fatigued him. Being lord of all he surveyed had been enjoyable, but the small-mindedness of colonial life depressed him and he was fed up with army intrigues. As he prepared to embark aboard a P&O liner, with Eritrea’s notables–both black and white–mustered in Massawa to say goodbye, the man of letters was, for once, lost for words. ‘I feel such emotion that I have neither the strength nor ability to express it.’

  His farewell message to the Eritrean people reveals just how far the anti-colonialist of yesteryear had travelled, how heady the role of Lord Jim, sustained over nearly a decade, had proved. It reads more like a prayer penned by an Old Testament patriarch ascending to his rightful place at God’s side, than an Italian politician returning to his Tuscan constituency and, eventually, the top job at a newly-created Ministry for Colonies.

  ‘People from the Mareb to the sea, hear me! His Majesty the King of Italy desired that I should come amongst you and govern in his name. And for ten years I listened and I judged, I rewarded and I punished, in the King’s name. And for ten years I travelled the lands of the Christian and the Moslem, the plains and the mountain, and I said “go forth and trade” to the merchants and “go forth and cultivate” to the farmers, in the King’s name. And peace was with you, and the roads were opened to trade, and the harvests were safe in the fields. Hear me! His Majesty the King learnt that his will had been done, by the Grace of God, and has permitted me to return to my own country. I bid farewell to great and small, rich and poor. May your trade prosper and your lands remain fertile. May God give you peace!’26

  With this portentous salutation, the Martini era came to a close.

  He left behind a society transformed, but one–as far as its Eritrean majority was concerned–that held him in awe rather than affection. Today, when most Eritreans learn English at school, Martini has become little more than a name, his thoughts and achievements obscured by the barrier of language. Asmara holds not a single monument to this seminal figure. But older, Italian-speaking Eritreans remember, and their assessment of Martini is as ambivalent as the man himself. ‘His legacy has been enormous, yet his aim was always to keep Eritrea in chains,’ says Dr Aba Isaak, a local historian. ‘He was a number one racist, but a superb statesman. I admire him, even while I regard him as my enemy.’27

  When Martini left, there was no doubt in his mind that his government owed him thanks beyond measure. By his own immodest assessment, he had shored up a bankrupt enterprise and ‘saved’ an entire colony from abandonment, transforming a military garrison into a modern nation-state. But Martini had also laid the groundwork–quite literally, in the case of the railway–for the sour years of Fascism, when the implicit racism of his generation of administrators was turned into explicit law, and a colonial regime that had seemed a necessary irritation began to feel to Eritreans like an intolerable burden.

  In the years that followed, the colony would serve as little more than a supplier of cannon fodder for Italy’s campaign in Libya, sending its ascaris to seize Tripolitania and Cyrenaica from the Turks in 1911. Italy’s African pretensions were largely forgotten as the country was plunged into the horrors of the First World War. The Allied carve-up of foreign territories following that conflict left Italians bruised. Right-wingers who still quietly pined for an African empire felt their country had been promised a great deal while the fighting raged, only to be palmed off with very little by the Allies when the danger of German victory passed. It was an anger that played perfectly into the hands of the bully who was about to seize control of Italy.

  As a youthful Socialist, Benito Mussolini h
ad railed against liberals such as Martini for frittering away funds he felt would have been better spent tackling Italy’s underdeveloped south, actually going to prison for opposing Italy’s invasion of Libya. But once he assumed office in 1922 as prime minister, Mussolini’s attitude to empire changed. Hardline Fascist commanders were dispatched to Libya and Somalia, where they ruthlessly crushed local resistance and expropriated the most fertile land. The extreme nationalism at Fascism’s core required a rallying cause and Mussolini was a great believer in the purifying power of battle. ‘To remain healthy, a nation should wage war every 25 years,’ he maintained. He was determined to prove to other European powers that Il Duce deserved a seat at the negotiating table. Nursing expansionist plans for Europe, he needed a quick war that could be decisively won, giving the public morale a boost before it faced more formidable challenges closer to home. Abyssinia, which many Italians continued to regard, in defiance of all logic, as rightfully theirs, seemed the perfect choice. France had Algeria, Britain had Kenya. It was only fair Italy should have her ‘place in the sun’.

  As the official propaganda machine cranked into action, Italians were once again sold the idea of Abyssinia as an El Dorado of gold, platinum, oil and coal, a land ready to soak up Italian settlers–Mussolini put the number at a blatantly absurd 10 million. Once again, one of Africa’s oldest civilizations was portrayed as a land of barbarians, who needed to be ‘liberated’ for their own good. Italian officials were not alone in nursing a vision of Abyssinia that could have sprung from the pages of Gulliver’s Travels. ‘There human slavery still flourishes,’ Time magazine told its readers in August 1926. ‘There the most trifling jubilation provides an excuse for tearing out the entrails of a living cow, that they may be gorged raw by old and young.’ Itching for a pretext to declare war on Ras Tafari, the former Abyssinian regent who had been crowned Emperor Haile Selassie in 1930, Mussolini finally seized on a clash between Italian and Abyssinian troops at an oasis in Wal Wal as a pretext. Retribution had been a long time coming, but the battle of Adua was about to be avenged.

  For Eritrea, the obvious location for Italy’s logistical base, the forthcoming invasion meant boom times. Ca Custa Lon Ca Custa (‘Whatever it costs’) reads the slogan, written in Piedmontese dialect, carved into the cement of the ugly Fascist bridge which fords the river at Dogali. It epitomized Mussolini’s entire approach to the war he launched in the autumn of 1935, ordering a mixed force of Italian soldiers and Eritrean ascaris to cross the Mareb river dividing Eritrea from Abyssinia. ‘There will be no lack of money,’ he had promised the general in charge of operations, Emilio de Bono, and the ensuing campaign would be characterized by massive over-supply.28 When de Bono asked for three divisions, Mussolini sent him 10, explaining: ‘For the lack of a few thousand men, we lost the day at Adua. We shall never make that mistake. I am willing to commit a sin of excess but never a sin of deficiency.’29 Some 650,000 men, including tens of thousands of Blackshirt volunteers, were eventually sent to the region and with them went 2m tonnes of material, probably 10 times as much as was actually needed. Flooded with supplies–much of it would sit rotting on the Massawa quayside, only, eventually, to be dumped in the sea–Eritrea’s facilities suddenly looked in dire need of modernization.

  A 50,000-strong workcrew was dispatched to do the necessary: widening Massawa port, building hangars, warehouses, barracks and a brand-new hospital. The road to Asmara was re-surfaced, airports built, bridges constructed. Martini’s heart would have thrilled with pride, as his beloved railway finally came into its own. Trains shuttled between Massawa and Asmara nearly 40 times a day, laden with supplies for the front. Even this was not considered sufficient, however, and, in 1936, work started on another miracle of engineering, the longest, highest freight-carrying cableway in the world. The 72-km ropeway erected by the Italian company of Ceretti and Tanfani, strung like a steel necklace across the mountain ranges, was as much about demonstrating the white man’s mastery over the landscape as meeting any practical need. It was exactly the kind of high-profile, macho project Mussolini loved.

  Asmara blossomed. New offices and arsenals, car parks and laboratories sprang up, traffic queues for the first time formed on the city’s streets. The most modern city in Africa boasted more traffic lights than Rome itself. Soon the simple one-storey houses of the 19th century were dwarfed by Modernist palazzi. In the space of three frenzied years, Italy’s avant-garde architects, presented with a nearly blank canvas and generous state sponsorship, created a new city. A mere five years before Mussolini’s new Roman empire was to crumble into dust, Eritrea’s designers dug foundations and poured cement, never doubting, it seems, that this empire was destined to endure.

  It was a short military campaign. By May 2, 1936, Italy’s tactic of bombing Abyssinian hospitals and its widespread use of mustard gas, which poisoned water sources and brought the skin out in leprous, festering blisters, had had the desired effect. With his army in tatters and Italian troops marching on Addis, Haile Selassie fled the country. He made one last poignant appeal for help before the League of Nations in Geneva, where, jeered by right-wing Italian journalists, he warned member states that their failure to stop Mussolini would destroy the principle of collective security that had been the organization’s raison d’être. ‘International morality is at stake,’ he said, ‘what answer am I to take back to my people?’30 European powers, who had already decided to take no more than token action, listened in silent embarrassment to this Cassandra-like warning. Riding a wave of popular rejoicing, Mussolini set about dividing Haile Selassie’s territory on ethnic lines. Abyssinia was swallowed up in Italian East Africa, a vast new Roman empire which embraced Eritrea and Somalia and covered 1.7 million sq km, stretching from the Indian Ocean to the borders of Kenya, Uganda and Sudan.

  In Eritrea, this should have been a golden age, for white and black alike. But while the economy thrived, relations between Eritreans and Italians had never been worse. The new Italians, Eritreans quickly noticed, were different from the old. They came from the same modest backgrounds as their predecessors, but they seemed, like Il Duce himself, to feel a swaggering need to demonstrate constantly who was boss. There was little danger of these new arrivals, convinced of their Aryan superiority, becoming insabbiati: they despised the locals too thoroughly to mix. ‘Every hour of the day, the native should view the Italian as his master, sure of himself and his future, with clear and defined objectives,’ explained an Italian writer of the day.31 To that end, a raft of increasingly oppressive racial laws was introduced across Italian East Africa between 1936 and 1940. Part and parcel of the anti-Semitic legislation being adopted in mainland Italy, they aimed at keeping the black man firmly in his place.32

  Asmarinos today still refer to the city as ‘piglo Roma’ and the centre of town as the ‘combishtato’, bastardizations of the ‘piccolo Roma’ Italy recreated on the Hamasien plateau and the campo cintato (‘enclosed area’), ruled off-limits for Eritreans outside working hours ‘for reasons of public order and hygiene’. Eritrean merchants with premises on prime shopping streets were forced to surrender their leases to Italian entrepreneurs. Consigned to the public gallery at the cinema, Eritreans were barred from restaurants, bars and hotels and made to form separate queues at post offices and banks. Africans actually preferred to keep their distance, claimed the Italian Ministry for African Affairs in justification.33 Once, Eritreans and their white compatriots had greeted each other as ‘arku’ (‘friend’). In future, Fascism decreed, Italians would address Eritreans with the peremptory ‘atta’ and ‘atti’ (‘you’), while the Eritrean was expected to use the respectful ‘goitana’ (‘master’) towards his white superior.

  The new legislation enshrined the principle of separate education Martini had first embraced. And no matter how talented or well-heeled, an Eritrean could not stay longer than four years at his all-black school. Italy needed obedient translators, respectful artisans and disciplined ascaris, not trouble-making intellectual
s. ‘The Eritrean student should be able to speak our language moderately well; he should know the four arithmetical operations within normal limits; he should be a convinced propagandist of the principles of hygiene, and of history, he should know only the names of those who have made Italy great,’ announced the colony’s Director of Education.34 The subject of Italy’s Risorgimento was dropped entirely from the syllabus, for fear it might spark inappropriate ideas.

  If the Fascist administrators disliked the notion of uppity natives, the prospect of an expanding ‘breed of hybrids’ positively appalled.35 Young Italian soldiers, whose tendency to acquire female camp followers was noticed by reporters covering the conflict, marched into Abyssinia singing the popular hit ‘Facetta Nera’ (‘Little Black Face’), in which a black Abyssinian beauty is saved from slavery, taken to Rome by her lover and dressed in Fascism’s black shirt. A year later, the authorities were attempting to suppress the song as Italian newspapers warned that the Fascist Empire was in danger of becoming an ‘empire of mulattos’.36 The new laws betrayed a vindictive determination to wipe out any vestige of affection, loyalty and love between the races. ‘Conjugal relations’ between Italians and colonial subjects were prohibited, marriages declared null and void. Italians who visited places reserved for ‘natives’ were liable to imprisonment and it was ruled that an Italian parent could neither recognize, adopt or give his surname to a meticcio. With a stroke of the pen, Rome turned a generation of mixed-race Eritreans into bastards. ‘Figlio di N’ was the mocking playground cry that greeted the mixed-race child, officially stripped of inheritance, citizenship and name: ‘son of X’.