I Didn’t Do It For You: How the World Used and Abused a Small African Nation. Michela Wrong

target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">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 resurfaced, 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 intellectuals. ‘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’.

      Long before racial segregation was adopted as an official credo in South Africa, Eritrea had already tasted the delights of apartheid. In its day, it was the most racist regime in Africa. Eritreans no longer regarded their Italian administrators as ‘good but stupid’. Every Eritrean who lived through that era nurses in his memory a moment of humiliation he can today shake his head over with the bitter satisfaction that comes from knowing history has had the last laugh, a deep guffaw that comes from the belly. ‘When a white man walked along the street, you always followed a couple of steps behind, never alongside,’ an old railwayman told me. ‘The white man always walked alone.’ ‘You could be dying of thirst, but the cafés in the town centre would still refuse to serve you so much as a glass of water,’ said another. A pastor remembered how, as a boy, he once made the mistake of crossing the road in front of an Italian policeman on a motorbike. ‘He was quite a long way off, but as far as he