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

Massawa’s capture left Italy in control of a stretch of the coast. But with their men succumbing to heatstroke, typhoid and malaria, the Italians knew the boundaries of their fledgling colony would have to be extended into the cool, mosquito-free highlands if it was ever to amount to anything. They began edging their troops up the escarpment, claiming lowland towns whose chiefs had little love for Ras Alula, Emperor Yohannes’ loyal warlord and ruthless frontier governor. It was at a spot called Dogali, 30 km inland, that Alula decided to draw a line in the sand in 1887, his warriors virtually wiping out an advancing column of 500 Italian troops. But, distracted by a major Dervish attack, Yohannes was in no position to press home his advantage. When the Abyssinian emperor was killed in battle and the Abyssinian crown claimed by his rival to the south-east, the King of Shewa, the Italians seized the opportunity to scale the Hamasien plateau, marching to Asmara and into the highlands of Tigray.

The colony baptized ‘Eritrea’ after Erythraeum Mare – Latin for ‘Red Sea’ – was beginning to take shape, and in the capital Massawa, Italian administrative offices sprang up alongside the classical Turkish and Egyptian buildings. Backed by King Umberto, always one of Italy’s most enthusiastic colonialists, the government initially entrusted the territory to Antonio Baldissera, a general with a reputation for ruthlessness. Registering that Italy could not afford to keep a standing army in Eritrea, Baldissera turned Massawa into a military recruitment centre for what he referred to as ‘the inferior races’. Stripped of farming land by their new rulers, Eritrean youths had little option but to sign up as ascaris, ready to fight Rome’s colonial wars at a fraction of the price of an Italian soldier.

Rome’s primogenito, its colonial first-born, was hardly the earthly paradise parliament – deliberately kept in the dark by both King and cabinet – had been led to expect. This was a military regime built on bullying and fear. Playing a clumsy game of divide and rule, in which he tried to turn local chieftains against the new Emperor of Abyssinia, Menelik II, while professing eternal friendship, Baldissera filled Massawa’s jail with suspected traitors and would-be defectors. When his officers met resistance, they resorted to enthusiastic use of the curbash, a whip made of hippopotamus hide that flayed backs raw. But the Italian public would have remained blithely unaware of the true state of affairs, had it not been for a scandal that exploded in the press in March 1891.

Ironically enough, the controversy was triggered by the government of the day. It had grown uneasy at what it was hearing from Massawa, where a formerly trusted Moslem merchant and a tribal chieftain had been sentenced to death for treason. Smelling a rat, Rome ordered an inquiry into the activities of Eteocle Cagnassi, Eritrea’s secretary for colonial affairs and Dario Livraghi, head of the colony’s native police force, who promptly fled. From exile in Switzerland, Livraghi penned a detailed confession, which he sent to a Milan newspaper. Just why the police chief should choose to thus expose himself remains unclear. But the editors of Il Secolo were so alarmed by Livraghi’s account, they ordered their journalist on the ground to carry out his own investigation before they dared print a word. His findings caused a sensation.

Rich Eritrean notables, including respected holy men, were regularly disappearing at night, never to be seen again. Their fate was an open secret in Massawa, reported journalist Napoleone Corazzini. Arrested by Livraghi’s policemen, they were being shot, clubbed and stoned to death and immediately buried in shallow graves on the outskirts of town. Others had been tortured to death in prison, arrested not for genuine security reasons but because corrupt Italian officials were greedily intent on confiscating their assets. Lists of intended victims had been found in Cagnassi’s office and Livraghi had personally carried out many of these extrajudicial killings. Corazzini, something of a tabloid hack, painted a grotesque scene: a Moslem cleric begging for mercy before a freshly-dug grave; Livraghi, cackling like a maniac, firing repeatedly into the old man; the police chief smoking calmly as the pit was filled and finally trotting his horse cheerfully over the mound to ensure the earth was packed nice and tight.

Having published Corazzini’s account, the newspaper felt it was safe to run Livraghi’s story, which presented an even grimmer picture. On top of what the journalist had described as ‘routine assassinations’, the Italians were using terror to keep locally-recruited Eritrean warriors loyal to the new colonial regime. Officially, suspected waverers were led to the border with Abyssinia and ‘extradited’. In fact, Livraghi revealed, they ended up in mass graves, slaughtered on the orders of Massawa’s military command. At least 800 ‘rebels’ had been killed in this way, sending a blood-curdling lesson to anyone thinking of following their example.

For decades, a barely-interested Italian public had lazily taken it for granted that Italy was doing good in Africa, its enlightened administrators lifting a heathen people out of the primeval slime. The Massawa scandal exposed colonialism at its most bestial. With every day that passed, new revelations about life in Eritrea – including a shocking account of how Italian officers had jokingly drawn lots for the five attractive widows of a murdered victim, then carted them off by mule – were being published in the press. Ordinary Italians were beginning to wonder why so many soldiers’ lives had been lost setting up a colony in which atrocities were apparently commonplace. The newspapers demanded an investigation, reluctant to believe their own articles. Aware that its fledgling African policy faced a test more dangerous than any military confrontation, Rome announced the establishment of a royal inquiry. And this was where Ferdinando Martini, ruthless humanist, pragmatic sophisticate, the iconoclast who ended up saving the establishment, entered the picture.

The son of a comic playwright, Martini came of aristocratic stock. He was born in Florence, a city whose inhabitants regarded themselves, in many ways, as guardians of Italian culture. As a liberal member of parliament for the Tuscan constituency of Pescia and Lucca, he was to be returned to parliament a total of 13 times. By the time the old magic finally failed and he lost his seat, held without interruption for 45 years, he was 77 years old and inclined to regard retirement as a blessing. But any 19th-century gentleman worthy of the title prided himself on being a polymath and, for Martini, a political career always went hand-in-hand with literature. Following in his father’s footsteps, he was to produce a steady stream of light comedies, erudite speeches and witty articles, taking time out from the political manoeuvrings and backroom bargaining associated with Montecitorio, the parliament in Rome, to run and edit several literary newspapers.

When it comes to history, those who write with ease enjoy an unfair advantage over ordinary mortals. They may be slyly self-promoting or subtly manipulative without us fully realizing it. Time has placed forever out of reach the ultimate litmus test, in which we hold their version of events up against our own memories and spot the inconsistencies. Because their words are what the records retain, because the gaps in their accounts left by the embarrassing and discreditable cannot always be filled, we see them largely as they intended to be seen.

No politician ever mastered his own legacy more effectively than Martini, thanks to the huge body of work he left behind. This was someone who felt compelled to put pen to paper every day, even if it was only to record a mocking paragraph in his diary or dash off an affectionate note to his daughter. The screeds of elegant copperplate draw the portrait of a man both irreverent and perceptive, capable of acknowledging his own failings while deriving huge amusement from those of others. They chime with the posed portrait photographs which show the author, eyebrows raised, high-domed head tipped quizzically to one side, challenging the camera. ‘He is balding, and this bothers him,’ reads the entry in a light-hearted biographical dictionary of the day.5 It describes an acid-tongued perfectionist, who liked to boast that his intellectual independence had won him the enmity of every political party. ‘He is blessed with an incisive mind and a lively turn of phrase. But if he judges others harshly, he is no less exacting with himself.’ Martini comes across as a charismatic maverick, hard to dislike, a fact that makes his unexpected role as apologist for white supremacy all the more insidious.

He had started out as one of the fiercest critics of Italy’s African adventure, arguing that a European nation which had itself only just thrown off the yoke of foreign rule was, in trying to subjugate a foreign people, guilty of the worst kind of hypocrisy. Why invest in Massawa’s infrastructure, when Italy’s poor south itself stood in crying need of development? After the Dogali massacre, Martini stuck his neck out by refusing to hail the slaughtered men as heroes and demanding the immediate recall of Italian troops, on the grounds that remaining in Eritrea was ‘neither the policy of a daring nation nor a wise people’. So, by asking Martini and several other well-known anti-colonial campaigners to be part of the seven-man team assigned to investigate the goings-on in Massawa, Rome was signalling its honourable intentions to a suspicious public. With Martini as vice-chairman of the royal inquiry, how could there possibly be a cover-up?

Setting off from Naples, the team spent eight weeks touring the colony. Travelling by mule, they interviewed Eritrean chiefs and Italian officials, took notes on climatic conditions and analysed local trade. For the inquiry’s remit went far beyond investigating the alleged human rights abuses. The Massawa scandal had highlighted the need for an authoritative appraisal of Eritrea’s economic and strategic potential. It was time Rome decided exactly what it wanted of its Red Sea colony.

It was a potential turning point in Eritrean history. Given Martini’s reputation for forthrightness and the doubts he had voiced about the colony’s raison d’être, his left-wing colleagues in parliament and Italian voters had no reason to expect anything other than a stringently impartial account. The level of trust placed on his shoulders makes what transpired that much harder to forgive.

For when the team published its conclusions in November, editors’ mouths dropped open. In their first, 9,000-word report, the inquiry members meekly accept the excuses made by the military commanders they had questioned in Rome and Massawa. Damning journalistic accounts are brushed to one side, as are Livraghi’s confessions, the product, the report hints, of an unhinged mind. With the exception of less than a dozen executions ordered during a crisis by Baldissera, who had helpfully explained that ‘it was necessary to strike terror into those barbarians to make them submit’, the team finds no evidence of night-time assassinations. It sympathizes with the general for the pressures he came under, finding that the colony’s existence ‘really was under threat’. As for the ‘supposed massacres’ of entire Eritrean military units, these ‘did not take place’. There might have been a couple of incidents in which rebels being escorted to the border – a mere 16, rather than 800 – had been shot. But, adopting an approach favoured in many a rape trial, the team prefers to blame the victims, whose failure to cooperate with their captors brought their fate upon themselves. Another convenient scapegoat was the Eritrean police force, which apparently had a problem grasping the concept of military discipline.

The very wording of the inquiry’s extraordinary conclusion, with its wealth of unconscious racism, tells us everything we need to know about the team’s philosophical point of departure. ‘If, in some isolated case, an abuse was committed, it can only be attributed to the savage temperament of the indigenous policemen necessarily entrusted with carrying out orders, and to the victims themselves,’ it reads. ‘Neither the [military] command nor any colonial officials can be held responsible.’ In the light of these findings, it was hardly surprising that a Massawa court absolved both Cagnassi and Livraghi, while sentencing two Eritrean police chiefs to long prison sentences. Newspapers which had called for an Italian withdrawal from Eritrea were left flailing, the parliamentary debate on the matter – despite some sarcastic speeches by anti-colonial deputies – sputtered to an anti-climax, without a vote. The system had protected its own and, as several Italian officials revealed in memoirs published long after events, the mass killings and frenzied executions of suspected troublemakers swiftly resumed in Eritrea.6

The second report the team drafted represents, at least as far as the former anti-colonials on the team were concerned, a further betrayal of principle. Rejecting the sceptical accounts of previous visitors, Martini and his colleagues hail Eritrea as a ‘fertile and virgin land … stretching out its arms to Italian farmers’. The colony, they say, is ideally placed to serve as an eventual outlet for Italy’s émigrés. To that end, Rome should concentrate on consolidating Eritrea’s borders, improving relations with local chiefs, replacing the military command with a civilian administration and attracting the peasant landowners who will form the backbone of a vibrant Italian community. Not an inch of acquired territory should be surrendered.

By simultaneously burying a scandal that threatened to rock the government and bestowing its blessing on Italy’s African daydreams, the inquiry had effectively granted a faltering colonial project a new lease of life. On this, the first of Martini’s two key encounters with Eritrea, the supposed freethinker had played a central role in a shameless whitewash which not only ensured Massawa’s atrocities quietly faded from view, but guaranteed the colony survived to be fought over another day.

Why did Martini do it? Why did he risk his reputation by putting his name to what a historian of the day described as ‘an incredible, medieval document, which should have been confiscated as an apologia for the crime … A sickening defence of assassination’?7

Any journalist is familiar with the sensation of being ‘nobbled’ by the target of an investigation. Starting out on a story in a state of hostile cynicism, his views falter as one interviewee after another put their cases with impassioned sincerity. The trust placed in the journalist is so unwavering, the hospitality so warm and, on closer examination, the people he was originally gunning for seem so reasonable. Years later, looking back on the glowing write-up that resulted, he winces at how easily he allowed himself to be manipulated, shrugs his shoulders and blames it on a heavy lunch. But it is hard to argue that Martini’s keen intelligence was momentarily befuddled by the justifications presented by the colonial officials he met. In later life, he never showed any sign of regretting his role as co-author of the vital report. What puzzled contemporaries described as Martini’s ‘conversion’ to the colonial cause was to be a permanent change of heart.

Did the quest for self-advancement play a role? Here, the picture becomes more murky. Martini was undoubtedly vain and hugely ambitious. It seems unlikely that he could already have had his eye on the post of Eritrea’s governorship, which would only be created 10 years into the future. But once granted a place on a high-profile royal inquiry, investigating a topic known to be particularly close to King Umberto’s heart, Martini must have been aware that a bland finding would mean political rewards somewhere down the line.

Martini’s own explanation for his U-turn – however nigglingly unsatisfying – probably lies implicit in the pages of Nell’Affrica Italiana, a highly personalized account of the Eritrea trip published after his return. Written in the self-consciously literary language of the day, but blessed with the author’s characteristic sharp eye for detail, it became a runaway bestseller, appearing in 10 editions and remaining in print for 40 years. Reaching a far wider audience than a dry government report ever could, Nell’Affrica Italiana, it could be argued, played a more crucial role in shaping public opinion towards Eritrea than anything else Martini wrote.

In it, Martini pulls no punches about the Italian-made horrors he witnessed in Eritrea. He describes the notorious ‘Field of Hunger’ – a desolate plain outside Massawa where the town governor had ordered destitute natives to be taken and left to die. ‘Corpses lay here and there, their faces covered in rags; one, a horrible sight, so swarmed with insects, which snaked their way through limbs twisted and melted by the rays of the sun, he actually seemed to be moving. The dead were waiting for the hyenas, the living were waiting for death.’

Martini takes to his heels after glimpsing a group of young Eritrean girls sifting through mounds of camel dung in search of undigested grain, fighting for mouthfuls from a horse’s rotting corpse. ‘I fled, horrified, stupefied, mortified by my own impotence, hiding my watch chain, ashamed of the breakfast I had eaten and the lunch that awaited me.’

He winces at the use to which the curbash is put, on both sides of the recently-established border. ‘Across the whole of Abyssinia, not excluding our own Eritrean colony, the curbash is an institution. Native policemen and guards are issued with it and when needs must (and it seems, from what I saw, that needs must rather often) they flog without mercy.’

Visiting an orphanage, he is repulsed by the sight of the sons of Eritrean rebels, shot ‘for the sole crime of not wanting Europeans and not wanting to take orders’, being taught to sing Rome’s praises. ‘Conquest always comes with its own sad, sometimes dishonest, demands. Yet this seemed, and still seems, an outrage against human nature. Even now, remembering it, I feel a rush of blood to my head.’

Elsewhere, he bitterly ruminates on the hypocrisy of the Italian colonial project. ‘We are liars. We say we want to spread civilization in Abyssinia, but it is not true … Far from being barbaric and idolatrous, these people have been Christians for centuries … We claim to want to end the fratricidal wars that have crushed any sprig of human industry in those regions, yet each day we sign up Abyssinians in our forces and pay them to butcher other Abyssinians.’

Yet having supped full of such horrors, having grasped the extent of his government’s hypocrisy, Martini comes to what might seem a counterintuitive conclusion. It is now too late, he argues, for Italy to pull out of Eritrea. By embarking in Africa, Italy has set in motion an unstoppable process of racial extermination which, however distasteful, must be allowed to run its course. Any other policy would be shameful. Rather than wasting time fretting over the legal niceties of land confiscation, he argues, Italy should be dispatching farmers to start work. ‘Let me repeat it for the 10th time: I would have preferred us never to have gone to Africa: I did what little I could, when there was still time, to get us to return home: but now that that time has passed … it is neither wise nor honest to keep spreading exaggerated stories.’ One can hear a sardonic disdain in Martini’s voice as he imagines the eventual fate of Africa’s indigenous tribes. ‘We have started the job. Succeeding generations will continue to depopulate Africa of its ancient inhabitants, down to the last but one. Not quite the last – he will be trained at college to sing our praises, celebrating how, by destroying the negro race, we finally succeeded in wiping out the slave trade!’

The white race is ordained to supplant the African. ‘One race must replace another, it’s that or nothing … The native is a hindrance; whether we like it or not, we will have to hunt him down and encourage him to disappear, just as has been done elsewhere with the Redskins, using all the methods civilization – which the native instinctively hates – can provide: gunfire and a daily dose of firewater.’

His language is staggeringly blunt, but it is meant to shock. Martini’s main message to his Italian readers, to paraphrase it in crude modern terms, was: ‘Let’s cut the crap.’ A genocide is already under way in Eritrea, he tells his audience, a genocide that is the expression of ineluctable historical forces. ‘We have invaded Abyssinia without provocation, violently and unjustly. We excuse ourselves saying that the English, Russians, French, Germans and Spaniards have done the same elsewhere. So be it … injustice and violence will be necessary, sooner or later, and the greater our success, the more vital it will be not to allow trivial details or human rights to hold us up.’ Moral squeamishness cannot be allowed to stand in the way of a glorious master project. Let us not shrink from what is necessary, however distasteful. But let us, at the very least, have the decency to admit what we are doing.8

In modern-day Eritrea, popular memory tends to divide the Italian colonial era into two halves; the Martini years, time of benign paternalism, when Eritreans and Italians muddled along together well enough; and the Fascist years, when the Italians introduced a series of racial laws as callous as anything seen in apartheid South Africa. But as Nell’Affrica Italiana shows, the assumptions of biological determinism that came to form the bedrock of both Fascism and Nazism were present from the first days of the Italian presence in Africa. The thread runs strong and clear through half a century of occupation. If men of Martini’s generation, in contrast with their successors, felt no need to enshrine every aspect of their racial superiority in a specific set of laws, it was only because they took their supremacy utterly for granted.

Martini is a fascinating example of how it is possible for a man to be both painfully sensitive and chillingly mechanistic. The views he expressed were the notions of his day, an era in which Darwin’s theories of Natural Selection and survival of the fittest were used to justify the slaughter of Congo’s tribes by Belgian King Leopold’s mercenaries, the German massacre of the Herero tribesmen in South West Africa and the British eradication of Tasmania’s natives. Like the rabbits a British landowner introduced to Australia, like the rampant European weeds overrunning the New World, the intellectually and technologically superior white races would push aboriginal tribes into extinction. British Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury summarized the philosophy in a famous 1898 speech. ‘You may roughly divide the nations of the world as the living and the dying. The weak states are becoming weaker and the strong states are becoming stronger … the living nations will gradually encroach on the territory of the dying.’9

Nor was Martini alone in finding the process distressing to watch. A strange kind of benevolent ruthlessness has always been the hallmark of the colonial conqueror. From H. Rider Haggard’s fictional hero Allan Quatermain muttering ‘poor wretch’ as he puts a bullet through yet another Zulu warrior’s heart, to the real-life Winston Churchill, shuddering with excitement and horror as shellfire rips through Mahdi lines at Omdurman, the literature of the day is peppered with compassionate exterminators. Martini was too intelligent not to grasp the humanity of the wretched Eritreans he met. Their plight, he told his readers, haunted his dreams. But at the end of the day, despite all his anti-establishment posturing and elegant irony, nothing mattered more to this Italian patriot than the greater glory of the Motherland.

Nell’Affrica Italiana contains one last clue as to why Martini changed his mind on Eritrea, though it is hard to distinguish authentic feeling from the rhetoric considered appropriate to the closing paragraphs of a 19th-century memoir. Sailing out of Massawa, Martini launches into a high-octane paean to Africa, the continent where, he says, ‘the mind purifies, the spirit repairs itself and we find God’. ‘Oh vast silence, oh nights spent in the open air, how you invigorate the body and strengthen the soul!’ he raves. Adopting the pose of jaundiced Westerner weighed down by the burdens of civilization, he envies the nomads of Africa. In their ‘happy ignorance’, he says, they never think to ask the moon why it moves across the sky or interrogate their flocks on the meaning of life. ‘How sweet it is to dream, amongst sands untouched from one month to another by a human footprint, of a society without sickness or strife, without wars or tail-coats, without coups d’état and visiting cards!’ It is a vision of the Noble Savage that owes everything to Rousseau and Romantic poetry and nothing to reality. Like so many travellers to Africa before and after him, Martini confused the absence of a set of rules recognized by a European with personal freedom. Plagued by outbreaks of cholera and the raids of local warlords, bound by their own community’s conservative codes of behaviour, Eritrea’s nomads had far more reason to feel hemmed in than an effete Italian aristocrat on a government expense account.