I Didn't Do It for You (5 page)

By the mid-19th century, Abyssinia had experienced 100 years of anarchy, its countryside devastated by roaming armies, its weak emperors challenged by power-hungry provincial warlords, or
rases
. Its shifting boundaries bore little relation to those of Ethiopia today. The empire had lost most of its coastline to the Turkish Ottomans in the 16th century, had been pushed from the south by Oromo migrations and was facing infiltrations from the west by the Egyptian army and the Mahdi's Dervish followers in Sudan. But Abyssinian Emperor Yohannes IV, operating out of the northern province of Tigray, looked to a glorious ancestral past for inspiration. Steeped in legends of the vast Axumite kingdom which had stretched in ancient times from modern-day east Sudan to western Somaliland, he dreamt of rebuilding a great trading nation which would roll down from the highlands and spill into the sea, a Christian empire in a region of Islam. Blessed with a sense of historical and religious predestination, he was unimpressed by clumsy European attempts to muscle in on the region. ‘How could I ever agree to sign away the lands over which my royal ancestors governed?' he once protested in a letter to the Italians. ‘Christ gave them to me.'

Italy first placed its uncertain mark on the Red Sea coastline in 1869, when Giuseppe Sapeto, a priest acting on behalf of the shipping company Rubattino–itself serving as proxy for a cautious government–bought the port of Assab from a local sultan. The trigger for the purchase was that year's opening of the Suez Canal, which was set to transform the Red Sea into a vital access route linking Europe with the markets of the Far East. Bent on capitalizing on anticipated trade, Britain had already claimed Aden, the French had established a foothold in
what is today Djibouti, while Egypt had bought Massawa from the Turks. As the European nation geographically closest to the Red Sea, as the birthplace of the great Roman and Venetian empires, Italy felt it could not stand idly by as its rivals scrambled to establish landing stations and trading posts along the waterway.

But commercial competition was never Italy's sole motivation for planting its flag in what would one day be Eritrea. The 19th century had seen a bubbling up of scientific curiosity in Africa, with geographical societies sending a succession of expeditions to explore the highlands and establish contact with Abyssinia's isolated monarchs. Many never returned, cut to pieces by hostile tribesmen. But those who did brought back wondrous tales of exotic wildlife and bizarre customs. Their reports fired the imaginations of Italy's writers, parliamentarians and journalists, who talked up Rome's ‘civilizing mission', its duty to bring enlightenment and Catholicism to a region blighted by the slave trade and firmly in the clutches of the Orthodox Church. ‘Africa draws us invincibly towards it,' declared one of the Italian Geographical Society's patrons. ‘It lies just under our noses, yet up until now we remain exiled from it.'
¹

Beneath the idle intellectual curiosity lay some sobering economic realities. Italy had only succeeded in uniting under one national flag in 1870, having thrown off Bourbon and Austrian rule. A very young European nation was struggling to meet the aspirations created during the tumultuous Risorgimento. Italy had one of the highest birth rates in Europe. Emigration figures reveal how tricky Rome found feeding all these voracious new mouths. Between 1887 and 1891, to take one five-year example, 717,000 Italians left to start new lives abroad, most of them heading for Australia and the Americas. The number was to triple in the early 1900s. Italy, a growing number of politicians
came to believe, needed a foreign colony to soak up its land-hungry. At worst, a territory in the Horn of Africa could serve as a penal colony, taking the pressure off Italy's prisons. At best, it would provide Italian farmers with an alternative to the fertile, well-watered territories they sought at the time across the Atlantic.

No one who has visited Eritrea and northern Ethiopia today, no one who has experienced the punishing heat of the coastal plains and seen the dry river beds, would strike his hand to his forehead and exclaim: ‘Just the place for our poor and huddled masses!' But then, Italy's African misadventure was always based on an extraordinary amount of wishful thinking. The priest who bought Assab claimed the volcanic site, one of the bleakest spots on God's earth, bore a striking resemblance to the north Italian harbour of La Spezia or Rio de Janeiro. Colonial campaigners conjured up visions of caravans trundling through Red Sea ports and new markets piled high with Italian manufactured goods, although explorers had already registered that the peasants of Abyssinia were virtually too poor to trade. (‘The Abyssinians go barefoot and it will be hard to persuade them to use shoes…A thousand metres of the richest fabrics would be more than enough to meet the Abyssinians' annual needs,' worried one.)
²
Italian politicians who toured the highlands would rave about ‘truly empty' lands lying ready for the taking,
³
although more discerning colleagues noted that every plot, however seemingly neglected, had its nominal owner. Geographical precision was sacrificed in favour of the rhetorical flourish: ‘The keys to the Mediterranean', one foreign minister famously, bafflingly, assured parliament, were to be found ‘in the Red Sea'.
⁴
Ignorance sets the imagination free. When it came to their own internal affairs, Italy's lawmakers were too well-versed in the gritty detail of domestic politics, too answerable to their constituencies, to
indulge in flights of fancy. When it came to Africa, however–continent of doe-eyed beauties, noble warrior kings and peculiar creatures–even the pragmatists let their imaginations run free.

Assab proved something of a false start. After an initial flurry of excitement, it lay undeveloped and unused, as Italian politicians vacillated over the merits of a colonial project. Then, in 1885, British officials gave Italy's foreign policy a kick, inviting the Italians to take Egyptian-controlled Massawa. The debt-ridden regime in Cairo was on the verge of collapse and the British, new masters in Egypt, were anxious not to see a power vacuum develop which could be filled by the French, their great rivals in the scramble for Africa. They helpfully explained to Italian naval commanders exactly where the Egyptian cannon were positioned, allowing the port to be captured without loss of life.

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.