Читать книгу I Didn’t Do It For You: How the World Used and Abused a Small African Nation - Michela Wrong - Страница 8

‘When the white snake has bitten you, you will search in vain for a remedy.’

A 19th-century rebel leader warns Eritrean

chiefs against the Italians

The old man lunged for his wooden cane and began flailing about around our feet. A moment earlier, the yard had seemed at peace, its occupants lulled to near coma in the heat, which lay upon us with the weight of a winter blanket. Now a deafening cacophony of clucks, squawks and screeches was coming from under the trestle bed on which Filippo Cicoria perched. From where I sat, I could see a blur of scuffling wings, stabbing beaks and orange claws. Two of his pet ducks were battling for supremacy. This was a cartoon fight, individual heads and wings suddenly jutting from the whirlwind at improbable angles. I kicked feebly in the ducks’ direction. ‘No, no,’ grunted Cicoria, jabbing rhythmically with his cane. ‘You have [jab] to hit them [jab, jab] on the head [jab].’ The squawks were rising in hysteria, but his broken leg, pinned and swollen, was making it difficult to manoeuvre into a position where he could deliver a knock-out blow. ‘That’s enough, you stupid bastards … THAT’S ENOUGH.’ There were two loud shrieks as the cane finally hit home and the duo fled for safety, leaving a small deposit of feathers behind.

Feathers, I now saw, lay everywhere. A breeze from the sea, a narrow strip of turquoise behind him, lifted a thin layer of white down deposited by the pullets cheeping softly in the hutches above his bed. A dozen muscovy ducks dozed in the shade, their gnarled red beaks tucked under wings, while at the gates grazed a gaggle of geese. The air was rich with the acid stink of chicken droppings. The man, it was clear, liked his fowls. But not half as much as he liked old appliances. Cicoria’s scrapyard, perched on the last in the chain of islands that forms the Massawa peninsula, held what had to be the biggest collection of obsolete fridges and broken-down air-conditioning units in the whole of Africa. Testimony to man’s losing contest with an unbearable climate, the boxes were stacked in their scores, white panels turning brown in the warm salt air. They lay alongside piled sheets of corrugated iron, abandoned car parts, ripped-up water fountains, discarded barbecues and ageing fuel drums. Chains and crankshafts, girders and gas cylinders, tubes and twists of wire, all came in the same rich shade of ochre. The entire junkyard was a tribute to the miraculous powers of oxidization. Once, Cicoria had been Mr Fix-It, the only man in Massawa who knew how to repair a hospital ice-maker, tinker with a yacht’s broken engine or get a hotel’s air conditioning running. Now, hobbled by a fall and slowed by emphysema, he was just Mr Keep-It, struggling for breath inside a man-made mountain of rust.

I had telephoned from Asmara, keen to meet a man who I had been told personified a closing chapter of colonial history. ‘He’s the last one in Massawa,’ an elderly Italian friend in the capital had said. ‘When all the other Italians left, he stayed, through all the wars. He can’t come up to Asmara now, the air’s too thin for him.’ When Cicoria lifted the receiver, I heard a farmyard chorus of honks and clucks, so loud I could barely make out his words. He had sounded ratty, but not openly hostile. ‘Is there anything you’d like me to take him, since you haven’t seen him for a while?’ I asked my friend. ‘Errr … No.’ ‘Well, I’ll just pass on your best wishes, shall I?’ I suggested. ‘Yes, hmmm, that would be nice.’ The reticence was puzzling.

The Italians have a word for those who fall in love with Africa’s desert wastes, putting down roots which reach so deep, they can never be wrenched up again. We say ‘gone to seed’, or ‘gone native’. The Italians call them the insabbiati – those who are buried in the sand – ‘people’, as Cicoria pronounced with lip-smacking relish, ‘completely immersed in the mire’. At 77, Cicoria was happy to count himself amongst their ranks and indeed, when I’d arrived for my appointment with Massawa’s last Italian, my gaze had initially flitted to him and skated on, looking vainly for a white face. Cicoria was as dark as a local, evidence of a lifetime spent working in the sun and the squirt of Eritrean blood that ran in his veins, inheritance of an Eritrean grandparent. A skinny wreck of a man, wearing a T-shirt that drooped to reveal his nipples, he sat hunched on the bed he had ordered to be carried out of his house and deposited in the centre of his metalwork collection. ‘In there, I felt like a beast in a cage, out here, at least I can swear at my animals.’ They say men’s ears keep growing when everything else has stopped, and in Cicoria’s case it seemed to be true. The onslaught of the years had turned his face into a gargoyle of ears, nose and missing teeth. Shrunken by time, this once-active man had gathered on the table before him what he clearly regarded as the bare necessities of human existence: two telephones, a roll of toilet paper and a slingshot.

He was as ravaged and pitted as the port itself. Massawa is a town with two faces. At the setting of the sun, when everyone heaves a sigh of relief, it becomes a place of hidden recesses and mysterious beauty, the lights playing softly over warm coral masonry. Tiny grocery shops, their walls neatly stacked with shiny metallic packets of tea and milk powder, soap and oil, glow from the darkness like coloured jewels. As the cafés under the Arabic arcades spring into life, naval officers in starched white uniforms sit and savour the cool evening air, watching trucks from the harbour chugging their way along the causeways, taking grain back to the mainland. Crouched in alleyways, young women sell hot tea and hardboiled eggs, the incense on their charcoal braziers blending with the pungent smell of ripe guava, the nutty aroma of roasting coffee and an occasional hot blast from an open sewer. But in the squinting glare of daytime, when only cawing crows and ibis venture out into the blinding sun, Massawa is just an ugly Red Sea town, scarred by too many sieges and earthquakes.

The town’s geographical layout – two large islands linked to the mainland by slim causeways built by the 19th-century Swiss adventurer Werner Munzinger – always meant it was an easy town to hold, a difficult place to conquer. In the Second World War, a defiant Italian colonial administration had to be bombed into submission by the British and the port was then crippled by German commanders who scuttled their ships in a final gesture of spite. When the EPLF guerrilla movement first tried to capture Massawa from the Ethiopians in the 1970s, its Fighters were mown down on the exposed salt flats. Thirteen years later, the rebels succeeded, but the town took a terrible hammering in the process. Pigeons roost in the shattered blue dome of the Imperial Palace, shrapnel has taken hungry bites out of mosques and archways, walls are pitted with acne scars. Near the port, a plinth that once carried a statue of the mounted Haile Selassie, pointing triumphantly to the sea he worked so hard to claim on Ethiopia’s behalf, stands decapitated. The Marxist Derg regime that ousted him tried to destroy the statue, the EPLF made a point of finishing the job. Occasionally, you’ll come across a building in the traditional Arab style, its intricately-carved wooden balcony slipping gradually earthwards. But some of Africa’s most grotesque modern buildings – pyramids of glass and cement – leave you wistful for what must have been, before the bombs and artillery did their work on the coral palazzi. The handwritten sign propped next to the till of a mini-market round the corner from Cicoria’s workshop captures what, in light of Massawa’s history, seems an understandable sense of foreboding. ‘Our trip – long. Our hope – far. Our trouble – many’ it reads.

Cicoria had lived through it all, surviving each military onslaught miraculously unscathed. ‘Once, they were shooting and one person dropped dead to the left of me, one was killed to the right and I was left standing in the middle. I’ve always had the devil’s own luck.’ He’d come to Massawa in the 1940s, a 15-year-old runaway escaping an unhappy Asmara home. ‘My mother had died and I never got on with my dad. I hated my father terribly. He was an ignorant peasant.’ His grandfather had been one of the area’s first settlers, a constructor dispatched by Rome to build roads and dams in an ultimately fruitless attempt to win the trust of Abyssinian Emperor Menelik II. ‘My family has a chapel in Asmara cemetery. You should visit it.’ Cicoria must have inherited from his grandfather some technical skill that drew him to the shipyards, where Italian prisoners-of-war and Russian, Maltese and British operators – ‘the ones who’d gone crazy in the war’ – were repairing damaged Allied battleships. After the machinists clocked off, the boy would sneak in and mimic their movements at the lathes. ‘I learnt how to make pressure gauges, spherical pistons and starter machines. No one ever taught me anything, I just watched and learnt. I can make anything, just so long as it’s black and greasy,’ he boasted.

This was the talent that had allowed him to play the inglorious role of Vicar of Bray, adapting smoothly to each of Eritrea’s successive administrations. When Massawa’s other Italians were evacuated, Cicoria’s skills meant he was too valuable to lose. Under the British, he worked on the warships, under the Ethiopians he was summoned to repair damaged artillery and broken domestic appliances. ‘All the Derg officers used to bring me their fridges to repair.’ When the Eritrean liberation movement started up, he claimed, he turned fifth columnist and joined an undercover unit, using his privileged access to sabotage the Ethiopian military machine. ‘I’m one of theirs. I’m Shabia, a guerrilla.’ But his eyes darted shiftily away when I pressed for details.

One quality his survival had certainly not relied upon was personal charm. As his Eritrean wife, a statuesque woman of luminous beauty, prepared lunch, I began to grasp what lay behind the hesitation in my Italian friend’s voice. Cicoria, it turned out, was good at hate. During a career in which I had interviewed many a ruthless politician and sleazy businessman, I had rarely met anyone, I realized, harder to warm to. His malevolence was democratically even-handed – he loathed just about everyone he came into contact with, the sole exception being the British officials who had recognized his skills all those decades ago. The American officers he had worked for had been ‘crass idiots’, the Ethiopians hateful occupiers. He despised his contemporaries in Asmara – my friend, it emerged, was a particular object of scorn – for not bothering to learn Tigrinya (‘a bunch of illiterates’). Modern-day Eritreans were useless, cack-handed when it came to anything technical. His life had been a series of fallings-out with workmates and relatives, most of whom were no longer on speaking terms. Perhaps they’d been alienated by Cicoria’s weakness for drink, or his habit of taking a new wife whenever he tired of an existing mate. ‘It’s not legal, but if you knew my life history, you’d understand.’ Leafing through a smudged photo collection he pointed to a first wife (‘as black as coal – can’t stand the sight of me’), a daughter (‘that bitch’), a brother (‘a real shit’) and a son (‘nothing in his head’). The 16-year-old son running errands around the yard scored little better. ‘Look at him. Strong as an ox,’ he shook his head pityingly. ‘But he’s got no brain, no brain at all.’ Even the muscovy ducks were viewed with jaundiced eyes. ‘My fondness for them only goes so far. Then I eat them.’ Only the latest of the many wives, whose face lit up with extraordinary tenderness when it rested upon him, won grudging praise. ‘She’s a good woman. Incredibly strong,’ he said, watching admiringly as she manoeuvred a fridge out of the house. ‘But she’s too old for me now. What I really need is a nice 19-year-old.’ Most depressing of all, Cicoria really did not seem to like himself – ‘I’ve always been a rascal, a pig when it comes to women, and I drink too much’ – while clearly finding it impossible to rein in a fury that kept the world at bay.

His view of Eritrea’s future was bleak. ‘This war is never ending. Believe me, these imbeciles will be fighting each other till the end of time.’ Ill-health had deprived him of his one pleasure – his joy at hearing the stalled and obsolete revving back into life – and gravity pinned him at sea level. With the loss of his beloved lathes, which lay exasperatingly out of reach, something had died. ‘I used to have high hopes,’ he muttered, ‘but this fall has been the last blow. Now I can’t see things improving.’ He had been to Italy for hospital treatment the year before and the trip, his first to the ancestral motherland, had been a revelation. He was now planning a permanent move there, he said, once he found a buyer for the scrapyard. I nodded, but found it impossible to imagine. The insabbiati do not travel well. Transposed, too late in life, to Europe’s retirement homes, they fade away, pale and diminished, smitten by the syndrome Italians call ‘mal d’Africa’. Far better to sit sweltering in this Red Sea cauldron, king of all he surveyed, compliant family at his beck and call.

Before saying goodbye, I put the question that had been niggling me. ‘What’s the slingshot for?’ His eyes lit up: ‘Any moment now, a crow will land on that telephone line. I’m a very good shot, but the bastards are canny. If you watch, as soon as my hand moves towards the slingshot, he’ll be off.’ We waited. On cue, a crow landed on the line. ‘Now watch.’ Cicoria’s hand travelled smoothly across the table to the slingshot. The crow cocked its head. With impressive speed, he lifted the weapon and fired. But the bird had already taken off, flapping its glossy black wings across the translucent waters of the Red Sea. Cicoria shook his head. ‘Bastard.’

A crabby geriatric, surrounded by the detritus of 20th century civilization, hating the world. With Cicoria, I felt, I had tasted the sour dregs of an overweeningly ambitious dream. The Italians who established their Eritrean capital in Massawa in 1890, the officials in Rome who fondly believed Africa’s original inhabitants were destined to wither away, ceding their land to a stronger, white-skinned race, could never have imagined that their bracing colonial adventure would splutter to this bad-tempered, seedy end.

They had come to the Horn with grandiose plans, buoyed by the bumptious belief – shared by all Europe’s expanding powers at that time – that Africa was an unclaimed continent, theirs not only for the taking but for the carving up and sharing out amongst friends. It was an assumption that held true nowhere in Africa, but least of all when applied to what was then known as Abyssinia, the ancient Ethiopian empire that lay hidden in the Horn’s hinterland, beyond a wall of mountain.

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.

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.

But underneath all the hyperbole, one catches a glint of sincere emotion. For Martini, it had been easy enough to argue for Eritrea’s abandonment from the distance of Rome. But criss-crossing the Hamasien plateau by mule, watching flying fish skipping over the Red Sea, basted by Eritrea’s harsh light, Martini had blossomed. Part of him had fallen in love with the place, a love affair that would last the rest of his life and bring him back. He was not about to pronounce the death sentence on a land that had touched his heart. Perhaps this was the true reason why, with typical sophistry, he managed to convince himself that a doomed and destructive colonial project was, in fact, the soundest of investments.

Driving back to Asmara in the evening light, I decided to take up Cicoria’s suggestion. The old Italian cemetery sprawls in rococo magnificence on the edge of town, next to its strangely anonymous modern Eritrean equivalent. Bougainvillea billows around weeping angels, stone fingers tear stone hair in grief. Between the cypresses, separated by a yellow scrub rustling with crickets and lizards, the old family mausoleums stand proud. In the more recent section, the gravestones bear Tigrinya lettering and photographs of Eritreans in graduation robes, instead of portraits of stolid Italian matrons in black. But the old mausoleums are exclusively the white man’s province. Serenaded by cooing doves, I strolled between the mini mansions, reading the names which must have once featured in local newspaper articles and taken pride of place on government committees. ‘Famiglia Ricupito d’Amico’, ‘Famiglia Giannavola’, ‘Famiglia Antonio Ponzio’. Asmara’s burghers had not stinted when it came to their final resting places. With their gothic turrets and marbled doorways, the chapels were more substantial than many Eritrean homes. This was a cemetery built by a conquering power, established by people so sure they were in Africa to stay they had laid down vaults for the great-grandchildren they knew would succeed them.

As one of the colony’s earliest settlers, the Cicoria family had claimed a prime site near the entrance. The chapel next door was being used as a storeroom by the elderly graveyard workers, paint tins resting on the floor. Undoing a rusty wire securing the door, I slipped inside. All Souls’ Day had just been and someone had left flowers, an old family friend, perhaps, able to grant the Cicorias the forgiveness they seemed incapable of offering one another. Water dripped from the cut blooms, gathering in a small rivulet that ran along the floor. Looking at the black-and-white photographs marking each resting place, I was struck by the hardness of the expressions. No smiles or tenderness here. The face of Antonio Cicoria, Filippo’s bridge-building grandfather, bore the deep grooves of a life in which nothing had come easy. Flinty and implacable, he looked a paterfamilias who would wield the belt with enthusiasm when disciplining wife and children. Another white-haired Cicoria stared from the slab above, chin jutting aggressively. Was this the hated father? There was no inscription, but he bore a passing resemblance to Filippo. The Italian equivalent of ‘What’s it to you?’ seemed to hover on his lips. With relatives like this, I thought, no wonder Cicoria had run away.

As I headed for the gates, I noticed a pile of splintered gravestones stacked in a corner. Every man tries to leave his mark upon the earth, but even stones eventually wear out. When these headstones had cracked, no solicitous Italian descendant was left in Eritrea to order a replacement. Would Cicoria’s body be brought here when his straining breath finally ran out? It seemed unlikely. And once the family friend stopped visiting and the rusty wire dropped off the door, this chapel, too, might end up serving as a workman’s shed. I was to visit the cemetery many times after that, but only once overlapped with a relative fussing over a tomb, a young meticcio based in Rome. On his rare visits to Eritrea, he said, he fought a losing battle against the weeds slowly obliterating his parents’ grave. Burial grounds, like hospitals, need fresh clientele to stay alive. In Asmara’s cemetery, you could feel the Italian story coming to a stop.

Clever as he was, Martini could not have got it more wrong. He never faltered in his belief in a future white Eritrea, a little Italy in Africa. Amid the bombastic self-confidence of the late 19th century, it seemed a foregone conclusion, so certain that only the methodology remained to be discussed. But Martini’s ‘doomed’ native proved more resilient than expected. Across Africa, the supposedly unstoppable flood of European settlers was easily dammed and reversed. Earning a living in Eritrea proved too tough for even the hardy peasants of Sicily and Calabria. Italy’s African colonies would never absorb more than one per cent of the country’s émigrés, compared to the 40 per cent that headed to America. In the 1940s, ridiculing Italy’s pretensions to empire, the British – who had so many of their own – started sending Italian settlers back from the Horn. When Ethiopia’s regime turned Marxist and nationalized Italian businesses in the 1970s, those who had clung on registered sadly for repatriation. Today the breed facing imminent extinction in Eritrea is white, not black. Less than 120 Italian families remain, liver-spotted men and women in their seventies and eighties who came back after independence in 1993 to die in the only place that felt like home. Not a single country estate lies in Italian hands and each year Vittorio Volpicelli, manager of the Casa degli Italiani, the Italian Club, is called upon to organize yet another medical evacuation, yet another funeral mass at the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary.

With each disappearance, the dwindling community grows a little more mournful, a little more inward-looking. Martini’s descendants, dubbed ‘soft Fascists’ by some Eritreans, have none of his brash confidence. If they still meet friends for an espresso at the Casa, where the Fascist party insignia – a bundle of rods symbolizing ‘strength through unity’ – graces the main gate, the Italians rarely allow the ‘F’ word to pass their lips. ‘You know, when they’re annoyed with us they like to throw Fascism in our faces. But if you look at the origins of the word, it actually stands for something rather beautiful,’ a faded Italian beauty told me as we sat having our hair done in Gino and Gina’s. Gino was Asmara’s first Italian hairdresser and his salon’s walls are decorated with photographs of heavily made-up European models, showing off the latest in 1960s styles. Now he potters around in a confusion of Alzheimer’s, collecting towels and taking orders from his wife. ‘This used to be such a beautiful, beautiful city,’ the signora reminisced. ‘Every day, a plane would fly in from Rome with fresh orchids for the flower shops. But now …’ There was no point going on. Asmara’s Italians may purse their lips, remembering days bathed in the golden light of memory, but they know better than to voice such views in public. They stay out of politics, keep themselves to themselves. Having experienced one nationalization, they know what angry African governments can do to unwanted white communities. Masters of yesteryear, they are now here on sufferance.