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‘Truly I could say that I built a colony and gave it to Italy.’

Ferdinando Martini

I noticed the scar on the first trip I made to Eritrea. It was impossible to miss: a thin white line that traced a winding route through the clumps of fig cactus and clusters of spiky aloes, lying like upturned octopi on the bottom of a fisherman’s boat. At times, the overgrown track ran alongside the road. At others, it veered off, plunging through a tunnel into the bowels of the mountain, only to resurface, gulping for air, a few minutes later. Lurching from side to side as the car took the hairpin bends on the road from Asmara to Massawa, I caught glimpses of terracotta brick buttressing hugging the cliff face, viaducts rearing high above the valley, bridges hurled recklessly across gorges. ‘That? It’s the old Italian railway,’ a friend explained. ‘A railway? Up here? Surely that’s not possible.’ ‘Oh yes. They were good builders, those Italians. They understood the mountain.’

It had been closed by the Ethiopians when the guerrilla war began to bite in the 1970s, its sleepers ripped up by soldiers and rebel fighters who used them to line the trenches. The elegant Italian arches now supported nothing at all, the track was just a convenient shortcut for Eritreans strolling to the nearest hamlet in the position they found so comfortable: walking stick slung across the shoulders, hands flopping, prisoner-of-war-like, from the pole. While structurally intact, the tunnels had followed the inexorable rule governing all dark places near human dwellings and were doused in the acrid aroma of urine. But these al fresco toilets would have won the admiration of Brunel himself.

Only a people that had already thrown railroads across the Alps and Dolomites would have dared take on the Eritrean escarpment. Trains, which cannot shift into lower gear or roar round hairpin bends when the gradient begins to bite, are not really designed to go up mountains. Between Massawa and Asmara the land soars from sea level to 2,300 metres in just 70 km. The engineers of the 19th century considered a 1 in 100 gradient to be ‘heavy’, a gradient of 1 in 16 represented the physical limit a railroad could tackle without cog or cable. At its steepest, on the vertiginous climb between the town of Ghinda and Asmara, the Eritrean railway would touch 1 in 28. And that gradient was only achieved by sending the narrow-gauge track looping for 45 km through the mountains, a sinuous, fiendishly-clever itinerary that won it the sobriquet ‘serpente d’acciaio’ – ‘steel snake’. The key Massawa–Asmara section alone, I later discovered, boasted 30 tunnels, 35 bridges, 14 arches and 667 curves.

Fastidious in their choice of route, the Italians were equally ingenious when it came to choice of hardware. The techniques adopted, whose idiosyncrasies have turned Eritrea into a place of pilgrimage for modern trainspotters, ranged from the childishly simple to the sophisticated. The Italians imported French steam locomotives, specially designed for mountain transport, whose engines boasted twice the grip of ordinary models, thanks to a system that recycled steam from the main cylinders to a powered front bogie. The locomotives’ normally rigid blast pipe was designed to be flexible, allowing the trains to take the tightest of curves. And wagons were fitted with individual hand brakes, which railwaymen spun to prevent the train picking up too much speed on the downhill run and released on the flat. It all made for a very slow, if spectacular ride: 10 hours from coast to capital.¹

Even to the untutored eye, the Eritrean railway was clearly something of an engineering masterpiece. And the man responsible for this gravity-defying marvel, which would take 30 years to complete, was none other than Ferdinando Martini, epigram-loving politico and raconteur.

Why did Martini return to Eritrea? When the royal inquiry team packed its bags and set sail from Massawa in June 1891, the parliamentarian had every reason to believe that, thanks in part to his own efforts, the colony’s future was now assured. But Martini could never have predicted the blow Rome would be dealt five years later, a humiliation so profound it would leave its public feeling heartily sick of all things colonial and ready to throw in the towel on his beloved Eritrea.

Well before Menelik II succeeded Yohannes as Emperor of Abyssinia, it had been clear that two expansionist forces which had been rubbing up against one another – resurgent Abyssinian nationalism and embryonic Italian colonialism – must one day clash head on. Having stamped its mark on Eritrea and signed a series of treaties with sultans on the Somali coast, Italy continued to circle the Horn of Africa’s real prize: Abyssinia. The eventual trigger for this shuddering collision was to be the Treaty of Uccialli, an agreement Menelik II signed with the Italians in the belief he was trading recognition of an Eritrean border encompassing the kebessa highlands for the right to import arms through Rome’s new colony to his landlocked empire. While Menelik had agreed certain terms in the treaty’s Amharic version, he gradually came to the outraged realization that he had put his name to very different undertakings in the Italian translation, which contained a sly clause turning his nation into a protectorate of Rome – effectively a vassal state. When Italy refused to reverse what must qualify as one of the crudest sleights of hand in diplomatic history, war became inevitable.

The battle that followed, staged outside the Tigrayan town of Adua in 1896, pitted 19,000 Italian-led troops against 100,000 Abyssinians, many of them equipped, ironically, with Remington rifles obligingly supplied by Italian emissaries trying to ingratiate themselves with Menelik.² Outwitted and outmanoeuvred, some 6,000 Italians and their Eritrean ascari recruits were slaughtered by the Abyssinians, more men dying in one day than throughout the whole of Italy’s war of independence. To ensure they never fought again, the Abyssinians amputated the right arms and left legs of surviving ascaris, a harsh lesson to those who took the white man’s silver. It was the first time a Western army of such a size had been bested by an African force, the most shocking setback experienced on the continent by a 19th-century colonial power. Stunned by a defeat that was in part attributable to the automatic assumption that primitive black warriors would stand no chance against modern white troops, in part to Italian Prime Minister Francesco Crispi’s disastrous habit of second-guessing his generals, Rome sued for peace.

Menelik could have capitalized on this stunning victory and attempted to eject the Italians altogether from the Horn. Instead, while insisting on Uccialli’s abrogation, he accepted the principle of an enlarged Italian Eritrea. But such concessions did little to dilute Adua’s devastating impact back in Italy. It was not for mountainous Eritrea and arid Somalia that the Italian public had supported the government’s expensive colonial project. Its eyes had always been locked on the green pastures further to the south, the fertile, farmable Abyssinian lands Menelik II had now decreed forever out of reach. Chanting ‘Viva Menelik’, furious crowds demonstrated against the Italian government, while socialist members of parliament renewed calls for Italy to pull out of Africa. Some already heard Eritrea’s death knell tolling: ‘The colony no longer lives, it breathes its last,’ pronounced Eteocle Cagnassi, the official who had so deftly escaped punishment for the Massawa atrocities. ‘The ministry is demolishing, not running it; it no longer has a governor, very soon there will be no settlers either. Even in its most difficult and dangerous moments, Eritrea never went through a more inauspicious and painful time.’³

It was at this delicate juncture that the government called in Martini, offering him the post of Eritrea’s first civilian governor. He turned it down, hesitated, then accepted. For conservative leader Antonio Di Rudini, who had taken over from the disgraced Crispi as prime minister, Martini was a canny choice. Although Di Rudini had made huge political capital out of criticizing the government’s handling of Adua, he was a pragmatist on colonial matters. He had decided to hang on to Eritrea, but only after playing briefly with the idea of handing the colony to Belgium’s King Leopold, master of the Congo. He realized that he could only successfully defy public opinion if the colony, focus of so much controversy, assumed the lowest of profiles. It must be removed from the control of a profligate military, its shifting border needed to be fixed and, above all, its demands on Italy’s exchequer must be drastically reduced. By recruiting Martini, who had somehow managed to survive the Massawa debacle with his reputation for feistiness intact, Di Rudini could appear to be responding to public sentiment. In fact, both he and King Umberto knew they were placing the colony in the safest of hands.

When Martini set to sea, there was talk in Rome of pruning Eritrea down to a triangle linking Massawa on the coast with Asmara and the highlands town of Keren, or something even more modest. Many of Martini’s colleagues actually expected the new governor to waste no time in winding up Eritrea’s affairs. But the establishment was intent on consolidation, not dissolution. ‘I have made quite enough sacrifices to public opinion on this African issue,’ the King confided to Martini before he left. ‘I will not make the ultimate sacrifice: we must and will not descend from the plateau.’⁴ And Martini, the ever-equivocal Martini, was on exactly the same wavelength. ‘If I can stop Africa being a thorn in our flesh … if I can pacify the colony, raise it to a point where it is self-supporting, allow it to become, so to speak, forgotten, wouldn’t I be doing the country a major service?’ he mused.⁵ He spelled out his position in a letter to a friend: ‘I will not return a single inch of territory … the day the government asks me to descend to Massawa is the day I land in Brindisi.’

For Martini, this represented a risky career move. By the time he left for Eritrea in December 1897, he was 56 years old, an age where the delights of African travel, with its malarial bouts, month-long mule treks and most basic of amenities, begin to pall. The job, which meant leaving behind his family, was no sinecure, and others had rejected it. He had already done well for himself, rising briefly to the post of Education Minister. By going to Eritrea, he would be removing himself from the buzz and chit-chat of Montecitorio, with all the opportunities it represented. But at his age, with so much already achieved, such things mattered less than they once had. There were times, indeed, when he felt nothing but disgust for politics, sorry he had ever entered the game. ‘When I look back on my 23 years in parliament, I mourn all that wasted time,’ he told a friend. ‘If I stay here, what will I do? Make speeches to the chamber: Sibylline words, scattered by the wind.’⁶ The clear skies he had lauded in Nell’Affrica Italiana were calling. Eritrea’s first civilian governor, he knew, would be a huge fish in a tiny pool, always a cheering position to hold. It must have been enormously flattering to think that, once again, the future of Italy’s ‘first-born’ rested largely on his shoulders. Who else, after all, knew more about Eritrean affairs? Who else could be trusted to do the right thing?

His nine-year stint as governor is recorded in Il Diario Eritreo, 7,000 pages of handwritten entries which constitute a priceless resource of the Italian colonial era. Although he indexed each of its 26 volumes, Martini never seems to have had publication in mind, referring to the work only as a collection of ‘notes’. At most, he probably intended the diary to serve as source material for an African memoir he never, in the end, got round to writing. Had it not been for Italy’s Ministry of African Affairs, which ordered it published in 1946 – nearly 20 years after Martini’s death – the diary would have remained locked away in the family’s archives. Why did he put so much care into what was meant as no more than a personal aide-mémoire? Because, one has to conclude, Martini simply could not do otherwise. A man with his inquiring mind, with his lifelong habit of capturing impressions on paper, simply had to record the intense sensations that came with his return to Eritrea. To write something down was to endow it with value, to allot it its proper meaning – the habit came to him as naturally as breathing. ‘There is more satisfaction to be won from writing what seems a stylish page than in overturning a ministry,’ he once remarked. Whether at sea, on the road, or at home, he faithfully kept his diary, rarely skipping a day. And the fact that publication was never on the agenda makes the diary far fresher, funnier and more accessible than the flowery Nell’Affrica Italiana. Martini himself never understood this. ‘In Africa, one writes rather badly,’ he says at one point. ‘This is certainly not a good page.’⁷ In fact, to modern eyes, he writes far better. A sustained ironic conversation with himself, the diary’s very lack of artifice brings 19th-century Eritrea to life in a way his more laboured writing never could.

Here is Martini the amused sociologist, fascinated at the goings-on in the stretch of open ground outside his Asmara villa, which serves, he discovers, as a communal latrine. ‘This wretched valley is the debating society for those who feel the need to shed excess body weight … One man comes along and squats. The effect is contagious. Another comes along, measures the distance and squats a dozen metres from the first, in the same position and with the same aim in mind. And then a third, a fourth; sometimes a fifth and a sixth. And the conversation starts … Simultaneous, contemporaneous, in parallel … Words are not the only thing to emerge, but they last longer than the rest.’⁸

And here is Martini the urban sophisticate, despairing, as Eritrea’s attorney-general reads out a report, at his colleagues’ pitiable level of education. ‘My God! What a business! It was the most laughable thing imaginable: logic, dignity of expression, grammar, were never so badly mangled. And to think these are the magistrates the government sends to civilize Africa!’⁹

Everything interests him, from the awed reaction of Massawa’s residents to his governor’s regalia of plumed hat and gold braid, to the flavour of the turtle soup and ostrich steak (‘like veal’, he notes) he is served at a welcome ceremony. The sexual mores of Eritrea’s tribes, the way in which a visiting chieftain falls in love with his reflection in a mirror, the staggering ugliness of a group of Englishwomen spotted in a Cairo hotel, the gossip in Asmara’s expatriate community, all are recorded with Martini’s characteristic impish sense of humour.

The task he had been set, he soon realized, was immense. Nearly 30 years after its arrival in the Horn, Italy had pitifully little to show for its investment. The Eritrea depicted in his diary is Italy’s version of the Wild West, swept by locust swarms and cholera outbreaks, braced for outbreaks of the plague; a land in which villages are raided by hostile tribes and shipping attacked by pirates. Half-Christian and half-Moslem, it is a frontier country in which slaves are still traded, shady European businessmen mingle with known spies and where government officials still fight – and die – in duels staged over adulterous wives.

Just as he had been warned in Rome, the military administration had careered out of control, spending Italian taxpayers’ money as though it would never be held to account. ‘Either idiots or criminals’, the dregs of the soldiering profession were drawn to Eritrea, he noted, men who believed ‘that colonizing Africa and screwing the Italian government are one and the same thing’. ‘Dirty, out of uniform, they frequent the brothels until late, while the officers divide their time between prostitutes and the gaming table.’¹⁰ He was appalled to see how the military had lavished government funds on officers’ villas instead of investing in the roads, bridges and sewerage the colony so clearly needed. ‘Even the best soldiers feel they are only doing their duty when they throw money out of the window,’ he lamented after discovering, rotting in Massawa’s storerooms, 60,000 men’s shoes, enough spurs to equip an army, 40,000 mattocks, 9 years’ supply of salt, 3 years’ of wine, 2 years’ of jam, 52 months’ worth of coffee and 22 months’ of sugar.

His Eritrean subjects were the least of his problems. The nine local ethnic groups had largely accepted Italian rule as a necessary evil. ‘They do not love us, but understand the benefits that come with our rule,’ remarked Martini, noting that local administrators regarded the Italians as ‘good but stupid’.¹¹ The settlers were the real disappointment. Far from serving as an alternative destination for the tens of thousands of Italians heading for the Americas, Eritrea held less than 4,000 ‘Europeans’, and that tally actually included hundreds of Egyptians, Syrians, Turks and Indians judged civilized enough to count as ‘white’. Land had been confiscated and experimental agricultural projects launched, but the going had proved so tough many Italian families begged to be sent home. Martini was none too impressed by those who remained, noting that their Greek colleagues seemed less prone to frittering away their profits. ‘The Greek does not buy horses and does not keep mistresses, the Italian keeps both horse and mistress.’¹² The constant complaints by the hard core that remained drove him wild. ‘I’ve always said that governing 20 Italians in the colony requires more patience, courage, and skill than governing 400,000 natives,’ he fumed. When Rome had the temerity to inquire whether an Eritrean display should feature in the Paris Exhibition’s colonial section, an exasperated Martini lost his temper: ‘All we can send are dead men’s bones, bungled battle plans and columns of wasted money. Up till now these are the only fruits of our colonial harvest.’¹³

Moving the capital from Massawa to cool Asmara, he set about his work with characteristic briskness. A series of decrees created a new civilian administration, placing the army firmly under its control. Strict limits were set to the number of civil servants employed in Eritrea, a move that slashed Rome’s expenditure. The worst soldiers and officers were simply expelled. ‘These steps will cause a great deal of ill feeling, but I know I am doing my duty. Order, discipline, justice and thrift: without these the colony can neither be governed nor saved,’ Martini pronounced.¹⁴ The colony was divided up into nine provinces, each with its own capital, and Martini established the building blocks of a modern society: an independent judiciary, a telegraph system and departments of finance, health and education.

The man who had calmly predicted the disappearance of Eritrea’s indigenous peoples quickly changed his tone. It was all very well airily discussing the elimination of local tribes as a passing visitor. Now that he was actually running Eritrea and could see for himself the damage – both political and commercial – done by military confrontation, Martini turned accommodating pacifier. Determined to shore up the Eritrean border, he became the perfect neighbour, putting an end to Rome’s long tradition of double-dealing. When rebel chiefs on the other side of the frontier challenged Menelik’s rule, Martini turned a deaf ear to their pleas for weapons. Instead of fantasizing, like so many Italian contemporaries, about avenging Adua, he cooperated with Menelik’s attempts to check the lawlessness on their mutual frontier, stabilizing the region in the process. As for emigration, Martini quickly realized how poorly judged the royal inquiry report had been. The colony was simply not ready for a flood of Italian labourers, who risked clashing with locals and would, in any case, be undercut by Eritreans willing to accept a fraction of what a European considered an honest wage. He scrapped legislation authorizing further land confiscation and pushed employers to narrow the huge differential between the wages paid Italians and Eritreans.

But while righting certain blatant injustices, Martini was never a soft touch. If Eritrea was to survive, the locals must be taught a lesson in the pitiless consistency of colonial law, the merest hint of insubordination ruthlessly crushed. Mutinous ascaris were shackled or whipped and the sweltering coastal jails filled with prisoners who often paid the ultimate price. ‘I’ve never had a bloodthirsty reputation and I really don’t deserve one,’ Martini wrote, after refusing to pardon a condemned bandit. ‘But here, without a death penalty, you cannot govern.’¹⁵ He was building a state, virtually from scratch, and often he felt as though he was doing the work single-handed. ‘There is not a dog here with whom one can hold an intellectual discussion,’ he complained in a letter to his daughter.¹⁶ It was a lonely, heady experience, bound to encourage delusions of grandeur. ‘At times, unfortunately,’ he confessed to his diary, ‘I feel it would not be too arrogant to say, adapting the words of Louis 14th, “I am the colony”.’¹⁷

The longer he stayed, the more convinced he became that the success of this monumental project hinged on one key element. He knew Eritrea had gold, fish stocks in abundance and river valleys capable of producing coffee and grain, cotton and sisal. But as long as a rickety mule track was the only way of scaling the mountains separating hinterland from sea, Eritrea would remain forever cut off from the African continent, its ports idle, its administration reliant on government subsidies. Only a railroad could unlock the riches of the plateau and – beyond it – the markets of Abyssinia and Sudan. It was the one explicit undertaking Martini had sought in exchange for his loyal service during his final conversation with King Umberto. ‘Without a railway joining Massawa with the highlands, nothing good, lasting or productive will ever come from Eritrea,’ he told the monarch. ‘Rest assured,’ the King had promised. ‘The railway will be built.’¹⁸

The close of the 19th century was the golden era of African railways. Flinging their sleepers and coal-eating locomotives across savannah and jungle, the colonial powers sent a blunt message to the locals: progress was unstoppable. The railroad was both an instrument of war, depositing troops armed with machine guns within range of their spear-carrying enemies, and an instrument of commercial penetration, bringing the ivory, minerals and spices at the continent’s heart to market, opening the interior to land-hungry farmers and hopeful miners. Cecil Rhodes dreamt of one that would run from Cape to Cairo, the explorer Henry Stanley, nicknamed ‘Breaker of Rocks’, was building one which would link Leopoldville to the sea, the British were braving man-eating lions to connect Uganda with the Swahili coast. Railways were the equivalent of today’s national airlines – no African colony worth its salt could be without one.

Martini did not intend to be left out, although he knew Eritrea’s topography made this a uniquely demanding challenge. When Martini arrived, the Italian army had already laid 28 km of track to the town of Saati, carrying troops to fight Ras Alula. But the work had been carried out in such haste, it all needed to be redone. There were drawings to be sketched, sites visited, contracts put out to tender and strikes to be settled. It all fell to Martini, acutely aware that Italy’s colonial rivals were establishing their own trade routes into the interior, with France and Britain vying for control of a railway that would link Djibouti with Addis Ababa. ‘The railway means peace, both inside and outside our borders, and huge savings on the budget,’ he told his diary, time and again. Despite the King’s promise, winning the funding did not prove easy. Having sent Martini out with orders to cut spending, Rome did not take kindly to constant requests for money. He would waste months peppering the Foreign Ministry with telegrams, winning his bosses round to the railroad’s merits, only to see the government fall and a new set of ministers take office, who all had to be persuaded afresh. The railway, fretted Martini, ‘would be the only really effective remedy to many – perhaps all – of the colony’s ills. But in Rome they do not want to know.’¹⁹

He assembled a small army of 1,100 Eritrean labourers and 200 Italian overseers for the backbreaking and dangerous work, hacking and blasting through the rock, building stations and water-storage vaults as the railroad inched forwards. Struggling to master the technical minutiae of rail engineering, Martini found himself acting as peacemaker between irate private contractors and his abrasive head of works, Francesco Schupfer, a stickler for detail capable of forcing a company caught using sub-standard materials to knock down a stretch of earthworks and start again. ‘Perhaps he is too rough, but he is a gentleman,’ Martini pondered, intervening yet again to smooth ruffled feathers. ‘He is hated by everyone, but very dear to me.’²⁰ When Britain raised the possibility of connecting Sudan’s rail network to the Eritrean line – a move that would have turned Massawa into eastern Sudan’s conduit to the sea – Martini was almost beside himself with excitement. ‘This is a matter of life and death, either the railway reaches as far as Sabderat or we must leave Eritrea,’ he pronounced.²¹ Just when his plans looked set in concrete, Rome began wondering – in a reflection of the changing technological times – whether it might not be better off investing in a highway to Gonder and Addis Ababa instead.

Despite all the telegrams and discussions, the stops and starts, the track slowly edged its way up to Asmara. By 1904, the crews had reached Ghinda, by 1911, four years after Martini had returned to Italy, it had reached Asmara. The final heave up the mountain proved the trickiest. Even today, old men living in Shegriny (‘the difficult place’), remember the dispute that lent their hamlet its name, as a father-and-son engineering team squabbled over the best route to take, each retiring to sulk in his tent before the precipitous route along ‘Devil’s Gate’ – little more than a narrow cliff ledge looking out over nothingness – was finally agreed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long before racial segregation was adopted as an official credo in South Africa, Eritrea had already tasted the delights of apartheid. In its day, it was the most racist regime in Africa. Eritreans no longer regarded their Italian administrators as ‘good but stupid’. Every Eritrean who lived through that era nurses in his memory a moment of humiliation he can today shake his head over with the bitter satisfaction that comes from knowing history has had the last laugh, a deep guffaw that comes from the belly. ‘When a white man walked along the street, you always followed a couple of steps behind, never alongside,’ an old railwayman told me. ‘The white man always walked alone.’ ‘You could be dying of thirst, but the cafés in the town centre would still refuse to serve you so much as a glass of water,’ said another. A pastor remembered how, as a boy, he once made the mistake of crossing the road in front of an Italian policeman on a motorbike. ‘He was quite a long way off, but as far as he was concerned I should have waited for him to pass. He caught up with me and slapped me round the face.’ The pastor recalled an old Italian lawyer expostulating at his failure to step into the gutter as he passed. ‘He said “Hey, can’t you see that a white man is coming?”,’ he chuckled. ‘It was his way of saying “Get off the pavement”.’

For Italy, the conquest of Abyssinia and racial subjugation of Eritrea would prove Pyrrhic victories. Resistance by Haile Selassie’s followers meant much of the Abyssinian countryside remained unsafe, and the number of settlers never rose above the disappointing. The extravagantly-funded war plunged Rome into debt and while other European powers milked fortunes from their territories abroad, Italy, embarrassingly, never managed to make colonialism work for her financially. Pouring investment into both Eritrea and Ethiopia, her empire cost her more than she gained and the government was juggling ballooning budget deficits when the Second World War began. Thanks to the predictably easy victory in Abyssinia, Italians would enter that campaign with a dangerously unrealistic belief in their military might, a confidence which shattered at huge national cost. And while the European powers agreed temporarily to turn a blind eye to Mussolini’s bullying, the Abyssinian campaign also marked the moment when Il Duce’s eventual destiny as Hitler’s patsy began to take shape. Having thoroughly alienated the liberal democracies with his behaviour towards Abyssinia, Mussolini’s natural place, increasingly, would seem alongside the Nazi leader.

The war’s most dramatic long-term outcome was to effectively kill off Italian colonialism. Crude and invasive, often loathed by Italian settlers whose presence in Eritrea predated Fascism, the racial legislation made daily life so ghastly for Eritreans that when history finally granted Italy’s African subjects an opportunity to decide their fate, they would turn and spit in the face of their former masters.

Looking back, many Eritrean intellectuals view the 1930s as the period in which the characteristics now regarded as quintessentially Eritrean began to take recognizable form. Every country which experiences colonialism is defined by how it digests humiliation. In many African states, the experience corroded a community’s sense of self-worth, dripping through the generations like acid. But in Eritrea’s disciplined, tightknit communities, sure in the knowledge of their ancient traditions and religious faith, subjugation ate into the soul in a different way. In the kebessa, families had always prided themselves on settling their disputes without recourse to outsiders. Nothing was considered more undignified than being seen to lose control, to let go. The brutality of the racial laws was met with tight-lipped self-restraint. Turning inwards, the Eritreans bottled up their emotions and waited to see what the future would bring. ‘Whatever sun rises in the morning is our sun, and whichever king sits on the throne is our king,’ runs a Tigrinya proverb which summarizes the bittersweet philosophy of a people accustomed to having things done to them. Since there was no point standing up to a mightier adversary, silence seemed the only way of salvaging self-respect. ‘You knew what the consequences would be if you openly revolted, so you were advised to bide your time, to be patient. That was the advice my father always gave me when I was growing up: “just be patient”,’ says Dawit Mesfin, an Eritrean intellectual living in London.³⁷ He calls this preternatural calm, the apparent passivity cultivated in that era, ‘quietism’. Like all superficial passivity, it was a lid on a pressure cooker, clamped over a storm of hurt pride and a longing for retribution.