As Italy turns again to Africa, ‘good coloniser’ myth persists

ASK HAILE SELASI ABOUT MUSSOLINI

By AFP
October 28, 2023

Italy's Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's government is hoping for African partners to help with energy security - Copyright AFP Munir uz ZAMAN

Rosa SMIRAGIA and Gaël BRANCHEREAU

Italy’s government is eyeing Africa in pursuit of energy security, even as some officials defend Rome’s often-bloody colonial past on the continent — giving short shrift to historical accuracy.

Historians agree that hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed under Italian colonial rule in Libya, Ethiopia, Eritrea and what is now Somalia from the late 19th century to the first half of the 20th.

Yet Italy’s deputy foreign minister, Edmondo Cirielli, said in June that the country’s presence on the continent was “civilising”, without bloodshed or repression.

“Whether before or during Fascism… (Italy) in Africa built and created a civilising culture” in its colonies, said Cirielli, a member of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s post-Fascist Brothers of Italy party, borrowing the “good colonisers” myth popular on the far right.

“Our ancient and thousand-year-old culture does not make us a people of pirates who go around plundering the world,” Cirielli said, in comments that raised eyebrows among historians and the left-wing opposition.

Unlike Germany reconciling with its Nazi past or France with its occupation of Algeria, Italy has been slow to embark on public soul-searching about its colonial history.

But opposition lawmakers have now drafted a bill to establish a “Day of Remembrance for the victims of Italian colonialism” in the four African countries.

The suggested date is February 19, which marks the start of a massacre of Ethiopian civilians by Italian troops in Addis Ababa in 1937.

“Other countries such as Belgium and Germany have apologised for the crimes of colonialism,” said Laura Boldrini, an MP for the centre-left Democratic Party who co-authored the bill.

“In Italy, we tend to deny and tell ourselves that ‘Italy, good people’ built roads, hospitals and schools,” she said.

Boldrini, a former head of the lower house of parliament, said right-wing newspapers had written disparaging articles about the text, “and this government does not take colonial crimes seriously”.

The bill has little chance of being adopted given the opposition of Meloni’s coalition, which has a parliamentary majority.

– ‘History of violence’ –

Alessandro Pes, a professor of contemporary history at the University of Cagliari, said the “stereotype of the ‘good coloniser’ has no significant historical foundation”.

Rather, that rhetoric “hid a desire for colonial expansion carried out through the use of violence and the forced subordination of colonised populations”, Pes told AFP.

Italy’s eyes turned to expansion after it became a unified state in 1861, with the young nation anxious to establish a toehold in Africa in competition with other European powers.

It sought “to resolve the big problems of unemployment and social malaise in Italy” by exporting workers to newly occupied territories in the Horn of Africa, said Uoldelul Chelati Dirar, a professor of African history at the University of Macerata.

Differing from its European rivals, however, Italy developed more infrastructure like roads, bridges and railways while in Africa — something right-wing politicians are quick to point out, he said.

Those investments have fuelled the “good people” myth that is deeply rooted in Italian society, “reflected in the extreme resistance to accepting the evidence that our history has also been a history of violence, exploitation and racism”, added Pes.

British historian Ian Campbell estimates that Italy’s occupation of Libya, Ethiopia, Eritrea and then-Italian Somaliland caused 700,000 African deaths.

This includes 150,000 people killed in Libya alone during the Fascist era under Benito Mussolini, Chelati Dirar said.

– Educational gap? –

In 2008, Silvio Berlusconi, then prime minister, signed a deal with Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi to pay $5 billion in investments to compensate for what the premier called “damage inflicted on Libya by Italy during the colonial era”.

But little is taught in Italian schools today about this aspect of its past, prompting some historians to make a link between an educational gap and modern-day racism.

Meanwhile, Meloni has criticised Italy’s European partners and fellow colonial powers — without naming them — during speeches addressed to African nations, as she seeks new deals on energy and access to raw materials.

Earlier this month in the Republic of Congo, she called for “an approach that is not the predatory and paternalistic one that has characterised relations with certain countries in the past”.

• Speech by the His Majesty Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia, at the Assembly of the League of Nations, at the Session of June--July 1936.

• In the early 1930s, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was determined to expand Italy's African empire by annexing Ethiopia. In December 1934, a clash, provoked by the Italians, occurred between Italian and Ethiopian armed forces at Walwal on the Ethiopian side of the frontier with Italian Somaliland. Mussolini declared the incident "an act of self-defense" and thus not subject to arbitration under international agreements. Italy demanded compensation and formal recognition of the area as Italian. When Emperor Haile Selassie refused to yield to these demands, Italy began mobilizing its forces. As a member of the League of Nations, Ethiopia brought the case before the Council, but Mussolini ignored all League proposals to resolve the crisis. On October 3, 1935, Italian forces invaded Ethiopia from Eritrea and Italian Somaliland. The capital of Addis Ababa fell in May 1936. Emperor Haile Selassie, who was in Geneva at the time, went to the Assembly and asked for help, but to no avail; the League refused to act and most member countries recognized the Italian conquest. Presented here is the text of the emperor's impassioned speech to the Assembly, which he delivered on June 30, 1936. He spoke in Amharic, the text of which is on the left side of the pages. The French translation is on the right. The text is preserved in the archives of the League, which were transferred to the United Nations in 1946 and are housed at the UN office in Geneva. They were inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World register in 2010.