Carlo Liuzzi, Italy’s Accidental Colony (Naples: Patriarca, 1982)
… In 1868, the Rubattino Shipping Company of Genoa needed a coaling station for ships transiting the Suez on the way to Zanzibar and South Africa. The Sultan of Aussa, a monarch of somewhat nebulous authority, offered the right price for the port of Assab on the Red Sea coast. Rubattino met his price, and established a small outpost the following year. A decade later, with the shipping company on the verge of bankruptcy, the Italian government took over the enclave, and Italy was suddenly in the colonization business.
Assab would remain a sleepy way station for decades, but it also became a crossroads. The inland Afars, nominally subject to the Aussa sultanate but in fact a collection of independent clans, sought out the Italian governor as a neutral mediator of their disputes and came into the port to trade salt for imported weapons and housewares. Muslims from the northern Eritrean coast, who were disfavored by the incoming Russian colonizers, also found their way to Assab, and many of them, already exiles, enlisted in the Italian navy or merchant marine. [1] By the time of the Great War, there were already small Eritrean communities living in Naples, Genoa and Rome, and a 1400-member Eritrean Regiment fought for Italy against the Franco-Austrian invasion.
Assab itself spent the war under French occupation. The Afar clans withdrew into the desert, holding their own against all comers, but they acquiesced in the port’s return to Italy at war’s end and the postwar expansion of the Italian zone to include the Aussa heartland. The Sultan concluded a new treaty in 1899 acknowledging nominal Italian overlordship and agreeing to pay an annual salt tribute, secure in the knowledge that Italy had little interest in the desert and scrubland that he controlled.
Relations between Italians and Afars did not always go smoothly. Individual clans, whose regard for the Sultan’s law was often as nominal as their monarch’s regard for Italy’s, occasionally raided the port, and the Italian garrison responded by mounting punitive expeditions with the aid of rival clans. The governors dispatched to Assab quickly learned that the clan chiefs rather than the Sultan were the authorities who really mattered, and by 1910, they had forged alliances with most of the chiefs and re-established their position as mediator to the others. The colony reverted to its prewar status as a backwater, only coming to the attention of Rome’s bureaucrats when something went wrong.
All that would change dramatically in the 1920s. The Republic of India’s independence opened vast new markets to Italian merchants: the number of Italian ships making the Suez crossing tripled between 1920 and 1925, and most of them stopped at Assab along the way. Assab proved even more convenient to trade with southern Yemen, which was now open to all nations with the establishment of the Ethiopian-sponsored State of Aden. By the later 1920s, Italian mercantile houses had offices in Aden, al-Hudaydah and the small Hadhrami ports, and they naturally looked to the governor at Assab for diplomatic support.
Suddenly, Assab was
important, and that meant that the harbor had to be improved and the city center built into a model Italian town. Between 1925 and 1935, more than 11,000 Italian administrators, small merchants and construction workers settled in the port, and the civic and business districts became full of statuary and monumental architecture. The construction boom lso brought thousands of Eritreans into the city to seek work, including for the first time the pastoral Afars, whose young men preferred construction or stevedoring jobs at good wages to salt-mining or following the herds.
The Afars would join the second wave of Eritreans to settle in Italy – 15,000 during the 1930s, with most settling in Naples where the largest existing Eritrean community lived. The clannish Afars worked well with the Camorra, although they sometimes clashed, while those of a more law-abiding bent found a niche as construction workers, peddlers and seasonal agricultural laborers. The earlier-arrived Eritreans, who had become fishermen and shopkeepers, considered the Afars uncouth and kept them out of the fishing business, but they thrived nevertheless.
The new wave of immigration and Assab’s growing commercial importance brought Africa into the Italian popular imagination. A wave of East African adventure novels swept the Italian market during the early 1930s, most famously
Faccetta Nera, in which a nineteenth-century Italian trader finds an abandoned Afar girl in the desert and adopts her as his daughter. Gangs of street toughs called themselves the Afars or the Sultans, while at the higher levels of society, the 1936 opera
Yasmin, or the Imam’s Sister was set in Assab and Yemen and featured both Eritrean and Arab musical influences.
And at the same time, the East African imagination increasingly featured Italy. As young Afar construction workers returned to their clans, their wealth making them powers to be reckoned with, they brought an appreciation of all things Italian. The Afars’ range was wide and they cared little for borders, so the Italian influences spread into French Obock and Ethiopia itself. In time, when the Nile War broke out, they would play a small but significant part…
Saida Serafini, A Princely State of Italy: Tunisia 1885-1950 (Rome: Bonino, 1997)
… On paper, Tunisia during the early Italian period had a status little different from the other princely states of Africa and Asia. Italy had outright control of the city of Bizerte, which it used as a merchant port and naval station, and it enjoyed capitulations in other Tunisian cities similar to those that existed in China or Morocco, but it was internally self-governing and even had its own army. The Bey of Tunis received honors as a head of state, albeit a subordinate one, when he visited Rome, and the Italian commissioners in Tunis were careful to observe court protocol.
By 1920, however, Tunisia’s relationship with Italy would take on dimensions unknown in any other princely state. Not only was it geographically close to its patron, but it had rich agricultural lands, and alone among similar states, it was marked out for colonial settlement. There had been Italians in the cities even before the Great War, and again after the wartime interlude of French occupation, but beginning in the late 1910s, an increasing number of immigrants found their way to the countryside.
The roots of this were several. Twenty years after the Great War, Italy had largely recovered its population losses, and tenant farmers were increasingly squeezed. At the same time, land reform was becoming increasingly contentious. In the north, reform had been achieved by confiscating and redistributing the estates of wartime collaborators, and associations of small farmers as well as the anarchist parallel society in Friuli had taken root. In the south, however, there had been no French or Austrian occupation, and there were no collaborators to dispossess. Some half-hearted efforts at reform were made, but they were stymied by corruption and favoritism, and some of the land that was supposed to be distributed to tenant farmers was bought up by the big landlords instead.
The peasants of the
mezzogiorno, who saw their northern counterparts receive land while they got none, became increasingly frustrated. Anarchist communes inspired by the Friulans’ success spread through the south, carrying out rent strikes and refusing to acknowledge the authority of the police or courts. Much of the countryside degenerated into a three-cornered feud between the anarchists, the feudal landlords and the Camorra, with the police often functioning as the landlords’ mercenaries; it wasn’t organized enough to be called a civil war, but revenge killings and expulsions were common.
The central government saw the south spinning out of control before its eyes, and with a prolonged military occupation of the
mezzogiorno unfeasible, it decided to follow Portugal’s example and relieve some of the pressure by sponsoring emigration. Many Italians would go to Brazil, the Southern Cone, the United States and Australasia; a few would take up land in Angola, Mozambique or South Africa; but the closest and easiest option was Tunisia. Under the Rome-Tunis treaties, Italian citizens had extraterritorial legal privileges in Tunisia, and the Italian government offered subsidies for land purchases. In theory, Italy had no power to compel Tunisians to sell their land, but the fact that many Tunisian landlords had commercial interests in Italy gave it leverage, and some agreed to sell large tracts in exchange for business concessions.
This had the effect of forcing many tenants off their land, driving them to the coastal cities or to Italy in search of work. These tenants, understandably embittered, would join the opposition to both the Bey and Italy, becoming constituents of the emerging Abacarist societies and political parties. But they would find surprising allies among the settlers themselves. By 1935, Tunisia’s Italian population numbered 140,000, of which more than 80,000 were farmers from Sicily and the southern Italian peninsula. Many of these had been radicals in Italy, and they brought their politics with them, seeing their new small farms and olive groves as a chance to put anarchist principles to work. And through their brethren in the cities, they made contact with the urban Abacarists and the Belloist villages in the countryside, and found that they had kindred spirits.
At the end of the 1930s, matters had come full circle: while the tenant farmers still resented the settlers, they now considered them valuable allies against the autocratic regime in Tunis. The Bey now faced a binational democratic and syndicalist opposition demanding for Tunisians the freedoms that Italians had taken for themselves, and the Italian members of that opposition – who had legal protections against arbitrary arrest and expulsion from their land – could work against him with virtual impunity. As 1940 dawned, the monarch faced an unpalatable choice between asking for direct Italian intervention – something that would compromise Tunisia’s independence and alienate many of the elites who supported his regime – and negotiating with an increasingly radicalized peasantry…
Julio Ebule, Where Spain and Cuba Met (Madrid: Noguera, 2005)
… Spanish Guinea stood aloof from the civil strife that troubled Spain during the 1910s and 20s. The colony was too small and far away to be worth fighting over, and as long as it paid its taxes and acknowledged the government in Madrid, it was left alone to do what it wanted. Some Africans went to Spain to volunteer as soldiers, and some Spanish liberals came to Santa Isabel to find sanctuary, but otherwise Guinea might as well have been a separate country: even the frequent rotation of governors mattered little to the bureaucrats and businessmen who really ran the colony’s affairs.
More accurately, Spanish Guinea was two separate countries. Rio Muni, on the mainland, was little developed: a few colonial officers were stationed at Bata, and the coastal plain was dotted with cocoa plantations run by absentee managers, but in the hills of the deep interior, many Fang barely knew that they were under colonial rule, and had more contact with itinerant Gabonais or even Luba traders than with Spaniards. The island of Fernando Po, on the other hand, was a busy trading center, and Santa Isabel a prosperous port town where the idea of a Coaster people was perhaps more fully realized than in any other place.
Many of the original traders in Fernando Po had been Krio from Sierra Leone, who spoke English and their own language. They, and latterly the Americo-Liberians, were still there. But from the 1840s onward, thousands of Spanish-speaking Afro-Cuban freedmen had settled there, and the connection to Cuba had continued even after slavery was abolished. Spanish had long since become the majority language to which the English-speakers from the north, and the Afro-Brazilians who had settled in the wake of the Marianada, all assimilated. And with Santa Isabel being the provincial town it was, the trading families from throughout the West African coast intermarried with each other and the natives of the island, producing a mixed fernandino nation that had commercial and familial links on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Afro-Atlantism of Liberia and Sierra Leone gained increasing currency in Fernando Po as it traded more with Cuba and Puerto Rico (which also stayed outside the civil troubles) and less with metropolitan Spain, and as the eighty-year-old Afro-Cuban networks were overlaid by those of Spanish exiles. During the 1920s, and even after stability returned to Spain in the 1930s, it became common for fernandinos to spend time studying or working in Havana, and the Catholic Liberal and socialist politicians in Cuba often had organizational and family connections to Santa Isabel. Two governors during the 1920s and one in the 1930s were Cuban, the last of them serving immediately before the first fernandino governor was appointed in 1936, and that year’s municipal election – the first to be held under a law permitting elected local governments in incorporated cities – was won by a Catholic Liberal-led coalition with strong Cuban ties.
It was all enough to make some fernandinos wonder whose colony Spanish Guinea actually was…
[1] See posts 624 and 916.
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