Hotel Tiberias: A Tale of Two Grandfathers. Sebastian Hope

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       Chapter Seven

      The end of the nineteenth century saw the colonial powers involved in an unseemly scramble for territory in Africa. Europe’s two newest countries, Italy and Germany, saw their chance to join the club; their problem was to find an opening. The Portuguese ruled Angola and Mozambique. The Belgians had the Congo. The French and the British converted their trading interests in West and Sub-Saharan Africa into colonial rule. The Spanish held the Western Sahara and enclaves in Morocco, eventually French, as were Algeria and Tunisia. The Ottomans, nominally, ruled Libya. After the British took control of Egypt in 1882, the French threat to the headwaters of the Nile made it necessary to extend their power into the Sudan. The Germans made room for themselves in Cameroon and South-West Africa, agreeing their sphere of influence in East Africa by treaty with the British. The only place for the Italians to gain a foothold was in the Horn of Africa.

      The Italian presence there began in 1869, less than a decade after Italy had reunited, freeing itself from the rump of Habsburg and Bourbon rule. Following the example of the British and the French in Seylac and Djibouti, the Italians established a coaling station at Aseb on the Danakil coast. Their ambitions did not end there. In 1885 they took another port, Massawa, on the Eritrean coast to the north, and in the space of four years extended their rule to such a degree that the Emperor of Abyssinia, Menilek II, was forced to cede the whole province to them. Their attention was then turned towards the Somali coast where they acquired two small protectorates in the north and succeeded to the interests of the British East Africa Company in the south. A direct attack against Abyssinia in 1896 was defeated, but Italy’s colonial intentions were stated for all to see, inscribed at the gateway to the Mediterranean on its consular building in Port Said: ‘Rome – once again at the heart of an Empire.’

      In 1911 the Italians invaded Libya and during the resulting war with the Ottomans they took ten of the twelve Greek islands that make up the Dodecanese. In 1915 Italy joined the Allied camp and though largely unsuccessful against the Austrians, gained territory in the Tyrol and at the head of the Adriatic. Italian ambitions towards the Dalmatian coast and Albania were disappointed. Though it retained control of the Ottoman islands taken in 1912, Italy did not receive the possessions it had been promised on the Turkish mainland, and furthermore the Treaty of Saint-Germain proscribed Italian expansion in Africa.

      The First World War was called the Great War until the Second World War started. It was supposed to be the last colonial war. Its closing territorial arrangements were to be ordered on Woodrow Wilson’s ‘principle of nationality’. Italy, which had regained its own nationality within living memory, felt cheated of the empire that was its birthright. Within a year of gaining office in 1922, Mussolini, at the head of a party whose symbol was the fasces of Imperial Rome, instructed his governors in Libya and Somalia to consolidate Italy’s power and this they did with enough vigour to prompt the last uncolonized state in Africa, Abyssinia, to join the League of Nations.

      As a force for world peace, the League of Nations was even more ineffectual than its successor. When it acted – such as in its support of a Jewish Homeland in Palestine – and when it failed to act – such as against Hitler’s remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936 – the consequences were alike: new conflicts. Abyssinia appealed to the League in vain as Italian forces encroached inland from the Somali coast, until the Italians provoked a skirmish at the Oasis of Welwel that provided the excuse for Italy’s invasion. The colonial powers of Europe expressed their horror. The League of Nations imposed sanctions on Italy that had no bite since they did not include oil; Mussolini conceded that if they had he would have had to withdraw in a week. (At that time nobody knew that the Italians in Libya were sitting on one of the largest oilfields in the world.) In May 1936 Emperor Haile Selassie went into exile and the world worried about other things once more. The era of the appeasement of Fascism had begun.

      The British protested strongly against the Italian trespass into their Nilotic sphere of influence, but took no direct action against their erstwhile allies. Britain did not have the military resources in Egypt and the Sudan to counter the Italian invasion. Moreover, to have attacked the Italians in Abyssinia would have not only threatened stability on the European mainland, but also prompted an attack against Egypt by Italy’s forces in Libya. Such an invasion would not have lacked local support. Since 1911 an increasing number of Italians of all types had settled in Alexandria and Cairo; the waterfront in Alexandria had come to resemble ‘a broken-down version of Naples’, according to Lawrence Durrell. King Fuad had been educated in Italy and numbered many Italians among his household. Realising the vulnerability of their own position, the British in Egypt could only take measures to discourage Italian ideas of further expansion, and these had a profound effect on the future of the 8th Hussars. Hackett recalls:

      we were hastily СКАЧАТЬ