I Didn’t Do It For You: How the World Used and Abused a Small African Nation. Michela Wrong

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

       CHAPTER 3 The Steel Snake

      â€˜Truly I could say СКАЧАТЬ