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

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      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 СКАЧАТЬ