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

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СКАЧАТЬ both he and King Umberto knew they were placing the colony in the safest of hands.

      When Martini set to sea, there was talk in Rome of pruning Eritrea down to a triangle linking Massawa on the coast with Asmara and the highlands town of Keren, or something even more modest. Many of Martini’s colleagues actually expected the new governor to waste no time in winding up Eritrea’s affairs. But the establishment was intent on consolidation, not dissolution. ‘I have made quite enough sacrifices to public opinion on this African issue,’ the King confided to Martini before he left. ‘I will not make the ultimate sacrifice: we must and will not descend from the plateau.’⁴ And Martini, the ever-equivocal Martini, was on exactly the same wavelength. ‘If I can stop Africa being a thorn in our flesh … if I can pacify the colony, raise it to a point where it is self-supporting, allow it to become, so to speak, forgotten, wouldn’t I be doing the country a major service?’ he mused.⁵ He spelled out his position in a letter to a friend: ‘I will not return a single inch of territory … the day the government asks me to descend to Massawa is the day I land in Brindisi.’

      For Martini, this represented a risky career move. By the time he left for Eritrea in December 1897, he was 56 years old, an age where the delights of African travel, with its malarial bouts, month-long mule treks and most basic of amenities, begin to pall. The job, which meant leaving behind his family, was no sinecure, and others had rejected it. He had already done well for himself, rising briefly to the post of Education Minister. By going to Eritrea, he would be removing himself from the buzz and chit-chat of Montecitorio, with all the opportunities it represented. But at his age, with so much already achieved, such things mattered less than they once had. There were times, indeed, when he felt nothing but disgust for politics, sorry he had ever entered the game. ‘When I look back on my 23 years in parliament, I mourn all that wasted time,’ he told a friend. ‘If I stay here, what will I do? Make speeches to the chamber: Sibylline words, scattered by the wind.’⁶ The clear skies he had lauded in Nell’Affrica Italiana were calling. Eritrea’s first civilian governor, he knew, would be a huge fish in a tiny pool, always a cheering position to hold. It must have been enormously flattering to think that, once again, the future of Italy’s ‘first-born’ rested largely on his shoulders. Who else, after all, knew more about Eritrean affairs? Who else could be trusted to do the right thing?

      His nine-year stint as governor is recorded in Il Diario Eritreo, 7,000 pages of handwritten entries which constitute a priceless resource of the Italian colonial era. Although he indexed each of its 26 volumes, Martini never seems to have had publication in mind, referring to the work only as a collection of ‘notes’. At most, he probably intended the diary to serve as source material for an African memoir he never, in the end, got round to writing. Had it not been for Italy’s Ministry of African Affairs, which ordered it published in 1946 – nearly 20 years after Martini’s death – the diary would have remained locked away in the family’s archives. Why did he put so much care into what was meant as no more than a personal aide-mémoire? Because, one has to conclude, Martini simply could not do otherwise. A man with his inquiring mind, with his lifelong habit of capturing impressions on paper, simply had to record the intense sensations that came with his return to Eritrea. To write something down was to endow it with value, to allot it its proper meaning – the habit came to him as naturally as breathing. ‘There is more satisfaction to be won from writing what seems a stylish page than in overturning a ministry,’ he once remarked. Whether at sea, on the road, or at home, he faithfully kept his diary, rarely skipping a day. And the fact that publication was never on the agenda makes the diary far fresher, funnier and more accessible than the flowery Nell’Affrica Italiana. Martini himself never understood this. ‘In Africa, one writes rather badly,’ he says at one point. ‘This is certainly not a good page.’⁷ In fact, to modern eyes, he writes far better. A sustained ironic conversation with himself, the diary’s very lack of artifice brings 19th-century Eritrea to life in a way his more laboured writing never could.

      Here is Martini the amused sociologist, fascinated at the goings-on in the stretch of open ground outside his Asmara villa, which serves, he discovers, as a communal latrine. ‘This wretched valley is the debating society for those who feel the need to shed excess body weight … One man comes along and squats. The effect is contagious. Another comes along, measures the distance and squats a dozen metres from the first, in the same position and with the same aim in mind. And then a third, a fourth; sometimes a fifth and a sixth. And the conversation starts … Simultaneous, contemporaneous, in parallel … Words are not the only thing to emerge, but they last longer than the rest.’⁸

      And here is Martini the urban sophisticate, despairing, as Eritrea’s attorney-general reads out a report, at his colleagues’ pitiable level of education. ‘My God! What a business! It was the most laughable thing imaginable: logic, dignity of expression, grammar, were never so badly mangled. And to think these are the magistrates the government sends to civilize Africa!’⁹

      Everything interests him, from the awed reaction of Massawa’s residents to his governor’s regalia of plumed hat and gold braid, to the flavour of the turtle soup and ostrich steak (‘like veal’, he notes) he is served at a welcome ceremony. The sexual mores of Eritrea’s tribes, the way in which a visiting chieftain falls in love with his reflection in a mirror, the staggering ugliness of a group of Englishwomen spotted in a Cairo hotel, the gossip in Asmara’s expatriate community, all are recorded with Martini’s characteristic impish sense of humour.

      The task he had been set, he soon realized, was immense. Nearly 30 years after its arrival in the Horn, Italy had pitifully little to show for its investment. The Eritrea depicted in his diary is Italy’s version of the Wild West, swept by locust swarms and cholera outbreaks, braced for outbreaks of the plague; a land in which villages are raided by hostile tribes and shipping attacked by pirates. Half-Christian and half-Moslem, it is a frontier country in which slaves are still traded, shady European businessmen mingle with known spies and where government officials still fight – and die – in duels staged over adulterous wives.

      Just as he had been warned in Rome, the military administration had careered out of control, spending Italian taxpayers’ money as though it would never be held to account. ‘Either idiots or criminals’, the dregs of the soldiering profession were drawn to Eritrea, he noted, men who believed ‘that colonizing Africa and screwing the Italian government are one and the same thing’. ‘Dirty, out of uniform, they frequent the brothels until late, while the officers divide their time between prostitutes and the gaming table.’¹⁰ He was appalled to see how the military had lavished government funds on officers’ villas instead of investing in the roads, bridges and sewerage the colony so clearly needed. ‘Even the best soldiers feel they are only doing their duty when they throw money out of the window,’ he lamented after discovering, rotting in Massawa’s storerooms, 60,000 men’s shoes, enough spurs to equip an army, 40,000 mattocks, 9 years’ supply of salt, 3 years’ of wine, 2 years’ of jam, 52 months’ worth of coffee and 22 months’ of sugar.

      His Eritrean subjects were the least of his problems. The nine local ethnic groups had largely accepted Italian rule as a necessary evil. ‘They do not love us, but understand the benefits that come with our rule,’ remarked Martini, noting that local administrators regarded the Italians as ‘good but stupid’.¹¹ The settlers were the real disappointment. Far from serving as an alternative СКАЧАТЬ