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

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СКАЧАТЬ and Indians judged civilized enough to count as ‘white’. Land had been confiscated and experimental agricultural projects launched, but the going had proved so tough many Italian families begged to be sent home. Martini was none too impressed by those who remained, noting that their Greek colleagues seemed less prone to frittering away their profits. ‘The Greek does not buy horses and does not keep mistresses, the Italian keeps both horse and mistress.’¹² The constant complaints by the hard core that remained drove him wild. ‘I’ve always said that governing 20 Italians in the colony requires more patience, courage, and skill than governing 400,000 natives,’ he fumed. When Rome had the temerity to inquire whether an Eritrean display should feature in the Paris Exhibition’s colonial section, an exasperated Martini lost his temper: ‘All we can send are dead men’s bones, bungled battle plans and columns of wasted money. Up till now these are the only fruits of our colonial harvest.’¹³

      Moving the capital from Massawa to cool Asmara, he set about his work with characteristic briskness. A series of decrees created a new civilian administration, placing the army firmly under its control. Strict limits were set to the number of civil servants employed in Eritrea, a move that slashed Rome’s expenditure. The worst soldiers and officers were simply expelled. ‘These steps will cause a great deal of ill feeling, but I know I am doing my duty. Order, discipline, justice and thrift: without these the colony can neither be governed nor saved,’ Martini pronounced.¹⁴ The colony was divided up into nine provinces, each with its own capital, and Martini established the building blocks of a modern society: an independent judiciary, a telegraph system and departments of finance, health and education.

      The man who had calmly predicted the disappearance of Eritrea’s indigenous peoples quickly changed his tone. It was all very well airily discussing the elimination of local tribes as a passing visitor. Now that he was actually running Eritrea and could see for himself the damage – both political and commercial – done by military confrontation, Martini turned accommodating pacifier. Determined to shore up the Eritrean border, he became the perfect neighbour, putting an end to Rome’s long tradition of double-dealing. When rebel chiefs on the other side of the frontier challenged Menelik’s rule, Martini turned a deaf ear to their pleas for weapons. Instead of fantasizing, like so many Italian contemporaries, about avenging Adua, he cooperated with Menelik’s attempts to check the lawlessness on their mutual frontier, stabilizing the region in the process. As for emigration, Martini quickly realized how poorly judged the royal inquiry report had been. The colony was simply not ready for a flood of Italian labourers, who risked clashing with locals and would, in any case, be undercut by Eritreans willing to accept a fraction of what a European considered an honest wage. He scrapped legislation authorizing further land confiscation and pushed employers to narrow the huge differential between the wages paid Italians and Eritreans.

      But while righting certain blatant injustices, Martini was never a soft touch. If Eritrea was to survive, the locals must be taught a lesson in the pitiless consistency of colonial law, the merest hint of insubordination ruthlessly crushed. Mutinous ascaris were shackled or whipped and the sweltering coastal jails filled with prisoners who often paid the ultimate price. ‘I’ve never had a bloodthirsty reputation and I really don’t deserve one,’ Martini wrote, after refusing to pardon a condemned bandit. ‘But here, without a death penalty, you cannot govern.’¹⁵ He was building a state, virtually from scratch, and often he felt as though he was doing the work single-handed. ‘There is not a dog here with whom one can hold an intellectual discussion,’ he complained in a letter to his daughter.¹⁶ It was a lonely, heady experience, bound to encourage delusions of grandeur. ‘At times, unfortunately,’ he confessed to his diary, ‘I feel it would not be too arrogant to say, adapting the words of Louis 14th, “I am the colony”.’¹⁷

      The longer he stayed, the more convinced he became that the success of this monumental project hinged on one key element. He knew Eritrea had gold, fish stocks in abundance and river valleys capable of producing coffee and grain, cotton and sisal. But as long as a rickety mule track was the only way of scaling the mountains separating hinterland from sea, Eritrea would remain forever cut off from the African continent, its ports idle, its administration reliant on government subsidies. Only a railroad could unlock the riches of the plateau and – beyond it – the markets of Abyssinia and Sudan. It was the one explicit undertaking Martini had sought in exchange for his loyal service during his final conversation with King Umberto. ‘Without a railway joining Massawa with the highlands, nothing good, lasting or productive will ever come from Eritrea,’ he told the monarch. ‘Rest assured,’ the King had promised. ‘The railway will be built.’¹⁸

      The close of the 19th century was the golden era of African railways. Flinging their sleepers and coal-eating locomotives across savannah and jungle, the colonial powers sent a blunt message to the locals: progress was unstoppable. The railroad was both an instrument of war, depositing troops armed with machine guns within range of their spear-carrying enemies, and an instrument of commercial penetration, bringing the ivory, minerals and spices at the continent’s heart to market, opening the interior to land-hungry farmers and hopeful miners. Cecil Rhodes dreamt of one that would run from Cape to Cairo, the explorer Henry Stanley, nicknamed ‘Breaker of Rocks’, was building one which would link Leopoldville to the sea, the British were braving man-eating lions to connect Uganda with the Swahili coast. Railways were the equivalent of today’s national airlines – no African colony worth its salt could be without one.

      Martini did not intend to be left out, although he knew Eritrea’s topography made this a uniquely demanding challenge. When Martini arrived, the Italian army had already laid 28 km of track to the town of Saati, carrying troops to fight Ras Alula. But the work had been carried out in such haste, it all needed to be redone. There were drawings to be sketched, sites visited, contracts put out to tender and strikes to be settled. It all fell to Martini, acutely aware that Italy’s colonial rivals were establishing their own trade routes into the interior, with France and Britain vying for control of a railway that would link Djibouti with Addis Ababa. ‘The railway means peace, both inside and outside our borders, and huge savings on the budget,’ he told his diary, time and again. Despite the King’s promise, winning the funding did not prove easy. Having sent Martini out with orders to cut spending, Rome did not take kindly to constant requests for money. He would waste months peppering the Foreign Ministry with telegrams, winning his bosses round to the railroad’s merits, only to see the government fall and a new set of ministers take office, who all had to be persuaded afresh. The railway, fretted Martini, ‘would be the only really effective remedy to many – perhaps all – of the colony’s ills. But in Rome they do not want to know.’¹⁹

      He assembled a small army of 1,100 Eritrean labourers and 200 Italian overseers for the backbreaking and dangerous work, hacking and blasting through the rock, building stations and water-storage vaults as the railroad inched forwards. Struggling to master the technical minutiae of rail engineering, Martini found himself acting as peacemaker between irate private contractors and his abrasive head of works, Francesco Schupfer, a stickler for detail capable of forcing a company caught using sub-standard materials to knock down a stretch of earthworks and start again. ‘Perhaps he is too rough, but he is a gentleman,’ Martini pondered, intervening yet again to smooth ruffled feathers. ‘He is hated by everyone, but very dear to me.’²⁰ When Britain raised the possibility of connecting Sudan’s rail network to the Eritrean line – a move that would have turned СКАЧАТЬ