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

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СКАЧАТЬ leave Eritrea,’ he pronounced.²¹ Just when his plans looked set in concrete, Rome began wondering – in a reflection of the changing technological times – whether it might not be better off investing in a highway to Gonder and Addis Ababa instead.

      Despite all the telegrams and discussions, the stops and starts, the track slowly edged its way up to Asmara. By 1904, the crews had reached Ghinda, by 1911, four years after Martini had returned to Italy, it had reached Asmara. The final heave up the mountain proved the trickiest. Even today, old men living in Shegriny (‘the difficult place’), remember the dispute that lent their hamlet its name, as a father-and-son engineering team squabbled over the best route to take, each retiring to sulk in his tent before the precipitous route along ‘Devil’s Gate’ – little more than a narrow cliff ledge looking out over nothingness – was finally agreed.

      The single most expensive public project undertaken by the Italians in Eritrea, Martini’s railway was emblematic of his rule. Its construction marked the time when Eritrea, exposed to Western influences and endowed with the infrastructure of a modern industrial state, started down a path that would lead its citizens further and further away from their neighbours in feudal Abyssinia. Yet, as far as Martini was concerned, this gathering sense of national identity was almost an accidental by-product. Like so many colonial Big Men, he was haunted by the need to tame the landscape, to carve his initials into Eritrea’s very rocks. Literally hammering the nuts and bolts of a nation into place, he was more interested in the mechanical structures taking shape than what was going on in the heads of his African subjects. This colony was being created for Italy’s sake and if much of what he did improved life for Eritreans, it was motivated by an understanding of what was in Rome’s long-term interests, not altruism. No one could accuse Martini of remaining aloof – he toured constantly, setting up his marquee under the trees and receiving subjects whose customs he recorded in his diary. He knew the ways of the lowland Kunama and the nomadic rhythms of the Rashaida. But these were more the contacts of a deity with his worshippers than a parliamentarian with his constituents. This was the interest a lepidopterist shows in his butterfly collection – cool, distant and with a touch of deadly chloroform.

      The approach is at its clearest when Martini writes about the two areas in which intimate contact between the races was possible: sex and education. Racial segregation had been practised in the colony since its inception. In Asmara, Eritreans were confined to the stinking warren of dwellings around the markets, while the Europeans, whose most prominent members donned white tie and tails to attend Martini’s balls, lived in villas on the south side of the main street. Public transport was also segregated: Eritreans would have to wait another half-century to share the novel experience of using a bus’s front door. But the races still mingled far more than the prudish Martini felt comfortable with. He disapproved of prostitutes, but was also repelled by the widespread phenomenon of madamismo, in which Italian officials took Eritrean women as concubines, setting up house together. The practice, he warned, raised a truly ghastly prospect. ‘A black man must not cuckold a white man. So a white man must not place himself in a position where he can be cuckolded by a native.’²² If the offspring of such unsavoury unions were abandoned, it would bring shame upon ‘the dominant race’; if decently reared, it could ruin the Italian official concerned. Either outcome was to be deplored, so the entire situation was best avoided. It was an attempt at social engineering that enjoyed almost no success. By 1935, Asmara’s 3,500 Italians had produced 1,000 meticci, evidence of a healthy level of interbreeding.²³

      But it is for his stance on education that Martini is chiefly resented by Eritreans today. The former education minister violently rejected – ‘No, no and once again, no’ – any notion of mixed-race schooling. His justification was characteristically quixotic, the opposite of what one might expect from a man who had embraced the credo of racial superiority. ‘In my view, the blacks are more quick-witted than us,’ he remarked, noticing how swiftly Eritrean pupils picked up foreign languages.²⁴ This posed a problem at school, he said, where ‘the white man’s superiority, the basis of every colonial regime, is undermined’. No mixed-race schooling meant there would be no opportunity for bright young Eritreans to form subversive views on their dim future masters. ‘Let us avoid making comparisons.’ The natives must be kept in their place, taught only what they need to fulfil the subservient roles for which Rome thought them best suited. It was a variation of the philosophy Belgium would apply to the Congolese in the field of education: ‘Pas d’élites, pas d’ennemis’ (‘No elites, no enemies’).

      In 1907, Martini asked to be recalled. He had pulled off a final diplomatic coup, travelling to Addis to pay his respects to an ailing Menelik II – ‘one of the ugliest men I have ever seen, but with a very sweet smile’. It was a nightmarish journey during which the mules plunged up to their stomachs in mud and Martini, vain as ever, fussed constantly over the size of the ceremonial guard each provincial ruler sent to meet him.²⁵ His work on the railway was not complete. It would never, in fact, be completed to his satisfaction, for Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in the 1930s would interrupt construction of a final section intended to link the Eritrean line to Sudan’s network. But Rome’s procrastination had fatigued him. Being lord of all he surveyed had been enjoyable, but the small-mindedness of colonial life depressed him and he was fed up with army intrigues. As he prepared to embark aboard a P&O liner, with Eritrea’s notables – both black and white – mustered in Massawa to say goodbye, the man of letters was, for once, lost for words. ‘I feel such emotion that I have neither the strength nor ability to express it.’

      His farewell message to the Eritrean people reveals just how far the anti-colonialist of yesteryear had travelled, how heady the role of Lord Jim, sustained over nearly a decade, had proved. It reads more like a prayer penned by an Old Testament patriarch ascending to his rightful place at God’s side, than an Italian politician returning to his Tuscan constituency and, eventually, the top job at a newly-created Ministry for Colonies.

      â€˜People from the Mareb to the sea, hear me! His Majesty the King of Italy desired that I should come amongst you and govern in his name. And for ten years I listened and I judged, I rewarded and I punished, in the King’s name. And for ten years I travelled the lands of the Christian and the Moslem, the plains and the mountain, and I said “go forth and trade” to the merchants and “go forth and cultivate” to the farmers, in the King’s name. And peace was with you, and the roads were opened to trade, and the harvests were safe in the fields. Hear me! His Majesty the King learnt that his will had been done, by the Grace of God, and has permitted me to return to my own country. I bid farewell to great and small, rich and poor. May your trade prosper and your lands remain fertile. May God give you peace!’²⁶

      With this portentous salutation, the Martini era came to a close.

      He left behind a society transformed, but one – as far as its Eritrean majority was concerned – that held him in awe rather than affection. Today, when most Eritreans learn English at school, Martini has become little more than a name, his thoughts and achievements obscured by the barrier of language. Asmara holds not a single monument to this seminal figure. But older, Italian-speaking Eritreans remember, and their assessment of Martini is as ambivalent as the man himself. ‘His legacy has been enormous, yet his aim was always to keep Eritrea in chains,’ says Dr Aba Isaak, a local historian. ‘He was a number one racist, but a superb statesman. I admire him, even while I regard him as my enemy.’²⁷

      When Martini СКАЧАТЬ