Italy's Colonial Futures: Colonial Inertia and Postcolonial Capital in Asmara

Italy's Colonial Futures: Colonial Inertia and Postcolonial Capital in Asmara

Mia Fuller

[From Asmarino Staff: This is an excellent article that deals with colonial legacy in Eritrea, not in the usual sense of it but inversely (and perversely) so: the making of the asmarino psyche and its impact on the nationalism of Eritreans. We recommend that you read the whole article; please press this link: Italy's Colonial Futures: Colonial Inertia and Postcolonial Capital in ... to do so. Here, we have provided only a small section of the article. And within the link, it is better if you select the PDF format for legibility reasons]

Asmara is no longer a secret.
--Naigzy Gebremedhin (2007, 25)

The mal d’Africa of the nineteenth century has been supplanted by the mal d’Europa of the twentieth century.
--Ruth Iyob (2005b, 271)

Abstract

The core of Asmara, Italy’s former colonial capital in Eritrea, is widely known as a unique repository of 1930s Italian architecture. In addition, its Italian food and other traces of the colonial era lend it the semblance, to foreign eyes, of a still-colonial city. This article describes this apparent colonial inertia with respect to Eritrean citizens’ and government’s interests in sustaining the illusion, and argues that they use their past as Italian colonial subjects – specifically, their postcolonial cultural capital - to fortify their sense of separateness from Ethiopians, and celebrate their independence from their African neighbor.

Postcolonial Capital

It must be underscored, however, that Eritrean authorities could not make use of outsiders’ colonial nostalgia, or rely on the Italian-colonial past to reinforce national sentiment, if Eritrea’s ordinary citizens did not concur in viewing that past as a basis for national solidarity and distinction. I turn now to the workings of political and cultural capital in the post-colony: to how the Eritrean state derives political capital from the Italian colonial past; and how Asmarini in general attribute distinctive cultural capital to their once having been colonized by Italians.

As described above, Eritreans have made their capital Eritrean through experiences good and bad. The Italian trace remains, but Eritreans’ collusion with a self-indulgent Italian image should be regarded as their re-use of a painful past toward a non-Italian future. Let me add that although the city’s core is almost entirely unmodified, a few uniquely Eritrean monuments to independence have been added. On a main road sits a gigantic pair of sandals, representing the plastic footwear worn by all the fighters in their epic struggle. The monument stands for the cause that united Eritreans against Ethiopia, regardless of class, gender, or age, and the war that brought them victory. A more discreet monument in the shape of Denden, the mountain where the fighters made the greatest sacrifices, was erected in a central city park. With these minor additions, what still looks to foreigners like an Italian city has been transformed into an Eritrean monument. The whole city – indeed, its wholeness in spite of years of war – celebrates Eritreans’ triumph in separating from Ethiopia. Whether the original constructions were Italian is outweighed by the fact that they pre-date the country’s federation with Ethiopia, and that they withstood the atrocities of Derg occupation.

Keeping Asmara’s Italian-era buildings in their original form allows, in visual terms at least, for Eritrean history to resume in the precise setting where it was unfolding before Ethiopian domination. In other domains as well, we can identify continuities, or repetitions, of patterns of governance and social conduct from the Italian era into the present, regardless of Eritrea’s forty years of Ethiopian control. Ruth Iyob (2005b) has been most articulate in calling attention to the abuses perpetrated by today’s state handin- hand with its exploitation of the vestiges of the colonial apparatus in continuing to subjugate the population. On a historical plane, Uoldelul Chelati Dirar (2008) has pointed out the crucial role of the ‘native troops’ (askari) who served the Italians in their East and North African wars, in forming a national Eritrean identity that is distinct from Ethiopians’. Furthermore, the emergence of an Italo-Eritrean population dating to the Italian era inevitably altered Eritrean society’s stratification, creating a new, partly marginalized, and yet sometimes privileged, sector (e.g., Barrera 2005). If Italian colonialism was constitutive of the Italian nation-state, as I argued earlier, in these respects we must note that it was of the Eritrean nation-state too.

Indeed, Eritreans’ sense of separateness from their Ethiopian neighbors was in some senses created, or developed, by their years under Italian rule; the city’s intact appearance is also proof of that historic separateness, which legitimizes (for Eritreans) their separateness from Ethiopia now. But there is even more at stake. For many Asmarini the cultural capital attached to the Italian past provides them with a claim to a long-standing cosmopolitanism. It is integral to the anecdote recounted above that the older Asmarino responds in Italian, not only because the tourist somehow assumes he will, but because he is of course in command of the former colonizers’ language. This too is a form of reappropriation, and of control over what was once one of the many instruments of Italian power over Eritreans. A further example of Eritreans’ colonization of Italian cultural capital in the present appears when they report that the first time they visit Italy, they are overwhelmed by how much they are reminded of Asmara – not the other way around.

Yet these claims to Italian culture provide more than distinction from the Ethiopian enemy; they are also claims of superiority over Ethiopians. Iyob puts it most trenchantly: “[Eritrean] proponents of mal d’Italia exhibit an innate sense of superiority over neighbors who escaped colonial rule and were thus bereft of Italian roads, cuisine, and fashion” (268-9). Italians of the Risorgimento particularly abhorred the fact that the occupying forces controlling the peninsula were Europeans – their closest relatives, so to speak – and the same holds here. In addition to the horrors perpetrated by the Derg, being subsumed and ruled as subalterns by fellow East Africans added insult and shame to the injury of colonial subjugation. A great deal of Eritrean rhetoric and positioning since independence can be read more clearly in this light: the nation must assure its symbolic difference from Ethiopia, no matter what the human cost involved, for example, in fruitless border wars.

On a lighter but still meaningful note, this helps explain the fact that the owners of an Italian cinema, restored in 2001, decided to name it Cinema Roma and decorate its façade with neo-classical pilasters. Meanwhile, the posh Bar Zara announces its date of establishment using Roman numerals – MMII – as the fascist government did in the 1930s. In cases such as these, Asmarini are not just repeating or continuing Italian-era usages; they have created new businesses trafficking in entertainment, but also in the cultural capital of superiority by a transitive association with Roman antiquity, arguably the most important foundation of European civilization, on the basis of their past as Italian colonial subjects. In the process, they have revived the fascist practice of invoking that antiquity. And yet, this seemingly philo-Italian or even philo-fascist trend is ultimately in the service of addressing neighboring Ethiopians as less worldly, or less European. Most importantly, Eritreans’ apparent colonial nostalgia is above all a function of their politics of differentiation from their African neighbors.

The Eritrean state, and many Asmarini, require all the symbolic foundations of distinction from Ethiopia they can muster in order to propel Eritrea into its own independent future. For this reason, we can expect that the vestiges and threads of Italian colonial culture will be preserved and nurtured for the foreseeable future as well. Italian colonialism, long since disowned by Italy, continues its own forward motion nonetheless.

[To read the full article, please press this link: Italy's Colonial Futures: Colonial Inertia and Postcolonial Capital in ...]

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