Read Online I Didn't Do It for You by Michela Wrong - Free Book Online Page B

centuries…We claim to want to end the fratricidal wars that have crushed any sprig of human industry in those regions, yet each day we sign up Abyssinians in our forces and pay them to butcher other Abyssinians.’
    Yet having supped full of such horrors, having grasped the extent of his government’s hypocrisy, Martini comes to what might seem a counterintuitive conclusion. It is now too late, he argues, for Italy to pull out of Eritrea. By embarking in Africa, Italy has set in motion an unstoppable process of racial extermination which, however distasteful, must be allowed to run its course. Any other policy would be shameful. Rather than wasting time fretting over the legal niceties of land confiscation, he argues, Italy should be dispatching farmers to start work. ‘Let me repeat it for the 10th time: I would have preferred us never to have gone to Africa: I did what little I could, when there was still time, to get us to return home: but now that that time has passed…it is neither wise nor honest to keep spreading exaggerated stories.’ One can hear a sardonic disdain in Martini’s voice as he imagines the eventual fate of Africa’s indigenous tribes. ‘We have started the job. Succeeding generations will continue to depopulate Africa of its ancient inhabitants, down to the last but one. Not quite the last–he will be trained at college to sing our praises, celebrating how, by destroying the negro race, we finally succeeded in wiping out the slave trade!’
    The white race is ordained to supplant the African. ‘One racemust replace another, it’s that or nothing…The native is a hindrance; whether we like it or not, we will have to hunt him down and encourage him to disappear, just as has been done elsewhere with the Redskins, using all the methods civilization–which the native instinctively hates–can provide: gunfire and a daily dose of firewater.’
    His language is staggeringly blunt, but it is meant to shock. Martini’s main message to his Italian readers, to paraphrase it in crude modern terms, was: ‘Let’s cut the crap.’ A genocide is already under way in Eritrea, he tells his audience, a genocide that is the expression of ineluctable historical forces. ‘We have invaded Abyssinia without provocation, violently and unjustly. We excuse ourselves saying that the English, Russians, French, Germans and Spaniards have done the same elsewhere. So be it…injustice and violence will be necessary, sooner or later, and the greater our success, the more vital it will be not to allow trivial details or human rights to hold us up.’ Moral squeamishness cannot be allowed to stand in the way of a glorious master project. Let us not shrink from what is necessary, however distasteful. But let us, at the very least, have the decency to admit what we are doing. 8
    In modern-day Eritrea, popular memory tends to divide the Italian colonial era into two halves; the Martini years, time of benign paternalism, when Eritreans and Italians muddled along together well enough; and the Fascist years, when the Italians introduced a series of racial laws as callous as anything seen in apartheid South Africa. But as Nell’Affrica Italiana shows, the assumptions of biological determinism that came to form the bedrock of both Fascism and Nazism were present from the first days of the Italian presence in Africa. The thread runs strong and clear through half a century of occupation. If men of Martini’s generation, in contrast with their successors, felt no need to enshrine every aspect of their racial superiorityin a specific set of laws, it was only because they took their supremacy utterly for granted.
    Martini is a fascinating example of how it is possible for a man to be both painfully sensitive and chillingly mechanistic. The views he expressed were the notions of his day, an era in which Darwin’s theories of Natural Selection and