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Italian Anti-colonialism and the Ethiopian War

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Italian Colonialism and Resistances to Empire, 1930-1970

Part of the book series: Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series ((CIPCSS))

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Abstract

In 1935, fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia, an independent sovereign state governed by the emperor Haile Selassie and recognized by the League of Nations: it was one of the last colonial wars of conquest ever fought in the world. Some activists, like Sylvia Pankhurst, saw Ethiopia as the first victim of fascist aggression after Italy. Mussolini was attempting to build up Italian colonial possessions at a time in which colonialism was beginning its decline and anti-imperialist movements were developing in various parts of the European empires. The Italo-Ethiopian war acted as a catalyst for anti-fascist and anti-colonial resistance movements on the eve of World War II, and, most notably, provoked a wave of reactions across the world. The Ethiopian war can be defined as a “critical event”—an event that institutes “a new modality of historical action that was not inscribed in the inventory of that situation”. In the lead-up to the invasion and afterwards, new modes of action came into being that redefined and focalized race consciousness for African Americans and other members of the black diaspora, in terms of a transnational sense of affiliation with an imaginary black homeland, Ethiopia.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Richard Pankhurst, Sylvia Pankhurst: Counsel for Ethiopia. A Biographical Essay on Ethiopian, Anti-fascist and Anti-colonialist History, 1934–1960 (Hollywood, CA: Tsehai, 2003), 2.

  2. 2.

    Veena Das, Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), 5.

  3. 3.

    François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 22.

  4. 4.

    According to the historian Angelo Del Boca, Britain displayed the most opposition to the war of all the European countries. See Gli italiani in Africa Orientale: La conquista dell’impero (Rome: Mondadori, 2001), 330, henceforth referred to as La conquista dell’impero. In Chaps. 3 and 4, I examine the writings of Pan-Africanists in relation to the invasion, as well as the more general reactions to the war within the African diaspora , including those of African Americans.

  5. 5.

    See Romain Rainero, L’anticolonialismo italiano da Assab ad Adua. 1869–1896 (Milan: Edizioni di Continuità, 1971).

  6. 6.

    See Daniel Waley, British Public Opinion and the Abyssinian War: 1935–1936 (London: Temple Smith, 1975).

  7. 7.

    See Jacqueline Andall and Derek Duncan, “Memories and Legacies of Italian Colonialism”, Italian Colonialism: Legacy and Memory, ed. Jacqueline Andall and Derek Duncan (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005), 15.

  8. 8.

    Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Mia Fuller, “Introduction”, Italian Colonialism, ed. Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Mia Fuller (New York: Palgrave, 2005), 3.

  9. 9.

    See the diatribe between Del Boca and Montanelli on this issue, as reported by Michele Brambilla (“Montanelli, Del Boca e l’Etiopia: le guerre non finiscono mai”, Corriere della Sera, October 1, 1996). Montanelli denied, in the face of all evidence, that Italians had used nerve gas against civilian populations in the invasion of Ethiopia. The Geneva Convention, established in 1925 after the horrors of the First World War involving poison gas, explicitly prohibited its use. Montanelli finally admitted he had been wrong after Del Boca presented him with incontrovertible evidence from the Italian State Archives testifying that the use of poison gas had been authorized by the commanding officers (see also Angelo Del Boca, I gas di Mussolini. Il fascismo e la guerra d’Etiopia, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1996).

  10. 10.

    Brambilla, 31.

  11. 11.

    Angelo Del Boca, “Gli studi sul colonialismo italiano”, L’impero fascista: Italia ed Etiopia (1935–1941), ed. Riccardo Bottoni (Bari: Laterza, 2008), 26–27.

  12. 12.

    An important publication in this rapidly emerging field of Italian postcolonial studies is Postcolonial Italy: Challenging National Homogeneity, ed. Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Caterina Romeo (2012).

  13. 13.

    See Fuller, “Italy’s Colonial Futures: Colonial Inertia and Postcolonial Capital in Asmara”, California Italian Studies 2:1, 2011, (3–19), and also Michela Wrong, I Didn’t Do It For You: How the World Betrayed a Small African Nation (London: Harper, 2005).

  14. 14.

    See Nicola Labanca, “Guerra coloniale in Africa orientale 1935–1941; un progetto totalitario?”, unpublished paper.

  15. 15.

    Giorgio Rochat, Le guerre italiane 1935–1943. Dall’impero d’Etiopia alla disfatta (Turin: Einaudi, 2005), xiii. Rochat speaks of a “fragmented memory” relative to these wars, which tended to be the preserve of military memoirs and the like, rather than part of a wider political national history (see xiv).

  16. 16.

    Two volumes by Giuliano Procacci stand out in this respect: Dalla parte dell’Etiopia. L’aggressione italiana vista dai movimenti anticolonialisti d’Asia, d’Africa, d’America (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1984) and Il socialismo internazionale e la guerra d’Etiopia (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1978).

  17. 17.

    See J. Ayodele Langley, Pan-Africanism and Nationalism in West Africa: 1900–1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973); S.K.B. Asante, Pan-African Protest: West Africa and the Italo-Ethiopian Crisis (1977); Joseph E. Harris, African-American Reactions to War in Ethiopia: 1936–1941 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1994); Penny von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans Against Anticolonialism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Diaspora and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003); Susan D. Pennybacker, From Scottsboro to Munich: Race and Political Culture in 1930s Britain (Princeton University Press, 2009).

  18. 18.

    Fikru Negash Gebrekidan, Bond Without Blood: A History of Ethiopian and New World Black Relations, 1896–1991 (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2005), 3. The term “Afrocentric” has a contested and complex legacy in the context of historiographical studies; Gebrekidan remarks that the reactions against the use of the term have more to do with reflexes than with thought-out responses. These are scholars who believe that the term relates more to a dogmatic approach (resembling other “isms” like Zionism, Marxism, etc.) rather than rational scientific enquiry, a parti pris position, as it were.

  19. 19.

    George Padmore , Pan-Africanism or Communism? The Coming Struggle for Africa (London: Dennis Dobson, 1956), 17.

  20. 20.

    See Nicola Labanca, Oltremare: Storia dell’espansione coloniale italiana (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002), 62–64.

  21. 21.

    However, Fabrizio De Donno examines a counter-narrative relating to the Risorgimento and colonization in the work of Alfredo Oriani, an early supporter of Italian colonialist ventures. He argues that Oriani and other followers of Giuseppe Mazzini felt that post-unification Italy had a duty to bring progress and liberalism to oppressed countries, much as the Risorgimento had been about liberating Italy from a foreign oppressor (see De Donno, “La razza ario-mediterranea”, Interventions 8:3 (2006), 400).

  22. 22.

    See Labanca, Oltremare, 71, and Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere [Prison Notebooks], ed. Valentino Gerratana (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), Q19§24, 2018–2019.

  23. 23.

    See Giovanna Tomasello, L’Africa tra mito e realtà: storia della letteratura coloniale italiana (Palermo: Sellerio, 2004), 26.

  24. 24.

    Rainero, L’anticolonialismo italiano da Assab ad Adua, 173–174.

  25. 25.

    Labanca, Oltremare, 81.

  26. 26.

    Labanca, Oltremare, 83.

  27. 27.

    Del Boca, L’Africa nella coscienza degli italiani: Miti, memorie, errori, sconfitte (Milan: Mondadori, 2002), 113.

  28. 28.

    Labanca, Oltremare, 153.

  29. 29.

    Ibid., 154.

  30. 30.

    Mirella Mingardo, “‘Pace’, ‘lavoro’, ‘civiltà’: propaganda e consenso nella stampa periodica durante la guerra d’Etiopia”, Ti saluto e vado in Abissinia: Propaganda, consenso e vita quotidiana attraverso la stampa periodica, le pubblicazioni e i documenti della Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense (Milan: Viennepierre, 1998), 24.

  31. 31.

    Ibid., 30.

  32. 32.

    See Michela Wrong, I Didn’t Do It For You, for an account of the impact of the Ethiopian war on the Eritrean colony, and Marco Barbon, Asmara Dream (2009), a collection of stunning, delicately tinted Polaroid photographs of Italian modernist architecture in Asmara, which survives largely intact to this day. Mia Fuller presents an excellent analysis of the way in which contemporary Eritreans experience and remember the legacy of Italian colonial architecture on their understanding of their own national heritage. She also critiques volumes like Barbon’s and those of other European photographers who tend to fixate on the “nostalgic” and timeless dimension of Asmara’s architecture without taking into consideration how Eritreans themselves conceptualize this built environment. See Fuller, “Italy’s Colonial Futures”.

  33. 33.

    See Mia Fuller, Moderns Abroad: Architecture, Cities, and Italian Imperialism (London: Routledge, 2007).

  34. 34.

    Wrong, I Didn’t Do It for You, 5.

  35. 35.

    Labanca, Oltremare, 197.

  36. 36.

    Del Boca, La conquista dell’impero, 219–220.

  37. 37.

    Rochat, Le guerre italiane, 21.

  38. 38.

    See Rochat, ibid., 21, and Del Boca, La conquista dell’impero, 247–290.

  39. 39.

    See Del Boca, La conquista dell’impero, 254.

  40. 40.

    Del Boca, ibid., 256.

  41. 41.

    Del Boca, ibid., 258.

  42. 42.

    Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Il poema africano della divisione “28 ottobre” (Milan: Mondadori, 1937), 29. Marinetti has plenty to say about the beauty of a war that “realizes the mechanical man”. The fascist aesthetic, for him, is perfectly embodied in this conflict. He also volunteered to fight in Ethiopia.

  43. 43.

    Rochat, 25.

  44. 44.

    “He and the other Great Schoolmaster and Radio Speaker in Rome went around saying that the war was made to order for the benefit of the peasants of Gagliano, who soon would have all the land they wanted, and such good land that all you had to do was to put seeds in it and the crops would shoot up without further aid. Unfortunately the two schoolteachers talked so much of the grandeur of Rome that the peasants had no confidence in anything they said […] They had no faith in a promised land which had first to be taken away from those to whom it belonged; instinct told them that this was wrong and could only bring ill luck. The ‘fellows in Rome’ didn’t usually put themselves out on their behalf and this latest undertaking, in spite of all the fuss made over it, must have a remote purpose in which they had no part.” See Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli, transl. Frances Frenaye ([1945]; London: Penguin, 2000), 130–131.

  45. 45.

    Del Boca, La conquista dell’impero, 256.

  46. 46.

    See, for example, Simona Colarizi, L’opinione degli italiani sotto il regime, 1929–1943 (Bari: Laterza, 1991); Patrizia Caccia and Mariella Mingardo, Ti saluto e vado in Abissinia: Propaganda, consenso, vita quotidiana attraverso la stampa periodica, le pubblicazioni e i documenti della Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense (Milan: Viennepierre, 1998); Paul Corner, “L’opinione popolare italiana di fronte alla guerra d’Etiopia”, L’impero fascista (1935–1941), ed. Riccardo Bottoni (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2008), 167–186; Enrica Bricchetto, La verità della propaganda. Il “Corriere della Sera” alla guerra d’Etiopia (Unicopli, 2004).

  47. 47.

    Paul Corner argues that people were generally not very convinced by the war and that even the great crowds that turned up on October 2, 1935, when the war against Ethiopia was declared, were actually made up of people who had been forced to be there (“L’opinione popolare italiana di fronte alla guerra d’Etiopia”, L’impero fascista, 173–174).

  48. 48.

    Charles Burdett, Journeys Through Fascism: Italian Travel Writing Between the Wars (New York: Berghahn, 2007), 118.

  49. 49.

    See Del Boca, La conquista dell’impero, 347. He refers to Alberto Asor Rosa, Storia d’Italia, vol. 4, Dall’Unità a oggi, Part II, La Cultura, (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), 1567–1577, and Anna Panicali, “Vittorini e l’alienazione negli anni trenta”, Ideologie, n. 7, 1961, 5–16.

  50. 50.

    Alberto Asor Rosa, Storia d’Italia, vol. 4, Dall’Unità a oggi, Part II, La Cultura (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), 1576–1577.

  51. 51.

    He notes that neorealism, as exemplified by Vittorini’s work, also failed to interrogate this “left fascist” matrix of its own formal and political enquiry. He argues that there was a process of repression involved towards this phase of youthful fascist activity among these writers (Asor Rosa, 1577).

  52. 52.

    Vasco Pratolini, Il Bargello, VIII, 20; cit. in Asor Rosa, ibid., 1574.

  53. 53.

    Elio Vittorini, “Ragioni dell’azienda collettiva”, in Il Bargello, VIII, 40; cited in Asor Rosa, ibid., 1575. Capitalized words are in the original. Burdett also comments on Vittorini’s argument that “the colony offered the ground for a ‘totalitarian corporativist experience’” (Journeys Through Fascism, 123).

  54. 54.

    Evelyn Waugh , Waugh in Abyssinia ([1936]; London: Penguin, 2000), 166.

  55. 55.

    Evelyn Waugh, Waugh in Abyssinia, 166–167.

  56. 56.

    See Robert Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 17.

  57. 57.

    Labanca, Oltremare, 409 and Francesca Locatelli, “La comunità italiana di Asmara negli anni trenta tra propaganda, leggi razziali e realtà sociale”, L’impero fascista, 369–391.

  58. 58.

    See Michele Strazza, “Il fascismo e l’emigrazione negli Stati Uniti”, http://www.storiain.net/arret/num139/artic1.asp. Strazza mentions that Mussolini changed his policy towards emigration in 1926–1927 and also decided to call emigrants “Italiani all’estero” instead of “emigranti”. Silone in his 1933 novel Fontamara documents what a tragedy it was for poor Southern peasants when emigration to the US was closed off to them during fascism (also due to more restrictive immigration laws in the United States).

  59. 59.

    Carla Ghezzi remarks that “colonia” and “coloniale” were ambiguous terms at the turn of the last century: there was a semantic slippage between Italian settlements outside national borders and the colonies of Somalia and Eritrea. This was a symptom of the simultaneous processes of emigration and imperialistic expansion taking place shortly after unification in 1861 (Carla Ghezzi, “Fonti di documentazione e ricerca per la conoscenza dell’Africa: dall’Istituto coloniale italiano all’Istituto Italo-Africano”, Studi piacentini 7 (1990): 167–192, 167). See also Mark Choate, Emigrant Nation: The Making of Italy Abroad (Harvard University Press, 2008), 2, for a discussion of the double meaning of “colonia” in the late nineteenth century.

  60. 60.

    See Mark I. Choate, “Tunisia, Contested: Italian Nationalism, French Imperial Rule, and Migration in the Mediterranean Basin”, California Italian Studies 1(1), 2010, 1–20. Furthermore, Burdett insightfully identifies analogies between fascist rhetoric around land reclamation works in the Pontine Marshes, implemented by Mussolini, and nationalist discourses surrounding the “re-conquest of Ethiopia” after the defeat of Adwa: “The recovery of the Ethiopian land surface re-enacted the Fascist recovery of the nation” (Journeys Through Fascism, 121).

  61. 61.

    Paul Corner, “L’opinione popolare italiana di fronte alla guerra d’Etiopia”, L’impero fascista (1935–1941), ed. Riccardo Bottoni (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2008), 180.

  62. 62.

    Del Boca, La conquista dell’impero, 714.

  63. 63.

    Del Boca, La conquista dell’impero, 717.

  64. 64.

    Cf. Del Boca, La conquista dell’impero, Rochat and Labanca for details of the massacre.

  65. 65.

    Waugh , Waugh in Abyssinia, 154.

  66. 66.

    Del Boca, La conquista dell’impero, 731.

  67. 67.

    Padmore , Pan-Africanism or Communism?, 146–147.

  68. 68.

    Cited in Del Boca, La conquista dell’impero, 740–741.

  69. 69.

    “Emperor Haile Selassie at the League of Nations”, Ethiopia Observer, vol. 3, n. 10 (September 1959), 315.

  70. 70.

    Richard Pankhurst, Sylvia Pankhurst: Counsel for Ethiopia, 63–64.

  71. 71.

    Barbara Sòrgoni, “Pratiche antropologiche nel clima dell’Impero”, L’impero fascista, 415–428.

  72. 72.

    At the time, the PCI was in exile in France.

  73. 73.

    In its April–May issue of 1935, Lo Stato Operaio, the Paris-based journal of the PCI in exile, published a long series of testimonies by farmers, manual workers and soldiers against the Ethiopian war, presumably collected by party members. One testimony claimed that many Italian families were dead set against this new war because the memory of Italy’s previous African wars, and of the massacres of Italian conscripts which had occurred there, was still very vivid among the population. See “I lavoratori italiani e la guerra (testimonianze)”, Lo Stato Operaio, anno 9, numero 4–5, April–May 1935, 272–286.

  74. 74.

    Italian anti-Slavic sentiment has been connected to a “border racism” (razzismo di frontiera) that dates back to the nineteenth century and even earlier, when Italian nationalism was emerging in juxtaposition with national-ethnic communities in the Balkan region. See Marta Verginella, “Antislavismo, razzismo di frontiera?”, Aut-Aut, special issue on “Il postcoloniale in Italia”, n. 349 (Jan–March 2011), 30–49.

  75. 75.

    See Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, vol. 3, 2031–2032.

  76. 76.

    See Andrea Marabini, La barbarie dell’imperialismo fascista nelle colonie italiane (Paris: Edizioni Italiane di Cultura, 1939).

  77. 77.

    Marabini, 35.

  78. 78.

    See Fabrizio De Donno, “The Gandhian Mazzini: Democratic Nationalism, Self-Rule and Non-Violence”, Giuseppe Mazzini and the Globalisation of Democratic Nationalism, 1830–1920, ed. C.A. Bayly and E. Biagini (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 430–461.

  79. 79.

    See Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Q19§24, 2011.

  80. 80.

    Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “Draft Theses on the National and Colonial Question” (1920), http://marxists.anu.edu.au/archive/lenin/works/1920/jun/05.htm; and Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1965).

  81. 81.

    For the historian Paolo Spriano, the importance of the Theses of Lyons was that they represented the most ambitious attempt to apply Leninist tactics and strategies to Italy. Spriano speaks of it in terms of a translation of the Soviet experience, a very sophisticated and advanced interpretation of the Russian revolution in an Italian key: a “research into the history of dominant groups and the class character of fascism. In this sense the Theses of Lyons are the most mature product of Gramsci and Togliatti’s Leninist theoretical approach/development [sviluppo]” (Spriano, Storia del partito comunista italiano. Da Bordiga a Gramsci, vol. 1 (Turin: Einaudi, 1967), 495). The Third Congress, held in Lyons, was also when the PCI definitively ostracized Bordiga and his supporters within the party, and Gramsci and Togliatti’s current became dominant.

  82. 82.

    See Spriano, Storia del Partito comunista italiano. Da Bordiga a Gramsci, vol. 1, 495.

  83. 83.

    Le Tesi di Lione. Riflessioni su Gramsci e la storia d’Italia, ed. Leone Cafagna et al. (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1990), 135.

  84. 84.

    Ibid., 135.

  85. 85.

    “Verbali delle sedute dell III Congresso del PCI, relazione della Centrale al congresso, 1926-01, Relazione sulla Quistione Agraria”, UA 382, 113, Archivio Storico del PCI, Istituto Gramsci (Rome).

  86. 86.

    Tesi di Lione, 142.

  87. 87.

    Tesi di Lione, 146.

  88. 88.

    Ibid., 146.

  89. 89.

    In The Prison Notebooks, Gramsci argued that the imperial aspirations of the new nation-state were linked to the Southern question and Italian economic policy after 1861. Gramsci notes how Italy’s need for agricultural land and space for demographic expansion fuelled the desire for colonies among Italian statesmen at the end of the nineteenth century, especially the Prime Minister Francesco Crispi, who was in office from 1887 to 1896, with one interruption (Quaderni, Q19§24, 2019). Gramsci observes that, in classic “imperial” fashion, Crispi presented the “mirage” of African colonies to the Southern Italian peasant as a diversionary tactic to avoid having to effect a more equitable redistribution of land in Italy itself (Quaderni, Q19§24, 2018) and to consolidate the hegemony of the political ruling class over the rural masses of the South. Colonization follows the flow of capital invested in different countries and is never due purely to the need to “place” excess population (Quaderni, Q8§80, 986; Q19§6, 1991). For Gramsci, Italian imperialism was “passionate and rhetorical”, without any real economic basis, since it lacked capital to invest in overseas markets.

  90. 90.

    See Del Boca, La conquista dell’impero, 322ff.

  91. 91.

    Tesi di Lione, 147.

  92. 92.

    Tesi di Lione, 156.

  93. 93.

    Ruggero Grieco, “Articoli delle tesi politiche del VI congresso con annotazioni manoscritte di Togliatti; rapporto di Grieco (Garlandi) alla ‘Commissione dell’Oriente prossimo’ sul partito nel lavoro nelle colonie, 1928-07-04”, UA 644, Archivio Storico del PCI, Istituto Gramsci (Rome). I am indebted to Tom Langley for this document. He located it in the archives of the PCI at the Istituto Gramsci of Rome and very kindly passed it on to me. I quote from his transcription of the text, a scanned copy of which is held in the archive.

  94. 94.

    No mention is made of this crucial document by Paolo Spriano, author of one of the most well known historical accounts of the PCI, Storia del Partito Comunista Italiano.

  95. 95.

    Gramsci , Quaderni del carcere, Q12§1, 1527–1528. Gramsci was writing about black intellectuals in 1932, according to the dating of the Notebooks.

  96. 96.

    Labanca argues that the Ethiopian war, which isolated Mussolini internationally, inevitably brought about his alliance with Hitler (Oltremare, 197).

  97. 97.

    Paolo Spriano, Storia del partito comunista italiano. I fronti popolari, Stalin, la guerra, vol. 3 (Turin: Einaudi, 1970), 49.

  98. 98.

    Folder 1309, 1935, Archivio Storico del PCI, Istituto Gramsci (Rome).

  99. 99.

    Folder 1320, 1935, Archivio Storico del PCI, Istituto Gramsci (Rome).

  100. 100.

    Spriano, Storia del partito comunista italiano, vol. 3, 48.

  101. 101.

    Colarizi, 202.

  102. 102.

    Carlo Rosselli (1935) folder 1286, Archivio Storico del PCI, Istituto Gramsci (Rome).

  103. 103.

    Patrizia Caccia and Mirella Mingardo, “Dissenso e opposizione nella stampa politica antifascista”, Ti saluto e vado in Abissinia, 79.

  104. 104.

    Tasca (1935) in Caccia and Mingardo, ibid., 78.

  105. 105.

    Folder 1356 (1935–1936), Archivio Storico del PCI, Istituto Gramsci (Rome).

  106. 106.

    Colarizi, 207.

  107. 107.

    Quoted in Spriano, Storia del partito comunista italiano. I fronti popolari, Stalin, la guerra, vol. 3, 62.

  108. 108.

    Remigio Barbieri, “Ilio Barontini, Partigiano in Etiopia”, L’Unità, November 12, 1970, 3.

  109. 109.

    Bruno Anatra, “Uno dei nostri colla resistenza abissina”, Rinascita 19 (1966), 18.

  110. 110.

    An important aspect of Mussolini’s foreign policy was his support for Arab nationalisms, in particular in Egypt and Palestine, against British colonial interests. In 1930, Mussolini’s monthly magazine Gerarchia suggested that the era of colonialism might be over, so that white and native peoples now needed to be treated as absolute equals. Denis Mack Smith notes that “Mussolini here came close to tapping one of the big revolutionary forces of the century, before falling back on the easier and less imaginative doctrines of imperialism and racial supremacy” (Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini’s Roman Empire (London: Longman, 1976), 34).

  111. 111.

    Folder 1312, Archivio Storico del PCI, Istituto Gramsci (Rome).

  112. 112.

    Bruno Anatra, “Uno dei nostri colla resistenza abissina”, Rinascita 19 (1966), 18.

  113. 113.

    See Del Boca’s account of the Barontini mission in Gli italiani in Africa Orientale. La caduta dell’impero (Milan: Mondadori, 1992), 333–340, henceforth referred to as La caduta dell’impero.

  114. 114.

    See Anatra, “Uno dei nostri colla resistenza abissina”, Rinascita 19 (1966), 17–18.

  115. 115.

    Del Boca, ibid., 333–340.

  116. 116.

    Barbieri, “Ilio Barontini, partigiano in Etiopia”, 3. However, this account is dubious since it is not even mentioned by Del Boca, the major Italian expert of the Italo-Ethiopian conflict, in his discussion of the Ethiopian resistance to Italian colonialism. He does mention Barontini, but never the fact that Haile Selassie nominated him vice-emperor in his place (see Del Boca, La caduta dell’impero, 333–340).

  117. 117.

    Del Boca recounts a particularly ferocious massacre of Coptic clergy in the convent-village of Debrà Libanòs, in which 449 priests were gunned down by Muslim troops under the orders of the Italian vice-roy Graziani. Del Boca comments that these deacons were “youthful martyrs that Christianity does not remember and does not mourn, because they were African and different” (Del Boca, La caduta dell’impero, 106).

  118. 118.

    Ilio Barontini, letter dated 6/2/1939, contained in folder 1498, Archivio Storico del PCI, Istituto Gramsci (Rome).

  119. 119.

    Barbieri, “Ilio Barontini”, 3.

  120. 120.

    Anton Ukmar, “Partigiano sulle rive del lago Tana”, Rinascita 19, 19.

Works Cited

Unpublished Material

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  1. School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Newcastle University, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK

    Neelam Srivastava

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Srivastava, N. (2018). Italian Anti-colonialism and the Ethiopian War. In: Italian Colonialism and Resistances to Empire, 1930-1970. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46584-9_2

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