LITMIR.BIZ

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trade. For the inquiry’s remit went far beyond investigating the alleged human rights abuses. The Massawa scandal had highlighted the need for an authoritative appraisal of Eritrea’s economic and strategic potential. It was time Rome decided exactly what it wanted of its Red Sea colony.

      It was a potential turning point in Eritrean history. Given Martini’s reputation for forthrightness and the doubts he had voiced about the colony’s raison d’être, his left-wing colleagues in parliament and Italian voters had no reason to expect anything other than a stringently impartial account. The level of trust placed on his shoulders makes what transpired that much harder to forgive.

      For when the team published its conclusions in November, editors’ mouths dropped open. In their first, 9,000-word report, the inquiry members meekly accept the excuses made by the military commanders they had questioned in Rome and Massawa. Damning journalistic accounts are brushed to one side, as are Livraghi’s confessions, the product, the report hints, of an unhinged mind. With the exception of less than a dozen executions ordered during a crisis by Baldissera, who had helpfully explained that ‘it was necessary to strike terror into those barbarians to make them submit’, the team finds no evidence of night-time assassinations. It sympathizes with the general for the pressures he came under, finding that the colony’s existence ‘really was under threat’. As for the ‘supposed massacres’ of entire Eritrean military units, these ‘did not take place’. There might have been a couple of incidents in which rebels being escorted to the border – a mere 16, rather than 800 – had been shot. But, adopting an approach favoured in many a rape trial, the team prefers to blame the victims, whose failure to cooperate with their captors brought their fate upon themselves. Another convenient scapegoat was the Eritrean police force, which apparently had a problem grasping the concept of military discipline.

      The very wording of the inquiry’s extraordinary conclusion, with its wealth of unconscious racism, tells us everything we need to know about the team’s philosophical point of departure. ‘If, in some isolated case, an abuse was committed, it can only be attributed to the savage temperament of the indigenous policemen necessarily entrusted with carrying out orders, and to the victims themselves,’ it reads. ‘Neither the [military] command nor any colonial officials can be held responsible.’ In the light of these findings, it was hardly surprising that a Massawa court absolved both Cagnassi and Livraghi, while sentencing two Eritrean police chiefs to long prison sentences. Newspapers which had called for an Italian withdrawal from Eritrea were left flailing, the parliamentary debate on the matter – despite some sarcastic speeches by anti-colonial deputies – sputtered to an anti-climax, without a vote. The system had protected its own and, as several Italian officials revealed in memoirs published long after events, the mass killings and frenzied executions of suspected troublemakers swiftly resumed in Eritrea.⁶

      The second report the team drafted represents, at least as far as the former anti-colonials on the team were concerned, a further betrayal of principle. Rejecting the sceptical accounts of previous visitors, Martini and his colleagues hail Eritrea as a ‘fertile and virgin land … stretching out its arms to Italian farmers’. The colony, they say, is ideally placed to serve as an eventual outlet for Italy’s émigrés. To that end, Rome should concentrate on consolidating Eritrea’s borders, improving relations with local chiefs, replacing the military command with a civilian administration and attracting the peasant landowners who will form the backbone of a vibrant Italian community. Not an inch of acquired territory should be surrendered.

      By simultaneously burying a scandal that threatened to rock the government and bestowing its blessing on Italy’s African daydreams, the inquiry had effectively granted a faltering colonial project a new lease of life. On this, the first of Martini’s two key encounters with Eritrea, the supposed freethinker had played a central role in a shameless whitewash which not only ensured Massawa’s atrocities quietly faded from view, but guaranteed the colony survived to be fought over another day.

      Why did Martini do it? Why did he risk his reputation by putting his name to what a historian of the day described as ‘an incredible, medieval document, which should have been confiscated as an apologia for the crime … A sickening defence of assassination’?⁷

      Any journalist is familiar with the sensation of being ‘nobbled’ by the target of an investigation. Starting out on a story in a state of hostile cynicism, his views falter as one interviewee after another put their cases with impassioned sincerity. The trust placed in the journalist is so unwavering, the hospitality so warm and, on closer examination, the people he was originally gunning for seem so reasonable. Years later, looking back on the glowing write-up that resulted, he winces at how easily he allowed himself to be manipulated, shrugs his shoulders and blames it on a heavy lunch. But it is hard to argue that Martini’s keen intelligence was momentarily befuddled by the justifications presented by the colonial officials he met. In later life, he never showed any sign of regretting his role as co-author of the vital report. What puzzled contemporaries described as Martini’s ‘conversion’ to the colonial cause was to be a permanent change of heart.

      Did the quest for self-advancement play a role? Here, the picture becomes more murky. Martini was undoubtedly vain and hugely ambitious. It seems unlikely that he could already have had his eye on the post of Eritrea’s governorship, which would only be created 10 years into the future. But once granted a place on a high-profile royal inquiry, investigating a topic known to be particularly close to King Umberto’s heart, Martini must have been aware that a bland finding would mean political rewards somewhere down the line.

      Martini’s own explanation for his U-turn – however nigglingly unsatisfying – probably lies implicit in the pages of Nell’Affrica Italiana, a highly personalized account of the Eritrea trip published after his return. Written in the self-consciously literary language of the day, but blessed with the author’s characteristic sharp eye for detail, it became a runaway bestseller, appearing in 10 editions and remaining in print for 40 years. Reaching a far wider audience than a dry government report ever could, Nell’Affrica Italiana, it could be argued, played a more crucial role in shaping public opinion towards Eritrea than anything else Martini wrote.

      In it, Martini pulls no punches about the Italian-made horrors he witnessed in Eritrea. He describes the notorious ‘Field of Hunger’ – a desolate plain outside Massawa where the town governor had ordered destitute natives to be taken and left to die. ‘Corpses lay here and there, their faces covered in rags; one, a horrible sight, so swarmed with insects, which snaked their way through limbs twisted and melted by the rays of the sun, he actually seemed to be moving. The dead were waiting for the hyenas, the living were waiting for death.’

      Martini takes to his heels after glimpsing a group of young Eritrean girls sifting through mounds of camel dung in search of undigested grain, fighting for mouthfuls from a horse’s rotting corpse. ‘I fled, horrified, stupefied, mortified by my own impotence, hiding my watch chain, ashamed of the breakfast I had eaten and the lunch that awaited me.’

      He winces at the use to which the curbash is put, on both sides of the recently-established border. ‘Across the whole of Abyssinia, not excluding our own Eritrean colony, the curbash is an institution. Native policemen and guards are issued with it and when needs must (and it seems, from what I saw, that needs must rather often) they flog without mercy.’

      Visiting an orphanage, he is repulsed by the sight of the sons of Eritrean rebels, shot ‘for the sole crime of not wanting Europeans and not wanting to take orders’, being taught to sing Rome’s praises. ‘Conquest always comes with its own sad, sometimes dishonest, demands. Yet this seemed, and still seems, an outrage against human nature. Even now, remembering it, I feel a rush of blood to my head.’

      Elsewhere, he bitterly ruminates on the hypocrisy of the Italian colonial project. ‘We are liars. We say we want to spread civilization in Abyssinia, but it is not true …

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