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

CHAPTER 3 The Steel Snake

‘Truly I could say that I built a colony and gave it to Italy.’

Ferdinando Martini

I noticed the scar on the first trip I made to Eritrea. It was impossible to miss: a thin white line that traced a winding route through the clumps of fig cactus and clusters of spiky aloes, lying like upturned octopi on the bottom of a fisherman’s boat. At times, the overgrown track ran alongside the road. At others, it veered off, plunging through a tunnel into the bowels of the mountain, only to resurface, gulping for air, a few minutes later. Lurching from side to side as the car took the hairpin bends on the road from Asmara to Massawa, I caught glimpses of terracotta brick buttressing hugging the cliff face, viaducts rearing high above the valley, bridges hurled recklessly across gorges. ‘That? It’s the old Italian railway,’ a friend explained. ‘A railway? Up here? Surely that’s not possible.’ ‘Oh yes. They were good builders, those Italians. They understood the mountain.’

It had been closed by the Ethiopians when the guerrilla war began to bite in the 1970s, its sleepers ripped up by soldiers and rebel fighters who used them to line the trenches. The elegant Italian arches now supported nothing at all, the track was just a convenient shortcut for Eritreans strolling to the nearest hamlet in the position they found so comfortable: walking stick slung across the shoulders, hands flopping, prisoner-of-war-like, from the pole. While structurally intact, the tunnels had followed the inexorable rule governing all dark places near human dwellings and were doused in the acrid aroma of urine. But these al fresco toilets would have won the admiration of Brunel himself.

Only a people that had already thrown railroads across the Alps and Dolomites would have dared take on the Eritrean escarpment. Trains, which cannot shift into lower gear or roar round hairpin bends when the gradient begins to bite, are not really designed to go up mountains. Between Massawa and Asmara the land soars from sea level to 2,300 metres in just 70 km. The engineers of the 19th century considered a 1 in 100 gradient to be ‘heavy’, a gradient of 1 in 16 represented the physical limit a railroad could tackle without cog or cable. At its steepest, on the vertiginous climb between the town of Ghinda and Asmara, the Eritrean railway would touch 1 in 28. And that gradient was only achieved by sending the narrow-gauge track looping for 45 km through the mountains, a sinuous, fiendishly-clever itinerary that won it the sobriquet ‘serpente d’acciaio’ – ‘steel snake’. The key Massawa–Asmara section alone, I later discovered, boasted 30 tunnels, 35 bridges, 14 arches and 667 curves.

Fastidious in their choice of route, the Italians were equally ingenious when it came to choice of hardware. The techniques adopted, whose idiosyncrasies have turned Eritrea into a place of pilgrimage for modern trainspotters, ranged from the childishly simple to the sophisticated. The Italians imported French steam locomotives, specially designed for mountain transport, whose engines boasted twice the grip of ordinary models, thanks to a system that recycled steam from the main cylinders to a powered front bogie. The locomotives’ normally rigid blast pipe was designed to be flexible, allowing the trains to take the tightest of curves. And wagons were fitted with individual hand brakes, which railwaymen spun to prevent the train picking up too much speed on the downhill run and released on the flat. It all made for a very slow, if spectacular ride: 10 hours from coast to capital.1

Even to the untutored eye, the Eritrean railway was clearly something of an engineering masterpiece. And the man responsible for this gravity-defying marvel, which would take 30 years to complete, was none other than Ferdinando Martini, epigram-loving politico and raconteur.

Why did Martini return to Eritrea? When the royal inquiry team packed its bags and set sail from Massawa in June 1891, the parliamentarian had every reason to believe that, thanks in part to his own efforts, the colony’s future was now assured. But Martini could never have predicted the blow Rome would be dealt five years later, a humiliation so profound it would leave its public feeling heartily sick of all things colonial and ready to throw in the towel on his beloved Eritrea.

Well before Menelik II succeeded Yohannes as Emperor of Abyssinia, it had been clear that two expansionist forces which had been rubbing up against one another – resurgent Abyssinian nationalism and embryonic Italian colonialism – must one day clash head on. Having stamped its mark on Eritrea and signed a series of treaties with sultans on the Somali coast, Italy continued to circle the Horn of Africa’s real prize: Abyssinia. The eventual trigger for this shuddering collision was to be the Treaty of Uccialli, an agreement Menelik II signed with the Italians in the belief he was trading recognition of an Eritrean border encompassing the kebessa highlands for the right to import arms through Rome’s new colony to his landlocked empire. While Menelik had agreed certain terms in the treaty’s Amharic version, he gradually came to the outraged realization that he had put his name to very different undertakings in the Italian translation, which contained a sly clause turning his nation into a protectorate of Rome – effectively a vassal state. When Italy refused to reverse what must qualify as one of the crudest sleights of hand in diplomatic history, war became inevitable.

The battle that followed, staged outside the Tigrayan town of Adua in 1896, pitted 19,000 Italian-led troops against 100,000 Abyssinians, many of them equipped, ironically, with Remington rifles obligingly supplied by Italian emissaries trying to ingratiate themselves with Menelik.2 Outwitted and outmanoeuvred, some 6,000 Italians and their Eritrean ascari recruits were slaughtered by the Abyssinians, more men dying in one day than throughout the whole of Italy’s war of independence. To ensure they never fought again, the Abyssinians amputated the right arms and left legs of surviving ascaris, a harsh lesson to those who took the white man’s silver. It was the first time a Western army of such a size had been bested by an African force, the most shocking setback experienced on the continent by a 19th-century colonial power. Stunned by a defeat that was in part attributable to the automatic assumption that primitive black warriors would stand no chance against modern white troops, in part to Italian Prime Minister Francesco Crispi’s disastrous habit of second-guessing his generals, Rome sued for peace.

Menelik could have capitalized on this stunning victory and attempted to eject the Italians altogether from the Horn. Instead, while insisting on Uccialli’s abrogation, he accepted the principle of an enlarged Italian Eritrea. But such concessions did little to dilute Adua’s devastating impact back in Italy. It was not for mountainous Eritrea and arid Somalia that the Italian public had supported the government’s expensive colonial project. Its eyes had always been locked on the green pastures further to the south, the fertile, farmable Abyssinian lands Menelik II had now decreed forever out of reach. Chanting ‘Viva Menelik’, furious crowds demonstrated against the Italian government, while socialist members of parliament renewed calls for Italy to pull out of Africa. Some already heard Eritrea’s death knell tolling: ‘The colony no longer lives, it breathes its last,’ pronounced Eteocle Cagnassi, the official who had so deftly escaped punishment for the Massawa atrocities. ‘The ministry is demolishing, not running it; it no longer has a governor, very soon there will be no settlers either. Even in its most difficult and dangerous moments, Eritrea never went through a more inauspicious and painful time.’3

It was at this delicate juncture that the government called in Martini, offering him the post of Eritrea’s first civilian governor. He turned it down, hesitated, then accepted. For conservative leader Antonio Di Rudini, who had taken over from the disgraced Crispi as prime minister, Martini was a canny choice. Although Di Rudini had made huge political capital out of criticizing the government’s handling of Adua, he was a pragmatist on colonial matters. He had decided to hang on to Eritrea, but only after playing briefly with the idea of handing the colony to Belgium’s King Leopold, master of the Congo. He realized that he could only successfully defy public opinion if the colony, focus of so much controversy, assumed the lowest of profiles. It must be removed from the control of a profligate military, its shifting border needed to be fixed and, above all, its demands on Italy’s exchequer must be drastically reduced. By recruiting Martini, who had somehow managed to survive the Massawa debacle with his reputation for feistiness intact, Di Rudini could appear to be responding to public sentiment. In fact, both he and King Umberto knew they were placing the colony in the safest of hands.

When Martini set to sea, there was talk in Rome of pruning Eritrea down to a triangle linking Massawa on the coast with Asmara and the highlands town of Keren, or something even more modest. Many of Martini’s colleagues actually expected the new governor to waste no time in winding up Eritrea’s affairs. But the establishment was intent on consolidation, not dissolution. ‘I have made quite enough sacrifices to public opinion on this African issue,’ the King confided to Martini before he left. ‘I will not make the ultimate sacrifice: we must and will not descend from the plateau.’4 And Martini, the ever-equivocal Martini, was on exactly the same wavelength. ‘If I can stop Africa being a thorn in our flesh … if I can pacify the colony, raise it to a point where it is self-supporting, allow it to become, so to speak, forgotten, wouldn’t I be doing the country a major service?’ he mused.5 He spelled out his position in a letter to a friend: ‘I will not return a single inch of territory … the day the government asks me to descend to Massawa is the day I land in Brindisi.’

For Martini, this represented a risky career move. By the time he left for Eritrea in December 1897, he was 56 years old, an age where the delights of African travel, with its malarial bouts, month-long mule treks and most basic of amenities, begin to pall. The job, which meant leaving behind his family, was no sinecure, and others had rejected it. He had already done well for himself, rising briefly to the post of Education Minister. By going to Eritrea, he would be removing himself from the buzz and chit-chat of Montecitorio, with all the opportunities it represented. But at his age, with so much already achieved, such things mattered less than they once had. There were times, indeed, when he felt nothing but disgust for politics, sorry he had ever entered the game. ‘When I look back on my 23 years in parliament, I mourn all that wasted time,’ he told a friend. ‘If I stay here, what will I do? Make speeches to the chamber: Sibylline words, scattered by the wind.’6 The clear skies he had lauded in Nell’Affrica Italiana were calling. Eritrea’s first civilian governor, he knew, would be a huge fish in a tiny pool, always a cheering position to hold. It must have been enormously flattering to think that, once again, the future of Italy’s ‘first-born’ rested largely on his shoulders. Who else, after all, knew more about Eritrean affairs? Who else could be trusted to do the right thing?

His nine-year stint as governor is recorded in Il Diario Eritreo, 7,000 pages of handwritten entries which constitute a priceless resource of the Italian colonial era. Although he indexed each of its 26 volumes, Martini never seems to have had publication in mind, referring to the work only as a collection of ‘notes’. At most, he probably intended the diary to serve as source material for an African memoir he never, in the end, got round to writing. Had it not been for Italy’s Ministry of African Affairs, which ordered it published in 1946 – nearly 20 years after Martini’s death – the diary would have remained locked away in the family’s archives. Why did he put so much care into what was meant as no more than a personal aide-mémoire? Because, one has to conclude, Martini simply could not do otherwise. A man with his inquiring mind, with his lifelong habit of capturing impressions on paper, simply had to record the intense sensations that came with his return to Eritrea. To write something down was to endow it with value, to allot it its proper meaning – the habit came to him as naturally as breathing. ‘There is more satisfaction to be won from writing what seems a stylish page than in overturning a ministry,’ he once remarked. Whether at sea, on the road, or at home, he faithfully kept his diary, rarely skipping a day. And the fact that publication was never on the agenda makes the diary far fresher, funnier and more accessible than the flowery Nell’Affrica Italiana. Martini himself never understood this. ‘In Africa, one writes rather badly,’ he says at one point. ‘This is certainly not a good page.’7 In fact, to modern eyes, he writes far better. A sustained ironic conversation with himself, the diary’s very lack of artifice brings 19th-century Eritrea to life in a way his more laboured writing never could.

Here is Martini the amused sociologist, fascinated at the goings-on in the stretch of open ground outside his Asmara villa, which serves, he discovers, as a communal latrine. ‘This wretched valley is the debating society for those who feel the need to shed excess body weight … One man comes along and squats. The effect is contagious. Another comes along, measures the distance and squats a dozen metres from the first, in the same position and with the same aim in mind. And then a third, a fourth; sometimes a fifth and a sixth. And the conversation starts … Simultaneous, contemporaneous, in parallel … Words are not the only thing to emerge, but they last longer than the rest.’8

And here is Martini the urban sophisticate, despairing, as Eritrea’s attorney-general reads out a report, at his colleagues’ pitiable level of education. ‘My God! What a business! It was the most laughable thing imaginable: logic, dignity of expression, grammar, were never so badly mangled. And to think these are the magistrates the government sends to civilize Africa!’9

Everything interests him, from the awed reaction of Massawa’s residents to his governor’s regalia of plumed hat and gold braid, to the flavour of the turtle soup and ostrich steak (‘like veal’, he notes) he is served at a welcome ceremony. The sexual mores of Eritrea’s tribes, the way in which a visiting chieftain falls in love with his reflection in a mirror, the staggering ugliness of a group of Englishwomen spotted in a Cairo hotel, the gossip in Asmara’s expatriate community, all are recorded with Martini’s characteristic impish sense of humour.

The task he had been set, he soon realized, was immense. Nearly 30 years after its arrival in the Horn, Italy had pitifully little to show for its investment. The Eritrea depicted in his diary is Italy’s version of the Wild West, swept by locust swarms and cholera outbreaks, braced for outbreaks of the plague; a land in which villages are raided by hostile tribes and shipping attacked by pirates. Half-Christian and half-Moslem, it is a frontier country in which slaves are still traded, shady European businessmen mingle with known spies and where government officials still fight – and die – in duels staged over adulterous wives.

Just as he had been warned in Rome, the military administration had careered out of control, spending Italian taxpayers’ money as though it would never be held to account. ‘Either idiots or criminals’, the dregs of the soldiering profession were drawn to Eritrea, he noted, men who believed ‘that colonizing Africa and screwing the Italian government are one and the same thing’. ‘Dirty, out of uniform, they frequent the brothels until late, while the officers divide their time between prostitutes and the gaming table.’10 He was appalled to see how the military had lavished government funds on officers’ villas instead of investing in the roads, bridges and sewerage the colony so clearly needed. ‘Even the best soldiers feel they are only doing their duty when they throw money out of the window,’ he lamented after discovering, rotting in Massawa’s storerooms, 60,000 men’s shoes, enough spurs to equip an army, 40,000 mattocks, 9 years’ supply of salt, 3 years’ of wine, 2 years’ of jam, 52 months’ worth of coffee and 22 months’ of sugar.

His Eritrean subjects were the least of his problems. The nine local ethnic groups had largely accepted Italian rule as a necessary evil. ‘They do not love us, but understand the benefits that come with our rule,’ remarked Martini, noting that local administrators regarded the Italians as ‘good but stupid’.11 The settlers were the real disappointment. Far from serving as an alternative destination for the tens of thousands of Italians heading for the Americas, Eritrea held less than 4,000 ‘Europeans’, and that tally actually included hundreds of Egyptians, Syrians, Turks and Indians judged civilized enough to count as ‘white’. Land had been confiscated and experimental agricultural projects launched, but the going had proved so tough many Italian families begged to be sent home. Martini was none too impressed by those who remained, noting that their Greek colleagues seemed less prone to frittering away their profits. ‘The Greek does not buy horses and does not keep mistresses, the Italian keeps both horse and mistress.’12 The constant complaints by the hard core that remained drove him wild. ‘I’ve always said that governing 20 Italians in the colony requires more patience, courage, and skill than governing 400,000 natives,’ he fumed. When Rome had the temerity to inquire whether an Eritrean display should feature in the Paris Exhibition’s colonial section, an exasperated Martini lost his temper: ‘All we can send are dead men’s bones, bungled battle plans and columns of wasted money. Up till now these are the only fruits of our colonial harvest.’13