I Didn’t Do It For You: How the World Used and Abused a Small African Nation. Michela Wrong
was being used as a storeroom by the elderly graveyard workers, paint tins resting on the floor. Undoing a rusty wire securing the door, I slipped inside. All Soulsâ Day had just been and someone had left flowers, an old family friend, perhaps, able to grant the Cicorias the forgiveness they seemed incapable of offering one another. Water dripped from the cut blooms, gathering in a small rivulet that ran along the floor. Looking at the black-and-white photographs marking each resting place, I was struck by the hardness of the expressions. No smiles or tenderness here. The face of Antonio Cicoria, Filippoâs bridge-building grandfather, bore the deep grooves of a life in which nothing had come easy. Flinty and implacable, he looked a paterfamilias who would wield the belt with enthusiasm when disciplining wife and children. Another white-haired Cicoria stared from the slab above, chin jutting aggressively. Was this the hated father? There was no inscription, but he bore a passing resemblance to Filippo. The Italian equivalent of âWhatâs it to you?â seemed to hover on his lips. With relatives like this, I thought, no wonder Cicoria had run away.
As I headed for the gates, I noticed a pile of splintered gravestones stacked in a corner. Every man tries to leave his mark upon the earth, but even stones eventually wear out. When these headstones had cracked, no solicitous Italian descendant was left in Eritrea to order a replacement. Would Cicoriaâs body be brought here when his straining breath finally ran out? It seemed unlikely. And once the family friend stopped visiting and the rusty wire dropped off the door, this chapel, too, might end up serving as a workmanâs shed. I was to visit the cemetery many times after that, but only once overlapped with a relative fussing over a tomb, a young meticcio based in Rome. On his rare visits to Eritrea, he said, he fought a losing battle against the weeds slowly obliterating his parentsâ grave. Burial grounds, like hospitals, need fresh clientele to stay alive. In Asmaraâs cemetery, you could feel the Italian story coming to a stop.
Clever as he was, Martini could not have got it more wrong. He never faltered in his belief in a future white Eritrea, a little Italy in Africa. Amid the bombastic self-confidence of the late 19th century, it seemed a foregone conclusion, so certain that only the methodology remained to be discussed. But Martiniâs âdoomedâ native proved more resilient than expected. Across Africa, the supposedly unstoppable flood of European settlers was easily dammed and reversed. Earning a living in Eritrea proved too tough for even the hardy peasants of Sicily and Calabria. Italyâs African colonies would never absorb more than one per cent of the countryâs émigrés, compared to the 40 per cent that headed to America. In the 1940s, ridiculing Italyâs pretensions to empire, the British â who had so many of their own â started sending Italian settlers back from the Horn. When Ethiopiaâs regime turned Marxist and nationalized Italian businesses in the 1970s, those who had clung on registered sadly for repatriation. Today the breed facing imminent extinction in Eritrea is white, not black. Less than 120 Italian families remain, liver-spotted men and women in their seventies and eighties who came back after independence in 1993 to die in the only place that felt like home. Not a single country estate lies in Italian hands and each year Vittorio Volpicelli, manager of the Casa degli Italiani, the Italian Club, is called upon to organize yet another medical evacuation, yet another funeral mass at the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary.
With each disappearance, the dwindling community grows a little more mournful, a little more inward-looking. Martiniâs descendants, dubbed âsoft Fascistsâ by some Eritreans, have none of his brash confidence. If they still meet friends for an espresso at the Casa, where the Fascist party insignia â a bundle of rods symbolizing âstrength through unityâ â graces the main gate, the Italians rarely allow the âFâ word to pass their lips. âYou know, when theyâre annoyed with us they like to throw Fascism in our faces. But if you look at the origins of the word, it actually stands for something rather beautiful,â a faded Italian beauty told me as we sat having our hair done in Gino and Ginaâs. Gino was Asmaraâs first Italian hairdresser and his salonâs walls are decorated with photographs of heavily made-up European models, showing off the latest in 1960s styles. Now he potters around in a confusion of Alzheimerâs, collecting towels and taking orders from his wife. âThis used to be such a beautiful, beautiful city,â the signora reminisced. âEvery day, a plane would fly in from Rome with fresh orchids for the flower shops. But now â¦â There was no point going on. Asmaraâs Italians may purse their lips, remembering days bathed in the golden light of memory, but they know better than to voice such views in public. They stay out of politics, keep themselves to themselves. Having experienced one nationalization, they know what angry African governments can do to unwanted white communities. Masters of yesteryear, they are now here on sufferance.
âTruly I could say that I built a colony and gave it to Italy.â
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 fishermanâs 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. âThat? Itâs the old Italian railway,â a friend explained. âA railway? Up here? Surely thatâs not possible.â âOh yes. They were good builders, those Italians. They understood the mountain.â
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 âheavyâ, 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 âserpente dâacciaioâ â âsteel snakeâ. The key MassawaâAsmara 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 locomotivesâ 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.