Blowing Against the Winds of Change: Settlers Facing Decolonization in Eritrea,1941–52

Eritrea is a peculiar case in the context of decolonization. Italy did not lose its African colonies (Libya, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia) under the pressure of nationalist movements, but following defeat during the Second World War. After the collapse of colonial rule in 1941, Eritrea was governed by a British administration, then federated with Ethiopia (1952) and annexed by it (1962), until it gained independence only through intense fighting (1991–93). Similar to Japan's ‘instant decolonization’, ¹ the abrupt loss of its former colonies has deeply influenced how decolonization in the Italian empire has been interpreted: painless, from a political point of view because it lacked the ‘agonies of decolonization’ experienced elsewhere ² or even a ‘nonevent’, if we consider its (non)effects on Italian post-colonial culture. ³ These two positions, now enriched by a growing historiographical debate, ⁴ are conditioned by a focus on what happened in the former metropole, rather than in the former colonies. The perspective changes radically if we consider the endurance of the settlers or their repatriation and reintegration as refugees in Italy. ⁵

Historiography no longer considers decolonization as a mere transfer of power, but as a process – a useful word even if it is still ‘far too orderly’ for an often disordered phenomenon ⁶ – in which the colonial (racial, social, and political) order was questioned, to the point of being overthrown: a process full of complexities the non-linear dynamics of which go far beyond the oppressor–oppressed binary vision. ⁷

Such a process could be observed in postwar Eritrea through the end of the 70-year-old settler colonial order, the birth of indigenous nationalism, and a lively political debate. The belief that postwar and post-colonial Eritrea deserves historiographical attention is certainly not new. The first reflections came early on from anti-colonial intellectuals, ⁸ British officers involved in the administration of the former Italian colony, ⁹ and from some Italian journalists. ¹⁰ The international debate on the fate of the country has been the target of several international studies, ¹¹ as well as the birth of Eritrean nationalism. ¹² In the 1980s and 1990s, Eritrean and Ethiopian scholars contributed greatly to the debate, sparked by the bloody war that opposed the Ethiopian regime: studies characterized by a marked political colouring, but still important for understanding the origins of the conflict. ¹³ In the same years, Italian historiography also began to consider the history of Eritrea as ongoing in 1941 with the end of the Italian rule, ¹⁴ and recently a series of new works from African and Italian scholars has enriched the state of the field. ¹⁵

This article starts from the premise that, despite the abundance of contributions, historians have not considered a central characteristic of Eritrea: that of being a settler colony. The growing scholarly field of Settler Colonial Studies (SCS), despite its keen – and much debated – attention to the Anglo-French colonial world, ¹⁶ for many years now has focused on explaining how settler societies are born, what consequences they produce, and how/when they end. ¹⁷ SCS scholars have identified violence as a common, fundamental characteristic of decolonization in settler colonies. Patrick Wolfe called settler colonialism, which he helped consolidate as an autonomous field of study, ‘relatively impervious to regime change’. ¹⁸ Lorenzo Veracini observed that, as a consequence of this resilience, especially in Africa, decolonization of settler colonies was ‘an especially brutal process’, ¹⁹ a matter of ‘either total victory or total failure’. ²⁰ Caroline Elkins argued that ‘the particular violence attendant on colonial retreat in the settler states’ is directly linked to ‘settler tyranny’. ²¹ Some case studies – always from the Anglo-French world ²² – have highlighted how decolonization in settler contexts ‘without exceptions involved a great deal of violence’, ²³ because of the very presence of settlers who invariably ‘resisted the push for self-determination’. ²⁴

As for the specific pattern of settler colonialism that took place in Africa, therefore, the analysis has so far highlighted the inevitability of violence during decolonization, due to the implicit unreformability of the settler colonial order. The purpose of this essay is not to deny, but to complicate this premise. I will do this by drawing upon my extensive use of Italian and British archival sources, together with abundant international literature and with a constant attention to comparison. These sources will allow me to focus on the actions of settlers in the context of rising Eritrean nationalism, with the aim of unveiling its complexity and challenging the typical monolithic representation of settlers’ attitudes.

I argue that if there is an undeniable correlation between the presence of settlers and an especially fraught process of decolonization, it is not at all obvious it need be necessarily violent. This article therefore complicates the state of the field, by examining a case study different from those on which most of the historiographical attention has so far concentrated (Algeria, Kenya, and Rhodesia), demonstrating how, in different contexts, settlers chose different ways to react to decolonization.

In Eritrea, the Second World War ended at dawn on 1 April 1941 when British troops entered Asmara, the capital of the oldest Italian colony. At the time of Italy's defeat, there were still 70,000 settlers in the country though their number would have decreased through the arrest and deportation by the British of the military and civilians implicated with Fascism. ²⁵ The sudden transition from colony to post-colony was greatly mitigated by several factors. Staff shortages convinced the British Military Administration (BMA) to keep the Italian bureaucratic machine largely intact: most of the Italian staff was kept in the office, and in 1946 there were 780 Italian officials and employees still at work. ²⁶ Continuity even prevailed in the police forces; in 1946, the Polizia dell’Africa Italiana had 172 men in service under the direction of British officers. ²⁷ Similarly, the local judicial administration remained in Italian hands, and Italian mayors administered Eritrean cities for at least until the middle of the decade. ²⁸

In the three years spanning 1941–44 rather than declining as a consequence of the war, the settler economy experienced development due to the internal demand for the goods that had been previously imported, and which, in wartime, had to be produced locally. A small, ephemeral manufacturing boom ended with the reopening of international markets after 1945. ²⁹

This smooth transition spared the settlers from the trauma of an abrupt awakening. In many respects, continuity prevailed over change; for several years, the bureaucracy, the economy, even the judiciary and the forces of public order, remained firmly in settler hands. Moreover, racial hierarchies had been kept firmly in place by the British, with part of the fascist racial legislation left in effect, so much so that in 1946 buses were still segregated with the sole exception of ‘blacks dressed in European style’. ³⁰ The transition between colony and post-colony did not bring about, for the moment, any discontinuity except the change of government.

And yet during the war, Britain had rained flyers on Eritrea which incited rebellion, and which certainly aroused hopes for change. Eritreans therefore were unlikely to take kindly to the fact that 10,000 acres of land were given to settlers in the first three years of British occupation for the urgency of meeting the food needs of the country. ³¹

The continuity of a quasi-colonial situation was worsened for the Eritreans by deteriorating economic conditions. In the cities, the large mass of unskilled white labour that Italy exported to the colony from 1935 occupied nearly every place in the job market. ³² When the British troops entered Asmara they found the Italians ‘filling every kind of post. Even subordinate posts were filled by Italians, and the Eritreans had not been given much of a chance, except in the army’. ³³ If, before the war, military enrolment of Eritrean men was an outlet for unemployment, after the Italian defeat this opportunity ceased, and the result was around 50,000 unemployed Eritrean ex-servicemen. ³⁴

The first, sporadic confrontations between Eritreans and settlers occurred, and their anti-colonial character was later noted by some BMA officers. Gerald K. Trevaskis argued that the early attacks on settlers’ farms were not ‘acts of brigandage but of a sinister patriotism which sought to drive the Italians from Eritrean land and to punish their Eritrean friends’. ³⁵ However, in the early 1940s, discontent did not immediately coalesce into a clear anti-colonial nationalist movement for several reasons, including the fact that Italy did not provide higher education to its colonial subjects; this was considered politically dangerous and economically useless. ³⁶ If in Kenya the anti-British hostility evolved as educated urban and rural discontent merged into ‘a considerable force with a clear anti-colonial dimension’, ³⁷ in Eritrea, this convergence did not happen for several years.

The first real nationalist movement was the Mahber Feqri Hager (Association for the Love of the Country, MFH), founded in May 1941, and led by a committee made up of six Christians and six Muslims. ³⁸ It was not a real party, since political activity was banned by the BMA until October 1946, but a representative organization whose main purpose was to protect the interests of Eritreans. The MFH had a generically anti-colonial agenda, but not a definite political identity. This first-generation Eritrean intelligentsia was mainly made up of former employees of the Italian administration, educated in religious schools, and now engaged in public debate allowed – for the first time in Eritrean history by the BMA – through several newly established newspapers. Out of this debate, different and increasingly mutually opposed currents emerged. Basically, what divided them were their opinions about the future of the country. The ‘unionists’, convinced that the ancient ties with the Empire of Ethiopia were strong, stood in favour of attaching the country to Ethiopia; while the ‘nationalists’ favoured total independence. In the eyes of the settlers, the former appeared as a ‘Sunday crowd of agitators, drunken criminals […] and children, walking through the streets of the city center with the Ethiopian flag on their heads’; ³⁹ while the latter were people ‘educated in the Italian primary schools’ who have ‘unfortunately’ heard of Italian Risorgimento. ⁴⁰

The fault line between the Eritrean currents was also religious – the majority of Christians were in fact unionists, while Muslims were mainly for independence – as well as economic. Eritrean Muslims were alarmed by the prospect of union with a country where their co-religionists were ‘segregated, denied the right to own land, and excluded from state office’, ⁴¹ while Christians saw in the Ethiopian Empire the best guarantee to maintain a dominant position in the land ownership of the future post-colonial Eritrea. ⁴²

Settlers were sure that close colonial ties would not be put into crisis by the emergence of new ideas. This was not peculiar to the Italian settlers; in other contexts, it has been observed that ‘the pull of the pioneer past was used to repurpose older imperial narratives, particularly that of “good governance”, which drew upon the idea that settlers knew the African best’. ⁴³ Two types of bond seemed particularly strong: the economic bond and the bond of ‘honour’ forged with thousands of Eritrean veterans who had fought for Italy. Furthermore, the settlers were aware of the little popularity enjoyed by the BMA, compared to which the colonial period was remembered as economically prosperous, so much so that in the 1940s, Eritrean folksongs satirized the taxation imposed by British ‘liberators’: ‘Aya Tilian Worki Se ‘aatu/Aya Ingliz Nokhwal Seldu (Big Brother Italian wears a Gold Watch/Big Brother Englishman Has Hollow Coins)’. ⁴⁴ The settlers were also convinced that they had acquired favour with the Eritreans after tragic events like the massacre of 28 August 1946, when a British battalion made up of Sudanese troopers raged against the Coptic population of Asmara causing the death of 42 people and the wounding of 74. ⁴⁵

At the same time, the settlers felt the existence of an ever-deeper rift between the Eritrean generations: the elderly – who had largely fought under the Italian flag – partly in favour of a continuation of the status quo, and the young people – who took advantage of the freedom of the press and the circulation of new ideas – whose political position did not foresee a colonial ‘return’. An Italian lawyer, and leader of the settler community, observed in this regard that

The majority of the population is faithful to us: very true. But we must not lose sight of the new generation that, in the space of seven years (from ’40 to ’47) had all the ease of growing up […]. And the new generation represents precisely the most restless element, the thirstiest for novelty.

Having grasped this generational difference, however, did not prevent the settler from giving an arrogantly paternalistic and deeply colonial interpretation of these young people ‘who, even if they just know how to read and write, already speaks of freedom, of progress, and would like to instantly transform themselves into lawyers, doctors, engineers’. ⁴⁶ The settlers’ inability to understand the growing anti-colonial unrest would profoundly affect how they reacted to it.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, there was a heated international debate about the future of the former Italian colonies except for the now independent Ethiopia. In 1947, the peace treaty signed by Italy formalized its renunciation of sovereignty over all the former colonies, which would remain under the BMA until the decision of the Four Powers (USA, USSR, Great Britain, and France). A Commission was sent to these former colonies, to gather information on the spot and ascertain the sentiments of local populations. The Four Powers Commission (FPC) left London on 7 November 1947 and remained in Eritrea until 20 December 1947, before moving on to Somalia and finally to Libya. ⁴⁷

The Commission profoundly changed the Eritrean political landscape. The arrival in Eritrea of ​​the FPC accelerated the political debate, leading to the definitive fragmentation of the MFH. The first Eritrean party, the Muslim League, was founded in Keren at the beginning of December 1946. They called for the independence of a united Eritrea, or alternatively, 10 years of international trusteeship. A little later, the Unionist Party, with a base of support among Coptic Christians, was established in Asmara, asking for union with Ethiopia. The third party to be born among the main Eritrean political groups was the Liberal Progressive Party (LPP), founded by the intellectual and journalist Woldeab Woldemariam on February 1947. ⁴⁸ The aims of the LPP were to achieve independence or, in the meantime, a 10-year trusteeship under the aegis of the United Nations. If Italian colonial ethnography had imagined an Eritrean society divided by ethnicity and language, the new post-colonial context gave rise to broad alliances on a religious and, in part, class basis. ⁴⁹

Initially, according to British sources, there was ‘no organized propaganda’ from the settlers’ side, except for some harmless publications. The most organized faction was the Unionist Party, whose ‘propaganda is incessant’ and consisted of ‘cash presents, and more promises, to [Eritrean] chiefs’, with the collaboration of the local Coptic Church, and the publication of two periodicals: Sylvia Pankhurst's New Times and Ethiopia News and the Amharic Voice of Eritrea, ‘undoubtedly financed from Addis Ababa’. ⁵⁰

The settlers, however, did not remain passive for long. Since the hope of a return of the colony to Italy was gone, ‘trusteeship’ had become the settlers’ goal to be pursued at all costs. But without political representation under British occupation, and in the absence of a representative of the Italian government to protect their interests, the settlers felt that the situation could get out of hand. They then began to organize themselves. In February 1947, in anticipation of the arrival of the FPC, a group of settlers created the Representative Committee of the Italians of Eritrea (CRIE). It was initially chaired by the lawyer Felice Ostini, then by doctor Vincenzo Di Meglio.

Such a representative body was not an exceptional organization; a similar institution was established in the same year by the Italian settlers in Libya, ⁵¹ and others would be born later elsewhere, like the Settlers’ and Residents’ Association of Nyasaland, which expressed the opposition of settlers to nationalism in Malawi (1960–3). ⁵² Simultaneously, the settlers created another association representing the interests of the many Italo-Eritreans in order to exploit their political weight in favour of Italy: the Italo-Eritrean Association (AIE), born with the purpose of ‘using the ties of kinship, of long coexistence made of respect and trust with native populations, to act as a link between the Italian population and the natives’. ⁵³ A political result of settlers’ strategies as well as the efforts of Eritrean mothers to raise successive generations of Italo-Eritrean children as Italians. ⁵⁴

The other category in which settlers could hope to find support was the former soldiers, known as Askari. This category occupied a crucial role in Eritrean society during the colonial era. It was perceived and represented by the Italians – unlike what happened in the British colonies – not through feminizing and derogatory metaphors but rather by resorting to paternalistic images as the ‘good, faithful askari’. ⁵⁵ In order to emphasize their connections to Eritrean warriors and win their political support after the war, settlers have continuously leveraged these stereotypes. The Veterans Association was established in April 1947 by the former soldiers, the disabled, the mutilated, and all of their families waiting for the army pensions to be paid by the former colonial administration. ⁵⁶ Its goals and intentions were comparable to those of the war veterans in French West Africa, who ‘remained some of the most consistent supporters of the maintenance of la présence française’. ⁵⁷

In order to function effectively, the three associations created by the settlers needed funding and a unifying director to coordinate their actions. Furthermore, when the FPC arrived in Eritrea, the settlers launched an intense pro-Italian propaganda. In May 1947, in Keren, magistrate Armando Albini and farmers Giacomo De Ponti and Luigi Ertola met to plan the constitution of a secret organization, which would be born on 7 August 1947 with the name of Secret Action Committee (CAS). It mainly included farmers and officers, and it was defined as ‘secret’ and ‘not for pure exhibitionism’, as they wrote in early internal memos, but because ‘the situation today requires the utmost discretion from the very members of the said Committee who are, in this regard, bound by oath’. ⁵⁸

Initially, the Committee members were forced to raise the necessary funds for themselves; then, between September and October 1947, the first funding from Italy secretly arrived. ⁵⁹ The main work carried out by the CAS was campaigning towards the Eritrean population, from making free distributions of cereals and other goods to bribing indigenous notables and politicians to bring them closer to the Italian cause.

With the arrival of the FPC approaching, it was necessary to crown the political action with the creation of a party that could bring together all the Eritreans in favour of the Italian trusteeship. On 29 September 1947, CAS members created the New Eritrean Pro-Italy Party (Mahber ne-Italia Eteddeli Hados Ertrà). Point 1, outlined in Pro-Italy Party's political programme, claimed to ‘freely collect the adhesions of all Eritreans who wish to achieve the independence of their country through the Italian trusteeship under the control of the UN’. ⁶⁰ The CAS organized and financed both the birth of the Party and its official press organ, the Mabrahtì Eritrà – Nur al-Aritrìa (Light of Eritrea) directed by Zere Johannes Woldeghebriel, who was also General Councillor of the Party. The birth of the Party was approved by the BMA on condition that all the members had to be Eritreans, although the British authorities were well aware that ‘certain Italians of the “old colonial” type are active behind the scenes in guiding the affairs of this party’. ⁶¹

The FPC arrived on the afternoon of 11 November 1947 and remained for five weeks in the territory. The subsequent result of its investigation was not decisive; the Commission concluded that the only point on which all the parties were in agreement was the desire not to dismember the territory. The FPC estimated that the Unionist Party was the largest while the Muslim League followed closely on its heels. The former had most of its supporters in the Plateau; the latter in the Lowland. The Pro-Italy Party was third, with about 9.2 per cent. A rather comforting result for the settlers: nothing had yet been decided, and in six months of activity they had shown good organization, managing independently and almost without support from Italy, to form a political party, create three associations (the CRIE, the Veterans Association, and the AIE) and run two newspapers.

In December, the settlers lost part of their autonomy, while the Italian government directly assumed the task of coordinating their political action through an agent, Giuseppe Barbato, specially sent to Eritrea. ⁶² Barbato, an official of the Ministry of Italian Africa, arrived in Eritrea as head of the Return Mission with the task of managing naval connections with Italy and helping settlers who wanted to repatriate. However, his most important and secret task was ‘persevering […] in our propaganda, bearing in mind the decisive extent to which venality and ambition generally act on the soul of the natives. Therefore, satisfy the former as far as possible and flatter the latter with reasonable promises’. ⁶³ At the same time, the CAS changed its name to a more acceptable Eritrean Assistance Committee (CAE).

Between July and December 1947, the CAS had spent 70 million lire, ⁶⁴ of which 22 million secretly arrived from Italy. ⁶⁵ Excluding the expenses for the newspapers and the Party, this money mostly served to fund the prominent personalities of the Eritrean political scene, ensuring the loyalty of friends and convincing others to change sides. The same happened in Somalia. ⁶⁶ This policy of systematic bribery was the legacy of a colonial method based on the consolidated stereotype that no other means would work with Africans. Albini himself explained it in the reports he regularly sent to Rome:

I would like to pray, just as a personal favor, not to think even remotely that Eritreans are willing to follow us for pure love of attachment and sympathy […] everyone, everyone, even the purest who seem, at first, more disinterested, try on this occasion to heal up, to get back on their feet, to at least get a new dress or the new suit, to pay off some troublesome debt. And all this costs money. ⁶⁷

On one occasion, Albini attributed the defection of an active member to the lack of funds of the Pro-Italy Party:

Obviously, we lacked any possibility of paying those donations that […] served to […] keep alive that atmosphere of trust and hope that characterized the feelings of the population towards us. ⁶⁸

For the leader of the settlers’ faction, the political struggle in Eritrea had become, at least on the settlers’ side, ‘money, only money and nothing but money’. ⁶⁹

In 1948, the results of the Four Power Commission were referred to the General Assembly of the United Nations, and the decision about the fate of the ex-Italian colonies was postponed. ⁷⁰ In April 1949, Eritrea passed to a civil administration (British Administration Eritrea), and Italy was finally able to have official representation in Asmara in the person of Count Adalberto Figarolo di Gropello. The political climate was tense, with multiple physical attacks on pro-independence leaders, culminating in the assassination of the President of the Muslim League of Asmara, Abdulkadir Kebire. The investigations that followed attributed the attack to Andinet, the Unionist Party's youth section, and the British administration subsequently dissolved them on accusations of terrorism. Evidence found in Andinet headquarters revealed the existence of an ‘organized anti-Italian terrorist party’ and indicated as participants in the movement the Ethiopian Liaison Officer Colonel Negga, his assistant Tecola Gebremedhin, and the secretary of the Unionist Party Tedla Bairu. ⁷¹

Already in August 1947, there were attacks against leaders of the pro-independence parties who the settlers were convinced were controlled by the hand of Colonel Negga; however, the suspicion was for the time being dismissed by the British as ‘Rumor-mongering’. ⁷² Two years later, one of the documents discovered in Andinet's headquarters contained a plan of action with 16 points, including the killing of the leaders of the Pro-Italy Party and of the Italian personalities related to it. ⁷³ Although the BMA considered Andinet ‘a subversive and terrorist organization’, its connection with Negga was still uncertain, nor was it clear who had given the order to eliminate Kebire. However, it was the opinion of the Chief of the British Administration, Brigadier Drew, that ‘though concrete proof may be lacking, the inference […] is, I consider, conclusive that colonel Negga was in close contact with the members of and was aware of, and, perhaps even a party to the activities of Andinet’. ⁷⁴ Kebire was not the only political target of the unionists. Woldemariam, for example, escaped multiple attacks, and Vincenzo Di Meglio also survived three attacks. ⁷⁵

In May 1949, a meeting took place that marked a turning point in events. To unblock the situation, the Italian Foreign Minister Carlo Sforza met his British counterpart, Ernest Bevin and forged a compromise formula that consisted of partitioning Eritrea between Ethiopia and Sudan, with a clause to safeguard Italian interests. The project was rejected by the United Nations Assembly. However, with this attempt at compromise, Italy had completely changed its political line, abandoning any ambition of trusteeship on the former colony. Such a turning point could not fail to arouse strong reactions in Eritrea. There was a demonstration of Italian students in Asmara, and telegrams full of indignation reached Rome from examples of all categories of settlers. Di Meglio wrote to Rome reporting ‘the protests, insults, bad words, the disgust and indignation’ aroused by the compromise, which he described as ‘an abyss of misery, mud, degradation, due to the government which has renounced and betrayed the legitimate aspirations of the Italian people’. ⁷⁶

The sense of betrayal and profound detachment from the motherland, whose political project now diverged considerably from that of the settlers, should not be surprising. Indeed, it is a phenomenon that has been observed in many contexts, where settlers felt themselves abandoned by the motherland once it ceased to support the maintenance of the colonial status quo at any cost. French pieds-noirs ‘found the idea of ​​an “Arab” Algerian independence unbearable. From their perspective, they had constructed Algeria for France; it belonged to themselves and France’. ⁷⁷ Similarly, in Kenya settlers ‘perceived incomprehension of the metropole for the colony’, ⁷⁸ due to the fact that they saw their position eroded by ‘government-supported multi-racialism’ and this made them feel abandoned against ‘forces either disinterested or antagonistic to them’. ⁷⁹

The settlers’ political actions could no longer be the same as before, now that it was clear that Rome would no longer fight for the Italian trusteeship. The Pro-Italy Party was dissolved at the end of May 1949 and reconstituted the following month with a new name, New Eritrea, and a new newspaper significantly named ‘Independent Eritrea’. Meanwhile, the Muslim League approved the creation of the Independence Bloc: a coalition of all the pro-independence parties, to which the settler-led formations (New Eritrea, Veterans, and Italo-Eritreans Association) also joined, while the settlers’ Representative Committee, waiting to be invited to join the Bloc, testified ‘its sympathy for independence’. ⁸⁰ The Bloc was officially formed on 23 July 1949.

However, the settlers’ methods of political struggle did not change. On the contrary, the whole Bloc was now being financed: eight parties ‘all with insatiable demands […] hungry hordes, jealous of each other, convinced that they are receiving less and less than the others, ready to show their teeth if they are not satisfied’. ⁸¹ So much so that the secret funding that Italy gave to the CAE had to increase from 15 to 24 million lire a month. The British were perfectly aware that Giuseppe Barbato was the settlers’ ‘political paymaster’, ⁸² and that the money the Italian agents gave to Eritrean intermediaries was then distributed

to the ordinary man in the street or peasant taking in exchange that person's Unionist Party card if he has one. Food and clothing is also distributed under the guise of charitable assistance. Every receiver gives his signature or thumb print. Lists of these will be produced to a visiting commission to prove supporters. ⁸³

Unionist methods were the same, only with scarcer funds available. It was in fact the opinion of the British that the Italian secret funding fomented political violence since the unionist counterpart ‘is unable to enter the market by offering higher bribes’. ⁸⁴

Finally, on 21 November 1949, the UN reached an agreement for two of the three former Italian colonies. Libya would become an independent state no later than January 1952, while Somalia would achieve independence after 10 years of Italian trusteeship. As for Eritrea, in the absence of an agreement, the sending of a new commission of inquiry was deliberated. The situation in which this second Commission worked was very tense. Finally, in December 1950, the UN General Assembly approved a resolution that provided for the federation between Eritrea and Ethiopia. The political struggle ended, the parties accepted it, and the settlers’ organizations – in fact totally defeated – were dissolved.

The delay in international decisions caused a dramatic increase in violence between 1947 and 1952. Despite the resentment that the continuation of a quasi-colonial status quo aroused in many Eritreans, violence did not initially target settlers, except in rare cases. There were some assaults on settler farms and the violent deaths of some Italians, but generally related to robberies. From 1941 to 1948 only 18 settlers were killed, while 46 died between 1948 and 1952. Only after 1948, therefore, the ‘shifta’ activity (‘shifta’ means bandit and political rebel ⁸⁵ ) acquired a clear anti-colonial character. At this point, some political factions began to use these various gangs of bandits, veterans, unemployed and grassroots rebels as an armed wing of the anti-colonial political movement.

If the settlers went largely unscathed, that was not the case for the Eritreans. To give just one example, in November 1950, there were three settlers reported as dead, compared to 24 Eritreans killed and seven wounded; the following month recorded two settlers dead against 38 Eritreans killed and about 20 wounded. These were not random occurrences, but a more or less constant trend. However, the increase in violence that struck the settlers between 1948 and 1952 is relevant. Brig. Drew in May 1949 reported that the attacks on settlers were, in his view, due to

a combination of political vendetta and of the fact that Italian life and property are the easiest objects of attack and offer the greatest immediate reward. They cannot be ascribed wholly to the political situation, though this factor doubtless enters in to a considerable extent. ⁸⁶

The aggressors had already changed their motives, acquiring a clear anti-colonial character. If before 1948 Eritreans had attacked the settler farms in order to raid or try to appropriate them, now the aim was to deliberately devastate their crops. Moreover, if robberies only rarely ended with the death of the attacked, now the settlers were being ambushed along the streets with all sorts of weapons including hand grenades and with the sole purpose of killing them. In addition to increasing in quantity and changing in quality, the attacks after 1948 adopted a new level of macabre (and unsubtle) messaging: the attackers began to claim their strikes by leaving a note on the victims’ bodies and leaving no doubt of the political significance.

This significant quantitative and qualitative change in activity starting from 1948 was prompted by the first Commission's inability to produce a solution. Settlers (and indirectly Italy) and Eritreans engaged in intense political action, and in this setting banditry evolved into violent conflict – primarily (but not exclusively) on the unionist side. Violence had become an increasingly used tool of pressure when the fate of the nation was at stake.

Sometimes the victims were involved in political activity, such as the Italo-Eritrean mining entrepreneur Vittorio Longhi. A member of the Council of the AIE, he had already suffered the destruction of the industrial plants and received various threatening letters, and eventually, he was killed by two gunshots to the head while he was on his way home with his young son. In most cases, however, the victims of the attacks were randomly chosen average settlers, such as the driver Giuseppe Nassisi, shot dead in Asmara; Gennaro Di Matteo, also a driver, murdered in the house in front of his family; the bricklayer Antonio Santangelo and the merchant Gregorio Merodi, killed together with a Greek merchant in a bar attacked with hand grenades and gunshots.

While the UN Commission carried out its investigation, from 8 February to 5 April 1950, seven Italians were murdered, and many Eritreans lost their lives. The delay in making decisions prolonged the violence throughout the summer and fall of 1950. Between May and November, another 10 Italians were killed, and the British Administration admitted that it did not have sufficient men and funds to ensure the protection of all the farms. It therefore concentrated on the defence of six areas considered crucial, all fairly close to Asmara, where it sent a 200-strong Police Field Force, formed and trained in three weeks. ⁸⁷

The aim of the attacks seems to be typically anti-colonial: to scare the settlers as much as possible, showing them that they were no longer welcome in Eritrea and, above all, that they were no longer safe. The corollary of the terrorist activity was a psychological war; it was not uncommon ‘to find in the morning, under the door, or in the windows, little notes of the following tenor, “Italians go away, death to the Italians, Italians all dead”, etc’. ⁸⁸ The result was that the sense of insecurity spread. Asmara became a city where ‘people have given themselves over to the frantic construction of boundary walls, palisades, barbed iron hedges, and so on. The conviction that something has to happen is increasingly gaining ground in everyone's mind’. ⁸⁹ A generalized fear then spread among the settlers, almost a psychosis: ‘The current week was characterized by a sense, not of alarm, but even of panic’ – Barbato wrote in a report:

A keen sense of alarm has spread in the peripheral centers where it is feared that, in the event of an attack, the few police forces would be easily overwhelmed while the Italian population would remain at the mercy of the bandits. ⁹⁰

British sources confirm these anxieties, describing settlers as fallen ‘into a state of hysteria’, ⁹¹ especially those ‘whose livehood is in the country (either farming or mining), have now abandoned their properties and have come into Asmara because of fear for their personal safety’. ⁹² Brigadier Drew called this atmosphere ‘a state of siege’, with no settlers who ‘now dare to work their farms’. ⁹³

The collective terror felt by settlers in the face of anti-colonial struggle is a well-known phenomenon. In Kenya, as in Eritrea, Mau Mau killed 32 Europeans and 1,819 African civilians. ⁹⁴ Despite the disproportionate numbers, however, especially for isolated and unprotected farmers ‘the fear of “the night of the long knives” that had hung over their colonial idyll for so long was finally upon them’, causing a ‘pathological atmosphere’ and a ‘growing settler hysteria’. ⁹⁵ This situation could have led the settlers to different reactions. In Algeria, the tension favoured a strong militancy in numerous groups of vigilantes created to defend settler sovereignty. ⁹⁶ Alongside these groups, a series of violent terrorist formations arose, and the settlers involved in them were the nucleus of what, in 1961, became the OAS, ⁹⁷ moved by ‘the will of a few civilians to defeat France's Algerian policy, and by the feeling of abandonment experienced by the Europeans’. ⁹⁸

None of this occurred in Eritrea, although the British authorities considered these possibilities for a moment. ‘Another Italian was murdered last night’ – wrote Drew to London in December 1949 – ‘Feeling amongst Italians is extremely tense and I am seriously concerned that they should commit some act which would really put the fat in the fire and bring down retribution on their own heads’. ⁹⁹ However, the settlers’ reaction was limited to a disorganized attempt at self-defence. From 1948 to 1951 settlers’ movements outside the cities were carried out only by police escort; trains and buses, frequently subject to rifle shots, also began to travel with police protection. The police force could do absolutely nothing to protect the farmers, who were most vulnerable to attack, especially those among them who were at the forefront of the political struggle. Filippo Casciani saw his farm completely destroyed and was saved only because he was not present at the time of the attack. Some farmers underwent the obligation to pay, in cash or kind, in exchange for a truce with the shifta gangs. Others tried to repel the attacks by shooting. Most of them fortified the properties with electrified fences, armed guardians, beacons, and bonfires that lit the borders all night: forms of self-defence similar to those experienced in the following decades in Malaya, Kenya, and Rhodesia, by white farmers perched behind their fences. ¹⁰⁰

Unlike these colonies, however, no vigilante groups or voluntary militias of any kind were formed among settlers in Eritrea. ¹⁰¹ The closest it came to this was in 1948 when the BMA proposed to the CRIE to set up a corps of armed volunteers to fight the shifta. Settlers refused the proposal, in order to ‘avoid an action which, while exposing the other Italians to bloody reprisals, would make them unpopular to Eritreans’. ¹⁰² Regarding the use of violence, there seem to have been no dissonant voices within the settler society: even a vocal far-right leader like Vincenzo Di Meglio has never openly endorsed the use of weapons except for purely defensive purposes.

The settlers’ failure to react to the violence directed against them can be explained by their inability to interpret it as anti-colonial violence. Ann Stoler has highlighted how assault on whites could alternatively be represented as ‘private’ or ‘political’ depending on the circumstances, and how these contrasting interpretations were strictly connected to ‘two different visions of how a colonial order should and could be maintained’. ¹⁰³ It is interesting to point out that Italian settlers maintained a constant empathy towards the Eritreans and attributed the responsibility for the conflict exclusively to Great Britain and Ethiopia. They always emphasized episodes such as the Eritreans’ visit to the settler victims of the attacks and the fact that they came offering ‘food, drink and even money!! These are the true, the authentic feelings of the Eritrean population towards the Italians!!’. ¹⁰⁴ Even in the darkest years, settlers remained convinced that ‘all Eritreans would deeply desire the return of the Italian government, in any form’. ¹⁰⁵ To that end, they made an imaginary and very clear distinction between ‘brigands’ and the general population: if the latter was entirely loyal to the Italians, the former, inevitably, ‘are not our people who are in ambush to plunder and to kill. They are foreign brigands brought out, instigated and paid for by those who use any means to achieve their goal’. ¹⁰⁶ Consequently, the settlers’ recriminations were never directed against the Eritreans, but only against ‘the vile British, who are regarded as supporting, if not actively organising, the shifta attacks’, ¹⁰⁷ and against the Ethiopians, accused of organizing and financing terrorism ‘in order to demonstrate the absolute intolerance of the natives’ towards the settlers. ¹⁰⁸

The settlers represented themselves as fundamentally beloved masters, a vision incompatible with the existence of any anti-colonial armed struggle. The attackers were therefore necessarily foreigners, infiltrators. It was a widespread colonial cliché that there were ‘the best race relations in the world’ and that the frictions were caused by troublemakers who ‘intimidated the ignorant, non-political black population’. ¹⁰⁹ European settlers generally explained anti-colonial violence by citing the fact that the Africans in their service were ‘possessed, or in the control of other forces’ and so denying ‘any legitimate grievances against the way they had been treated by settlers closed the door to any materialist or social explanation’. ¹¹⁰ The case of Eritrea does not differ from this picture.

The process that led Eritrea from being an Italian colony to being federated with Ethiopia, was a complicated form of decolonization – so much so as to be perceived as the passage from one annexation to another. ¹¹¹ The word decolonization can nevertheless be used if we consider that the solution adopted by the United Nations definitively deprived the settlers of the right to participate in the construction of the new state by excluding them both from the Constituent Assembly and the future Eritrean government. As a political and social category, they were defeated and ousted. Even demographically: their number dropped from about 39,000 (1944), to 25,000 (1948), to only 18,000 (1950). ¹¹² Overall from 1941 to 1950, 75 per cent of the settlers had abandoned the country. One reason for their evacuation surely owed to pressures created by the war and economic crisis. At the same time, as Veracini pointed out, echoing Fanon, most of the settlers had no interest in trying to build decolonized relationships. Their departure was the ultimate sign of how difficult, even unimaginable, they found it to conceive of ‘the very possibility of a relation between colonizer and colonized after the discontinuation of a settler colonial regime’. ¹¹³

This outcome seems to confirm the theory according to which, in a settler context, the only possible decolonization involves the disappearance of the settlers themselves. Further proof of this is the substantial inability of the settlers to interpret the crisis as an anti-colonial struggle. This strategy, Ann Stoler wrote, helped settlers to deflect ‘attention from the relations of power and production on which colonial violence, fear, and rule were based’. ¹¹⁴ Settlers, while actively participating in the political competition, rejected a priori the idea of ​​being unwanted. They attributed the anti-colonial violence exclusively to external actors, because they considered Eritreans to be in favour of the Italian presence, even if this favour had to be encouraged with money, gifts, and propaganda. Such a mindset left very little room for a renegotiation of roles. In a settler colony, ‘decolonisation cannot even conceptually be construed as a relationship between formally (yet not substantively) equal subjects’, ¹¹⁵ and the Eritrean case confirms this.

Decolonization in a settler context is, however, more nuanced and complex than some interpretations suggest. Conceptualizations focused on the ‘moral blindness of the settler populations at the time of decolonization’ ¹¹⁶ are mostly drawn – with a bit of teleology – upon the dramatic outcome that decolonization has often, but not always, had. Theory should instead be articulated in the face of the plurality of contexts in which the settlers adopted heterogeneous positions. In Rhodesia, for example, the anti-colonial war ‘created a general societal malaise, a weariness that […] prompted feelings of die-hard-ism, centered on an impending, quasi-apocalyptic last stand for whites’, ¹¹⁷ inducing settlers to ‘see themselves as the last bulwark of Christianity and the Western civilization’. ¹¹⁸ Elsewhere, settlers imagined the post-colonial participation of settlers and African and mixed-race bourgeoisie. ¹¹⁹ The Capricorn Africa Society, composed mainly but not exclusively of whites, lobbied in favour of a federative solution for the British colonies of central-eastern Africa: the merger of Kenya, Nyasaland, the two Rhodesias, Tanganyika and Uganda in a single Dominion, in which the privileged status of settlers would be guaranteed, and all races would have the right to vote as long as they demonstrated certain ‘standards of civilization’. ¹²⁰ These were clearly elitist attempts conceived by whites to counter African nationalism by imagining a different decolonization.

Comparisons are always a risk, and certainly, we must keep in mind the specificities of the case in question: in Eritrea, settlers faced decolonization not supported by the colonial government, but subjects of a foreign military administration, while the fate of former colonists and former colonized was decided elsewhere, far from the country. That said, case studies have made it clear that a monolithic view of the settler’s reaction to decolonization is inaccurate. The idea of ​​a compact group of supporters of the white minority rule ignores both the heterogeneity of settler society and the variety of relations it has established with the indigenous majority. From this point of view, the way in which settlers in Eritrea reacted to the end of the colonial era and the loss of their status is significant. While rejecting acts of force and any kind of armed struggle (except for self-defence), they exercised their political will despite considerable constraints. Despite foreign occupation and scarce support from the motherland, they independently set up a secret committee, a political party complete with newspapers, and three representative political associations.

The settlers were also able to involve a certain number of Eritreans in their struggle, although it cannot be established how many joined out of conviction, how many in exchange for money and food, and how many (veterans and their families) in the hope of receiving their pension from Italy. African scholars are divided between those who deny the existence of a ‘pan-Eritrean identity’ in the 1940s, ¹²¹ and those who attribute the birth of an Eritrean self-consciousness to the 70 years of Italian colonialism. ¹²² It is therefore a subject of historiographical contention. As for the settlers, denying Eritreans the ability to elaborate a political position other than loyalty to the old masters and conceiving of no way to deal with them other than bribery, they confirmed the stubborn persistence of the settler colonial state of mind.

The settlers were also able to demonstrate some flexibility, and this is another point that must be emphasized. The idea of an ‘inherent exclusivism’ of the settler colonial frame of mind that implies a ‘winner takes all’ mentality, ¹²³ must be more nuanced. The Eritrean case demonstrates how settlers, by adapting their positions to international change, could shift from demanding a complete return to the status quo, towards trusteeship, before finally supporting the independence of the country. Of course, they did it in the hope of retaining their privileged status and some political influence. Nonetheless, it is a further confirmation of the fluid nature of the concept of post-colonial nation as elaborated by the settlers: not uniquely and irreversibly anchored to white rule, but certainly conceived in order to defend their own interest, and in the (paternalistic and deeply colonial) presumption of knowing what the black majority wanted and what was best for them.

In conclusion, the 10 years in which Eritrea's destiny was decided, a destiny that would have changed many times later but without settlers’ contribution, saw a multiplicity of indigenous and exogenous actors at play, each with its own agency and project. From this picture, it is clear that settlers, far from both Rhodesia’s die-hardism and the violent militancy of Algeria, produced their own original form of political struggle. This complicates and enriches our idea of how settlers, far from being an undifferentiated category, resisted decolonization.