Italian Memories/African Memories of Colonialism

Abstract

Francophone and Anglophone Africa have received much attention from Africanists, resulting in a vast literature. This body of work has partly privileged oral literature and the production of memories. Besides collections of Africans’ personal memories assembled by historians, anthropologists, and other specialists on colonialism, we also have access to a rich memoiristic literature by Europeans who were bureaucrats, settlers, travelers, and soldiers in the African colonies. But documentation of oral literature concerning Italian East Africa (Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia from 1936 to 1941) is meager. Italians left few first-person accounts of their African experiences, and contemporary scholars of Italian colonialism have not sought to transcribe the memories of its protagonists, whether Italian or African. This is an essential premise of my work on oral histories. I have sought to reconstruct Italian colonialism in East Africa through two types of individual, informal oral testimonies: those of surviving Italian colonizers, whom I interviewed in Italy many years after their experiences, and those of once-colonized Africans.1 The present essay is a synthesis of my works on these subjects; but it also addresses new reflections, and outlines a first stage of comparison between Italians’ and Africans’ memories of Italian colonialism—a comparison that provides us with a new interpretative key for many colonial histories.