The Italian Communist Party in Somalia between colonial legacies and party pedagogy

Abstract

This article addresses a number of historiographical questions about the relationship between Italian communism and colonialism. It does so by analysing the presence of a section of the Italian Communist Party in Mogadishu in 1942. After describing its origins and relations with the military administration and the Italian community in British-occupied Somalia, the article examines the activities of the communists in Mogadishu and their relationship with the party, from which the local section seems to have been quite autonomous. While this confirms that the ideas and practices of the communist movement circulated well beyond the networks of the Third International, it is also an atypical element in the political context of those years. The article then identifies the section's recruitment of militants in British prison camps as a peculiar variation of the Tolliattian ‘new party', before concluding with a discussion of the paternalist and colonialist attitudes underlying the exclusion of Somalis from the section's political horizon.