Identity and Contemporary Representations:The Heritage of Alberto Pollera's Monograph, I Baria e i Kunama Gianni Dore The Italian colonial system has had different impacts on the diverse local contexts of inland Eritrea. As has already been shown, colonial practices, as well as the ways they have been received, have not always been the same, in their forms and their meanings, for the different groups inhabiting a multiethnic and multilingual area such as Eritrea. Different relationships and representations, whether under British administration, in the wake of the bloody events of 1948–1952, under the federation, under the Derg, during the struggle for liberation, or finally today, in the troubled construction of the independent state, have conditioned subsequent history. Indeed, one of the major problems that has arisen in the construction of the independent state is that of compatibility between the process of Eritrean national unification and the respect for linguistic diversity that has been institutionally recognized.1 The question is how peripheral communities experience regional systems and take part in the process of building a modern African state. Alberto Pollera and the Kunama: How a Tradition Is Constructed Colonial knowledge acts on today's identity movements, whether collective or individual, along unforeseen pathways. Through his colonial [End Page 71] monograph, I Baria e i Kunama, published in 1913 but based mainly on his experience as residente between 1903 and 1909, Alberto Pollera2 introduced to a wider public the peoples of the Western Eritrean low-lands, Kunama and Nara, then called respectively Baza or Baze and Barià, which actually mean "slave," names that were given by the Tigreans and later used by the Italians. In his introduction, Pollera constructs a traditional essence of Kunama society with its variations and its regional and subregional specificities: In my narrative of the lives and the customs of those populations, I was soon confronted with noticeable diversities, from place to place, and village to village, although these were inhabited by peoples of the same descent.3 That statement was true to the historical and social realities of the western Eritrean lowlands, populated by various groups, among them the Kunama themselves, agriculturalist and partially pastoralist, internally divided by dialects that were not always mutually intelligible.4 All of these groups were parts of a continuum of societies exposed to various influences both from the subregions of the highlands and from the Sudanese states. The influence of the two historical mainstreams was felt most directly in the border villages, which were in a liminal situation between the Kunama regions and the varied groups and individuals with whom they interacted and intermarried. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Kunama individuals had traveled through the territory just north of Mogolò, a small center of attraction and exchange, north of the Gash and already in decline at the time of Munzinger's famous journey, while some of them had reached even further, all the way to the Taka and the Sennaar, either as slaves, moving from master to master, or as laborers, especially in the Kassala Turko-Egyptian cotton scheme, or as servants or soldiers in the Turko Egyptian garrisons. They could be found in Port Suakin, on the Red Sea, in Tokar's prison, in Massawa, as the offspring of mixed marriages or with families of the Addi Abo, and beyond the Setit (Tika for the Kunama), as laborers, under Tigrean or Muslim supervisors, in the farms [End Page 72] of the mäzäga of Wälqayt,5 lands which were known as tsellim, or black, even further away in Gondar. Some of them, if luck helped them, went back to their villages, sometimes to become the closest of their people to the colonial power because of their experience as travelers and ability to speak other languages they were recruited as soldiers and interpreters, and, before that, interpreters for the delegations of groups of villages in their tax dealings with the local Algeden and Beni Amer dominant groups (themselves often brokers or mediators on behalf of Sudanese or Tigray political centers). Why did Pollera make the homogeneity of the traditional Kunama the subject of his monograph, rather than their heterogeneity and their variations? The...
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Mar 14, 2016
Stephen Sloane 
Open Access