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Ed Webb

The enduring appeal of liberation movements | News | Africa | M&G - 0 views

mg.co.za/...appeal-of-liberation-movements

Namibia Zimbabwe SouthAfrica Zambia Mozambique parties politics movement decolonization

shared by Ed Webb on 02 Dec 19 - No Cached
  • This week, Namibians voted for a new president and Parliament in the country’s sixth general election since independence in 1990.The South West African People’s Organisation (Swapo) has won every single one of those elections
  • Angola, Botswana, Mozambique, Tanzania and Zimbabwe are all governed by the liberation movement that ushered in their independence, whereas in South Africa the party that helped to end apartheid is still in charge
  • Even the least popular among them, Zimbabwe’s Zanu-PF, was returned to power with a parliamentary majority of 52.35%
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  • “Liberation movements in Southern Africa cultivated a heroic narrative translating into a patriotic history: we liberated you, therefore you owe us,” he says. “Based on such liberation gospel, they occupied the political commanding heights and used this initial dominance to promote the equation that the party is the government and the government is the state.”
  • A new generation — the so-called “born-frees”, who did not grow up during their country’s respective struggles — does not feel the debt of gratitude to their liberators quite so strongly, and is much more likely to punish the ruling party for service delivery failures. They are, however, also more likely not to vote, which can have the effect of reinforcing the strength of a liberation movement.
Ed Webb

Italy Still Won't Confront Its Colonial Past - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...ont-confront-its-colonial-past

Italy Libya Ethiopia Eritrea Somalia colonialism history memory

shared by Ed Webb on 01 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • Italy’s colonial past is largely absent from public debate in the country.
  • Last month, an anti-racist group in Milan asked for the removal of a statue of the journalist Indro Montanelli, pointing out that he bought a 12-year-old Eritrean girl as a “temporary wife”—that is, a sex slave—when he was a young colonial soldier in the 1930s. It was no secret. Montanelli, a celebrity conservative journalist who also enjoyed a following among the left, repeatedly bragged about the episode until his death in 2001. He resorted to overtly racist tropes, describing the girl, whose name was either Fatima or Destà, as “a docile tiny pet” and stressing that he was repulsed by her smell. He dismissed the charges of pedophilia, claiming that African girls are different from Europeans: “At 14, they’re women; at 20 they are old.”
  • During Italy’s occupation of the Horn of Africa, it was fairly common for Italian soldiers to take local girls as temporary wives, a practice known as “madamato” (from the word “madama,” or mistress), which Italians authorities considered legal—and even encouraged—until 1937, when the Fascist regime outlawed it in the name of racial purity. Obviously the only possible union was between Italian men and African women: The local male population wasn’t even allowed to have contact with white women.
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  • In 1952, the Italian government commissioned a study of its past colonial activities from a group of 24 scholars, largely former colonial officials, including governors and geographers. The committee, known as “Comitato per la documentazione dell’Opera dell’Italia in Africa,” (Committee for the Documentation of the Italian Activities in Africa) continued its work until 1984, producing 40 volumes, most of them hagiographies.
  • Fascist troops conquered Ethiopia in 1936, with the help of chemical weapons, and took Albania in 1939
  • “Having colonies was seen as a way of being modern,”
  • It’s estimated that during the 60 years of Italian colonialism, almost 1 million people died due to war, deportations, and internment
  • widespread summary executions, torture, and mass incarceration. To crush the Libyan resistance, in 1930 the Italian general Rodolfo Graziani, nicknamed “the butcher of Fezzan,” put the civilian population in concentration camps. In Ethiopia, the Fascists deployed chemical attacks. When Ethiopian rebels tried to kill him, in 1937, Graziani had 19,000 Ethiopian civilians executed in retaliation.
  • After the end of World War II, Italy’s new ruling class, largely composed of anti-Fascists, created two intertwined myths: the myth of the “good Italian colonialist” and the myth of the “good Italian soldier.”
  • The aim was to create a sense of cohesion between the new anti-Fascist government and the general population, by reassuring the latter they don’t share the blame of the dictatorship’s deeds
  • The myth of the good colonialist was devised as a propaganda tool to make the point that Italy should keep its colonies that were conquered before Fascism, which didn’t work out.
  • When Ethiopia requested the extradition of Graziani in 1949, Italy refused, despite the fact that he was included in a list of war criminals of the United Nations for the use of toxic gases and the bombing of some Red Cross hospitals.
  • In 1882, the Kingdom of Italy, which was founded only two decades earlier, invaded Eritrea, and seven years later, it conquered Somalia. Between 1895 and 1896 Italy also tried to conquer Ethiopia, but it failed spectacularly, with the Ethiopian troops inflicting on the Italian attackers the worst defeat ever suffered by a European nation in Africa. In 1911, the Italians took Libya.
  • Unlike other European countries, Italy never had prominent voices confronting its colonial crimes
  • “The French public might not have agreed with the position of Sartre or Fanon, but they knew who they were,”
  • colonial brutality is the subject of a classic of Italian cinema: Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film The Battle of Algiers, which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and a nomination at the Academy Awards, chronicled the brutal French repression of Algeria. It posed no problem, because the bad guys were the French.
  • the Italian governement intervened in 1982 to prevent the distribution of a movie that would have put Italy’s colonialism in bad light: Lion of the Desert, chronicling Italy’s repression of the Libyan resistance led by Omar al-Mukhtar, was not aired until 2009, during a state visit by Muammar al-Qaddafi
  • As recently as 1997, Italy formally protested against the United Kingdom because the BBC aired a documentary, called Fascist Legacy, about Italian war crimes. The Italian state TV channel RAI bought a copy of the movie but never aired it.
  • in 2012, a mausoleum honoring Graziani, the war criminal, was erected near Rome. A court ordered it to be taken down, because it violated a law against “Fascist propaganda” (Graziani also headed the pro-Nazi army of the Salò Republic), but the order was never carried out. While it has been defaced and mocked with graffiti, the mausoleum still stands.
  • Italy decolonization was “a passive process, not an active one.” Italy did not go through a lengthy independence war, as France did in Algeria, nor did it witness a large-scale civil rights movement, as Britain did in India: Italy simply lost its colonies because it lost the war
  • there were “two types of removal: one from the authority but also one from the Italian people.” She points out that many Italian families have recent ancestors who fought in colonial wars in Africa. “If people were to check in their attics, they will likely find memorabilia of that period,” but they ignore it
  • a small but growing number of Italian authors who are tackling Italy’s colonial violence head on
  • Italian authorities should build monuments to the victims and start teaching about colonial violence in schools: “Many high school books still claim that Italy went to Africa to bring civilization.”
  • Despite the fact that Italy is fast becoming a multiethnic society, and despite the fact that its colonies came to an end almost 80 years ago, the country doesn’t seem ready to face its own past.
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