Italian East Africa
Italian East Africa Africa Orientale Italiana () | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1936–1941 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
Motto: Marcia Reale d'Ordinanza "Royal March of Ordinance" | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
Status | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
Emperor | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
• 1936–1941 | Victor Emmanuel III | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Governor-General[a] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
• 1936 | Pietro Badoglio | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
• 1936–1937 | Rodolfo Graziani | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
• 1937–1941 | Amedeo di Aosta | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
• 1941 (acting) | Pietro Gazzera | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
• 1941 (acting) | Guglielmo Nasi | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Historical era | Interwar period to World War II | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
9 May 1936 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
• Italian Ethiopia declared part of Italian East Africa | 1 June 1936 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
19 February 1937 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
19 August 1940 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
27 November 1941 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
10 February 1947 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
Area | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
1939[2] | 1,725,000 km2 (666,000 sq mi) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Population | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
• 1939[2] | 12,100,000 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Currency | Italian East African lira | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||
Today part of | Eritrea Somalia Ethiopia Somaliland |
Italian East Africa (Italian: Africa Orientale Italiana, AOI)[3] was an Italian colony in the Horn of Africa. It was formed in 1936 after the Second Italo-Ethiopian War through the merger of Italian Somaliland, Italian Eritrea, and the newly occupied Ethiopian Empire.[4]
Italian East Africa was divided into
During the
History
Conquest of Ethiopia
Historians are still divided about the reasons for the Italian attack on Ethiopia in 1935. Some Italian
Unlike forty years earlier, Italy's forces were far superior to the Ethiopian forces, especially in air power, and they were victorious. Emperor Haile Selassie was forced to flee the country, with Italian forces entering the capital city, Addis Ababa, to proclaim an "Italian Empire of Ethiopia" by 5 May 1936.[9] Some Ethiopians welcomed the Italians and collaborated with them in the government of the newly created Italian Empire, like Ras Seyoum Mengesha, Ras Getachew Abate and Ras Kebbede Guebret. In 1937 the friendship of Seyoum Mengesha with the Italian Viceroy Prince Amedeo, Duke of Aosta enabled this Ras to play an influential role in securing the release of 3,000 Ethiopian POWs being held in Italian Somaliland.
Mussolini's international popularity decreased as he endorsed the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany, beginning a political tilt toward Germany that eventually led to the downfall of Mussolini and the Fascist regime in Italy in World War II.[10] Italian East Africa was formed on 1 June 1936, shortly after the conquest, by merging the pre-existing colonies of Italian Somaliland and Italian Eritrea with the newly conquered territory.[11] The maintenance and creation of Ethiopian colonies was very costly.
Second World War and dissolution
On 10 June 1940, Italy declared war on Britain and
Hostilities began on 13 June 1940, with an Italian air raid on the base of
By early 1941, Italian forces had been largely pushed back from
In January 1942, with the final official surrender of the Italians, the British signed an interim Anglo-Ethiopian Agreement with Selassie, acknowledging Ethiopian sovereignty. Makonnen Endelkachew was named as Prime Minister and on 19 December 1944, the final Anglo-Ethiopian Agreement was signed.
In the
Colonial administration
The colony was administered by a
Territory
When established in 1936, Italian East Africa consisted of the old Italian possessions in the
Italian East Africa was briefly enlarged in 1940, as Italian forces invaded British Somaliland, thereby bringing all Somali territories, aside from the small colony of French Somaliland, under Italian administration. However, the enlarged colony was dismembered only a year later, when in the course of the East African campaign the colony was occupied by British forces.[15]
Economic development
Fascist colonial policy in Italian East Africa had a
The Italians invested substantively in Ethiopian infrastructure development. They created the "
Italians even created new airports and in 1936 started the
The most important railway line in the African colonies of the Kingdom of Italy, the 784 km long Djibouti-Addis Ababa, was acquired following the conquest of the Ethiopian Empire by the Italians in 1936. The route was served until 1935 by steam trains that took about 36 hours to do the total trip between the capital of Ethiopia and the port of Djibouti. In 1938 following the Italian conquest, train speed was increased with the introduction of four high capacity railcars "type 038" derived from the model Fiat ALn56.[21]
These diesel trains were able to reach 70 km/h and so the time travel was cut in half to just 18 hours: they were used until the mid 1960s.[22] At the main stations there were some bus connections to the other cities of Italian Ethiopia not served by the railway.[23] Additionally, near the Addis Ababa station was created a special unit against fire, that was the only one in all Africa.[24]
However Ethiopia and Africa Orientale Italiana (AOI) proved to be extremely expensive to maintain, as the budget for the fiscal year 1936-37 had been set at 19.136 billion lira to create the necessary infrastructure for the colony.[17]: 5 At the time, Italy's entire yearly revenue was only 18.581 billion lira.[17]: 5
The architects of the Fascist regime had drafted grandiose urbanistic projects for the enlargement of Addis Ababa, in order to build a state-of-the-art capital of the Africa Orientale Italiana, but these architectural plans -like all the other developments- were stopped by World War II.[25]
Education
Prior to Fascism, education in Italian East Africa had primarily been the responsibility of both Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries. With Mussolini's rise to power, government schools were created which eventually incorporated the Catholic missionaries' educational programmes while those of the Protestant missionaries became marginalised and circumscribed. Andrea Festa, who was made director of the central office governing primary education in Eritrea in November 1932, declared in 1934 that Fascist efforts in education needed to ensure that native Africans were "acquainted with a little of our civilisation" and that they needed to "know Italy, its glories, and ancient history, in order to, become a conscious militia man in the shade of our flag." Such education initiatives were designed to train Africans in a variety of practical tasks useful to the Fascist regime as well as to indoctrinate them with the tenets and lifestyle of Fascist ideology with the aim of creating citizens obedient and subservient to the state. Their propagandistic nature was especially apparent in history textbooks issued to African children, which entirely omitted any discussion of events such as Italian disunity, Giuseppe Mazzini's "Young Italy" movement, the revolutions of 1848, or Giuseppe Garibaldi's Expedition of the Thousand and instead stressed the "glories" of the Roman Empire and those of the Italian state that claimed to be its successor. Glorification and lionisation of Mussolini and his "great work" likewise pervaded them, while periods during which Libya and other then-Italian possessions had been controlled by older, non-Italian empires, such as the Ottoman Empire, were portrayed through an unflattering lens. Use of the Fascist salute was mandatory in schools for African children, who were constantly encouraged to become "little soldiers of the Duce", and every day there was morning ceremony at which the Italian flag was hoisted and patriotic songs were sung. Italian children, whose education the Fascist government prioritised over that of Africans, received education similar to that in Fascist Italy's metropole, though with some aspects of it tailored to the local situation in East Africa. Fascist Italy sought to neutralise any educational institutions which provided instruction to Africans beyond the level expected by Fascist ideology, in particular the secondary education network that prior to the Italian invasion had prepared and enabled a relatively small but significant amount of Ethiopians to study abroad at universities in Europe.
In February 1937, following an attempt on the life of Rodolfo Graziani, educated Ethiopians, already having been distrusted by colonial government authorities and many having already been placed in concentration camps, became victims of state-sponsored mass murder, with much of the intelligentsia of Ethiopia being executed and the remainder exiled to penal colonies on Italian-controlled islands in the Mediterranean Sea. Fascist education in the colony proved to be a failure in the end, with only one twentieth of Italian colonial soldiers possessing any literacy. During World War II, which saw the liberation of Italian East Africa from Fascism, few Africans displayed any loyalty to the Fascist state that the state's schools had so fervently tried to instill, and Ethiopia post-World War II found itself impoverished of skilled workers due to the very limited and propagandistic education provided to its non-Italian inhabitants under Mussolini's rule.[26]
Demographics
In 1939, there were 165,267 Italian citizens in the Italian East Africa, the majority of them concentrated around the main urban centres of Asmara, Addis Ababa and Mogadishu. The total population was estimated around 12.1 million, with a density of just over 6.9 inhabitants per square kilometre (18/sq mi). The distribution of population was, however, very uneven. Eritrea, with an area of 230,000 km2 (90,000 sq mi), had a population estimated in about 1.5 million, with a population density of 6.4/km2 (16.7/sq mi); Ethiopia with an area of 790,000 km2 (305,000 sq mi) and a population of some 9.5 million, had a resulting density of 12/km2 (31/sq mi); sparsely populated Italian Somaliland finally, with an area of 700,000 km2 (271,000 sq mi) and a population of just 1.1 million, had a very low density of 1.5/km2 (4/sq mi).[27]
English | Capital | Total population[2] | Italians[2] | Tag | Coat of Arms |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Amhara Governorate | Gondar | 2,000,000 | 11,103 | AM | |
Eritrea Governorate | Asmara | 1,500,000 | 72,408 | ER | |
Galla-Sidamo Governorate | Jimma | 4,000,000 | 11,823 | GS | |
Harar Governorate | Harar | 1,600,000 | 10,035 | HA | |
Scioa Governorate | Addis Ababa | 1,850,000 | 40,698 | SC | |
Somalia Governorate | Mogadishu | 1,150,000 | 19,200 | SOM |
Italian atrocities
In February 1937, following many murders of Italian and Eritrean soldiers and an assassination attempt on Italian East Africa's
After the massacres, Graziani became known as "the Butcher of Ethiopia".[30] He was subsequently removed by Mussolini and replaced by Prince Amedeo, Duke of Aosta, who followed a more conciliatory policy towards the natives, obtaining a huge success in pacifying Ethiopia.[31]
By the eve of the Italian entry into the Second World War (January/February 1940) the Ethiopian guerrillas were still in control of some areas of Harar and the Galla-Sidamo Governorate. Amedeo's conciliatory efforts obtained that Abebe Aregai, then the last leader of the "Arbegnoch" (as the guerrilla fighters were called in Ethiopia) made a surrender proposal to the Italians in the spring of 1940 (after the 1939 surrender of Ethiopian leaders Zaudiè Asfau and Olonà Dinkel).[32] The Italian declaration of war on 10 June 1940 and British influence blocked the surrender proposal.
See also
- List of governors-general of Italian East Africa
- List of governors of the governorates of Italian East Africa
- Dubats
- Political history of Eastern Africa
- Italian Ethiopia
- Italians of Ethiopia
- Italian guerrilla war in Ethiopia
- Italian African Police
- Italian East African lira
- Augusto Turati
- Languages of Africa
- Armed Forces of Italian Empire in "Africa Orientale italiana"
Notes
References
- OCLC 690378095.
- ^ Istat (December 2010). "I censimenti nell'Italia unita I censimenti nell'Italia unita Le fonti di stato della popolazione tra il XIX e il XXI secolo ISTITUTO NAZIONALE DI STATISTICA SOCIETÀ ITALIANA DI DEMOGRAFIA STORICA Le fonti di stato della popolazione tra il XIX e il XXI secolo" (PDF). Annali di Statistica. XII. 2: 263. Archived from the original(PDF) on 3 August 2014. Retrieved 24 December 2013.
- ^ OCLC 961059564.
- ^ "Italian East Africa". World Statesmen. Archived from the original on 14 February 2012. Retrieved 9 November 2015.
- ISBN 978-0-304-93201-6.
- ^ Ofcansky and LaVerle Berry, Thomas P. "Ethiopia in World War II". A Country Study: Ethiopia. Library of Congress. Archived from the original on 29 October 2004. Retrieved 11 January 2014.
- from the original on 18 March 2023. Retrieved 18 March 2023.
- ^ OCLC 48139682.
- ^ "Ethiopia 1935–36". icrc.org. 8 January 2008. Archived from the original on 1 December 2006.
- ISBN 9780275948771. Archivedfrom the original on 3 February 2024. Retrieved 24 May 2015.
- ^ Jochim, Mark (10 March 2017). "Italian East Africa #1 (1938)". A Stamp A Day. Archived from the original on 29 January 2022. Retrieved 18 November 2019.
- ^ OCLC 504230580.
- OCLC 718241912.
- ISBN 978-0-85229-787-2.
- OCLC 317592773.
- ^ "More detailed map". Archived from the original on 24 August 2023. Retrieved 26 August 2023.
- ^ OCLC 185703605.
- ^ "Italian industries and companies in Eritrea". Archived from the original on 29 April 2009.
- ^ "1940 Article on the special road Addis Abeba-Assab and map (in Italian)" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2 April 2012. Retrieved 22 September 2011.
- ^ "AFRICA in "Enciclopedia Italiana"". www.treccani.it. Archived from the original on 6 June 2019. Retrieved 3 July 2019.
- ^ "LE CHEMIN DE FER FRANCO ETHIOPIEN ET DJIBOUTO ETHIOPIEN". www.train-franco-ethiopien.com. Archived from the original on 24 February 2021. Retrieved 1 July 2018.
- ^ "LE CHEMIN DE FER FRANCO ETHIOPIEN ET DJIBOUTO ETHIOPIEN". www.train-franco-ethiopien.com. Archived from the original on 2 August 2020. Retrieved 1 July 2018.
- ^ "LE CHEMIN DE FER FRANCO ETHIOPIEN ET DJIBOUTO ETHIOPIEN". www.train-franco-ethiopien.com. Archived from the original on 24 July 2017. Retrieved 1 July 2018.
- ^ ""Pompieri ad Addis Abeba" (in Italian)". Archived from the original on 4 November 2016. Retrieved 20 December 2018.
- ^ "Addis Abeba 1939 Urbanistic and Architectural Plan" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 22 July 2011.
- JSTOR 217091.
- ^ Royal Institute of International Affairs (24 August 1940). "Italian Possessions in Africa: II. Italian East Africa". Bulletin of International News. 17 (17): 1065–1074.
- OCLC 600764772.
- JSTOR 41988224.
- OCLC 516514436.
- OCLC 278096179.
- ^ Bahru Zewde, "A History of Modern Ethiopia", second edition (Oxford: James Currey, 2001), pp. 172f
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- Mauri, Arnaldo (1967). Il mercato del credito in Etiopia (in Italian). Milan: Giuffrè. pp. XVI, 504.
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