November 13, 2021 8:47 AM
Daughters and sons of our own blood, for whom it is the right of blood it is not fair. Italians ignored, offended, removed. They are called Francesca, Salvatore, Rosina or Vittorio, like their grandparents and great-grandparents, who arrived in Eritrea with the royal army at the end of the nineteenth century or later, during fascism. “I only knew about him that he was from Rome”, says Salvatore Crispi, 36, a graduate surveyor at the Italian School of Asmara: “I had no certificates or documents and I went to Facebook: I wrote to almost everyone who had the same surname and who live in Lazio, but no one answered “.
Salvatore lives in Rome, among the Prenestino high-rises: one in a thousand who made it, not as a citizen but as a refugee, escaped from Eritrea by President Isaias Afewerki together with three grandchildren. He passed through Ethiopia, taking advantage of a window of peace and open borders before war broke out again in the Tigray region. “It was immediately after the reconciliation agreement between the two countries, the borders were opened for the first time and there were even buses,” he recalls. “With me were Nahor, Mutasala and Hosaena, the youngest: leaving Eritrea was forbidden, because for minors already at the age of five there is a ban on expatriation due to the obligation of military service”.
The march takes them to Addis Ababa. Then they have to go back, back to Tigray, around Shire, to register as asylum seekers. Salvatore eventually arrived in Italy, but not as an Italian. His name is among the 349 collected and verified one by one by Father Protasio Delfini, a priest of the parish of San Francesco d’Assisi in the Eritrean city of Massawa, signatory of a letter-appeal sent on 13 October to the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella. “We ask to examine and finally resolve”, the text reads, “an issue never really addressed, a crime of colonial racism that has marked the lives of thousands of innocent women and men and which continues to discriminate generations of people”. In the text, on behalf of the Committee for the recognition of citizenship of Italo-Eritreans, almost a century of discrimination, inconsistencies, quibbles and legal absurdities is reconstructed.
Not even a photo
The story begins in 1890, when the Rubattino shipping company buys the Assab bay. It continues with the advance of the Italian army and the advent of fascism, with the “empire” and its laws against the “madamato” and the “mestizo”. “Many of our mothers thought that those momentary cohabitations with the Italian military would last forever and did not worry about the recognition of their children”, recalls Protasio, one of them, now 81 years old: “They had them baptized in the church with an Italian name , but often of the father when he returned home there was not even a photograph left “.
Since 1937, with the “politics of race”, it becomes a crime to have relations with African women and to have children from mixed unions. Girl-mothers end up abandoned, often with no means of providing for their babies; and the discriminated “mestizos” end up in orphanages or religious institutes. They call them derogatory dqala, bastards, half-breeds, and even those who want to retaliate in some way from the violence of colonial rule do so.
The mestizos born in sixty years of colonialism in the Horn of Africa are at least 20 thousand and of these only five or six thousand have been recognized
After the Second World War, the laws change. Eritrea becomes part of independent Ethiopia and in Rome it is established that those born in the territories of the former colonies are declared Italian citizens “if for any reason it can be reasonably believed that one of the parents is an Italian citizen”. The turning point, however, is only in the words. According to Protasio, “since then no government has ever dealt with the question of awards”. Not even the 1992 law on citizenship, that of the right of blood. “We brought together Eritrean families descending from Italians, gathering all possible evidence that would prove these relationships, and thus we were able to obtain the sentences of recognition of paternity from the high court of Asmara”, recalls the priest. “Some of these, about eighty, have been accepted by the municipalities of origin of the ancestors; but this did not happen due to the many requests in respect of which the city of origin was not known, diverted to Rome and rejected on the basis of an opinion from the public prosecutor’s office, which did not validate the decisions of the Eritrean judges ”.
There are the knots of international law, with appeals also addressed to former presidents Oscar Luigi Scalfaro and Carlo Azeglio Ciampi. And then above all the stories, similar and yet all different from each other. Some are told by Vittorio Longhi, journalist, author of the autobiographical book The color of the name. His name is after his grandfather, a mestizo activist murdered in 1950, son of Giacomo, a non-commissioned officer who arrived in Eritrea at the end of the nineteenth century who had left at least his surname to a child.
Vittorio grew up in Catania and is an Italian citizen. He calculates that the mestizos born in sixty years of colonialism in the Horn of Africa are at least 20 thousand and that of these only five or six thousand have been recognized. “Unlike many others, the descendants of Eritrean Italians almost never have the opportunity to carry out research to prove their origins, because without the right passport you cannot leave Asmara”, he stresses.
It refers to the restrictions imposed by Afewerki, to a military service that lasts for years and to the victims of the shipwreck of 3 October 2013 in the sea of Lampedusa. But he always returns to a fight for justice, even against racism and chauvinism, two evils with which Italy, according to him, has never really dealt with. “Even in response to the new outbreaks of fascism”, says Vittorio, “judicial procedures should be facilitated, first of all considering as evidence the period of birth which often coincides with that of the racial laws, the non-recognition by the father and the condition of mestizos of those who apply “.
The closure of the Italian school
Among them there is also Salvatore, the surveyor. It arrived in Italy in 2019 thanks to the humanitarian corridors of the Community of Sant’Egidio. Together with a lawyer friend he is organizing an appeal to the court of Rome to obtain citizenship and, in the meantime, he is enrolled in the professional register and works in a supermarket. He shares the photos of his grandchildren via email, taken away from Asmara so that they could be reunited with their mother. Her name is Francesca. She did not have to flee from Eritrea, because she married an Italian citizen, Paolo Delfini, a mathematics and physics teacher known at the Asmara School. “My father and mother didn’t have any pictures of their grandfather,” he tells us. “We only knew his name was Giuseppe; we also tried the Central State Archives, Eur, but we found nothing. We have now stopped looking. My father’s name, on the other hand, is Fioravante: he was born in 1938 or 1939 and has always remained in Eritrea ”.
Asmara, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, also remains Italian. “His cafes are always called Moderno and Vittoria”, confirms Giampaolo Montesanto, professor in the Eritrean capital for almost 20 years, author of the documentary in 2018 Mixed-breed. “The Mocambo, where Macario, Alberto Sordi and Anna Magnani performed, the Impero cinema, the Rome or the Fiat Tagliente service station, resembling a futurist-style spaceship, resist”.
However, not everything is the same as before. Last month the news of the closure of the Italian school, after a first stop of lessons due to the covid-19 pandemic. The institute, inaugurated at the beginning of the twentieth century to train the children of the colonial ruling class, was now almost exclusively attended by Eritrean students. The elementary school was called Michelangelo Buonarroti, the middle school was Alessandro Volta, the high school Guglielmo Marconi. The keys to the premises were handed over by the Italian embassy to the managers of the Eritrean education ministry, which undertook to restart the lessons by replacing some study subjects for the benefit of scientific disciplines and in English.
“The school, attended by about 1,200 pupils, was the largest among the Italian ones abroad”, sighs Giampaolo, speaking on the phone after returning to Sicily: “Imagine the archives, the photographs, the friendships”. As a teacher, he has also proposed an unofficial program in recent years. “I couldn’t just talk about Giuseppe Garibaldi or Giovanni Pascoli,” he explains. “We had to discuss and make known the history of Eritrea, because otherwise the children would have continued to wonder if they had the right to exist”. With them, in the corridors of the institute, beyond the gate and the bougainvillea, Salvatore also ran and joked. “For many families the Italian school was a point of reference”, he tells us now. “In Rome, however, they seem to have forgotten about it, just like the children of the colonies. Today when I say that I come from Eritrea, many do not even know where it is “.
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