Free I Didn't Do It for You by Michela Wrong

survival of the fittest were used to justify the slaughter of Congo’s tribes by Belgian King Leopold’s mercenaries, the German massacre of the Herero tribesmen in South West Africa and the British eradication of Tasmania’s natives. Like the rabbits a British landowner introduced to Australia, like the rampant European weeds overrunning the New World, the intellectually and technologically superior white races would push aboriginal tribes into extinction. British Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury summarized the philosophy in a famous 1898 speech. ‘You may roughly divide the nations of the world as the living and the dying. The weak states are becoming weaker and the strong states are becoming stronger…the living nations will gradually encroach on the territory of the dying.’ 9
    Nor was Martini alone in finding the process distressing to watch. A strange kind of benevolent ruthlessness has always been the hallmark of the colonial conqueror. From H. Rider Haggard’s fictional hero Allan Quatermain muttering ‘poor wretch’ as he puts a bullet through yet another Zulu warrior’s heart, to the real-life Winston Churchill, shuddering with excitement and horror as shellfire rips through Mahdi lines at Omdurman, the literature of the day is peppered with compassionate exterminators. Martini was too intelligent not to grasp the humanity of the wretched Eritreans he met. Their plight, he told his readers, haunted his dreams. But at the end of the day, despite all his anti-establishment posturing and elegant irony, nothing mattered more to this Italian patriot than the greater glory of the Motherland.
    Nell’Affrica Italiana contains one last clue as to why Martini changed his mind on Eritrea, though it is hard to distinguish authentic feeling from the rhetoric considered appropriate to the closing paragraphs of a 19th-century memoir. Sailing out of Massawa, Martini launches into a high-octane paean to Africa, the continent where, he says, ‘the mind purifies, the spirit repairs itself and we find God’. ‘Oh vast silence, oh nights spent in the open air, how you invigorate the body and strengthen the soul!’ he raves. Adopting the pose of jaundiced Westerner weighed down by the burdens of civilization, he envies the nomads of Africa. In their ‘happy ignorance’, he says, they never think to ask the moon why it moves across the sky or interrogate their flocks on the meaning of life. ‘How sweet it is to dream, amongst sands untouched from one month to another by a human footprint, of a society without sickness or strife, without wars or tail-coats, without coups d’état and visiting cards!’ It is a vision of the Noble Savage that owes everything to Rousseau and Romantic poetry and nothing to reality. Like so many travellers to Africa before and after him, Martini confused the absence of a set of rules recognized by a European with personal freedom. Plagued by outbreaks of cholera and the raids of local warlords, bound by their own community’s conservative codes of behaviour, Eritrea’s nomads had far more reason to feel hemmed in than an effete Italian aristocrat on a government expense account.
    But underneath all the hyperbole, one catches a glint of sincere emotion. For Martini, it had been easy enough to argue for Eritrea’s abandonment from the distance of Rome. But criss-crossing the Hamasien plateau by mule, watching flying fish skipping over the Red Sea, basted by Eritrea’s harsh light, Martini had blossomed. Part of him had fallen in love with the place, a love affair that would last the rest of his life and bring him back. He was not about to pronounce the deathsentence on a land that had touched his heart. Perhaps this was the true reason why, with typical sophistry, he managed to convince himself that a doomed and destructive colonial project was, in fact, the soundest of investments.
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    Driving back to Asmara in the