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

expected. Across Africa, the supposedly unstoppable flood of European settlers was easily dammed and reversed. Earning a living in Eritrea proved too tough for even the hardy peasants of Sicily and Calabria. Italy’s African colonies would never absorb more than one per cent of the country’s émigrés, compared to the 40 per cent that headed to America. In the 1940s, ridiculing Italy’s pretensions to empire, the British–who had so many of their own–started sending Italian settlers back from the Horn. When Ethiopia’s regime turned Marxist and nationalized Italian businesses in the 1970s, those who had clung on registered sadly for repatriation. Today the breed facing imminent extinction in Eritrea is white, not black. Less than 120 Italian families remain, liver-spotted men and women in their seventies and eighties who came back after independence in 1993 to die in the only place that felt like home. Not a single country estate lies in Italian hands and each year Vittorio Volpicelli, manager of the Casa degli Italiani, the Italian Club, is called upon to organize yet another medical evacuation, yet another funeral mass at the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary.
    With each disappearance, the dwindling community grows a little more mournful, a little more inward-looking. Martini’s descendants, dubbed ‘soft Fascists’ by some Eritreans, have none of his brash confidence. If they still meet friends for an espresso at the Casa, where the Fascist party insignia–a bundle of rods symbolizing ‘strength through unity’–graces the main gate, the Italians rarely allow the ‘F’ word to pass their lips. ‘You know, when they’re annoyed with us they like to throw Fascism in our faces. But if you look at the origins of the word, it actually stands for something rather beautiful,’ a fadedItalian beauty told me as we sat having our hair done in Gino and Gina’s. Gino was Asmara’s first Italian hairdresser and his salon’s walls are decorated with photographs of heavily made-up European models, showing off the latest in 1960s styles. Now he potters around in a confusion of Alzheimer’s, collecting towels and taking orders from his wife. ‘This used to be such a beautiful, beautiful city,’ the signora reminisced. ‘Every day, a plane would fly in from Rome with fresh orchids for the flower shops. But now…’ There was no point going on. Asmara’s Italians may purse their lips, remembering days bathed in the golden light of memory, but they know better than to voice such views in public. They stay out of politics, keep themselves to themselves. Having experienced one nationalization, they know what angry African governments can do to unwanted white communities. Masters of yesteryear, they are now here on sufferance.

CHAPTER 8
The Day of Mourning
    â€˜To betray, you must first belong.’
    Kim Philby
    Running through Asmara is what must surely be one of the most frequently baptized boulevards in Africa. Its many christenings track the stages of Eritrea’s busy history. In Martini’s day, it was known as Corso Vittorio Emanuele, after the king who ruled from across the seas. Under the Fascists, it was renamed Viale Mussolini, but when the British took over and taught the Italians to be ashamed of themselves, it became Corso Italia. Under imperial Ethiopian rule, it turned into Haile Selassie Avenue, only to metamorphose into National Avenue under the Derg. This was the street down which rebel tanks, cheered by hysterical Asmarinos, thundered when the EPLF captured the city, a victory parade followed by another, inevitable rebranding as Liberation Avenue.
    Lined with cafeterias, banks and grocers, this is the heart of the city, the natural starting point for the evening passeggiata in which Asmarinos effortlessly reclaim the thoroughfare from which they were once barred. The Italians planted the boulevard with