The military in its different expressions has played a crucial role in the history of Northeast Africa marking in a very peculiar way the development of the region. This Panel aim at investigating the various impact warfare, conflict and displacement on both colonial-and postcolonial time, from different perspectives such as military traditions, gender, urban settlements, construction of power, elites, and theatrical representations.
Little attention has been paid in contemporary research to the impact of the military on colonial Northeast Africa and its lasting consequences on post-colonial societies, particularly with regard to the former Italian colonies of Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia.
This is quite puzzling, particularly if one considers that for some of those territories –namely Eritrea – the recruitment into the colonial army reached such a conspicuous intake that it produced a serious imbalance in the local labour market. This, in turn, generated processes of regional migration, which are still under researched, in order to compensate for the sudden unavailability of local labour.
Colonial troops had a very important role in colonial strategies as they were considered instrumental to the expansion and strengthening not only of the military control of the territory, but also of the social and political grip over colonized peoples. Moreover, colonial troops played a relevant role in the nationalist movements sprouted during the troubled years following the collapse of the Italian colonial rule over the region.
From a broader perspective it is apparent that the military factor has continued to play a very central role in the social and political history of Northeast Africa. This panel is intended to be an opportunity to discuss current research on the impact of the military factor on the social and political history of Northeast Africa from an interdisciplinary perspective.
In order to accommodate such a rich variety of themes and perspectives the panel will be organised into two sessions, a first one focusing on the colonial period and a second one focusing on the post-colonial one.
Warfare has been a major aspect of the history of colonial Northeast Africa. Within this context, a special role has been played by colonial soldiers (ascari), which were major actors in the process of negotiating urban spaces, political and economic visibility. To a certain extent colonial troops acted as early elites and, therefore, to reconstruct the experience of ascari is crucial to understand the history of colonial society and their post-colonial developments.
This paper is concerned with the nature of conflict and violence from the particular perspectives of, firstly, forms and modes of war in selected areas of Eastern Africa, and secondly, the various contemporary interpretations of these apparent forms of violence, and the ways in which these interpretations might lead us to understand those modes of conflict in context. The sub-theme of the paper, moreover, is also to investigate how we can begin to understand more recent conflict in the region under study, and perhaps in Africa more widely, pursing the notion that violence is thematic and cyclical, and that that of more recent times – especially in the Horn – represents ‘unfinished business’.
The historiography dealing with colonial troops in Northeast Africa has been quite limited in quantity and quality, which is striking considering the massive involvement of local populations in colonial warfare. This paper discusses some of the main stumbling blocks behind this unusual development which the author identifies as problems related both to sources (their availability, identification and classification) and to methodology (utilisation of sources, representation ad memory of colonialism).
The 5th battalion was the first Eritrean unit to serve in the Turkish-Italian war of 1911-1912 during which it displayed excellent military skills. Nevertheless at the core of this very first Eritrean presence in Libya there were some considerations that were not exclusively military and that involved a wider debate on the Italian colonial rule. Making use of the impressive amount of photographs and other visual records that documented the battalion’s activities during its mission to Libya, this paper will discuss the wider meanings that were conveyed to the Eritrean, Libyan and Italian societies through the iconography of the 5th battalion.
The Fascist campaign against Ethiopia of 1935 represents a watershed in the recruitment policy of Italian colonial authorities. The massive employment of colonial troops for that campaign modified substantially procedures related to recruitment, payment and organisation of military camps. This paper will discuss the impact of those developments on the labour market, on urban growth and on the degree of co-optation of ascari in the colonial system.
Throughout the Italian colonial period in Eritrea, being ascari (colonial soldiers) in the Italian army was the most stable occupation. This paper will explore the extent to which ascari employed for the Italian colonial campaigns (in Somalia, Libya and Ethiopia) and later resettled in Asmara contributed to the making of urban economy and culture from 1890 to 1941. Key questions would include the identification of which ascari, benefited from the development of capital accumulation and how their urban resettlement affected the development of social, ethnic and gender relations. Particular attention will be given to the growth of Asmara’s sewa houses and the development of prostitution.
The military has played an important role also in post-colonial Northeast Africa’s societies marking deeply the development of nationalist elites and their political debate, the articulation of state power and nation building processes. This session will focus on all those dramatic transformations, which will be discussed from different methodological and disciplinary perspectives.
This paper attempts to cast light on the way the British Military Administration (BMA) dealt with Eritrean soldiers between 1942 and 1952, de-legitimating Italian-based identities and privileges and inaugurating the development of local armed forces. The discussion will focus on how, within a complex and rapidly evolving environment, the BMA affected the occupied society, by analysing the trajectories in which Eritrean soldiers were inscribed in their political and societal fabric. While literature has focused mainly on acts of resistance, and mostly shifta’s activities, this paper draws on the recent “War and Society” literature and analyses the conditions under which Eritrean soldiers and policemen constructed and negotiated their new social and professional identities. Furthermore, the paper will focus on how Eritreans fared during the political struggle fought over the future of their homeland.
This paper describes the interdependences and mutual influences of the military and the social sectors as part of a violent attempt to decolonise and to overthrow the existing political system in Eritrea. Starting with a short description of those colonial and indigenous military patterns which influenced the inception of the Eritrean war, it will trace continuities and ruptures which accompanied the course of the war during the three phases of ELF hegemony, ELF-EPLF competition, and EPLF hegemony until the end of the war, taking the social aspects of the “Eritrean revolution” as a parameter for the relationship between the military and the civil sectors within each front. Finally, it will investigate the post-independence period from 1991 to 1998 in order to pinpoint successes and failures in the re-shaping of a civil society in Eritrea, and connect these with the issues of demobilisation and re-mobilisation which led into the new war with Ethiopia of 1998-2000.
After his return from exile in 1941 Haile Selasse I resumed his previous attempts to create a modern Ethiopian army, which was rapidly to became the largest one in sub-Saharan Africa. However, though modern in organisation and equipment, it retained many features and attitudes of the traditional Ethiopian military forces. The new army created by the Emperor was meant to defend his personal rule and the internal feudal order of the Empire against internal challenges, safeguard the territorial integrity of the country against centrifugal tendencies and protect Ethiopia against possible external aggression. The internal tasks assigned to the modern Ethiopian army had precedence over the task to defend the country against external threats. As the political power in Ethiopia failed to solve the growing internal contradictions by political means and relied increasingly on military might to contain them, it was inevitable that the army became politicised and finally instrumental in toppling the old political order.
This paper proposes to give an overview of the influence of the military on performance culture in Eritrea, focusing on the period of the liberation war and beyond. Shows mounted by both the ELF and the EPLF displayed a distinct change of theatrical aesthetics related to the fighters’ experiences in the field. For one, the performance of social roles changed dramatically which engendered unprecedented kinetic and sartorial codes also echoed in theatre arts; secondly, new elements were introduced into the shows which were stylized reflections of life in the military. Whereas on independence social codes noticeably returned to ‘civilian’ norms, military performance aesthetics have continued to be a mainstay of Eritrean performance culture, with a particular revival during the 1998-2000 Eritro-Ethiopian war.
The emergence of armed national liberation movements in Eritrea during the 1960s represented the consummation of a shift from a legalized public sphere in which nationalist politics had been contested, to a subterranean world of virtual illegality in which armed resistance acquired exclusive efficacy. Imperial repression acted as a decisive accelerator of this shift, but once forced into the confines of this political space, the militarization of nationalist politics had a dynamic of its own. In this paper, I want to examine how the form of resistance specific to an armed movement shaped the dynamics of nation formation, determining the parameters of what could and could not be thought. By re-examining wartime nationalist politics in this way, we can perhaps begin to see the partialities of the post-war order it ratified far more clearly than before.