Colonial Concubinage in Eritrea, 1890S1941

1996 Giulia Barrera.
All rights reserved. No part of the following papers

may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever
without written permission of the Program of African
Studies, except in the case of brief quotations
embodied in critical articles & reviews.
Dangerous LIAISONS
Colonial Concubinage in Eritrea, 1890S1941

Giulia Barrera
PAS Working Papers
Number 1
Series Editors
Jonathon Glassman @ Jane I. Guyer @ Karen Tranberg Hansen @ Roseann Mark
Program of African Studies

Northwestern University
620 Library Place
Evanston, Illinois 60208-4110
U.S.A.
1996 by Giulia Barrera. All rights reserved.
Dangerous LIAISONS
To think that little plaything is my wife!

From Madama Butterfly by G. Puccini/G. Giacosa
L. Illica
Mogli e buoi dei paesi tuoi.

Wives and oxen [must be] of your own country.
Italian popular saying
Contents
List of illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 @ African women in the Italian colonial imagination 8

2 @ Clues to the identity of the madame
12
3 @ The madamato in the liberal and early Fascist period (18901933) 21

4 @ Mixed-race marriages and mtissage before racial legislation (18901933) 28
5 @ The madamato becomes a crime:
Fascist racial policy after the Ethiopian invasion (19351941) 34
6 @ The madamato in the court decisions 43
7 @ Eritreans and madame
50
Final considerations 54
Sources and bibliography
58
List of illustrations
1
A Black Venus. Postcard. Circa 1930.

Source: Archivio Privato, Roma. Reprinted, by permission, from Luigi Goglia, ed., Colonialismo e
fotografia: il caso italiano, pl. II.93, p. 137.
Bilen Girl. Postcard published by A. Baratti, Asmara. Circa 1936.

Source: Istituto storico della resistenza e della societ contemporanea nel Novarese e nel Verbano,
Cusio, Ossola Piero Fornara. Collection Edoardo Colombara. Reprinted, by permission, from Adolfo
Mignemi, ed., Immagine coordinata per un impero, pl. 127, p. 103.
Civilization. Postcard for the Italian troops during the Italo-Ethiopian war.
Designed by the painter Enrico De Seta.
Source: Civica raccolta di stampe A. Bertarelli, Milano. Reprinted, by permission, from Adolfo
At the Post Office. Postcard for the Italian troops during the Italo-Ethiopian war.
Designed by the painter Enrico De Seta.
Source: Civica raccolta di stampe A. Bertarelli, Milano. Reprinted, by permission, from Adolfo
A mixed-race girl. Photograph. Circa 1905.
A madama. Photograph. Circa 1900.
An officer with his madama. Photograph.
A madama with her child. Photograph.
Source: Raccolta Guastoni. Achivio Privato, Roma. Reprinted, by permission, from Luigi Goglia, ed.,
Colonialismo e fotografia: il caso italiano, pl. V.23, p. 225.
fotografia: il caso italiano, pl. V.21, p. 224.
fotografia: il caso italiano, pl. V.22, p. 225.
Reprinted, by permission, from Luigi Goglia and Fabio Grassi, eds., Il colonialismo italiano da Adua
allimpero, pl. 10.
Acknowledgments
First of all, I would like to thank the persons I interviewedsome of whom I identify only by
their initials to protect their personal privacyas well as the friends who helped me to arrange
the interviews. This paper is a revision of my first-year research paper; I would like to thank
E. William Monter and my fellow participants in the 199495 History E-70 seminar at
Northwestern University, with whom I initially discussed it. I am grateful for the help I
received from Alessandro Triulzi, Abebe Kifleyesus, Barbara Srgoni, Berhe Habte-Giorgis, and
Luigi Goglia. Goglia and Adolfo Mignemi deserve my thanks for letting me use the pictures
that accompany the paper. I am particularly grateful to Roseann Mark for her patient editing
and for transforming all of my awkward Italianisms into proper English. Jane Guyers
thoughtful input prior to publication was extremely valuable. And I owe a very special thanks
to Jonathon Glassman for his comments and suggestions on successive drafts. Finally, I must
add that I remain solely responsible for the papers content.
My predissertation fieldwork in Eritrea in 1996 was made possible by a Hans E.
Panofsky research award, administered by the Program of African Studies, Northwestern
University. My graduate studies at Northwestern have been partially funded by a Fulbright
fellowship.
Giulia Barrera
Evanston, Illinois
Late Autumn 1996
Introduction
During the era of Italian colonialism in Eritrea (18901941),1 a large number of Italian
men had African concubines. We do not know precisely how many because reliable figures
are difficult to find, but colonial sources overwhelmingly suggest that mixed-race unions were
very common. As well, the Fascists vociferous campaign in the late 1930s against mixed-race
unions and miscegenation (mtissage) indirectly attests to the magnitude of the size and
social impact of this phenomenon. Another piece of indirect evidence is the large number of
mixed-race children born at the time.2 Decades later, a sizable Italo-Eritrean community still
forms an important component of the Eritrean social landscape.
Generally speaking, Italian men categorized their Eritrean sexual partners as either
sciarmutte or madame.3 Sciarmutta was an Italianization of the Arabic term sharmta
and stood for prostitute; the term madama applied to concubines who associated with Italian
men, although Italian men and their madame did not always cohabit. In a broader sense, the
term seems to have referred to an African woman in an exclusive relationship with an Italian
man. By Italian standards the madamato or madamismo (i.e., the relationship with a
madama) had no legal sanction; Italians considered it something different from marriage,
questioning whether or not an African woman could ever become a real wife. Italians
debated the issue throughout the colonial period, but for most the answer was a definite
No.
My research focuses on the history of the madamato. In choosing to use Italian
terminology to define my object of study, I am aware that these labels and the notions they
The Italian penetration of Eritrea started in 1869, when the Rubattino Shipping Company acquired the port
of Assab. In 1882 the Italian government took over Assab; in 1885 it occupied Massawa and started heading
inland. On January 1, 1890, the Italian government formally established the colony, naming it Eritrea. For a
general history of the first period of Italian colonialism in the Horn, see Battaglia, La prima guerra dAfrica; Del
Boca, Gli Italiani in Africa Orientale; Labanca, In marcia verso Adua.
2
In 1947 the Italo-Eritrean Association, an organization established after the collapse of Italian rule in east Africa,
claimed to represent approximately 15,000 mixed-race persons and about 17,000 Eritrean women who were living
with Italians or were mothers of mixed-race children (Four Power Commission of Investigation for the Former
Italian Colonies, Report on Eritrea, London, 22 June 1948, app. 111, Memorandum of the Italo-Eritrean Association,
Asmara, 10 December 1947 [British Museum, Dept. of Printed Books, UNP 211, P53/1353]). Gino Cerbella,
Italian assistant consul, estimated the number of mixed-race people to be 15,500 in 1959 (Cerbella, Eritrea 1959).
3
According to a 1957 Italian dictionary, madama is an honorific or respectful title, given to a quality woman;
but [it] is a Gallicism, and we rather prefer signora, dama, donna [lady, lady of rank, woman] (Novissimo
dizionario della lingua italiana. Seconda edizione [Milan: Ceschina, 1957]). The term probably implied, at least
at the beginning, a certain ironical contempt. It became popularly used in both everyday parlance and scholarly
literature.
2
signify bear the imprint of the Italian marriage and racial ideologies of the time. Of course my
suggestion that language is not a neutral medium is nothing new; however, in this case the
term madamato is a useful analytical toolnot in spite of, but precisely because of its bias
and opacity. Italian men devised and used this term only in Italys colonies in the Horn
because they needed a name for those relationships they considered to be different from their
relationships with Italian women. Exactly what this difference was they really were not able
to say. Scholars and judges grappled with the questionespecially at the time of the racial
lawsbut answers proved to be extraordinarily elusive.
Use of the term madamato also illustrates how defining and categorizing different
mating patterns can be a problematic and ideologically loaded enterprise. Examination of the
madamatos history exposes the ideological nature of any clear-cut divisions between different
categories of relationships (prostitution, concubinage, lovers, marriage, etc.). Sex, emotional
attachment, exploitation, violence, money exchange, mutual support, etc. all combined in the
madamato, but by no means were they peculiar to this kind of union. To varying degrees and
in myriad forms, these elements coexisted in many mating patterns, marriage included.
The sexual ideology of the Italian men concerned in my research could be summarized
in terms of two ideal polar opposites: at one pole was their idea of a strictly sexual
relationship, involving only bodily contact and physiological functions; at the other pole was
marriage, a social institution and the only appropriate context for affection and sentiments.
Ideally, black women were for sex and white women for sentiments. But reality contradicted
this model: the madamato exceeded the boundaries of a sex-as-a-physiological-function
relationship. This is one reason the Fascist government outlawed it.
Mixed-race unions, in Italian as well as other colonies, were never merely private affairs
between individuals. Interracial relations were a key political issue and the subject of careful
regulation by colonial authorities; the regulations sometimes explicitly addressed
concubinage. In its earliest stages a mixed-race union was usually left alone or even
encouraged; but as it deepened through later stages it was increasingly discouraged and
persecuted. Referring to different colonial contexts, anthropologist Ann Stoler points out
that
concubinage was a domestic arrangement based on sexual service and gender inequalities which
worked as long as European identity and supremacy was clear. When either was thought to be
vulnerable, in jeopardy, or less than convincing, at the turn of the century and increasingly through
the 1920s, colonial elites responded by clarifying the cultural criteria of privilege and the moral
premises of their unity. Structured sex in the politically safe context of prostitution, and where
3
possible in the more desirable context of marriage between full-blooded Europeans, replaced
concubinage.4
The pattern Stoler outlines accurately depicts Italian colonial policy in Eritrea,
although the clarification the Italian colonial elites would try to impose came later, more
suddenly, and in violence. On the heels of the Italo-Ethiopian war (193536) and the
establishment of the Italian empire in Africa Orientale Italiana (Italian Eastern Africa or
AOI), the Italian Fascist regime adopted a blatantly racist policy. The racial legislation began
in 1937 with a decree outlawing relations of a conjugal nature between Italian men and
African women. In other words, the madamato became a crime.
Though declared illegal, the madamato certainly did not disappear. It might have
changed in nature and/or practice, but we cannot be sure. Much evidence suggests that the
number of cases of madamato actually rose after it was banned (largely because more Italians
were living in Eritrea in the late 1930s than were before)reminding us that the gap between
governmental policies and actual behaviors can be considerable. Thus, to understand the
madamatos history it is necessary to unpack received notions of the colonizer and analyze
colonial society in its different articulations.
For instance, the attitudes of different authorities (metropolitan vs. colonial, military
vs. civil, religious vs. state, etc.) and different categories of people certainly merit a closer look.
Did military officers and rank-and-filers, high officials and low-rank employees share similar
ideologies and practices? In the Italian coloniesprobably more than in any other European
colonycolonists came from both the middle and lower classes.5 At the time of the ItaloEthiopian war, more than 50,000 unemployed men went to Eritrea to work in street
construction and in other public works.6 We do not know if the Italian men who had a
madama typically belonged to one particular social class. Apparently, servicemen viewed a
madama as a luxury only commanding officers could afford, and rank-and-filers had to resort
Stoler, Carnal Knowledge, 6061.
On Italians in the Horn and their social background, see Del Boca, Gli italiani in Africa orientale; and Le Hourou,
Lpope. For research specifically addressing the experience of Italian subalterns in the colony (mostly as
servicemen), see Dore, Guerra dEtiopia, 47587; Tassis Torriani, A te caro libro, 6374; Taddia, La
memoria; Labanca, Coscritti in colonia, 95; Guerrini, Esotismo, 11723; and idem, Chiss quante
stramberie, 7188.
6
Del Boca, Gli italiani in Africa orientale, 296; Longrigg, Short History of Eritrea, 140.
4
to prostitutes.7 I found nothing to suggest that having a madama was a function of class
among civilians; in fact, some evidence supports that socioeconomic status and the
probability of associating with madame were inversely related.8
It was probable that the Italian men who had a madama came from very different
economic, social, and cultural backgrounds. Their relationships and the meanings they
attached to them might have varied accordingly. One can reasonably expect, for instance,
that a mason from rural Sicily and a colonial official from Milan had fairly different ideas about
marriage, or sexual and racial relations, as well as different life strategies.
Also, to speak of colonized women or Eritrean women as a single entity is a gross
generalization. Eritrea was home to nine different ethnic groups,9 who spoke nine different
languages10 and practiced various religions including Christianity (predominant in the
highlands), Islam (in the lowlands), Judaism, and various local religions. Agriculture
supported the population in the highlands, while in the lowlands pastoralism and
agropastoralism were common. Marriage customs varied widely from one group to another,
and differences also existed within each group. Furthermore, some of the madame could have
come from neighboring countries, particularly from Tigray. It is therefore very difficult to
characterize the madames background and, consequently, to understand the causes
underlying their relationships with Italian men, their ideas of marriage, and their conceptions
of the madamato. How Eritrean madame defined Italian men and their relationships with
them is unknown, and we lack evidence to show whether they used madame or a different
term to define themselves.
Indisputably, colonialism was an essential precondition for the madamato. However,
here I should caution that colonial power, exoticism, racism, and sexism are necessary but not
sufficient to understand the madamato. To different degrees sexual relations and
concubinage between colonizer and colonized could and did occur in any and all colonial
Labanca, In marcia verso Adua, 219.
See for instance the research by Le Hourou on the Italian insabbiati (literally, covered with sand, figuratively
gone native) in Ethiopia. She interviewed some 30 Italian men still living in Addis Ababa; many of her
interviewees were from the lower classes, and they cited their relationship with an African woman as a reason for
their permanence in the country. Le Hourou, however, did not explore the nature of the relationships between
these men and their African partners (Le Hourou, Lpope).
9
Afar, Bilen, Hadareb, Kunama, Nara, Rashaida, Saho, Tigre, and Tigrinya.
10
Afar, Bilen, To Bedawi, Kunama, Nara, Arabic, Saho, Tigre, and Tigrinya.
5
settings; colonialism per se does not tell us why the madamato was so commonly practiced
in Eritrea.
A review of the Italian settlement policies of the time yields some useful leads. The
Italian population in the colony was always rather low, and of that number women were a
tiny minority. In 1905, after 15 years of Italian colonization, only 2,333 Italians lived in
Eritrea, 834 soldiers included; Italian women numbered 482.11 The number of Italians in the
colony grew during the following decades, and the male-to-female ratio eventually grew more
balanced. A census in 1931 indicated the presence of 4,188 Italians in Eritrea, 2,471 men and
1,717 women. But counting only unmarried people aged 15 and over1,076 men, 398
womenit is obvious that the sex ratio remained quite uneven. From 1935 on, the Italian
population skyrocketed, peaking at 75,000 in 1940 (59,000 men and 16,000 women).12 All
these figures show how a high percentage of the Italian men seeking a relationshipwhether
strictly sexual or sentimentalwith a woman in Eritrea might be apt to turn to Eritrean
women.13
However, as Stoler observes, demographics were not the bedrock of social relations
from which all else followed.14 The dearth of Italian women in the colony accounts for the
demand for Eritrean women, but it does not explain why the demand was successfully met
or how specific forms of the madamato came into being. What combination of necessity,
hope for economic improvement, physical coercion, personal choice, social pressure,
sentiment, or ambition motivated some Eritrean women to become madame? What did they
think of it? How did it fit into their personal life strategies? One can also wonder if and in
what ways their families were involved: did a woman become a madama in obedience to or in
spite of her familys will? Was it because these women lacked a family to arrange a marriage?
11
Martini, Relazione sulla Colonia Eritrea, 46.
12
In 1931 the Italian population included approximately 500 soldiers. No proper census took place after 1931;
thus the population figures supplied for 1940 must be considered as purely indicative (Castellano, La
popolazione italiana, 53040). The Eritrean population in 1947 was around 850,000 (Four Power Commission,
Report on Eritrea).
13
The sex ratio in the period under examination varied from 3.8:1 in 1905, to 1.4:1 in 1931 (the figure becomes
2.7:1 if one considers only unmarried people aged over 15), to 3.6:1 in 1940.
14
6
Were they madame because their family support was inadequate or because they had to
support their families?15
Much evidence suggests that for many Eritrean women, to become a madama was to
experience a form of oppression in which various incarnations of exploitation based on gender,
racial, and class inequalities combined. However, as Frederick Cooper recently pointed out,
recognition of the much greater power of the Europeans in the colonial encounter does not
negate the importance of African agency in determining the shape the encounter took.16
The madamato was a set of relationships grounded in the material basis of colonialism and
shaped by colonial discourse,17 but it was lived out by concrete individuals: by men who
participated in very different ways in the colonial enterprise and by women who were not
merely passive victims.
My paper builds upon these methodological assumptions but does not provide final
answers to the complex set of questions I have suggested so far. Rather, my aim is to lay out
pertinent elements leading to new questions for further research. This is the first step of a
work in progress; more archival research and personal interviews, both in Italy and in Eritrea,
will be required to advance our understanding of the madamato.
Because this present research is based almost exclusively upon published sources, it
substantially benefits from research by other scholars on the madamato18 and more generally
on colonial Eritrea. However, the existing research on Italian colonialism19 on the one hand,
15
Luise White points out that it is a mistake to assume that women who become prostitutes are victims of
weak families; they might actually be victims of strong ones. The same might be true for the madame (White,
Comforts of Home, 9).
16
Cooper, Conflict and Connection, 1529.
17
For a thorough analysis of Italian juridical and anthropological discourse on interracial sexual relations, refer
to Srgoni, Parole e corpi.
18
The madamato has already been briefly described in studies of the general history of Italian colonialism (e.g.,
by Angelo Del Boca and Alberto Sbacchi) and of the history of colonial racial policies (by Richard Pankhurst in
1969 and Luigi Goglia in 1988). Only Gabriella Campassi has written an article entirely devoted to the issue.
She considers the madamato a paradigm for the relations of colonizer and colonized; her analysis concentrates
on the exoticism/eroticism nexus in Italian colonialism. In all these studies the focus is on Italian colonial policies
and on the attitudes of Italian men; the agency of Eritrean women has been totally ignored or else considered
impossible to assess (Campassi, Il madamato in Africa Orientale, 21960).
19
Historians have frequently complained about the scarcity of research on the social history of Italian colonialism.
For years archival sources have been barely accessible to scholars, and this has been a major hindrance to the
development of historical studies. For instance, see Rochat, Colonialismo, 10720; Triulzi, Italian
Colonialism and Ethiopia, 23743; and Gli studi africanistici in Italia (in particular R. H. Rainero, 95110;
7
and on Eritrean history20 on the other leaves vast territories unexplored, particularly where
social history is concerned. An obvious gap is the almost complete lack of research on Eritrean
womens history.21 My paper clearly reflects the difficulties of working in largely
uninvestigated territory. True to the nature of a working paper, it shares the preliminary
results of my efforts to date, and these results which are necessarily tentative and temporary.
I will be very grateful for critical remarks.
Rochat, 11117); Taddia, La memoria; and Labanca, In marcia verso Adua, 333.
20
For a general survey of recent historiography on Eritrea (prior to Eritrean independence), see Crummey,
Society, State, and Nationality, 10319. Two consequences of 30 years of war in Eritrea are that field work was
rendered virtually impossible and the attention of many scholars was directed to political history.
21
To my knowledge, the only exception is Araia Tseggai, Eritrean Women and Italian Soldiers, 712. Research
on womens participation in the war of Eritrean liberation also offers scattered information on womens history.
For instance, see Wilson, Women and the Eritrean Revolution. Some information can also be derived from general
studies on Ethiopian womens history, such as Tsehai Berhane Sellassies In search of Ethiopian women and
Pankhursts The History of Prostitution in Ethiopia.
1 @ African women in the Italian colonial imagination

Another colonist, who was coming back from Keren, was very impressed by the provoking figures of
Bilen girls. These girls are considered, and correctly, the most beautiful of the country, they are aware
of that, and therefore ask at least 100 Maria Therese Thalers for their virginity. The colonist told me
he was extremely surprised that in a conquered country, like Eritrea, it was not allowed to the white
ruler to possess these girls with violence, or at least a much smaller price was not imposed.22
For the most part, European men were wont to assume that colonial conquest entitled
them to sexual rewards, as this letter from 1911 brutally exemplifies. The conquest of
women, as Stoler suggests, was not only a metaphor for colonial domination but also part
of its substance.23
During the colonial period the popular press and colonial literature amply supplied the
European male imagination with erotic images of African women. Photographs and postcards
(see plates 14) were powerful vehicles for exciting male fantasies.24 During the ItaloEthiopian war, such imagery was part of the specialized propaganda required to motivate
hundreds of thousands of Italian men to wage war in a distant land.2 5 One of the most
popular songs in Italy at the time was Faccetta neraLittle Black Facewhich included
the refrain:
22
Letter to consul Piacentini, 1 July 1911, published in Goglia and Grassi, Il colonialismo italiano, 136. The
author of the letter was not given; the original is in the Archivio storico diplomatico del Ministero per gli affari
esteri, Archivio Eritrea, 11/8/79.
23
24
See for instance Alloula, The Colonial Harem. For the Italian case, see Campassi, Uomo bianco, donna nera,
5462; and Goglia, Colonialismo e fotografia: il caso italiano.
25
Alberto Sbacchi reports that 358,000 Italian soldiers participated in the Italo-Ethiopian war in 1936 (Sbacchi,
Ethiopia under Mussolini, 178). On Fascist colonial propaganda at the time of the invasion of Ethiopia, see
Mignemi, ed., Immagine Coordinata.
Little black face, beautiful Abyssinian woman, wait and hope, because the time is close, when we will
be with you, and we will bring you a new king and a new duce.26
26
Facetta nera, bella abissina/aspetta e spera che gi lora savvicina/quando saremo vicino a te/noi ti daremo
un nuovo duce e un nuovo re. Rochat, Il colonialismo italiano, 170-71.
11
12
13
The propaganda successfully penetrated the collective imagination of the masses. A
soldier, Dino Colombara, wrote in his diary in 1935 that he used to run away from the
barracks into the nearby village and have fun with ebony little faces; and he further noted
that these women stank like hell.27 Placing erotic images side by side with negative
stereotypes was neither rare nor contradictory. Savagery and sensuality were represented as
complements to each other in Italian images of African women. These themes recurred in
colonial literature and were echoed, as far as we can infer from the scarce sources available, in
writings by subalterns.28
African women, radically depersonalized, thus became an open space upon which racial
and erotic stereotypes could be freely created. Much colonial literature often depicted the
African woman as, on the one hand, a beast of burden exploited by a lazy man, and on the
other hand as a highly desirable sexual plaything, an untamed animal dominated by
sensuality.
A similar pattern, as Francesco Surdich observes, characterized colonial images of
Africa itself. By exalting the beauty of the continent and simultaneously offering a barbarous
caricature of its indigenous populations, colonial images of Africa stimulated a desire for
conquest while seeming to provide the moral justification for it. At the same time, a deep
misunderstanding of African customs engendered the idea that all Africans enjoyed unlimited
sexual freedom; thus, the women of Africa were both passionate and available.29
Authors who depicted the passions of African women in hyperbolic terms struck a
responsive chord in many bourgeois European males. European middle- and upper-class
women had been conditioned to fit a desexualized stereotype in which they represented the
emotions, the Hearth, or sometimes the Soul, seat of morality and tenderness, as Leonore
Davidoff suggests. By contrast, African and lower-class European women were thought to be
closer to nature; they supposedly allowed their sensuality to spill out over their total lives.30
Thus, the sexual gratification of white middle-class men was negotiated in between these two
27
Emphasis added. The diary of serviceman Edoardo (Dino) Colombara, workman from Novara, is published in
Mignemi, Immagine coordinata, 224.
28
On images of African women in Italian colonial literature, see Surdich, La donna dellAfrica Orientale,
193220. We can learn something about the Italian sailors gaze vis--vis African women from Guerrini, Chiss
quante stramberie, 122.
29
Surdich, La donna dellAfrica Orientale.
30
Davidoff, Class and Gender, 1921.
14
self-created polarities: if white middle-class women were for the soul, then black women were
for the body; if the former had delicate sentiments, the latter had instinct; the former
represented beauty, the latter sensuality; the former was for love and family, the latter for
passion. The black Venus promised a triumph of the senses overbut still compatible with
and useful tostrict European moral codes. An explicit example is offered by Renato Paoli,
an Italian journalist who visited Eritrea in 1906. He wrote that he felt in the colony the lack
of the fair sex ... I mean women, not females. There are females, black, exuberant and
generous; but women are missing, and women can be only white.31 However, the white
women he missed never arrivedat least there were never enough to meet the need. So who
were these females?
2 @ Clues to the identity of the madame

As my introduction forewarned, we lack a satisfactory answer to the question of who
these females were. That is, we do not know the identity of the madame in terms of their
ethnic origins, social background, age, marital status, etc. In this section I summarize
informationmostly from colonial sourcesabout marriage customs and the division of labor
by gender in Eritrea. This data will lead to some working hypotheses about the Eritrean
women who were likely to become madame and the madames ideas about marriage and
conjugal relations.
According to the colonial official and prolific ethnographer Alberto Pollerawho, by
the way, lived with a madamaItalian mens concubines were generally Abyssinian
Christians. Abyssinian Muslims, he supposed, viewed a difference of religion as a major
obstacle to mixed-race unions.32 Although Polleras explanation is unsatisfactorygiven that
Italian men found African concubines even in entirely Muslim countries33 his claim that
most madame were Abyssinian Christians is probably valid, and religious compatibility is
31
Paoli, Nella colonia Eritrea, 106. Emphasis added.
32
Pollera, La donna in Etiopia, 73.
33
There is no research on the issue, but several clues signal that concubinage was practiced, albeit probably less
frequently, in Libya and Somalia. In 1932, for instance, General Rodolfo Graziani, vice-governor of Cyrenaica,
sent officers a circular letter expressing his intention to eradicate the plague of mabruchismo, a local
equivalent for madamato (Goglia and Grassi, Il colonialismo italiano, 354). The practice of the madamato in
Somalia is mentioned, for instance, in Perricone Viol, Ricordi somali, 2038.
15
likely to have contributed to the prevalence of Christians among the madame. Another reason
might be simply that most Italians lived in Asmara, where Tigrinya Christians formed the
largest portion of the local population.
Polleras definition of Abyssinian Christians would have included the inhabitants
of both Ethiopian Amhara and Tigray as well as Eritrean Tigrinya. Nothing in the colonial
sources suggests that the madame were other than Eritreans. However, there are indications
that a certain number of madame might have come from Tigray.34 For instance, when ItaloEritreans living in Italy applied for Eritrean citizenship after Eritrean independence, there
were some whose mothers were from Tigray.35 It is not easy to assess to what degree osmosis
took place decades ago between the populations living on one side or another of the Mareb,
the river that marked the border between Eritrea and Tigray.36 Certainly some migration from
Tigray to Eritrea coincided with the great famine of 188892;37 it may have subsequently
resurged during the years 193641 when Eritreas administrative borders were enlarged to
include Tigray, and Asmaras population boomed. It is important to keep in mind that since
most Italians lived in townsespecially Asmara but also Massawa, Keren, and othersthe
madamato was by and large an urban phenomenon, and that urbanization in Eritrea was a
consequence of colonialism;38 therefore, the madame were necessarily urban newcomers,
having migrated from both distant and nearby rural areas.
34
Some of the Eritreans I interviewed shared this belief. However, the notion that the madame were not from
Eritrea might have arisen from a desire to defend the reputation of Eritrean women; thus, reports that many
madame came from Tigray effectively comprise a hypothesis that needs further testing while simultaneously
making the compelling suggestion that the madame bore a social stigma.
35
Mr. Haile, cultural attach of the Eritrean Embassy in Rome, personal communication with author, July 1995.
Unfortunately, he did not have statistical data on the issue, but I am grateful to have had his help.
36
The territory of Eritrea was historically known as Mareb Mellash (Across the Mareb), an expression which
served the Court and officers of Ethiopia to differentiate it from the rest of the Tigrinya-speaking northern areas
of the kingdom (Longrigg, Short History of Eritrea, 9).
37
Speaking of that period, James T. Bent writes: Asmara is quite the most prosperous place in Abyssinia in these
later days. Crowds of pauper fugitives come in here from Abyssinia proper in search of work (Bent, Sacred City).
Pankhurst reports a sizable migration from certain northern Ethiopian provinces to Eritrea (Pankhurst, Great
Ethiopian Famine, 27780).
38
Eritrea in 1890 had no towns whatsoever, save the shabby jumble of huts that was Massawa. Fifty years later
Asmara [had] 40,000 Europeans and 60,000 or more native inhabitants (Longrigg, Short History of Eritrea, 138).
Since different sources give different totals, it is advisable to regard such population estimates as suggestive at
best. According to Castellano, for instance, Asmaras population in 1940 was 53,000 (Castellano, La
popolazione italiana).
16
Ethnographic sources describe the Tigrinya as a patriarchal society organized along
rigid gender-role divisions and strict customary norms. Their rigidity might have been
exaggerated by ethnographers who, assuming that Africans lives were governed by tradition,
looked for rules to include in their codes of customary laws. Customary norms in Eritrea
traditionally underwent periodic revision within each community, but we do not know much
about how the codification of customary norms by colonial authorities interacted with local
social dynamics.39
Scholars have emphasized the centrality of marriage in Tigrinya social organization.
Historian Irma Taddia, for instance, points out that only married men could get a share of
communal land.40 There is an element of fiction in the description of any customs, a wish
to read order into diversity, as Landeg White observes.41 Such an element of fiction is
apparent in efforts by some ethnographers to divide local marriage customs into a fixed
number of types; but just how many is accurate? Two, three, five?
At the turn of the century, Conti Rossini, by far the most prominent ethnographer of
Eritrea, singled out two basic forms of marriage among the Tigrinya:
The first one is based on a true solemn pact among two kin groups; the second one is an agreement
that states that the woman will go to live with the man under a given payment and, usually, for a
given time. A further development of the first one is the religious marriage. But, in general, the
religious component is not within the marriage contract, and it is not necessary at all in order to have
a perfectly valid and legal union.42
Other scholars, however, viewed religious and civil marriage as two different
institutions, as Eritreans do today. Both were considered legitimate by the church, but the
formerwith holy communionwas indissoluble and generally practiced only by the clergy.43
39
On colonial ethnographers codification of Tigrinya customary norms, see Kemink, Tegrea Customary Law
Codes, 5672. On the historical creation of customary law and the way it affected women in particular, see
Chanock, Making Customary Law, 5367.
40
Taddia, LEritrea colonia, 187.
41
White, Magomero, 101.
42
Conti Rossini, Principi di diritto, 189.
43
See for instance Masucci, Lunione, 29. Francesco da Offejo went so far as to identify five forms of marriage
(Francesco da Offejo,DallEritrea, 9091). In contrast Ruffillo Perini viewed religious marriage as a simple variant
of the solemn marriage as Conti Rossini did; Perini, however, singled out two other forms of marriage or rather
conjugal union: the conjugal union per contract [seb dummz] and concubinage cinghert] (Perini, Di qua
17
According to Conti Rossini, the solemn marriage or mraqal kidan in Tigrinyaa
marriage for pactmust be considered the true marriage (the other one, I would say, is a sort
of simple conjugal union).44 The complex set of norms that ruled such a marriage is
irrelevant here, but I will summarize selected elements with a view to understanding the
background of the madame.
Generally, a marriage for pact was arranged by the fathers (mothers had no authority
in the matter) while the designated bride and groomespecially the bridewere still
children. According to Pollera, fathers arranged marriages when their children were usually
not younger than seven years old. The bride went to live permanently with her groom when
she was 12, although her marriage would have been finalized earlier and she would have lived
with her spouse for some time before. (An extremely early marriage age is still reported in
recent times.45 )
Among the Tigrinya the bride brought a dowry, but Muslims required the groom to
pay a bride-price.46 This difference might help to account for the high percentage of
Christians among the madame. For a young Tigrinya woman, especially if her family could
not afford a dowry, the madamato might have been an appealing alternative. Muslims,
assuming that most Italian men were not keen to pay a bride-price, were likely to suffer an
economic loss when a daughter became a madama.
Before a marriage took place, the genealogy of the future son- or daughter-in-law was
the subject of much scrutiny by both families involved. Many Eritreans (not just the
Tigrinya) assigned extraordinary value to the purity of bloodi.e., the assurance that a
prospective spouses ancestry did not include slaves, minstrels, or outcastes such as
blacksmiths and goldsmithscategories often charged with witchcraft.47 For the slave girl
dal Marb). On marriage in modern Eritrea see Paulos Tzadua, Le diverse forme del matrimonio, 530. Some
information can also be derived from the literature on womens participation in the liberation war, such as Silkin,
Women Can Only Be Free, 14763; and Wilson, Women and the Eritrean Revolution.
44
45
Normally a girl is betrothed between the ages of 8 and 14 years old, and she is married around the ages of 13,
14, or 15. Her husband may be a few years older and can even be of her fathers generation (Silkin, Women Can
Only Be Free, 149).
46
The EPLF has tried during the last 20 years to eradicate these practices, which tells us the they were still in use.
See for instance the National Union of Eritrean Womens 1980 publication Women and Revolution in Eritrea.
47
Purity of blood remains a concern in recent times. See Wilson, Women and the Eritrean Revolution, 123.
18
there is no hope of marriage, noted Pollera, while music players, blacksmiths, and goldsmiths
could marry only among their own people.48
Another apparently important precondition for a daughters marriage was her virginity.
It is well known, Giovanni Masucci stated, that virginity is highly considered in
Ethiopia.49 The extremely early marriage age in Eritrea, for example, has been explained as
a consequence of the absolute requirement for girls to remain virgins until marriage.50
From this brief description of marriage for pact, it can be deduced that such strict
rules were likely to marginalize certain women, some of whom might welcome the mating
opportunities offered by Italians. Predictably, non-virgin girls, women of impure blood, and
women without a dowry constituted a pool of viable candidates for becoming madame.
Except for religious marriages, in Eritrea divorce was possible and seemed to be quite
commonplace. But here it should be noted that since divorce did not exist in Italy, Italians
might have been inclined to exaggerate its occurrence in the colonies. If she consented, a
divorced woman could remarry; quite often the request for remarriage was addressed directly
to her.51 It is difficult to know the frequency of remarriage because colonial and
contemporary sources are contradictory in this regard.52 For instance, according to Letenkiel
Tewolde, an Eritrean woman I interviewed who was about 20 years old in 1935, remarriage was
difficult, particularly if a woman already had more than two children; men did not want to
support such burdens. However, Letenkiel divorced and remarried even though she already
had four children. But I had a very strong will, she explained. In the countryside, she
said, remarriage was also arranged by families simply because women did not have the
opportunity to meet men outside the family. But in the towns women had the opportunity
to meet men in drinking houses. Only the lucky ones remarried, and many divorced women
48
Pollera, La donna in Etiopia, 3435. According to Conti Rossini, most goldsmiths were Jews (Conti Rossini,
Principi di diritto, 93).
49
Masucci, Lunione, 38. Opinion on this point, however, was not unanimous. Pollera, for instance argued that
in most of Christian Abyssinia virginity is not taken into consideration, while it was considered very important
by Muslims (Pollera, La donna in Etiopia, 15).
50
Tsehai Berhane Sellassie, In Search of Ethiopian Women, 13. As a whole, research on modern Eritrea greatly
emphasized this issue. See for instance Cowan, Women in Eritrea, 79.
51
52
For example, see Wilson, Women and the Eritrean Revolution, 12526.
19
ended up becoming prostitutes.53 It is reasonable to expect that others ended up becoming
madame.
In the early 1960s Wolfgang Weissleder studied the high incidence of divorce and
remarriage among the Amhara. He pointed out that both marriage and divorce were driven
by strategic choices aimed at maximizing access to the labor force and economic assets.54
Conflict over land, as Donald Crummey points out in his study of family and property among
the Amhara nobility, was an inherent feature of family dynamics. However, conflict,
Crummey argues, does not preclude the familys also being the locus of affection and
nurture.55 It is hard to say to what extent these considerations regarding the Amhara might
also have applied to the Tigrinya since the two groups had different land tenure systems and
other significant dissimilarities. Amhara women, for instance, had access to land property and
inheritance to a degree unknown to Tigrinya women.56 In any case, these observations
certainly suggest important lines of research. If both the Tigrinya and the Amhara
conceptualized marriage and divorce as strategic tools for maximizing access to economic
resources, unions with Italian men might also be understood in these terms. At the same
time, one should keep in mind that to conceptualize marriage in these terms was not to
reduce it to an arrangement devoid of affection.
The second kind of marriage identified by Conti Rossini is of special importance for
my research. Known as marriage for pay or dmz, in it a woman commits herself, directly
or through her family, to live in conjugal union with a man, for a given length of time, and for
the payment of a given sum.57 At this point Conti Rossini noted that superficial
observersespecially Catholic missionariesmistook such unions for concubinage:58 It is
53
Letenkiel Tewolde et al, 13 May 1995.
54
Weissleder, Amhara Marriage, 6785.
55
Crummey, Family and Property, 217.
56
On land tenure systems among the Amhara, see: Levine, Wax & Gold; Hoben, Land Tenure among the Amhara;
Crummey, Abissinian Feudalism, 11538; and idem, Family and Property. On land tenure systems among
the Tigrinya, see Taddia, LEritrea colonia.
57
58
Conti Rossini, Principi di diritto, 249. The term is also spelled demozor damoz.
Catholic missionary Francesco da Offejo, for instance, described the marriage for dmz as a union of Muslim
origin, particularly common among soldiers: they take a woman with them almost like a servant, they pay her
something per month, they get rid of her when they want and they call her ghered, which means, in fact, servant
(Francesco da Offejo, DallEritrea, 9091).
20
a mistake. I deem it to be the continuation or, at least, the equivalent of an extremely ancient
Semitic [temporary] marriage.59
According to Conti Rossini, a comprehensive set of rules regulated such unions. The
amount of payment was usually fixed in advance; the man always had to provide for the
womans living expenses; the woman had to live with the man, take care of him and his house,
and be loyal to him. Children of such marriages were considered fully legitimate, and their
fathers had to pay their expenses. Children usually lived with their mothers for the first three
years, but subsequently custody had to be granted to the father. Even if the father refused
custody, he was required to continue to provide support. Customary laws also prescribed
special norms regarding the length of the marriage and the possibility of its early dissolution.
It was also possible for the union to develop into a solemn marriage. Guarantees for the
respect of the agreements and the customary laws were also provided.60
The colonial sources unanimously confirm that marriages of this kind were common.
Dmz marriage still occurs today among the Amhara, with features similar to those described
by Conti Rossini for the Tigrinya. It is not a prestigious form of marriage, Weissleder
argues, and is usually entered into by poor women who bring no land or wealth to the
union. He further points out that rather than being the loosest form of marriage, it tends
to give maximum protection to the economic interests of the woman.61 Also, recent
ethnographies of Indarta, a district in south Tigray, describe a form of temporary marriage
similar to a dmz union62 using different nomenclature.
There is no mention of dmz marriage, however, in recent literature on women and
marriage in Eritrea. Several hypotheses might explain the discrepancies between colonial and
contemporary accounts concerning dmz marriage (or temporary marriage by any name) in
Eritrea. One or both sets of authors may simply be wrong, or Italian men may have
exaggerated the prevalence of dmz marriage since to them it seemed to offer builtin
justification for their behavior; that is, they felt at liberty to claim that the madamato was
59
Conti Rossini, Principi di diritto, 249. Shii Muslims have a form of temporary marriage which is commonly
practiced in modern Iran and elsewhere. See Haeri, Law of Desire.
60
61
Weissleder, Amhara Marriage, 74. See also Laketch Dirasse, Commoditization, 5, 89.
62
Haile Michael Misginna talks of gcrdcnna, from grd, the term for servant (Haile Michael Misginna,
Betrothal and marriage customs, 49), while Dan Bauer refers to temporary marriages by qusar, literally by
accounting (Bauer, Household and Society in Ethiopia, 136).
21
perfectly acceptable because Eritrean society approved of dmz marriage. But dmz
marriage may have been customary only among limited groups of Eritreans or only in
neighboring regions. Still another hypothesis could be that contemporary researchers may
have failed to report this kind of marriage, or they may have mistaken it for concubinage.
It is also possible that dmz marriage was commonly practiced during the colonial
period, but that thereafter it progressively disappeared due to a trend in the last century
toward more standardized forms of marriage. Already in 1942 Masucci argued that the
original institution of dmz, in its historical and juridical evolution, is degenerating, and is
getting closer and closer to concubinage. ... Even the natives I interviewed mistook dmz for
concubinage.63 Certain particulars of the colonial experience in Eritreaespecially the
experience of the madamatocould have played a decisive role in the demise of dmz
marriage. Italians systematically violated the customs that informed such marriages, meaning
that thousands of Eritrean women and their children were left without economic support.
Neither the colonial authorities nor the local communities that traditionally enforced dmzs
provisions were able to prevent this from happening. Thus, dmz marriage could have
permanently degenerated into either unregulated concubinagea considerably more
disadvantaged arrangement for womenor prostitution.
Both colonial literature and recent studies report that labor in the region was rigidly
divided along gender lines. These divisions were (and are) different from ethnic group to
ethnic group. Traditionally, for example, among the Tigrinya, men weave and women do
not, while among the Rashida the reverse is true.64 Among the Tigrinya a customary
interdiction against womens plowing was enforced,65 and women were usually excluded from
owning land. Different customs applied, but in general it seems that women could buy land
but keep it only temporarily, and they could not inherit it.66
The inability to own land and the customary prohibition against plowing deprived
women of two fundamental means of survival in an agricultural society. As a result it was not
uncommon for a woman to spend most of her life ensconced in male-headed households: first
63
Masucci further explained that the same term, garad (from the verb garradato hire a woman, a servant, a
slave), was used for both a concubine and a temporary wife in dmz marriage (Masucci, Lunione, 3334).
64
Reentemeesters, Women and Development Planning, 73.
65
Taddia, LEritrea colonia, 155. Customary interdictions against women performing certain tasks still persist
today (Reentemeesters, Eritrea, 6).
66
Taddia, LEritrea colonia, 117.
22
she lived with her father, then with her husband, and, in the case of divorce or widowhood,
with either her father or a brother. Among her few alternatives to living by agriculture were
performing domestic service, running a small beer house, or resorting to prostitution.
Interestingly, studies about Amhara and Tigray show the that strict enforcement of
traditional gender roles made life difficult not only for female-headed households, but also for
monosexual households in general.67 The prohibition against males functioning in the
domestic field, Dan Bauer argues, means that a household may not operate, even for a short
time, without a woman old enough to prepare food. Particularly useful to understanding the
rationale behind some dmz unions is Bauers subsequent observation that in recognition
of this problem, temporary marriage ... may be arranged.68
To a significant degree the living conditions of Eritrean women during the period of
the highest diffusion of the madamato (i.e., from 1935 on) were also shaped by the fact that
Eritrea was used as a reservoir of soldiers for the Italian colonial army. Tekeste Negash has
convincingly shown that even though Italian colonialism failed in many respectsincluding,
but not limited to, its settlement policy and its exploitation of Eritrea as a source of raw
material and as a market for Italian productsit was very successful at turning Eritrea into
a source of colonial soldiers or askari. From 1907 on, Italy recruited Eritrean askari for its
colonial wars in Somalia, Libya, and, to a larger extent, in Ethiopia. Over 60,000 Eritrean
askari were deployed in the Italo-Ethiopian war, depriving the Eritrean economy of 40% of its
male labor force (see table 1). During the 193541 period, Tekeste Negash remarked, from
the few studies available on the economy of the peasantry, recruitment to the colonial army
appeared to have caused the virtual collapse of the subsistence economy.6 9 He did not
articulate his analysis in gendered terms, but one can infer that this drainage of men from the
countryside and the consequent agricultural collapse must have deleteriously affected
womens lives. Presumably, some of the Eritrean women who were compelled to seek
alternative means of self-support suddenly found themselves in a position to meet the
Italians demand for prostitutes, domestic servants, and madame. To be sure, more than a
few women were able to live on their husbands pay; in fact, askaris wives tended to depend
67
According to Weissleder, the rigid division of labor compelled people to marry because neither men nor
women can carry a household independently from each other; actually, from the works of Levine, Hoben, and
especially Bauer, we can learn that monosexual households did exist (Weissleder, Amhara Marriage, 72; Levine,
Wax & Gold; Hoben, Land Tenure among the Amhara; Bauer, Household)
68
Bauer, Household, 136.
69
Tekeste Negash, Italian Colonialism in Eritrea, 51.
23
on and follow their husbands whenever and as far as possible. Letenkiel Tewolde says that
she stayed alongside her askari husband and they were much better off than peasants.70 But
not all women married to askari could follow their husbands; it was impossible, for instance,
when the askari were sent to Somalia or Libya.
Table 1. Percentage of the colonial army out of the total male labor force
year
size of army
total
population
actively
productive
men
percentage in
army
1912
5,990
330,000
82,000
7.3
1925
9,080
480,000
120,000
7.5
1935
60,200
600,000
150,000
40.3
Source: Tekeste Negash, Italian Colonialism in Eritrea, 51.
3 @ The madamato in the liberal and early Fascist period (18901933)

In a written report on the state of the colony from 1902 to 1907, Governor Martini
informed the Italian parliament that it was because of this imbalance [between white men
and white women] that the serious inconvenience of unions between white men and native
women takes place.7 1 Ascertaining the exact nature of the unions Martini deemed a
serious inconvenience is difficult because he applies the term madama in his diary to any
Eritrean woman in a relationship with an Italian man, while at other times he seems to use
it as a synonym for prostitute. In 1898, for instance, he wrote:
70
Letenkiel Tewolde et al, 13 May 1995.
71
Martini, Relazione sulla Colonia Eritrea, 49.
24
Obscene hubbub this night. Four topographers were lodged in a state building. They divided with a
sheet the only room in four parts, in each of them they put an angareb [Eritrean bed], and upon each
angareb a topographer lay with his madama. The use was tolerated, but it degenerated into abuse
and cannot be tolerated any longer. State buildings become brothels; officers lose with these whores
any sense of dignity and decorum. Even worse, low officials.72
It can hardly be disputed that Italian colonialism brought with it incentives for
prostitution, as Richard Pankhurst points out.73 But apparently those who had enough
moneyofficers and officialspreferred to have a concubine and leave the part-time
prostitutes to soldiers, although confusion between the two roles seemed to persist.
Evidence suggests that while most Italians readily distinguished between occasional
prostitutes and concubines, some believed there was an apposition or a continuity between
the status of a prostitute and that of a madama. For example, Martini mentions in his diary
the mistress of a certain Lieutenant B., today the owner of a brothel.74 According to P.
Ambrogetti, a physician involved in monitoring the health of prostitutes, often officers chose
their madame at the horse-shoe [the brothel].75 In 1900 he wrote in his booklet on Sexual
Life in Eritrea: The woman in Abyssinia early reaches puberty and very early becomes free.
When she does not immediately get married, she almost always becomes a prostitute.76
Unrestrained in touting the contrast between putative Eritrean sexual freedom and the
unhealthy sexual repression dominant in Italy, he went on to explain that prostitution in
Abyssinia has not the features of degeneration. ... It is a fairly respectable job. ... It is neither
like among us [Italians] a cause of corruption, nor a school for sexual perversion.77 It is
possible that Ambrogetti was misinterpreting the exchange of money within a marriage for
dmz as a sign of a client/prostitute relationship, or maybe he was simply seeing only what
he wanted to see; but another hypothesis is also plausible.
72
Martini, Diario eritreo, 1:220.
73
Pankhurst, History of Prostitution, 16.
74
75
After an 1885 Italian regulation prostitutes had to live in a special area outside villages; their huts were
configured in the shape of a horseshoe. Among Italians in Eritrea, thus, horseshoe was synonymous with
brothel (Ambrogetti, La vita sessuale, 910, 13).
76
Ibid., 5.
77
Ibid., 15.
Laketch Dirasse, who has studied prostitution in Addis Ababa, argues that the Italian
occupation induced the decline of traditional prostitution, which historically had been locally
regarded as an honorable activity. Early in the century, many women, she argues, ran small
drinking places and supplemented their trade in native brew by consorting with multiple
mates for remuneration. According to tradition in Addis Ababa (as elsewhere in Africa), the
relationship between the prostitute and her regular clients [was] not merely a commercialized
sexual transaction.78 As Pankhurst shows, Italian colonialism led to the progressive
commercialization of prostitution in Eritrea.79 In turn-of-the-century Italy, prostitution was
subject to state regulation; prostitutes were registered and underwent periodic medical
evaluations.80 At that same time the influential Italian anthropologist Cesare Lombroso was
popularizing his belief that some women were born prostitutes and were lower on the
evolutionary scale than normal women.81 Thus, many Italians arrived in Africa believing
that prostitutes belonged to a different category of people who should be strictly confined
to the margins of society. So it should not surprise us that in 1885, as soon as they landed
at Massawa, the Italian army issued a regulation on prostitution: prostitutes could no longer
live in villages, where they could freely mingle with the rest of the population, but had to live
instead in a segregated area.82
By introducing their own categorizations of sexual relationships, Italian men
contributed to the transformation of local ones. In all likelihood, some of the prostitutes
Ambrogetti identified actually were women who ran drinking houses. Thus, when reading
sources from the earliest period of Italian colonialism, it is essential to realize that a dynamic
tension arose between the renaming undertaken by the colonizers and the preexisting social
realities.83
If they were not already prostitutes before becoming madame, some Eritrean women
could have been forced to become prostitutes after having been madame. According to
Pollera:
78
Laketch Dirasse, Commoditization, 7, 2630. See also White, Comforts of Home.
79
80
In the period under consideration, Italian legislation regarding prostitution changed at different times. See
Gibson, Prostitution and the State.
81
Ibid., 13537.
82
Labanca, In marcia verso Adua, 219.
83
As Hilda Kuper observed, In a colonial situation name-giving tends to become name-calling, quoted in Hunt,
Noise over Camouflage, 47194.
26
Abandoned by the European the madama easily and quickly falls into deep poverty, as it will be
difficult for her to marry, because nobody wants to bear the burden of another mans children. She
cannot find an honest job, because there are no occupations or workshops, and thus she often falls
into the lowest prostitution.84
The union preceding abandonment like this, one can infer, was not a client/prostitute
relationship in the Italian sense thereof, but rather a form of concubinage. Pollera, who
seemed to have more knowledge of Eritrean customs than many of his fellow colonists, was
aware of dmz marriage and blamed the Europeans (when he could more honestly have
said the Italians) for not respecting its rules.
Before becoming madame, some women were little more than children. Many Italian
males had sailed to Eritrea dreaming of Africa as a virgin land of virgins, and at least some
of them seemed determined to take full advantage of that. It appeared that for many men,
possessing a young virgin was more gratifying than procuring a prostitute, as the quotation
at the beginning of the first section implies. Furthermore, the customary marriage age in
Eritrea rendered young girls accessible, whereas in Italy the marriage age was considerably
higher.85 One of the insabbiati (i.e., Italians who went native) recently interviewed by
Fabienne Le Hourou marked the contrast: Ethiopia [was] a paradise for us old men. I, an
old man, [could] have a twelve-year-old girl!86
84
85
At the turn of the century the average marriage age in Italy was 27-28 years for men and 25-26 years for women
(De Giorgio, Le italiane dallUnit, 321).
86
Le Hourou, Lpope, 101.
27
28
29
In 1898 Governor Martini wrote in his diary:
At Keren the nuns had converted some girls to Catholicism; an officer caught sight of one of these
neo-Catholics that had grown up a bit (here they are fully women at thirteen-fourteen years old), and
he brought her away from the mission and made her his madama.87
A few days later he wrote that he had ordered back to Italy an officer whose main
occupation, or at least the one he liked best, was to raise little girls with tender-loving care,
to later make them concubines for himself and his comrades (poor Castellanis Cagigia called
him daddy).88 Martinis conclusion was that this was further proof of the ignorance of
many of these soldiers, who stay in the colony only because it is easier to express ones
brutality, and because one can be idle most of the day.89
Martinis descriptions of cases of child abusehis accounts confirm that having sex
with a very young girl was a form of child abuse by Italian standardsprovide other important
insights into how a madamato relationship could start and what kind of women were
involved. Women who were aloneespecially orphaned girls who had no family to support
themwere virtually defenseless in their encounter with the colonizers. One can easily
imagine how the difference in power between an orphaned girl and an Italian officer would
be so extreme as to render her unable to negotiate the terms of the relationship.
Other women, however, seemed to be in a stronger position vis--vis the Italian men
in their lives. For instance, some were able to ask 100 MT Thalers for their virginity, as noted
in the letter quoted at the beginning of the first section. Possibly others were able to
negotiate an agreement similar to dmz marriage. As well, it is likely that some men were
seeking more than just an outlet for sex, desiring instead the material and emotional comforts
of a home. For instance, G. M., an Eritrean woman I interviewed, explained to me that when
the Italian man for whom she kept house asked her to live with him, her grandmother
intervened and negotiated the terms of the relationship with the man. Her grandmothers
foremost concern was that he would respect G. M. and her children: If you want to keep her
well, its not just a matter of money; its a matter of truth. The lasting relationship that
87
88
Anche il capitano C..., la cui principale occupazione, o almeno la pi gradita, fu di tirar su bambine a
minuzzoli di pane per farne poi le concubine sue o dei suoi commilitoni (la Cagigia del povero Castellani lo
chiamava babbo) anche il capitano C. ... rimpatrier con lo stesso piroscafo (Martini, Diario eritreo, 1:89).
Emphasis in the original. Cagigia (or more likely Khadija) must have been the concubine of this Mr. Castellani,
whom Martini called poor possibly because Castellani may have been deceased at the time Martini wrote.
89
Ibid., 84.
30
resulted, although not legally sanctioned, bore a strong resemblance to a typical marriage:
together they shared affection, community of life, responsibility for the education of their
children, etc. However, I perceived in G. M.s account a lingering awareness of the inequality
of their partnership, as she repeatedly referred to her partner as the engineer rather than as
my husband or by his name. This was her habit, although she once said, When we got
married...,90 before sharing another recollection of the relationship.
The words of former Eritrean Governor Riccardo Astuto dei Lucchesi conjure scenes
of a European-style middle-class conjugal life thriving, it would seem, where he had not
expected it to take root. Officers and officials, he wrote with scorn, centered their lives on
concubinage with their madame: They sometimes held them like ladies in their houses, so
that it could happen ... that the General Staffs Head was invited for lunch by a captain and
his madama.91 Martini also alludes to relationships that resembled a conjugal union. In
1898 he wrote in his diary about his discussion with Michele da Carbonara, a Roman Catholic
prefect in Eritrea, concerning religious marriage between whites and native Catholic
women. I should note that until the Concordat of 1929 between the Vatican and the Italian
state, religious marriage had no legal value in Italy. Martini argued:
The native woman perhaps believes that civil and religious marriage are merged in the same
ceremony, as in her country. The white man knows that religious marriage does not have any value in
Italian law. The white man can cheat, the native woman can be cheated, the latter will believe that
the union is indissoluble, when it is certainly not the case. When the husband leaves her, she will
address the government and the Courts, that will answer her that they cannot do anything about it.
Our inability to help will damage our ultimate authority; and this situation will not serve the
Catholic missionaries propaganda either.92
Martinis words attest to the ambiguous nature of the madamato. He did not equate
the madamato with marriage, although he referred to the man as the madamas husband
(marito). Certainly, a marked power inequality between the man and the woman was
inherent in the kind of relationship he described. Nevertheless, the simple fact that a man
could resort to using religious marriage to gain access to a woman suggests that she was not
in a totally subordinate position, unlike orphaned girls. Unfortunately, we do not know who
was the first to raise the issue of Catholic marriage: Eritrean women? Their families? Italian
90
G. M., 13 August 1996.
91
Astuto edited Martinis diary (Martini, Diario eritreo, 1:262 n. 2).
92
Ibid., 145.
31
men? Or perhaps the missionaries? An answer to this question would help to illuminate the
madamatos complex dynamics.
Martinis great concern was that such behavior by Italians created a negative
impression among the locals:
Natives laugh when they see officers who act the fool for a prostitute. A sort of refrain is popular in
the colony; apparently it is praise, but I deem it rather sarcastic. It says: the Italian government is
good, good, good. Thanks to it every askari has his wage, every poor person has work, every woman
her Thaler.93
In Keren, Martini wrote, it was not uncommon to find officers madame living in
officers quarters, while in a building outside Keren [lived] non-commissioned officers
madame, this way lodged at state expense!94 Thereafter the governor took the first measure
to limit the madamato and forbade officers to keep their madame in state buildings.95
In general, military personnel seem to have toleratedeven accommodatedthe
madamato. Since strict rules governed the marriages of Italian servicemen,96 the madamato
appeared to some men to be an appealing alternative to regulated wedlock. One might also
suppose that men serving in the colony adopted a sort of code of silence regarding their sexual
liaisons: what happened in the colony did not have to become public in Italy, and the
madamato did not have to put an officers ordinary family life in danger.
Sometimes, however, the madamato did not remain an easily overlooked side note.
This was especially true when children were born.
4 @ Mixed-race marriages and mtissage before racial legislation

(18901933)
To understand how Italians perceived the madamato, it is helpful to analyze the Italian
legislation of the time and Italian attitudes toward mixed-race marriages and mtis (i.e.,
93
Ibid., 220.
94
Ibid., 8687.
95
The following governor, Salvago Raggi, also forbade colonial officials to live with native women (r.d. 18
December 1911, [art. 12]).
96
In particular, to obtain a marriage authorization, officers and their spouses had to meet certain economic
requirements (Buono, Il matrimonio; Minniti, Primi orientamenti).
32
mixed-race) children.97 Such an analysis should also help to illuminate the character of
Italian colonial racism before the imposition of the racial laws.
Since Italian law did not stipulate special requirements for them, mixed-race
marriages were always possible, like any other marriage between an Italian citizen and a
foreigner. In Eritrea the Italian civil code was in force, and no special ordinance concerning
interracial marriage was on the books.98
There was one 1914 law that stated that any colonial official who married a native
woman automatically lost his post.99 The existence of this law indirectly confirms that
mixed-race marriages were allowed but certainly not encouraged; in fact, reportedly they were
extremely rare. A study published in 1916 by Judge Adelgiso Ravizza reveals that the only
mixed-race marriage to take place in accord with Italian law involved an Italian woman and
an African professor at the Istituto Universitario Orientale of Naples. 100 According to Astuto,
mixed-race marriages, very rare in any case, were always only religious, and for Italians they
almost always represented a disguised concubinage.101 My own preliminary search of the
marriage records preserved in Asmaras Catholic Cathedral disclosed only a handful of mixedrace marriages.
Why did an overwhelming majority of Italian men choose not to marry the African
women in their liveswomen with whom they shared their homes and, in many cases,
fathered children? One answer could be that since they were in the colony only temporarily
these men imputed little value to the transient unions they formed there. But this was by no
means the only reason. The difference of civilization and education between the European
man and the native woman, argued Alberto Pollera, is too great and there cannot be,
therefore, that perfect unity of sentiments that is necessary to give a happy and energetic life
97
For a discussion of Italian legislation concerning interracial sexual relations in Eritrea with a special focus on
the analysis of juridical discourse, see Srgoni, Parole e corpi.
98
Actually, a special civil code for the Eritrean colony had been approved by the Italian parliament in 1909, but
it was never enforced for lack of an Arabic and an Amharic translation, compulsory for its application. On the
tormented vicissitudes of the Eritrean civil code, see Sag, Sui tentative di codificazione, 567616.
99
R.d. 10 December 1914, no. 1510, art. 42.
100
Ravizza, Matrimoni misti, 336. The man at issue, defined by Ravizza simply as a native, was AfWrq
Gbr-Iysus. See Rouaud, Af-Wrq.
101
Martini, Diario eritreo, 171 n. 1.
33
to a family.102 However, Pollera himself, just prior to his death in 1939, arranged for his
cohabitation with an Eritrean woman to be formalized in a religious ceremony.103 Another
colonial official, Ravizza, not only emphasized the inferiority of Abyssinian civilization but
further suggested that Eritrean women, who
had run into the arms of Italians, attracted by the prospect of a material reward, ... had proved, except
for very few cases, that they could be nothing more than instruments of pleasure for Italian men, and
that they were not able to become, if not their wives, at least their loyal companions and the tender
and caring mothers of their children.104
African women, as already suggested, were for sex, not for love. But of course having
sex was the one prerequisite to producing children. For Italians at that time, coitus
interruptus was essentially the only form of contraception; in the colony even this most basic
contraceptive measure was probably rare.
So mixed-race offspringmtiswere an inevitability; but how were these children
to be viewed? There were different answers to this question. Mtis had a very bad name
among Italians in Eritrea. Many held the belief that mixed-race girls tended to become
prostitutes while mixed-race boys easily became criminals. Some authors took such racist
opinions as proof of an innate degeneracy in biracial offspring. Others, like Pollera and
Ravizza, vehemently disputed popular theories about the racial inferiority of mtis or their
natural inclination toward crime; they suggested instead that the high rate of criminality
among mtis had social origins.
Eritrean customary law, Pollera explained, authorized mothers to attribute paternity
while Italian law did not. As a consequence, many Italian men, taking advantage of Eritrean
womens ignorance in this regard, easily convinc[ed] them to become their concubines, and
abandon[ed] them when they [had] a baby.105 Abandoned by their fathers, these children,
Pollera continued, were likely to be shunned by their mothers families, who felt no
responsibility to provide for them. Hence mother and child quickly sank into the deepest
poverty. He claimed that indigence, coupled with resentment toward those who had
102
103
Polleras marriage was particularly remarkable given that Italian law at the time prohibited both mixed-race
marriages and concubinage. Alberto Polleras marriage to Ghidam Menelich [sic] is registered as #35 (3 August
1939) in the Liber Matrimoniorum privati preserved in Asmaras Catholic Cathedral.
104
Ravizza, Matrimoni misti, 345.
105
34
abandoned them, pushed mtis toward delinquency. (Incidentally, Pollera himself was the
father of mtis children; he recognized them and provided for their education.)
Rosalia Pianavia Vivaldi also disputed popular assertions about the innate inferiority
of mtis. While living in Eritrea in 189396 she organized the first orphanage for mtis
infants and youth. Recognizing that mixed-race children were neither more nor less naturally
clever and healthy than other children, she argued that they grew sick and dull only as a result
of the poor care they received.106 Gradually, some Italians came to believe that mtis became
sources of social dysfunction mainly because as very young children they had been the victims
of severe circumstances beyond their controlcircumstances which included abandonment
by their fathers who, by their actions, had discredited Italians. But others, like Lombroso,
insisted that mtissage was a problem in and of itself which gave rise to a racially inferior
subpopulation that was inherently inclined toward crime.107 He was not alone in his
discomfort with the recognition that mtis violated the clear division between the colonizer
and the colonized; therefore they were an element of social disorder. This attitude prevailed
during Fascism and was ultimately sanctioned by the racial legislation.
In contrast, some authors, like Ravizza, preached that the intermediate position of
mtis (i.e., between whites and blacks, colonizer and colonized) could prove advantageous:
white enough to absorb white societys values but not white enough to join and claim rights
within it, mtis were in an ideal position to serve the colonizers ends. As they seemed to
represent, somehow, a more domesticated black, mtis could easily provide the ideal labor
pool for the colony. Interestingly, Ravizza tried to justify his position by fusing patriarchal
and racial ideologies. He made a clear distinction between the offspring of a white man and
a black woman and vice versa. The child of an Italian man and an Eritrean woman was a
combination of the best qualities of both parents, he argued, because the child inherits the
superior intelligence of his or her father and the physical strength of his or her motherwhose
endowments included not only sensual passion but also endurance and resistance to harsh
African climates.108
Eugenics was quite popular when Ravizza wrote in 1916 and concern over the
decadence of the white race was widespread.109 Thus, the social climate was conducive to
106
Pianavia Vivaldi, Tre anni in Eritrea, 310.
107
108
Ibid., 339.
109
Pogliano, Scienza e stirpe.
35
his opinion that mixed-race children were, in effect, born to be useful because they had
been fortified by the blood of their mothers. There was no danger of white racial
degeneration in mixed-race unions because, he explained, in unions between a savage and
a civilized person, the features of the civilized one produce for the major part the moral
temperament of the children.110
Similar opinions were receiving widespread public support at the time111 and are now
a source of insight into the racial and gender ideologies of Italian men during the first period
of Italian colonialism. Some believed that mixed-race children bore the special imprint of the
twin superiorities (i.e., sexual and racial) of their white fathers. Add to this the belief that
what really mattered in a persons makeupthe moral characterwas always inherited from
the father. Biological and social reproduction equally respected predetermined natural
hierarchies. Needless to say, Ravizza absolutely condemned a union between a white woman
and a black man for the same reasons: the children of such a pairing, he argued, would be
raised according to the fathers customs; they would grow up as natives. Ravizza could not
accept that an individual who was actually 50% white could go native (ironically, at this
point he was referring to the effects of nurture rather than biology).112 He took it for granted
that male supremacy (i.e., the gender hierarchy) prevailed over black inferiority (i.e., the racial
hierarchy); in other words, Ravizza could not imagine any woman, even a white one,
dominating a man, even an African. Such widely unchallenged ideology prompted colonial
authorities to expel from the colony two Italian women who had entered into irregular unions
with African men, asserting that the colony did not need their bad example.113
How many Italians, if not good husbands, were at least good fathers? Not very many,
one can infer, given their propensity to abandon their children. A first clue to the paternal
attitudes of Italian men is found by determining how many recognized their children. A
mixed-race child who was recognized by his or her Italian father automatically became an
Italian citizen. According to the 1931 census, there were 515 mixed-race Italian citizens in
110
111
Pollera, for instance, wrote in 1937: As everybody knows, the features of the male parent prevail over those
of the mother (Goglia, Una diversa politica razziale, 1077).
112
113
Ibid., 336.
36
Eritrea (among a total Italian population of 4,188).114 Unfortunately, we have no way of
knowing how many mtis children were not recognized by their fathers.
Sometimes mtis were materially supported by their fathers; in fact Martini wrote that
it became increasingly common for Italian fathers to provide for their children. 115 Pianavia
Vivaldi acknowledged that some fathers had given her money to support the orphanage. In
the colonial literature one can also find mention of mtis children being brought to Italy
where they went to school, but apparently they were rare exceptions. A 1914 Italian law
addressed mtis for the first time, stating that a mtis could not become a colonial official.116
This is an indirect clue that some mtis had risen to a position to apply for such offices.
The 1933 legislation on Eritrea and Somalia (Ordinamento organico per lEritrea e la
Somalia)117 dealt more extensively with mtissage. The law confirmed that mtis children
who were recognized by their Italian fathers automatically gained Italian citizenship. It also
introduced a special regulation for children of unknown parents. Those whose physical
characteristics ... give rise to the belief that both parents were of white race automatically
obtained Italian citizenship. Those who appeared to be biracial could gain Italian citizenship
only if a judge deemed them worthy.118 Three years later the new law for the Africa Orientale
Italiana119 effaced this possibility. The notion that an individuals physical characteristics
determined personal status, however, persisted and subsequently led to dreadful
consequences.
Alberto Polleras mixed-race son Giorgio might be considered an emblematic figure of
the transition to Fascist racial legislation. Giorgio Polleras case is tragically ironic: he was near
to completing his university degree in economics when he volunteered to serve on the Italian
side in the Italo-Ethiopian war. He died fighting in Ethiopia in December 1937, and the
114
Only six mtis were over 40 years old (i.e., born before 1891), while 172 mtis were born between 1892 and
1911, 160 between 1912 and 1921, and 177 between 1922 and 1931 (Castellano, La popolazione italiana,
536).
115
116
R.d. 10 December 1914, no. 1510, art. 3.
117
L. 6 July 1933, no. 999.
118
They had to prove that they had a perfectly Italian education, that they were not polygamists and had no
record of major crimes, and that they had successfully attended the third class of elementary school (art. 18).
119
R.d.l. 1 June 1936, no. 1019.
37
same Italian government which had already started to issue its strict racial laws awarded him
a gold medal.120
5 @ The madamato becomes a crime:

Fascist racial policy after the Ethiopian invasion
The Italo-Ethiopian war marked a fundamental shift in Fascist colonial policy. In the
span of a few months in 193536 the Italian army conquered Ethiopia, helped by its vast
technological supremacy and massive use of mustard gas.121 Mussolini was now faced with
the problem of ruling a large and hostile territory. He adopted as key instruments in colonial
governance a new racial policy and a focus on expanding Italian settlement.
Empires are conquered with arms, but held with prestige, Mussolini maintained.122
Thus inspired, the Fascist government tried to preserve the prestige of the Italian race
by establishing and enforcing clear boundaries between the colonizer and the colonized.
Between 1937 and 1940 the Fascist regime deployed a comprehensive body of racial laws
aimed, for different reasons, against Jews in Italy and against Africans in the colonies. It is
important to realize that it was not only its alliance with Nazi Germany that drove Fascism
to its racial policies: the African problem, historian Luigi Goglia argues, had a significant
influence on the general racist turn of the Fascist regime.123 Actually, the impact of the
Fascist racial policy was felt first in Africa.
In a written article at the beginning of 1937, the minister of colonies, Alessandro
Lessona, spelled out the provisions of the racial policy in the new Africa Orientale Italiana
(hereafter AOI):
1) absolute clear separation of the two races;
2) collaboration without promiscuity;
3) humanity in consideration of past mistakes;
120
Goglia, Una diversa politica razziale, 1075; idem, Note sul razzismo, 1223.
121
Rochat, Limpiego dei gas.
122
Pankhurst, Fascist Racial Policies in Ethiopia, 279.
123
Goglia, Note sul razzismo, 1223.
38
4) implacable severity for future mistakes.124
The first effect of the new segregation policy was the criminalization of the madamato. The
laws only article read:
The Italian citizen who, in the territory of the Kingdom or the colonies, has a relation of a conjugal
nature with a colonial subject of the Africa Orientale Italiana, or with a foreigner belonging to a
people which has traditions, customs, social and juridical concepts analogous to those of the
subjects of the Africa Orientale Italiana, will be punished with imprisonment from one to five
years.125
Soon thereafter certain colonial ordinances put into practice the guidelines
enumerated by Lessona. One ordinance forbade whites to live in black districts; another
ordered absolute separation of the races at sites of public entertainment; and a third imposed
a regime of segregation on transportation.126 At the same time, Fascism launched a massive
campaign of racist propaganda. A group of scholars published, with full governmental
support, Il Manifesto della razza (The Races Manifesto), elaborating a ten-point
scientific justification for Fascist racism.127 Soon afterward the fundamental law of Italian
racist policy was issued: the Measures for the defense of the Italian race128 incited the
persecution of Jews in Italy and forbade marriages of an Italian citizen of Aryan race with a
person of another race (art. 1).
Italian racial policy in AOI particularly targeted mixed-race unions and mtistwo
conspicuous bridges between Italians and Africans which put into question the
124
Alessandro Lessona, Gli Italiani nellImpero: Politica di razza, La Stampa, 9 January 1937, quoted in Goglia,
Note sul razzismo, 1239.
125
Il cittadino italiano che nel territorio del Regno o delle Colonie tiene relazione d indole coniugale con
persona suddita dellAfrica Orientale Italiana o straniera appartenente a popolazione che abbia tradizioni,
costumi, e concetti giuridici e sociali analoghi a quelle dei sudditi dellAfrica Orientale Italiana, punito con la
reclusione da uno a cinque anni (r.d.l. 19 April 1937, no. 880, turned into l. 30 December 1937, no. 2590).
126
Goglia, Note sul razzismo, 124950; and Pankhurst, Fascist Racial Policies in Ethiopia, 277.
127
Also known as the manifesto of racist scientists, it appeared on page two of the first issue of La Difesa della
razza (1938) and in other periodicals. It declared that distinct human races existed and had a purely biological
basis; that there was a pure Italian race whose physical and psychological features had to be preserved at all
costs; and that any union with individuals of the non-European races would have endangered the purity and
preservation of the Italian race. For a recent republication of the manifesto, see Il Ponte 34, nos. 1112 (1978):
15079.
128
R.d.l. 17 November 1938, no. 1728.
39
incommensurableness of the two races. It was intended to limit sexual contact between
Italian men and African women. In a circular letter to all Italian residents of Shoa, Governor
Guglielmo Nasi wrote: Aut imperium aut voluptas! (Either empire or pleasure!) He went
on to say that intimacy with the female element damages our prestige.129 It was no easy
task, however, to impress this new doctrine upon an army of men who had sailed to Ethiopia
singing Faccetta nera.130 In fact that very song, soon after the conquest of Ethiopia, was
violently attacked in the press as a sign of mental corruption, thoroughly incompatible with
the building of an empire.131
The new racist sexual policy did not, however, forbid any and all forms of intimacy
with African women; occasional sexual relations were still allowed, and prostitution was legal
and under state control. Actually, the Fascist government tried to pursue its policy of racial
separation even in this domain. The ideal solution in the Fascist scheme of things would
have been to reserve white prostitutes for Italians and leave the black ones to Africans. At the
same time, the idea of populating the colony with Italian prostitutes seemed at odds with
notions of Italian prestige. The Italian government thus found itself in contradictory
circumstances and even made an unsuccessful attempt to import prostitutes from France.132
Once it reluctantly decided to supply prostitutes from Italy, colonial authorities incessantly
clamored for more, but the number imported was never enough to meet the demand.
Consequently, licenses were increasingly issued to African prostitutes and clandestine
prostitution continued to flourish.
After so much boasting about Italian virility, the Fascist powers found it difficult to
implement a strict policy of racial segregation. Instead, Fascism focused on the struggle to
suppress the living consequences of Italo-Eritrean sexual liaisonsthe mixed-race children.
Mtissage became the subject of a massive propaganda campaign during which innumerable
articlesin both the scholarly and the popular presssingled out mtis as a major cause of
social disorder. Mtis denoted degeneration. Everybody knows, wrote a judge in his
129
Circular letter of 4 January 1938 in Goglia and Grassi, Il colonialismo italiano, 394.
130
See n. 26 above.
131
See for instance Paolo Monelli, Donne e buoi dei paesi tuoi, La Gazzetta del Popolo, 13 June 1936, reprinted
in Rochat, Il colonialismo italiano, 191-93.
132
40
decision, that the mixed-race combines the vices and faults of his parents races, and does
not inherit their qualities.133
The aim of the Fascists virulent campaign against mtissage was well elucidated by
Renzo Salis, one of the participants in the Third Conference of Colonial Studies in Florence
in 1937. Salis explained that it was necessary to avoid all hybridism which would, so to
speak, mark a gray zone between the function of command and the function of
obedience.134 Mtissage, declared an aforementioned judge, caused a deleterious social
promiscuity, which mixed and put at the same level the conqueror and the conquered
people.135 In other words, it undermined the conceptual tools Fascism relied upon to
legitimize its recent bloody and internationally condemned African conquest.
In 1939 Fascism reorganized its segregation laws. The very title of the new rules
Penal sanctions for the defense of racial prestige against the natives of Italian Africa136
exposes the intent of the Fascist racial policy: to create a regime of segregation and infuse
Italians with notions of their racial superiority. The law itself is a clear indication that
boundaries between superior and inferior races were hazardously unclear and that many
Italians were not adequately aware of their prestige.
The reach of the new laws was bidirectional in that it simultaneously threatened both
Italians whose behavior tarnished the Africans conception of the moral figure of the Italian,
as well as natives who offended the citizen in his quality of belonging to the Italian
race.137 The law comprehensively banned for the first time acts prejudicial to the prestige
of the Italian race as it reinforced segregation norms already in place, forbade Italians to
engage in manual work of the same type performed by Africans, and renewed the prohibition
against relations of a conjugal nature. Furthermore, it regarded mtis infants as potential
133
TRIBUNALE DI ADDIS ABEBA, 13 January 1938, defendants Pulcinelli and Ascal. The journal did not publish the
name of the judge.
134
Quoted in Pankhurst, Fascist Racial Policies in Ethiopia, 276.
135
TRIBUNALE DI ADDIS ABEBA, 13 January 1938. [The same defendants as in n. 133.]
136
L. 29 June 1939, no. 1004, Sanzioni penali per il prestigio di razza di fronte ai nativi dellAfrica Italiana.
137
The first article read: Agli effetti della presente legge sintende lesivo del prestigio di razza latto commesso
dal cittadino abusando della sua qualit di appartenente alla razza italiana o venendo meno ai doveri che da tale
appartenenza gli derivano di fronte ai nativi, cos da sminuire nel loro concetto la figura morale dellitaliano. Agli
effetti della stessa legge sintende lesivo del prestigio della razza italiana latto del nativo diretto ad offendere il
cittadino nella sua qualit di appartenente alla razza italiana, o, comunque in odio alla razza italiana.
41
criminal evidence. Public prosecutors, when informed of mtis born after April 1937, were
required to determine whether a relation of a conjugal nature had produced these offspring.
An additional step was taken one year later. Since it could not physically eradicate
them, the Fascist government decided to categorize mtis as full-fledged Africans. In so
doing, the Fascists empowered a law to control mtis identityan issue both deeply political
and personal which daily social practice had failed to solve. The Norms about Mtis of
1940138 simply stated that mtis were natives. Thus, they could no longer be recognized by
their Italian fathers and thereby gain Italian citizenship. Moreover, the law stated that only
the native parent was obligated to support mixed-race offspring, and it outlawed special
schools and institutions for mtis. Finally, Italians were forbidden to adopt mtis or any
African children. (Some Italian couples had tried to adopt Ethiopian children after the
Ethiopian war.)139 I should emphasize at this point that this law was diametrically opposed
to the indigenous customary norms that considered the father fully responsible for his
children, even for those born within a temporary marriage.
Though its aims were clear, there were serious contradictions in this forced
nativization of mtis. Issuing from Lessonas advocacy of humanity in consideration of
past mistakes, the law stated that mtis who already had Italian citizenship should be
allowed to retain it along with their Aryan identity (or Jewish, depending on the identity of
the father). Additionally, mtis of at least 13 years of age were eligible to gain Italian
citizenship provided they had received an Italian education (through the third grade, at least)
and displayed good civil, moral, and political conduct. Thus, according to the Fascist reading
of biology and race, the same combination (i.e., an African woman + an Italian man) could
produce two different outcomes: if not an Africanwhich was most often the casethen an
Aryan, especially if he or she was a model of good behavior.
The long-term objective of Fascist racial and sexual policy in AOI was to populate the
colony with Italians. Actually, the so-called demographic colonization was simultaneously
an aim and an instrument of government. Mussolinis major justification for Italian
expansionist colonial policy was that Italy deserved more land for its vigorous population.
Italian colonialism, he maintained, was different from the French or the British version: not
a plutocratic, exploitative colonization, but a demographic colonization. Prolific peoples
138
L. 13 May 1940, no. 822.
139
Goglia, Note sul razzismo, 1240.
42
have a right to an Empire, Mussolini asserted.140 Italy, the proletarian nation, would have
effortlessly filled its colonies.141 Indeed, since the 1920s the Fascist regime had been
energetically promoting demographic development in Italy.142 The whole philosophy of the
Fascist demographic policy was elegantly synthesized in Mussolinis motto: Nations
fortunes are bound to their demographic power.143
Even a cursory review of its history shows that the success of the settlement policy fell
far short of expectations and bore little resemblance to its depiction in the propaganda. To
be sure, its failure was partly due to the outbreak of war. Nonetheless, the number of Italians
in Eritrea grew enormously in comparison to the pre-Ethiopian-war period, thanks to the
military effort and a vast program of public works. No proper census took place after 1931,
but the Italian population was estimated to be around 75,000 in 1940 versus 4,188 in 1931.144
As already mentioned, women were less than a quarter of the total population; evidently in
Asmara in 1939 there were 41,263 Italian men and 11,177 women, while in other towns of
AOI the sex ratio was even more imbalanced.145 The paucity of Italian women in the colonies
was of special concern to the Fascist authorities. It is clear, one could read in a pamphlet
of the Istituto Fascista dellAfrica italiana, that the races defense policy will really be
successful only when the problem of the women in the colony finds a solution. The desired
solution, the booklet explained, would identify and enable a proper social function for
Italian women in Ethiopia; the satisfaction of mans sexual instincts was not the point.146
So the regime created special mass organizations to train Italian women for colonial life while
the popular press emphasized the fundamental role of Italian women in building the empire.
Someone even suggested that Italian orphaned girls could be exported to the colonies and
140
Quoted in Rossetti, La donna e lImpero, 1.
141
To promote the population of AOI, Fascism created some official bodies, like the Ente Puglia dEtiopia or the
Ente Romagna dEtiopia (after the name of two Italian regions); also the organization for veterans assistance, the
Opera nazionale combattenti, had a special program for peasant settlement in AOI.
142
On Fascist demographic policies, see De Grazia, Le donne nel regime fascista, 69111.
143
Rossetti, La donna e lImpero, 1.
144
Castellano, La popolazione italiana, 539.
145
Rossetti, La donna e lImpero, 2.
146
Istituto Fascista dellAfrica italiana, Nozioni coloniali per gli iscritti alle organizzazioni del PNF (Trento: 1939),
appearing in Goglia and Grassi, Il colonialismo italiano, 323.
43
placed in special institutions designed to serve as nurseries for the raising of wives for settlers
and lower-rank officials.147
Despite the regimes investments of energy and creativity, it became clear that
populating AOI with Italian families would simply take time; however, repressive measures
designed to serve the same end could be implemented right away. The carabinierithe
Italian military policebegan conducting surprise inspections of private homes to monitor
and control the sexual arrangements of individual Italians. Beginning in September 1937
colonial courts started reviewing cases of madamato. We do not know how many cases of
madamato were brought to court or how many men were convicted of such a crime, but we
do know that the new measures failed to halt the phenomenon. Oral testimony suggests the
law was only partially enforced. One of the so-called insabbiati (Italians who went native)
in Ethiopia told his interviewer: Who respected the racial laws? Not even the carabinieri!
The carabinieri were worse than the others! Carabinieri and officers!148 Moreover, according
to the Italo-Eritrean Association, the number of Eritrean women living with Italians climbed
from 1,150 in 1935 to 10,000 in 1937, on to 13,000 in 1939, and finally reached 15,000 by
1940.149
The accuracy of these figures is questionable, but certainly they signify that ItaloEritrean concubinage was ongoing.150 The impact of the racial legislation should not be
underestimated, however. One can wonder, for instance, whether the Italians who bravely
violated the law against the madamato were equally brave in defying the law that forbade
them to provide for their mixed-race childrens living expenses. Furthermore, it is beyond
question that even if it did not eliminate the madamato, the racial legislation promoted racist
behavior; colonial racial attitudes became more brutal and more absolute; and the Fascist laws
also served to legitimize the exploitation of African women. During the liberal period it was
147
A. M. Galli, Le donne italiane in colonia, LAzione coloniale, 4 February 1937, quoted in Goglia, Note sul
razzismo, 1242. Gallis proposal was also supported by the Italian Society of Genetics and Eugenics (Del Monte,
Genesi e sviluppo del meticciato in Eritrea, 844).
148
Le Hourou, Lpope, 97. Also the oral testimonies collected by Taddia confirm the non-observance of the
law (Taddia, La memoria, 90, 96, 98).
149
Four Power Commission of Investigation for the Former Italian Colonies, Report on Eritrea, London, 22 June
1948, app. 111, memorandum.
150
Also, the procreation of mixed-race children did not stop. In the municipality of Asmara alone, the official
birth registry indicated that 2,594 mtis children were born between 1937 and 1940 (Cerbella, Eritrea, 9). It is
impossible to know how many more mixed-race children were born but not officially registered.
44
morally objectionable for an Italian man to abandon an African woman and his mixed-race
dependents; during Fascism, it was his duty to do so. The laws did make a difference.
46
47
6 @ The madamato in the court decisions

Between 1937 and 1941, scholarly journals specializing in legal, racial, and colonial
matters published a few dozen court cases relating to the crime of a relation of a conjugal
nature between an Italian citizen and a subject of AOI (read: madamato).151 The editors,
concerned less with describing such relations than with discussing the juridical problems the
law raised, published only excerptsa few lines to a few pagesfrom the court decisions so
as to offer readers insights into the laws interpretations.
Although the wording of the law was short and simple, it was far from easy to
interpret, as some jurists complained. Judges and jurists agreed that the law had a double
aim: the defense of the Italian races prestige in front of natives, and elimination, or at least
strong limitation, of mtissage.152 Judge Nigro suggested in this regard that during
occasional sexual relations the Italian usually takes protective measures for fear of contagion,
and so he rarely generates.153 The key problem, however, was distinguishing between a
relation of a conjugal nature and a merely sexual relation, given that the latter was legal and
the former was not. Numerous examples of contorted reasoning from the bench suggest to
me that most judges unwittingly found themselves party to a paradoxical enterprise: on the
one hand they were seeking to deny the possibility of meaningful, affective relationships
between colonizers and colonized, while on the other hand they were trying to repress
relationships bearing these very features.
A conjugal relation like the madamato, explained a judge, is indicated by the presence
of both a material element (i.e., the sexual contact) and a moral element (i.e., unity and
community of life). Community of life, he further explained, does not only mean
cohabitation but also the existence between the man and the woman of that special bond
known as affectio maritalis (i.e., conjugal love).154 Other judges contested this notion,
arguing that such standards may be valid in Italy, where they described a conjugal relation
151
Most of the published cases were discussed by the Court of Appeals of Addis Ababa, which had jurisdiction
over the whole of AOI. We cannot know, in most cases, in which part of AOI the crime took place. I believe
that cases originating outside Eritrea are also meaningful for the present study.
152
Rosso, Definizione, 681.
153
CORTE DAPPELLO DADDIS ABEBA, 13 December 1938, Pres. Carnaroli, drafter Nigro; defendant Augello.
154
TRIBUNALE DI ADDIS ABEBA, 13 January 1938, defendants Pulcinelli and Ascal. The journal did not publish the
name of the judge in this case.
48
between whites, but they could not pertain to mixed-race unions. Judge Patroni, for instance,
stressed that the law did not speak of conjugal relations but of relations of a conjugal
naturetwo intrinsically different sets of circumstances. There was no need, according to
this reasoning, for evidence of a superior sentiment such as the affectio maritalis to
establish the commission of the crime; the material element alone was sufficient. In fact
criminal charges against participants in mixed-race unions never alleged the existence of a
relationship more uxorio (i.e., a conjugal relationship) because the madamato, Patroni argued,
is always the product of an economic transaction in which the native female gives in for
material rewards and money. The man is almost never moved by superior sentiments, the
judge continued, because the idea of family is so different between Italian citizens and
natives that any relation with aims other than sexual can hardly exist.155 The legislator,
echoed Giovanni Rosso, who annotated the decision, did not require a sentiment to qualify
the madamato as a crime.156 In other words, these judges believed that the racial inferiority
of Africans excluded the possibility that a mixed-race union could ever constitute a fullfledged conjugal relation. Unabashed racists like Somalias Governor Maurizio Rava could be
heard explaining that any feelings a madama might have were, at best, akin to the sensitivities
of a house pet.157 Similar beliefs and opinions of an equally brutal nature appear to have been
epidemic among the ranks of the judiciary.
Thus, judges routinely scrutinized the private lives of defendants, searching for
material evidence of the crime. I should add here that the law on madamato punished only
the Italian citizen;158 as a result, judges were required to clarify only the mans behavior. For
this reason court decisions are of little help in reconstructing the madamas agency in each
case. To judges and defendants, the role of the women involved was irrelevant.
Predictably, the defendantsall of whom were male, as already indicatedtypically
pleaded not guilty, often claiming that the African woman involved was either a prostitute
or a servant who was occasionally required to perform sexual services. If judges found their
claims credible, these men were free to go. Such was the fate of a certain Mr. Russo in 1939.
155
GIUDICE DELLA COLONIA DI HARAR , 13 September 1939, est. Patroni, defendant Zucotti.
156
157
M. Rava, Per la dignit del bianco, LAzione coloniale 7 (1937): 1, quoted in Campassi, Il madamato in
Africa Orientale, 256.
158
As Giovanni Leone explained, The juridical good defended by the law (purity and superiority of our race, our
prestige in front of the subjects) belongs to citizens moral patrimony (Leone, La non punibilit, 88).
49
The Appeals Court of Addis Ababa made it clear that Russo considered the African woman
who lived with him to be just a humble servant. It simply happened that being her boss,
he sometimes released his lustfulness on her.159 Circumstances like these were by no means
unique. An Eritrean woman, Hiwet Ogba Georgis, recently recalled:
All domestic workers were afraid of being sexually attackedthat is why we always preferred houses
with old people or with a lot of children. Italian men would rape domestic workers and if they got
pregnant they would kick them out and deny any connection with them.160
Community of meals was considered incriminating evidence of madamato. Beyond

a simple community of bed, which signified a sexual relationship but nothing more, the
jurist Rosso explained, it is a relationship on an equal basis between a national and a native,
together with a long-lasting and continuing sexual community that forms the crime of
madamato.161
This is a very important point. The law was not designed to punish the sexual
exploitation of African women; on the contrary, it targeted sentiments and any manifestation
of community of life on an equal basis. For instance, the Appeals Court of Addis Ababa
condemned a man because his relationship with an African woman was shown to be not just
a physiological sexual outlet; to the mans discredit, it was also characterized by intimacy
and feelings.162 Conversely, the same court discharged another man when he was able to
prove that there was no community of life in his relationship with an African woman;
apparently he persuasively assured the court that there had been only repeated embraces
between a male and a woman as a passing outlet.163
The fact that men could find themselves in court for involvement in a relationship
with a madama that went beyond sexual exploitationat least by the standards of Italian
men at the timeconfirms that such relationships existed. The following analysis of the
indices of the crime provides useful information about these standards as well as significant
details of the multiform nature of madamato.
159
CORTE DAPPELLO DI ADDIS ABEBA, 7 March 1939, Pres. Rosso, drafter Guerrazzi; defendant Russo.
160
Wilson, Women and the Eritrean Revolution, 16.
161
162
CORTE DAPPELLO DI ADDIS ABEBA, 6 January 1939, Pres. and drafter Carnaroli, defendant Avidano.
163
CORTE DAPPELLO DI ADDIS ABEBA, 13 June 1939, Pres. Guerrazzi, drafter Ferri, defendant Del Chiappo.
50
Gift giving, for instance, was deemed a sure sign of madamato if the defendant could
not show that his presents were a form of payment to his madama. Quite often jealousy was
viewed as evidence of the crime. For an illustration, take the history of a certain Giovanni
Spano, condemned for the crime of madamato in 1938. His madama, a young woman called
Dest Agos, told their story to the judge. She had come to Gondar four months before with
a group of askari. When Spano asked her to stay with him as a wife, she agreed. He paid
all their living expenses while she did the housework and prepared the meals they ate
together. I was like a wife, she explained, emphasizing that they shared the same bed and
had frequent sexual intercourse. She also showed to the court a dress she had received as a
present from Spano, adding that he was extremely jealous. He did not want her to talk
with other peopleespecially whitesand forbade her even to appear on the street. After
three months of living together, Spano was hospitalized for treatment of a venereal disease.
He welcomed her visits and requested that she bring him cigarettes. But during his illness
she was left without means of subsistence, the judge explained, and therefore she had to
sell herself to other whites. Aware of her behavior, Spano used to escape from the hospital
and go to her tukul (hut) to beat her; the beatings continued until she called the carabinieri
to stop him. Spano defended himself by claiming that Dest Agos was nothing but a
prostitute. Indeed she was, the judge agreed, before he met her and during his
hospitalization, but not in between. It was indisputable, in the estimation of the court, that
throughout those three intervening months Spano and Dest Agos definitely had a conjugal
relation.164
Their story is quite puzzling. Giovanni Spano and Dest Agoswhat did they mean
to each other? Maybe Spanos wife or fiance in Italy would have met with the same jealousy
and violence from him? If this were true one must take at face value his request to Dest
Agos to go live with him as a wife. It could be that he felt free to consider Dest Agos as
his property simply because he thought of himself as her racial superior, a conqueror in a
conquered country. Each hypothesis is plausible, and both could be true. After all, mutual
respect and equality are not guaranteed accompaniments to a marriage, and violence
continues to be a normal component in many marriages today.
For her part Dest Agos probably saw in Spano some assurance of ongoing economic
support. At the time of their meeting she was living off her relationships with menaskari
at first, then Italians. Curiously, however, her claim to have been like a wife to Spano
suggests that she may have viewed marriage as an economic transaction that included no
164
TRIBUNALE DI GONDAR , 19 November 1938, Pres. and drafter Maisto, defendant Spano.
51
promise of longevity; were this her view, she may have had dmz marriage in mind. As I
noted before, such an idea of marriage would not have excluded affection, nor did an
exchange of money necessarily signify prostitution. Possibly, to save face, Dest Agos may
have felt compelled to stress the difference between her sexual liaisons with clients before
she began living with Spano and during his absence, and the kind of relationship she
maintained with Spano for three monthsa relationship she probably considered more
prestigious. Following this line of thinking one would have to agree with the judges ruling
that Dest Agos and Spano did in fact have a relation of a conjugal nature.
It is also interesting that Dest Agos turned to the Italian police for help. Even if the
law on madamato was not intended to protect African women, women could manipulate it
to secure protection against Italian men who behaved like masters. Often court decisions
reflected that a man was convicted because of the incriminating testimony given by his
madama. Unfortunately, it is difficult to tell whether the madame in these cases were
intentionally incriminating their partners. We will never know, for instance, if Dest Agos was
deliberately using her testimony about her relation of a conjugal nature as a means to take
revenge on Spano for beating her.
Jealousy and thrashings were not uncommon in madamato, and the court cases I
reviewed include several stories of violence. The Appeals Court of Addis Ababa once released
a man who was able to show that to possess a native woman he had had, each time, to use
force ... He had hit and also beaten her ... until the woman, to avoid such a calamity, called
the police.165 The police hauled him to court not for violence against the woman but rather
on suspicion that he was having an affair with her. This case is symptomatic of the mentality
of the Italian police, who regarded violence as a normal component of conjugal relations;
however, violence could not be all there was to it. The man was let go not because he used
violencewhich could just as easily have been taken as a sign of jealousy and thus have served
as evidence of his amorous feelings toward herbut because he had been forced to resort to
it each time to get her to comply. If, on the contrary, his abusive behavior had been
shown to be jealous rage, the law against the madamato would have worked to the advantage
of the madama. Thus it was possible for a woman to invoke the law in her own defense (but
alas, not always with success).
Other sources confirm that colonialism largely encouraged violence against women.
Italian men often behaved as absolute masters. In a recent interview an Eritrean woman
165
CORTE DAPPELLO DI ADDIS ABEBA, 27 September 1939, Pres. and drafter Guerrazzi, defendant Cerullo.
52
recalled: There were many instances of rapes of Eritrean women by Italian men.166 A
Hungarian physician who served in Addis Ababa during the Italian invasion wrote in 1940:
Several times I witnessed the deportation of women to such houses [brothels] with revolting
violence, one girl being attacked by three or four armed soldiers of civilization!167 Maria
Messina, an Italo-Eritrean born in Asmara in 1917, stressed that the situation dramatically
worsened after the Italo-Ethiopian war: Mussolini, she recently recalled, sent to Eritrea
scores of black shirts. They were vulgar guys, scoundrels, jailbirds, and they raped women.
We girls could no longer get out at night. There was a big difference, she avowed, between
this rabble and old colonists.168
I found an interesting case from Mogadishu, whichthough set far from
Eritreamerits attention as an illustration of attitudes common among Italian men in the
colonial setting. Incidentally it also proves that the madamato was not limited to Christians.
A particular colonial official who could no longer live with his madamashe had been
expelled from the town and was living in a nearby villagewas still paying all her expenses
and sending gifts not only to her but also to her sister. According to the judge in this case,
the official in question spent many nights with his madama and they often shared meals
together. When he ran into financial trouble, she offered to return the jewels he had given
her. The judge added (apparently in shock) that this official had even had pictures taken of
himself with his madama. However, because he was full of jealousy he often beat her.169
From this account the persistent ambiguity of the madamato emerges again quite clearly.
Economic transactions, displays of masculine authority and possessiveness, violenceall these
were present in this particular incarnation of the madamato, but they intermingled with other
more subtle components, including feelings difficult to identify. Their story is unremarkable
inasmuch as it includes the chief ingredients common to most accounts of abuse and
subjugation in male-female relationships; an ordinary Italian coupleeven in a non-colonial
settingmight have painted a similar picture of their lives.
The photograph of this official and his madama, if we had it, would be likely to
communicate valuable information. Was it like a picture of a hunter proudly displaying his
166
Wilson, Women and the Eritrean Revolution, 13.
167
Sava, Ethiopia under Mussolinis Rule.
168
Maria Messina, 28 December 1995.
169
CORTE DAPPELLO DI ADDIS ABEBA, 13 December 1938, Pres. Carnaroli, drafter Nigro, defendant Augello.
53
trophy? Did he use the photo to boast about his conquest to his friends? As a rule, colonial
photographs were yet another instrument to objectify African people; images of naked
women (see plates 1 and 2) were constantly paraded before the European male gaze.170 But
some of the pictures, like certain court cases, reveal that madamato relationships were not
always exclusive of affection or respect. The mother and child depicted in plate 8, for
instance, could be representative of ordinary family life just about anywhere at the time.
We know very little, unfortunately, of a certain Mr. Fenzi, convicted of madamato in
1939. Since his guilt was immediately obvious to the judge, no detailed description of his
crime was recorded. We do learn that Fenzi lived in a tukul with his madama, and his Italian
family knew about it. His sister, in fact, had written him: Tell me frankly if I can come and
visit you and Hasce; and in another letter, I am very sorry to hear that the dear Hasce is no
longer with you; you know, maybe it is better, because when one falls in love, one suffers so
much. ... Anyway, when you see her, say hello to her for me, and tell her that I love her as a
real sister would.171 These letters indicatemore persuasively than most other evidence ever
couldthat Fenzi considered his relationship with Hasce a conjugal one, even by Italian
standards. Few men were like Fenzi, to be sure; but he was not unique. A certain Mr.
Seneca, for instance, acknowledged that
he had taken with him a native woman; he had brought her with him during his transfers; he loved
her; he had always shared bed and meals with her; he had spent all his money on her; he had given
presents to her and to her mother; he had paid for a medical treatment for her ovaries, in order to
have a baby with her; he had hired a native as a servant for her; and he had prepared a letter to H. M.
the King and Emperor to ask for an authorization to marry the native woman. 172
The judges pronouncement on Senecas behavior was unequivocal: obviously, Seneca

was a serious case of insabbiamento. Here it is not only a white who sexually desires the black
Venus and keeps her isolated in order to have safe and comfortable encounters, explained
the judge; the soul of the Italian is disturbed. A prison term of one year and one month,
wrote the judge, should be enough to clear the mind of the Italian, and to dissipate the
female in one hundred new encounters, that will make her less appealing for the national, and
170
Alloula, The Colonial Harem.
171
TRIBUNALE DI HARAR , 23 August 1939, Pres. Ricci, defendant Fenzi.
172
CORTE DAPPELLO DI ADDIS ABEBA, 31 January 1939, Pres. Guerrazi, drafter Nigro, defendant Seneca.
54
will bond her to new interests and maybe to new cupboard loves.173 We will never know if
Senecas devotion lasted beyond the duration of his imprisonment.
Another Italian man by the name of Fag, who was also on trial in 1939, seems to have
regarded his madama as a live-in, full-time prostitute who, because he paid for her, belonged
to him. He had hired her as a servant for 150 a monthrelatively good pay, given that the
average monthly earnings for a servant seemed to be 100174 and an askaris pay was 200.175
She and Fag slept and sometimes ate together, and he presented her with perfume. But
the girl ran away to marry a person of her own race. He went to look for her, and, with the
excuse he had already paid her a months salary, got her back. ... He was so sexually taken by
her, that he boasted of her qualities with his acquaintances.176 Apparently, a womans
experience of the madamato sometimes took the form of a forced economic transaction. It
would be extremely valuable to know who convinced or forced the madama to go back to
Fag. The police? This is unlikely since he had tried to conceal his relationship from the
police. Her family? If they had been benefitting from her 150 monthly pay, her family
probably would have urged her to return to Fag. In fact if their union had been deemed a
marriage for dmz, from the Eritrean point of view it was her duty to respect the agreements.
7 @ Eritreans and madame

The court case just described tells us that there was at least one Eritrean man who was
willing to marry a madama (although it appears he did not succeed). This important
information helps us to understand how Eritreans perceived the madamato. Regrettably, we
have very little information on this issuejust a few scattered clues that point to the
complexity of the matter.
173
Ibid.
174
Servants wages are sometimes mentioned in the court decisions.
175
Le Hourou, Lpope, 109.
176
CORTE DAPPELLO DI ADDIS ABEBA, 5 September 1939, Pres. and drafter Carnaroli, defendant Fag.
55
Some evidence suggests that Eritreans in general ostracized and marginalized madame.
When I asked Letenkiel Tewolde, Who were the madame? she answered, Bedame,177 you
mean, clarifying that they were the domestic servants of the Italians. They often had affairs
with them. That is why nobody would have married a bedama. They said: Oh, she has been
a bedama! Letenkiel recalls that they used to sing a little song to women who had born
children with Italian soldiers: Beautiful dark girl, you have disgraced your people; when you
pass by me, you have to turn down your head.178 Evidently, crossing ethnic boundaries
could be socially perilous for Eritreans.
The Eritrean mothers of mixed-race children led very hard lives. Recognizing this,
several women chose abortion and did not survive, reported Aster Gebremariam Demoz.179
Once you had a child with an Italian, Letenkiel told me, nobody would marry you.
When possible these women went back to their parents; otherwise they often went to work
as housemaids180 or in drinking houses. However, B., a former madama whom I interviewed,
told me that even though she had been deserted by her Italian partner with their three-yearold child, she received several offers of marriage from Eritrean men.181
Mtis children, too, were made to suffer hardship and marginalization. In 1949
Giovanni Pollera, one of Alberto Polleras children, reported that of 6,000 fatherless and
impoverished mixed-race children, 1,000 urgently needed shelter and treatment in
orphanages.182 Also, the British Senior Civil Affairs Officer for Asmara and the Hamasien
reported in 1948 that 1,000 mtis children were in serious want.183 As we have already seen,
177
Bedama was the Eritrean vulgarization the Italian term madame (Araia Tseggai, Eritrean Women and Italian
Soldiers, 9).
178
Letenkiel Tewolde et al., 13 May 1995. According to Araia Tseggai, Eritrean women who served as madame
were considered equivalent to plain prostitutes by the general populace. However, he further suggests that their
status improved over time, as Italians elevated such prostitutes [to] socially important positions in the Eritrean
community (Araia Tseggai, Eritrean Women and Italian Soldiers, 911).
179
Letenkiel Tewolde et al. [The same interview as in the preceding note.]
180
Similarly, in Ermina DellOros fictional story of an Eritrean madama abandoned by her Italian man, the
protagonist earns her living working like a servant (DellOro, Labbandono).
181
B., 15 August 1996.
182
Pollera, Un grave e spinoso problema.
183
Letter of the Senior Civil Affairs Officer for Asmara and Hamasien to the Chief Secretary, 19 August 1949.
Research and Documentation Center (Asmara). British Military Administration, box 288, f. 19/J/1, Relief. Native
56
Rosalia Pianavia Vivaldi had set up orphanages for mixed-race children as early as the 1890s.
In the 1940s the Catholic Church, the Eritrean Childrens Welfare Society, and other
charitable organizations intensified their efforts to meet the basic human needs of the
growing multitude of mtis children. But the hardships facing these children were not only
economic. A mtis woman who had migrated to Italy recently recalled that in Eritrea the
Italians called us bastards and the Eritreans white asses; we were neither fish, nor flesh, nor
fowl.184 For the most part, mtis considered themselves Italiansat least when they were
in Eritrea; when they emigrated to Italy, the reverse was true.185
Evidently an exception to the rule, Maria Messina (mentioned earlier) recounted her
story of successful integration into the Italian community despite her status as a mtis.
Recognized by her Italian father, a skilled workman who lived with her mother until his death
in the 1930s, Messina was able to attend Italian schools and felt comfortable with her Italian
schoolmates. Later on she married an Italian lawyer, and one of her mixed-race sisters married
an Italo-Eritrean land owner who had studied in Italy with his brothers. A mixed-race friend
of hers married an Italian engineer, and she knew of others with similar life stories.186
Messinas account offers an interesting glimpse of a middle-class Italo-Eritrean milieu that
resisted marginalization by the Fascists, but the Messinas seem to have been unusually
fortunate.
In the 1940s an Eritrean man published a booklet denouncing the abuses perpetrated
by Italians during the British occupation. He wrote that Italians, if they get children from
Eritrean women, do not look after them; they do not even want to see them; for they consider
it a disgrace to have children by Eritrean women although they run after our women like
dogs.187 His excoriation of Italian abuses mixes in this passage with the sexist notion of our
women, which also appears in a rare document originally produced by Ethiopian anti-Italian
resistance leaders. Shoa patriots wrote that the Italians were appropriating our cattle, our
poor relief. Orphanage, #72.

184
V. Costa, Letnia eritrea di Frosinone, Tesi di laurea in etnologia, Universit degli studi di Roma La Sapienza,
(A. A. 198687), 83.
185
Ibid.
186
Maria Messina, 28 December 1994.
187
Alazar Tesfa Michael, Eritrea To-day, 15. Emphasis added.
57
sons and have even begun selecting from our women to make them into their wives.188 In
this document the anti-colonial stance is intermingled with signs of offended male pride.
The marginalization of the madame could also be rooted in similar discourse. In fact,
ironically, while the our women paradigm denied womens personal agency, it
simultaneously stigmatized and assigned fault to women who stayed with the enemy.189
Another index of Eritrean resentment toward Italians for their mistreatment of Eritrean
womenand perhaps for mixed-race unions tout courtis the popular reinterpretation given
to Bhta Hagos 1894 revolt against (ostensibly) the Italian colonial policy of land alienation.
Some Eritrean men, with a view to setting the record straight, informed me that Bhta Hagos
took on the colonial authorities because they had ordered him to give them the nicest
women of his tribe.190
Eritrean society, however, was by no means monolithic in its judgment of madame,
and not only for the obvious reasonnamely, that the madame and mtis numbered in the
thousands. As we saw earlier, some Eritrean men were willing to marry former madame.
Furthermore, mixed-race unions did not concern the madame alone; a madamas family could
be involved as well. For instance, G. M., whose grandmother helped her negotiate the terms
of the relationship she would have with an Italian partner, explained to me that once she
started living with the engineer, she was able to channel some economic support to her
family.191 Another woman, K. S., whose lengthy relationship with a tailor from Sardinia
ended only upon his death in the 1960s, told me that her mother lived with them.192 It
seems unlikely that the families of these two women would have viewed mixed-race unions
with the same resentment and scorn reported by other sources.
188
Tekeste Negash, No medicine, 61. Emphasis added.
189
It is ironic that such ideas were quite congruent with Fascist ideas about women. In a 1938 speech to the
Consiglio nazionale of the PNF (National Fascist Party), Mussolini said that when the Amhara saw that the
Italians went around in rags worse than their own, that they lived in tukuls like their own, and that they kidnapped
their women, etc., they said This is not a race that brings civilization! and they rebelled. This is the reason,
Mussolini continued, for the racial laws (Goglia, Note sul razzismo, 1260. Emphasis added).
190
This interpretation of Bhta Hagos revolt came up in several informal interviews; here I have quoted from my
interview with M. Mahri et al., 30 July 1996.
191
G. M., 13 August 1996.
192
K. S., 26 August 1996.
58
Final Considerations
It would be unwise of me to finalize a set of conclusions at this stage. As I
acknowledged in the introduction, this is a work in progress which is ending where, ideally,
further fieldwork and archival research will begin. Conclusions and closure are beyond the
aims of the present work. Rather, I hoped to suggest some working hypothesis to take to the
next stage of my future research.
At nearly every turn in my inquiry, the madamato stubbornly eluded any clear-cut
definition. Diversityin its actors and likewise in the kinds of relationships they
developedseems to have been its hallmark. As we have seen, the form and content of the
relationships categorized as madamato varied widely: from heinous forms of child abuse and
cases of the sexual exploitation of domestic servants, to genuine love stories (like those of
Seneca and Fenzi) and dynamic multiracial families (like Maria Messinas). Clearly, the
complexity of the madamato warrants a finer, more nuanced analysis that will address the
plurality of the colonial experience.
The diversity of the relationships in question was in part an outgrowth of the widely
differing power relations between the partners. G. M., the woman whose relationship with
an Italian man was shaped by her grandmothers mediation, apparently had the backing of
her family, and as a result she was in a stronger position relative to her partner than, say, the
orphaned girls described by Martini, who seemed defenseless against the predation of
unscrupulous Italian officers. G. M.s position allowed her to decide whether or not she
accepted the engineers offer to live with him, and she could take steps to safeguard her
respectability and the quality of her domestic life. For her, as she put it, it was not just a
matter of money; it was a matter of truth.193 The assurance of income motivated many
Eritrean women to work as domestic servants for Italian men, and then to live with them as
madame, but the economic needs of these women can be counted as only one of a
multiplicity of forces in the dynamics of the madamato. The fact that an Eritrean woman was
in financial need before becoming a madama does not negate the possibility that she might
have been seeking, in her life with an Italian partner, to assure for herself a particular quality
of life and domestic stability.
Unfortunately, our fact-finding (and our speculation, for that matter) are constrained
by the dearth of information about Eritrean womens experience under colonialism. For the
193
G. M., 13 August, 1995.
59
most part, educated guesswork is our only guide to the trajectories of the lives of individual
women before and after becoming madame and to the ways they conceptualized their
relationships with their Italian partners. Occasionally, useful clues to the wills of individual
women come from reports of madame calling police for protection from abusive partners,
successfully escaping from bad relationships, or offering urgent economic help to their
partners or remaining at their side through successive transfers. Despite its spareness of
detail, information like this seems to support Coopers assertion of the importance of
African agency in determining the shape the [colonial] encounter took.194
To be sure, some of the contrasts marking certain articulations of the madamato were
due to differences in the makeup of the colonizers. Dissimilarities in the socioeconomic
backgrounds of the Italian colonists help to explain their behavioral differences, but it seems
dubious to suggest that a linear causality existed between the class of the colonist and the
kind of interracial relations he had. For instance, unlike their middle-class counterparts,
working-class colonists were often unable to incur the expense of bringing their spouses (or
fiances) from Italy to Africa; therefore, these men were likely to be more inclined to form
relationships with local women. As well, the duration of migratory projectswhich could
dictate a short- or a long-term stay in the coloniesmay have affected the decision-making
of some Italian men regarding the form of their interaction with local women. E. O., a tailor
from Sardinia and the partner of a woman I interviewed, and Maria Messinas father both
decided to settle permanently in Eritrea after they finished their military service in Africa. It
is reasonable to expect that they conceptualized their relationships with the African women
in their lives differently from, say, an officer who was serving in Eritrea for a limited time only,
just to garner a promotion or a shorter tour of duty. It would seem that the colonial official
Alberto Pollera, who chose to adopt Eritrea as his new homeland, was more like the former
than the latter. Years of uninterrupted community of bed and meals (as the Fascist judges
would have put it) and of shared parenting may not have produced the perfect union of
sentiments Pollera sought,195 but nevertheless may have given rise to important emotional
investments.
Social stratification among Italians was particularly marked from 1935 ona time
when the government was intensifying efforts to swell the ranks of the colonists.
Contemporary research on Italian working-class colonists has just begun to suggest how and
194
Cooper, Conflict and Connection, 1529.
195
60
to what extent Italian subalterns participated in the dominant colonial and racist ideology;
further research is still needed. But certainly racism was not exclusive to middle-class
colonists, and, it should be observed, the conquest of Ethiopia and the establishment of the
Italian empire in east Africa received overwhelming popular support from Italians of all walks
of life.196
It is safe to say that most of the colonists in Eritrea believed in Fascist colonialism;
thus, it ironic that so many of them violated governmental directives regarding mixed
unionsdirectives which, as we have seen, were a key part of Fascist colonial policy. In the
eyes of the government these men were directly challenging the ideological basis of Fascist
colonialism. We have no evidence, however, suggesting that the 1937 law against the
madamato was ever publicly challenged, except for the isolated voice of Alberto Pollera. 197
The Fascists attempts to ban the madamato seem to have failed not under the pressure of
a self-conscious and active opposition, but because such a prohibition conflicted with some
of the colonists primary material and emotional needs.
The Fascist government campaigned vigorously to enshrine marriage to an Italian
woman as the ideal for colonists; in practice, however, the colonists only available alternative
to the madamato was not marriage but prostitution of a particularly commercialized and
depersonalized nature. Prostitution seemed a poor substitute for the madamato, which was
for the colonists not only a steady source of sex but also a complete package of domestic
services combined with the kind of nurture and emotional support many colonists thought
they had left behind in Italy.
The Fascist government was trying to impose a model of sexuality in colonial Eritrea
that many men clearly found unsatisfactory. The terminology used by Fascist judges is itself
an easy hint to the governments broader ideological project of promoting a concept of
sexuality that reduced it to a physiological function. Whenever we encounter judges
speaking of males needing to release their lustfulness and about sex as a passing outlet,
we not only witness the depersonalization of African women into females (which was
nothing new for colonial Africa), but in the same discourse we also see Italian men similarly
reduced to and lumped together as undifferentiated males.
196
See Dore, Guerra dEtiopia; Tassis Torriani, A te caro libro; Taddia, La memoria; Labanca, Coscritti in
colonia; Guerrini, Esotismo; and Le Hourou, Lpope.
197
Goglia has found in the Italian Foreign Offices archives a memo by Alberto Pollera dated 28 March 1937,
wherein he petitions the government not to issue the law against the madamato (Goglia, Una diversa politica).
61
Thousands of miles away from home, alone, and in a foreign country, some of the
colonists were after something more than sex as a passing outlet; some wished to
reconstruct a home for themselves and thus needed all that only a madamaand not a
prostitutecould provide. Bearing this in mind, we see how the experience of the madamato
could serve as an index to the decision-making of individual men and women who were
striving, within the overall structure of colonial domination, to create meaningful domestic
lives for themselves.
At the same time we should consider Stolers warning that miscegenation signaled
neither the presence nor absence of racial discrimination; hierarchies of privilege and power
were written into the condoning of interracial unions, as well as into their condemnation.198
Indeed, to condone the madamato was not to ignore race; furthermore I wish to emphasize
that the madamato itself was not free of racism. The court cases provide ample evidence of
how violence and affective bonds, sex and racism frequently intermingled in these
relationships.
Violence in the context of the madamato was often the product of racism and colonial
domination; however, violence against madame was a manifestation of an attitude toward
women which predated the Italian penetration of Eritrea and was common elsewhere (outside
the colonies). The attitude to which I refer is, of course, sexism. Recall the jurist Rossos
claim that the law against the madamato was designed to suppress relationships on an equal
basis.199 What judges construed to be an equal basis was hardly so, but gender inequality
in conjugal relationsand its occasional display in violence toward womenwas not an
anomaly by most Italian standards. Thus, sexismalong with racism and colonial
dominationshaped the madamato, and the madames subjection to sexist violence was just
one of the natural characteristics of conjugal life no matter how disputed, site-specific, or
improvised its form. In other words, some of the unions considered to be madamato were
indeed marked by exploitation and abuse, but these same relationships could also bear
emotional significance and be viewed by both their participants and external observers as
relations of a conjugal nature.
198
Stoler, Carnal Knowledge, 86. Emphasis in the original. Srgoni has also confirmed Stolers analysis in
reference to the Eritrean case (Srgoni, Parole e corpi, 215-16).
199
Rosso, Definizione, 683. Emphasis added.
Sources and bibliography

Oral sources
Letenkiel Tewolde et al. Evanston, Illinois, 13 May 1995.
Adhanet Adgoy and Hareg Nega also contributed during part of the interview. I am
deeply grateful to Aster Gebremariam Demoz, who arranged for the interview to take
place, served as interpreter, and was herself a source of valuable information.
Messina, Maria. Rome, 28 December 1995.
M. Mahri et al. Asmara, 30 July 1996.
G. M. Asmara, 13 August 1996.
B. Asmara, 15 August 1996.
K. S. Asmara, 26 August 1996.
Court cases 200
TRIBUNALE DI ADDIS ABEBA, 13 January 1938, defendants Pulcinelli and Ascal. Razza e
civilt 1, no. 1 (1940): 12528.
TRIBUNALE DI HARAR, 28 February 1938, Pres. Ricci; defendants Pedrini and DAmbrosio.
Razza e civilt 1, nos. 57 (1940): 550.
TRIBUNALE DI GONDAR , 19 November 1938, Pres. and drafter Maistro; public prosecutor
Rufini; defendant Spano. Razza e civilt 1, no. 1 (1940): 12831 and Rivista italiana
di diritto penale (1939): 8590.
200
Criminal court cases in Italy are usually identified by the court, the name of the presiding judge, the name of the judge
who wrote the decision (here identified as "drafter") and the name of the defendant(s); sometimes the name of the Public
Prosecutor is also given. All the court decisions I examined were published; therefore I furnish the reference for the relevant
publication(s).
63
CORTE DAPPELLO DI ADDIS ABEBA, 13 December 1938, Pres. Carnaroli; drafter Nigro; def
e n
d a
n t
Au
gell
o .
I l
Dir
itto
raz
zist
a 2,
no.
1
(19
40)
:
37
38.
CORTE DAPPELLO DI ADDIS ABEBA, 3 January 1939, Pres. Carnaroli, drafter Ferri; defendant
Giuliano. Razza e civilt 1, nos. 57 (1940): 550.
CORTE DAPPELLO DI ADDIS ABEBA, 3 January 1939, Pres. Carnaroli, drafter Guerrazzi; defen
dant
Marca
.
Razza
e
civilt
1, nos.
5 7
(1940
): 551.
64
CORTE DAPPELLO DI ADDIS ABEBA, 3 January 1939, Pres. Carnaroli, drafter Guerrazzi; defen
dant
Manc
a. Il
Diritt
o
razzis
ta 2,
nos.
2 4
(1940
)
:
1333
4.
CORTE DAPPELLO DI A DDIS ABEBA, 3 January 1939, Pres. and drafter Carnaroli; defendant
Melchionne. Razza e civilt 1, nos. 57 (1940): 548; Il Diritto razzista 2, nos. 56 (1940):
281.
CORTE DAPPELLO DI ADDIS A BEBA, 6 January 1939, Pres. and drafter Carnaroli; defendant
Avidano. Razza e civilt 1, no. 8 (1940): 674.
CORTE DAPPELLO DI ADDIS ABEBA, 10 January 1939, Pres. Carnaroli, drafter Guerrazzi;
defendant Pratola. Razza e civilt 1, no. 8 (1940): 676.
CORTE DAPPELLO DI ADDIS ABEBA, 24 January 1939, Pres. Carnaroli; drafter Nigro; defendant
Sodano. Razza e civilt 1, nos. 57 (1940): 548.
CORTE DAPPELLO DI ADDIS ABEBA, 31 January 1939, Pres. Guerrazzi, drafter Nigro; defendant
Seneca. Razza e civilt 1, nos. 57 (1940): 54849.
CORTE DAPPELLO DI ADDIS ABEBA, 7 February 1939, Pres. Carnaroli, drafter Ferri; defendant
Venturiello. Razza e civilt 1, nos. 57 (1940): 549.
65
Santaniello. Razza e civilt 1, nos. 57 (1940): 551.
Venturiello. Razza e civilt 1, nos. 57 (1940): 549.
Pontoniero. Razza e civilt 1, nos. 57 (1940): 554.
Travaglini. Razza e civilt 1, nos. 57 (1940): 556.
CORTE DAPPELLO DI ADDIS ABEBA, 14 February 1939, Pres. Carnaroli, drafter Nigro;
defendant Autieri. Razza e civilt 1, nos. 57 (1940): 549.
CORTE DAPPELLO DI ADDIS ABEBA, 21 February 1939, Pres. Carnaroli, drafter Ferri;
defendant Ubertini. Razza e civilt 1, nos. 57 (1940): 554.
CORTE DAPPELLO DI ADDIS ABEBA, 7 March 1939, Pres. Carnaroli, drafter Ferri; defendant
Nigro. Razza e civilt 1, nos. 57 (1940): 558.
CORTE DAPPELLO DI ADDIS ABEBA, 7 March 1939, Pres. Russo, drafter Guerrazzi; defendant
Russo. Razza e civilt 1, no. 8 (1940): 676.
CORTE DAPPELLO DI ADDIS ABEBA, 14 March 1939, Pres. Carnaroli, drafter Nigro; defendant
Re. Razza e civilt 1, nos. 57 (1940): 553.
CORTE DAPPELLO DI ADDIS ABEBA, 21 March 1939, Pres. Carnaroli, drafter Guerrazzi; defen
dant
Valli.
Razza
e
civilt
1, nos.
5 7
66
(1940
): 557.
CORTE DAPPELLO DI ADDIS ABEBA, 21 March 1939, Pres. Carnaroli, drafter Ferri; defendants
Spallone and Curatolo. Razza e civilt 1, no. 8 (1940): 675.
CORTE DAPPELLO DI ADDIS ABEBA, 4 April 1939, Pres. Carnaroli, drafter Nigro; defendant
Isella. Razza e civilt 1, nos. 57 (1940): 552.
TRIBUNALE DI ASMARA, 5 April 1939, Pres. Regnoli; defendant Arena. Razza e civilt 1, no.
8 (1940): 675.
TRIBUNALE DI ASMARA , 19 April 1939, Pres. DAmario; defendant Baglio. Razza e civilt 1,
nos. 57 (1940): 555.
CORTE DAPPELLO DI ADDIS ABEBA, 13 June 1939, Pres. Guerrazzi, drafter Ferri; defendant
Del Chiappo. Razza e civilt 1, nos. 57 (1940): 550.
C ORTE DAPPELLO DI ADDIS ABEBA, 13 June 1939, Pres. Guerrazzi, drafter Nigro; defendant
Guerrieri. Razza e civilt 1, nos. 57 (1940): 556.
CORTE DAPPELLO DI ADDIS ABEBA, 11 July 1939, Pres. Carnaroli, drafter Ferri; defendant
Bastoni. Razza e civilt 1, no. 8 (1940): 676.
CORTE DAPPELLO DI ADDIS ABEBA, 11 July 1939, Pres. Carnaroli, drafter Nigro; defendant
De Gioia. Razza e civilt 1, no. 8 (1940): 673.
CORTE DAPPELLO DI ADDIS ABEBA, 18 July 1939, Pres. and drafter Carnaroli; defendant
Palmieri. Razza e civilt 1, nos. 57 (1940): 554.
CORTE DAPPELLO DI ADDIS ABEBA, 8 August 1939, Pres. and drafter Guerrazzi; defendant
Balardi. Razza e civilt 1, nos. 57 (1940): 553.
TRIBUNALE DI HARAR, 23 August 1939, Pres. Ricci; defendant Fenzi. Razza e civilt 1, no. 8
(1940): 673.
67
CORTE DAPPELLO DI ADDIS ABEBA, 5 September 1939, Pres. and drafter Carnaroli; defendant
Fag. Razza e civilt 1, nos. 57 (1940): 547; Il Diritto razzista 2, nos. 56 (1940): 281.
GIUDICE DELLA COLONIA DI HARAR, 13 September 1939, est. Patroni; defendant Zuccotti.
Razza e civilt 1, no. 8 (1940): 67780.
TRIBUNALE DI ADDIS ABEBA, 14 September 1939, Pres. Buongiorno; defendant Infantini.
Razza e civilt 1, no. 8 (1940): 674.
TRIBUNALE DI ADDIS ABEBA, 21 September 1939, Pres. Morando; defendant Rizzi. Razza e
civilt 1, no. 8 (1940): 674.
CORTE DAPPELLO DI ADDIS ABEBA, 26 September 1939, Pres. Guerrazzi, drafter Nigro;
defendant Romersa. Razza e civilt 1, nos. 57 (1940): 549; Il Diritto razzista 2 , nos. 56
(1940): 281.
CORTE DAPPELLO DI ADDIS ABEBA, 27 September 1939, Pres. and drafter Guerrazzi;
defendant Cerullo. Razza e civilt 1, nos. 57 (1940): 558.
T RIBUNALE DI HARAR, 29 September 1939, Pres. Ricci; defendant Pratola. Razza e civilt 1,
no. 8 (1940): 675.
TRIBUNALE DI HARAR, 20 October 1939, Pres. Ricci; defendant Tinello. Razza e civilt 1, nos.
57 (1940): 555; Il Diritto razzista 2, nos. 56 (1940): 279.
TRIBUNALE DI ADDIS ABEBA, 11 November 1939, Pres. and drafter Buongiorno; defendant
Bettini. Razza e civilt 1, nos. 57 (1940): 552; Il Diritto razzista 2, nos. 56 (1940): 280.
CORTE DAPPELLO DI ROMA, 17 November 1939, Pres. and drafter Musillami; defendant
Maria Tesone. Il Diritto razzista 2, nos. 56 (1940): 27173.
CORTE DAPPELLO DI ADDIS ABEBA, 21 December 1939, Pres. Morando; defendants Luria and
Ciulla. Razza e civilt 1, nos. 57 (1940): 557.
68
TRIBUNALE DI ASMARA, 31 December 1939, Pres. Guerra; defendant Franzoni. Razza e civilt
1, nos. 57 (1940): 554; Il Diritto razzista 2, nos. 56 (1940): 27879.
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What is the madamato?

What is the madamato?

What changes did Fascist racial policy introduce after the Ethiopian invasion?

What changes did Fascist racial policy introduce after the Ethiopian invasion?

1996 Giulia Barrera.

All rights reserved. No part of the following papers

Colonial Concubinage in Eritrea, 1890S1941

Program of African Studies

1996 by Giulia Barrera. All rights reserved.

To think that little plaything is my wife!

Mogli e buoi dei paesi tuoi.

1 @ African women in the Italian colonial imagination 8

3 @ The madamato in the liberal and early Fascist period (18901933) 21

A Black Venus. Postcard. Circa 1930.

Bilen Girl. Postcard published by A. Baratti, Asmara. Circa 1936.

A mixed-race girl. Photograph. Circa 1905.

A madama. Photograph. Circa 1900.

An officer with his madama. Photograph.

A madama with her child. Photograph.

Stoler, Carnal Knowledge, 6061.

Labanca, In marcia verso Adua, 219.

Martini, Relazione sulla Colonia Eritrea, 46.

Stoler, Carnal Knowledge, 64.

Cooper, Conflict and Connection, 1529.

1 @ African women in the Italian colonial imagination

Stoler, Carnal Knowledge, 5455.

un nuovo duce e un nuovo re. Rochat, Il colonialismo italiano, 170-71.

Surdich, La donna dellAfrica Orientale.

Davidoff, Class and Gender, 1921.

2 @ Clues to the identity of the madame

Paoli, Nella colonia Eritrea, 106. Emphasis added.

Pollera, La donna in Etiopia, 73.

Taddia, LEritrea colonia, 187.

White, Magomero, 101.

Conti Rossini, Principi di diritto, 189.

Conti Rossini, Principi di diritto, 190.

Conti Rossini, Principi di diritto, 245.

Letenkiel Tewolde et al, 13 May 1995.

Weissleder, Amhara Marriage, 6785.

Crummey, Family and Property, 217.

Conti Rossini, Principi di diritto, 24955.

Reentemeesters, Women and Development Planning, 73.

Taddia, LEritrea colonia, 117.

Bauer, Household, 136.

Tekeste Negash, Italian Colonialism in Eritrea, 51.

Source: Tekeste Negash, Italian Colonialism in Eritrea, 51.

3 @ The madamato in the liberal and early Fascist period (18901933)

Letenkiel Tewolde et al, 13 May 1995.

Martini, Relazione sulla Colonia Eritrea, 49.

Martini, Diario eritreo, 1:220.

Pankhurst, History of Prostitution, 16.

Martini, Diario eritreo, 1:89.

Laketch Dirasse, Commoditization, 7, 2630. See also White, Comforts of Home.

Pankhurst, History of Prostitution, 16.

Labanca, In marcia verso Adua, 219.

Pollera, La donna in Etiopia, 79.

Le Hourou, Lpope, 101.

Martini, Diario eritreo, 1:84.

G. M., 13 August 1996.

Astuto edited Martinis diary (Martini, Diario eritreo, 1:262 n. 2).