Abstract
This chapter seeks to explain colonial relations in Eritrea by focusing on Italian colonial educational policies and the extent to which they were put into practice. The colonial state was solely responsible for educational policies, but it shared responsibility for their implementation with the Catholic mission.1 The questions I aim to answer are: (1) what role did colonial education play in the maintenance of colonial rule? (2) how did the colonial state perceive the spread of education and what measures did it take to regulate and streamline it?
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Notes
The Catholic and Swedish Evangelical missions had schools in Eritrea long before the Italian occupation. See Donald Crummey, Priests and Politicians: Protestant and Catholic Missions in Orthodox Ethiopia, 1830–1868 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972);
Richard Pankhurst, “The Foundations of Education, Printing, Newspapers, Book Production, Libraries and Literacy in Ethiopia,” Ethiopia Observer 6, no. 3 (1972): 241–290;
Gustav Arén, Evangelical Pioneers in Ethiopia: Origins of the Evangelical Church in Mekane Yesus (Stockholm: EFS-förl., 1978); and, on the later history of the Swedish Evangelical mission and its expulsion from the colonies in 1936,
Viveca Halldin Norberg, “Swedes in Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia, 1924–1952: A Study in Early Development Co-operation” (Ph.D. diss., University of Uppsala, 1977), 74; and
Gerald K. N. Trevaskis, Eritrea: A Colony in Transition, 1941–1952 (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), 33.
The most relevant studies are Mininni Caracciolo, “Le scuole nelle colonie italiane di diretto dominio,” Rivista di pedagogía 23, nos. 3–5 (1930): 183–207 and 273–298;
Rodolfo Micacchi, “L’insegnamento agli indigeni nelle colonie italiane di diretto dominio,” Atti del secondo congresso di studi coloniali (1934), vol. 4, 226–256 (Florence: Olschki, 1935);
Enrico De Leone, “Politica indigena e scuola,” Rivista italiana 231 (1937): 3–15.
Roland De Marco, The Italianization of African Natives: Government Native Education in the Italian Colonies, 1890–1937 (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1943), is unreliable on many accounts.
Richard Pankhurst, “Education in Ethiopia during the Italian Fascist Occupation, 1936–1941,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 5, no. 3 (1972): 361–396, is useful but too general on Eritrea.
Ferdinando Martini, Il diario eritreo, 4 vols. (Florence: Vallecchi, 1942–1943), vol. 2, 472, entry of May 27, 1901; also Martini to Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Asmara, April 26, 1901, in Archivio Centrale dello State, Archivio Ferdinando Martini, busta 4; and Renato Paoli, Nella colonia eritrea. Studi e viaggi (Milan: Treves, 1908), 96.
Maurizio Rava, “Politica sociale verso gli indigeni e modi di collaborazione con essi,” in Convegno di scienze morali e storiche. Tema: L’ Africa, ed. Fondazione Alessandro Volta, 2 vols. (Rome: Reale Accademia d’Italia, 1939), 771; Giuseppe Bottai, “La scuola fascista nell’Africa italiana,” Etiopia 3, no. 3 (1939): 3.
The Catholic mission consisted of the Capuchin Fathers, established in Eritrea since 1894; the Daughters of St. Anna, established in 1878; and the Sisters of Pia della Nigrizia, established in 1910. These orders replaced the French Lazarists, who were active in Eritrea prior to Italian colonization and were replaced by Italian orders for patriotic reasons. See ASMAI, posizione 33/1, fascicolo 8, Governor Baratieri to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, September 9, 1894, and ibid., posizione 33/2, fascicolo 6, Foreign Minister Blanc to Governor Baratieri, January 21, 1895; also Cesare Marongiu Buonaiuti, Politica e religioni nel colonialismo italiano, 1882–1941 (Milan: Giuffrè, 1982), 61–62. According to Metodio Da Nembro, La missione dei Minori Cappuccini in Eritrea (1894–1952) (Rome: Institutum Historicum Ord. Fr. Min. Cap., 1953), 74, by 1923 all three public schools had been handed over to the Catholic mission, a strong indication that the state was satisfied with the mission’s performance.
Metodio Da Nembro, “Genesi e sviluppo del clero nativo, etiopico fino alla costituzione della gerarchia,” Euntes, Docete 6 (1953): 308–309. By 1940, there were forty Eritreans studying in the Ethiopian College at the Vatican. ACS, Ministero dell’Africa Italiana (MAI), busta 15, December 20, 1940. Figures on number of graduates from Keren seminary are drawn from Da Nembro, La missione dei Minori Cappuccini, 319.
Government Decree no. 3809, September 12, 1921; figures from Angelo Pìccioli, La nuova Italia d’oltremare: L’opera del fascismo nette colonie italiane (Milan: Mondadori, 1934), vol. 2, 1149.
Gaspare Colosimo, Relazione al Parlamento sulla situazione política, economica ed amministrativa dette colonie italiane presentata alla Camera dei Deputati il 23 febbraio 1918 ed al Senato del Regno il 28 febbraio 1918 (Rome: Tipografía del Senate di G. Bardi, 1918), 375–376; also De Marco, The Italianization of African Natives, 49. By 1916, the Swedish Evangelical mission in Eritrea had a total of 1,250 students, of which about a third were females. Boys’ schools were organized into four years of primary education followed by a three-year postprimary program. For girls, education lasted three years and was designed to make good housewives out of them. According to Pìccioli, La Nuova Italia d’oltremare, vol. 2, 1149, the number of students in the Swedish mission schools fell from 1,400 in 1922 to three hundred in 1932 (when those schools were closed down). Among the reasons for the decline was the opening of the Vittorio Emanuele School in Asmara in 1926.
VII Censimento generale, 1931, 39. The approximate figure of two percent is based on the assumption that the school-age population constituted about twenty percent of the population. According to the 1939 census the population of Great Eritrea amounted to 1,537,213 (Vittorio Castellano, “Il censimento del 1939 della popolazione indigena della Eritrea e lo sviluppo della popolazione indigena della Eritrea storica, in un cinquantennio di amministrazione italiana,” Rivista italiana di demografía e statistica 2, no. 2 (1948): 270–271). Thus of a school age population of over three hundred thousand, the total enrolment of five thousand amounted to about 1.7 percent of all school age children and much less than one percent of the total population.
See, for example, on British educational policy in Ghana, Geoffrey B. Kay and Stephen Hymer, eds., The Political Economy of Colonialism in Ghana: A Collection of Documents and Statistics, 1900–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 278–304;
Hanns Vischer, “Native Education in British Tropical Africa,” in Convegno di scienze morali e storiche. Tema: l’ Africa, ed. Fondazione Alessandro Volta, 2 vols., 949–969 (Rome: Reale Accademia d’Italia, 1939);
O. F. Ogunlande, “Education and Politics in Colonial Nigeria: The Case of King’s College, Lagos, 1906–1911,” Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 7, no. 2 (1974): 325–343;
Prosser Gifford and Timothy Weiskel, “African Education in a Colonial Context,” in France and Britain in Africa: Imperial Rivalry and Colonial Rule, ed. Prosser Gifford and William R. Louis, 662–711 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971).
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© 2005 Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Mia Fuller
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Negash, T. (2005). The Ideology of Colonialism: Educational Policy and Praxis in Eritrea. In: Ben-Ghiat, R., Fuller, M. (eds) Italian Colonialism. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-8158-5_10
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