Abstract
This chapter will focus on the madamas, colonial women who contracted to provide all the “comforts of home” to male Italian settlers in East Africa. I discuss the case of Eritrea, which, being the first settler colony of the new Italian state, occupied a central place in the narratives glorifying Italy’s mandate to “civilize” Africa.1 Fueled by state promises to transform them from land-hungry peasants into rich coloniali, large numbers of Italian settlers occupied Eritrea starting in the 1880s, leaving their wives at home.2 While the madamas represented only a small fraction of colonized women in Eritrea, they emerge as a key feature of the Italo-African encounter and dominate colonial discourses regarding native women.3
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Notes
Paolo de Vecchi, La missione civilizzatrice dell’Italia in Africa (Florence: Barberia, 1912).
Giulia Barrera, “Dangerous Liaisons: Colonial Concubinage in Eritrea 1890–1941,” African Studies Program Working Papers, no. 1 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University, 1996), 9;
Barbara Sòrgoni, Parole e corpi: Antropología, discorso giuridico epolitiche sessuali interrazziali nella colonia Eritrea (1890–1941) (Naples: Liguori, 1998), 29.
This phenomenon was also present in French and British colonies. See Sarah Graham-Brown, Images of Women: The Portrayal of Women in Photography of the Middle East 1800–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988);
Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
Tertulliano Gandolfi, I misteri dell Africa Italiana (Rome, 1910), excerpted in Di mal d’Africa si muore: Cronaca inedita dell’Italia unita, ed. Aldo De Jaco, 244–247 (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1972).
Barbara Sòrgoni, “Diventare antropologo: Alberto Pollera e l’etnografia coloniale,” Quaderni storici 37, no. 109 (2002): 55–82.
Sondra Hale, “Liberated, but not Free: Women in Post-War Eritrea,” in The Aftermath: Women in Post-Conflict Transformation, ed. Sheila Meintjies, Anu Pillay, and Meredeth Turshen (London and New York: Zed Press, 2002).
Charles Cobb, “Eritrea Wins the Peace,” National Geographic 189, no. 6 (June 1996): 85–105.
Elise F. Barth, “Peace as Disappointment,” PRIO REPORT 3/2002 (Oslo: International Peace Research Institute, August 2002), 13–15.
William A. Shack, The Central Ethiopians: Amhara, Tigrinya, Northeastern Africa and Related People (London: International African Institute, 1976), 32–35.
These precolonial “comfort wives” should not be confused with the independent courtesans of the Abyssinian highlands known as Faitot, whose photographs and social history were never captured. Christine Matzke mentions their existence but they remained elusive in my conversations with Eritreans in 1998 and 2001. See Christine Matzke, “Of Suwa Houses and Singing Contests: Early Urban Women Performers in Asmara, Eritrea,” in African Theatre: Women, ed. Martin Banham, James Gibbs and Femi Osufisan, 29–46 (Oxford: James Currey, 2002), 31.
Laketch Dirasse, The Commodification of Female Sexuality: Prostitution and Socio-Economic Relations in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (n.p., 1976).
On the bitterness engendered in Eritrean males by the Italians’ ability to pay more, see Gerald K. N. Trevaskis, Eritrea: A Colony in Transition 1941–1952 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), 50.
For comparative perspectives on the sexualized and/or racialized image of disenfranchised women, see Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (London: Routledge, 1995), 122–126; and
Malika Mehdid, “A Western Invention of Arab Womanhood: The ‘Oriental’ Female,” in Women in the Middle East: Perceptions, Realities and Struggles for Liberation, ed. Haleh Afshar, 18–58 (London: Macmillan Press, 1993).
Cited in Araia Tseggai, Eritrean Women and Italian Soldiers: Status of Eritrean Women Under Colonial Rule (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 8.
Alberto Sbacchi, Ethiopia under Mussolini: Fascism and the Colonial Experience (London: Zed Books, 1985).
Trevaskis, Eritrea, 50; Richard Pankhurst, “The Legal Question of Racism in Eritrea during the British Military Administration: A Study of Colonial Attitudes and Responses, 1941–1945,”Northeast African Studies 2, no. 2 (1995): 30–48.
On the origins of Eritrean nationalism see Ruth Iyob, The Eritrean Struggle for Independence: Domination, Resistance, Nationalism, 1941–1993 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
The British-led Allied forces captured Asmara in April 1941, and issued a declaration that designated the former Italian colony as an “occupied enemy territory,” a status that deprived the Eritreans from mobilizing openly. For details see Alemseged Tesfai, Aynfalaa’lae (Asmara: Hindri Publishers, 2001), 31.
Christine Matzke, “Engendering Theatre in Eritrea: The Roles and Representations of Women in the Performing Arts,” in Hot Spot Horn of Africa: Between Integration and Disintegration, ed. Eva-Marie Bruchhaus, 156–164 (Münster: Lit Verlag Afrikanische Studien BD. 19, 2003).
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© 2005 Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Mia Fuller
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Iyob, R. (2005). Madamismo and Beyond: The Construction of Eritrean Women. 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_21
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