Cruce et Aratro: Fascism, Missionary Schools, and Labor in 1920s Italian Somalia

Abstract

Until the 1920s, the Catholic missionary presence in Italian Somalia was weak due to both the lack of resources and the colonial state’s anti-clerical attitude. Things changed under the first fascist governor Cesare Maria De Vecchi (1923–1928) and the work of Consolata Fathers (1924–1930). Then, church and state cooperated in the active expansion of missionary-run education, especially catechism and the teaching of practical arts among the local youth. Governmental, Vatican, and missionary sources suggest that the very motor of colonial school building was the need for local skilled labor and that, while De Vecchi promoted assimilationist teaching, his successor Guido Corni (1928–1931) switched to curriculum adaptation and discouraged evangelization. Such a change reflects broader trends in the history of global education as well as racial thinking and religious policy in Italian colonies.

Introduction

In May 1928, the Catholic missionary journal La Consolata opened with a piece titled “Cruce et Aratro.” The anonymous author wrote that in Somalia “we [Italian missionaries] colonize only through the plow [aratro] and the cross [cruce], and by ‘colonize’ here we mean civilize.” Earlier missionary work had proved such a strategy to be successful in the neighboring British colony of Kenya. For twenty-five years, the fathers had “civilized” men and women through nuns’ “heroic charity” and increased “material wealth resulted from physical work.” What the Italian missionaries had achieved for the British—the transformation of African subjects into Christians and workers—had to be achieved in Somalia.¹

Scholarship on Italian colonialism in Somalia has addressed the study of developmentalist discourses and practices from both the colonial period (1908–1941) and the postwar UN trust mandate of Italian administration (1949–1960).² Historians have retraced how, with the arrival of the first fascist governor in the colony in 1923, the colonial state planned ambitious policies of agricultural and infrastructural expansion. Its goal was to prepare for the military conquest of neighboring Ethiopia, later achieved during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War in 1935–1936. It was thus no coincidence that in 1928 La Consolata depicted Somalia as “Italy’s most promising colony.”³ Public and private investments aimed at the creation of a plantation system for crop export to Italy in the fertile southern regions of Somalia. Further, both private companies and the colonial state tried to resolve the shortage of workforce through coercive practices including native land expropriation, the promotion of forced marriages for the reproduction of labor, and the legalization of forced labor.⁴ According to Annalisa Urbano, the development (valorizzazione) of Somalia was an evolving discourse that provided both a justification and a scope for the colonial venture. Colonial authorities legitimized forced labor recruitment as part of a modernizing strategy and “school of progress” for locals. Ultimately, she has shown, the investment in plantation agriculture and related decrease in the production for the local market made Somalia dependent on imports, which had a long-standing impact on postwar international programs for the development of the region.⁵

Colonial state, private businesses, credit institutes, and the exploited workforce are the protagonists of this historiography on “civilization through labor” in Italian Somalia. This essay’s goal is to introduce two key actors that remain missing from the picture: the Catholic Church and education. I show that, as a result of fascist and Vatican converging agendas, missionaries occupied a leading role in the shaping of developmental discourses and practices in Italian Somalia. They did so by creating the colony’s first school system and by making of labor the core of education. While highlighting the peculiarities of the cruce et aratro project as undertaken in Italian Somalia, I argue that it reflected broader trends both in religious and racial policy in Italian colonialism as well as in inter-war educational and labor policies throughout Africa.⁶

In conducting this study, I relied on the archives of the Consolata Missions Institute (CMI) in Rome, Italy.⁷ The Consolata Fathers directed all the Italian educational initiatives in the colony from 1924 to 1930,⁸ leaving a rich set of primary sources including the correspondence with fascist authorities, private letters, and self-reports. I have also consulted the official documentation produced by and stored at Italian and Vatican governmental institutions.⁹ These sources provide insights into the quotidian life and administration of the colony.¹⁰

Church–State Reconciliation

In her book on Trinitarian missions in Italian Somalia (1903–1924), the historian Lucia Ceci shows how, up to the early 1920s, the Catholic presence in Somalia was very weak due to colonial authorities’ anticlericalism and the missionaries’ lack of both human and financial resources.¹¹ In 1904, the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith founded the Vicariate of Benadir, comprising the Benadir coastal area under Italian protectorate to become the colony of Italian Somalia in 1908. The Congregation promoted abolitionism and assistance for freed slaves in a region where slavery was still widely practiced. Rulers supported the anti-slavery project but prevented missionaries from any activity of religious proselytism that could create tensions with the local Muslim society. The Trinitarians’ duty was to provide for charity and to train locals as Italian language speaking skilled workers that one day could serve the labor needs of the Italian settler community. While Italian settlers paid for their children’s school equipment, the colonial government entirely funded the local youth’s education.¹² By 1923, Trinitarians had built three missionary stations in Mogadishu, Gelib, and Brava.¹³

Liberal authorities, in other words, encouraged the plow (aratro) but strictly prohibited the cross (cruce). Things would change with the arrival of the fascist governor Cesare Maria De Vecchi (1923–1928) and Consolata missionaries, Trinitarians’ successors (1924–1930). On the one hand, De Vecchi pursued a resolute policy of direct rule through territorial expansion, native land expropriation, and increased Italian settlement. The consequent centralization of Italian rule and internal pacification of the colony paved the way for missionary activities. Not only missionaries could work under the colonial state’s stronger protection, but the colonial state itself increasingly needed missionary work in the form of both the plow and the cross. De Vecchi launched infrastructure building projects as well as extended and intensified agricultural exploitation of newly acquired lands: the need for labor was high. Simultaneously, the Catholic settler population almost doubled in a few years (from 674 in 1921 to 1200 in 1929),¹⁴ and the governor created a native army (Corpo Zaptiè) whose members were to be granted with basic public services including Italian language teaching and healthcare. A fervent Catholic, De Vecchi announced that he aimed to intensify religious proselytizing, deploring previous governors’ prohibitions.¹⁵ Trinitarians, lacking funds and internally divided, abandoned Somalia a few weeks later.¹⁶

In 1924, on the other hand, Consolata missionaries replaced Trinitarians as a result of an agreement between De Vecchi and the Congregation for the Propagation of Faith.¹⁷ Evidence suggests that the Italian Ministry of the Colonies was closely following CMI’s work in Africa and thinking about their possible replacement of Trinitarians since 1917. Italian authorities valued several factors. First, during the First World War missionaries had shown their devotion to Italy by sending letters of support for the military victories of the Italian army in the peninsula. Second, in British East Africa (Kenya), the mission had started medical activities and professional courses for the African youth. Through religious and commercial activities, Consolata missionaries had also penetrated in southwestern Ethiopia, a region the Italian government was interested in for a potential plan of expansion.¹⁸ For these reasons, colonial authorities viewed the Consolata Fathers as champions of Italian loyalty and colonial agents professionally specialized in the vocational education of African subjects.¹⁹

Missionary work in Italian Somalia, however, was not only in the agenda of the Italian state. On the Vatican side, the work of Consolata missionaries was part of an ongoing missionary strategy plan set by Benedict XV and his successor Pius XI. In 1919 and 1926, the two Popes respectively published the apostolic letter Maximum Illud and the encyclical Rerum Ecclesiae exhorting evangelization among “pagan” people as a supranatural endeavor separated from national and imperial aims. The ultimate goal of missionaries, according to both documents, was the expansion of the kingdom of God, not an empire of man.²⁰ In fact, CMI adopted an explicitly pro-Italian attitude that seemed to contrast the encyclical’s scope: La Consolata consistently praised Italy’s colonial presence in Somalia as well as emphasized the “Italian” character of missionary teaching.²¹ I found no evidence suggesting that CMI’s posture played a role in either the choice or later replacement of Consolata missionaries by Vatican authorities—whereas it certainly influenced Italian authorities’ active support of their work. Most likely, the Pope prioritized the good and cooperative relationship between the Catholic Church and the (highly nationalist) fascist state as a precondition to evangelization in Italian colonies, especially given that such a relationship came after a long season of Italian authorities’ strong anticlericalism and diffidence toward Catholics.²² In 1926, a journalist wrote:

Vatican authorities are following with great interest the work of Consolata missionaries in Somalia, as their work is the first complete experiment the Pope has potentially created for the conversion of the Muslims… [The plan] could be explained as such: [missionaries should] first of all study Islamism deeply, the language, habits, the mentality of Muslim people, and then, through charity, address them directly, trying to earn their respect, then their love, eventually their soul.²³

La Consolata depicted the apostolate as explicitly “experimental.”²⁴ While the 1926 encyclical focused on evangelization in terms of preaching to the natives and building up native clergy and congregations, Consolata missionaries developed their own strategy as to fit best the reality of Italian Somalia, where there were no Christian natives. In 1925, Gabriele Perlo, new Apostolic Administrator of the Benadir Vicariate,²⁵ wrote:

We are in a wholly Muslim fieldwork and can pursue our direct apostolate only among the Italians … and a few Catholic Eritreans who have moved here as workers, as well as among mixed-race children [meticci] and orphans of whom we take care.²⁶

“With Muslims,” another missionary wrote in 1926, “it is necessary to pursue other strategies [than direct apostolate]: education, labor, and Christian charity.”²⁷ Consolata missionaries thus distinguished between “direct” and “indirect” apostolate. Direct apostolate addressed the already Christian segment of the population as well as its socially least integrated segment (foundlings) and consisted of catechism. Indirect apostolate involved the Muslim population and consisted in showing how magnanimous missionaries were by providing Muslims with various charity activities, including education and job opportunities.

To sum up, both the fascist colonial state and the Catholic Church espoused the cruce et aratro project, though from different perspectives and with different aims. On the one hand, De Vecchi was interested in training programs for the native youth (aratro) and Catholic services (cruce) to meet the labor and religious needs respectively of the emergent settler community. On the other hand, with the Pope’s support Consolata missionaries aimed at providing direct Christian teaching among Italian and Eritrean Christians (cruce) while surreptitiously (indirectly) showing that missionaries were benefactors to the native Muslims. Charity and vocational education would give Muslims better opportunities in the job market (aratro). As a consequence of this close church–state collaboration, the Apostolic Vicariate of Benadir increased its religious and missionary power in accordance with the colony’s territorial expansion.²⁸ Cross and plow, Italian and Vatican interests, colonial policy and missionary work went hand in hand for the first time in the history of Somalia.

In the years 1924 to 1930, missionaries considerably expanded the Catholic network from Mogadishu, Gelib, and Brava to Villabruzzi, Merca, Afgoi, Gelib, Genale, Baidoa, Vittorio d’Africa, and Hafun. With De Vecchi’s support, they founded missionary residences, hospitals, shelters for the poor and the elderly, leproseries, orphanages, agricultural settlements, and churches, including a monumental cathedral in Mogadishu.²⁹ As La Consolata reported in July 1925, however, education was the very arena where missionaries could enact their “civilizing” plan with the same gradualism they had experimented in Kenya.³⁰

The Shaping of Colonial Education Under De Vecchi (1923–28)

In the 1920s, missionary work was officially regulated through a series of agreements signed by missionaries and governors. These negotiations fostered the creation, shaping, and progressive consolidation of Italian language schools in Somalia. Was there continuity between liberal and fascist approaches to colonial education? What were the prevailing pedagogies of the colonial state in Somalia? Can we trace trends and change over time during the first decade of fascist rule?

Italian Somalia’s colonial school system—entirely controlled by missionaries—was born fifteen years after its official foundation as a colony in 1908. In July 1923, liberal authorities signed a two-year agreement on education with Trinitarian missionaries. The government would officially appoint missionaries to teach only the indigenous youth.³¹ The goal was to put an “experiment” in place, through which colonial authorities could “gradually find the final shape colonial schools will have to assume.” Missionaries had to have earned a teaching license in the metropole but could be assisted by a non-licensed father with some missionary experience in Somalia. The government would provide for all the school materials and general expenses, as well as pay 3000 rupees per year to the mission. Classes had to be divided according to the “traditional division of the population” and “pedagogical exigencies as established by the government.” As mentioned, any religious propaganda was strictly prohibited. School subjects included morals and civics, reading, writing, math, calligraphy, geography, and history of Italy and its colonies, drawing and practical arts. The detailed description of morals and civics teaching content is revealing in that it put great emphasis on the convenience of colonial rule and settled life (as opposed to vagrancy) as well as the division between Italian citizens and colonial subjects:

Morals and civics: respect of the elderly, women, disadvantaged, etc. Every man needs the other men – Advantages of civil life – Concept of residence – Respect of public goods (property of all, result of common labor) – Goodness towards animals – Economy – Italian citizens and colonial subjects. The state, the Residence is for everybody’s convenience. Duties towards the Residence. Good use of time. Benevolence and solidarity. Not to do justice on your own. Concept of the state.³²

Such an insistence on settled and civil life was not a mere matter of public order for De Vecchi. Lee Cassanelli’s scholarship explains how vagrancy resulted from freed slaves’ escape from colonial plantations and infrastructure building sites due to harsh working conditions. The colonial state considered it a prominent problem to contribute to the scarcity of available labor.³³ By teaching the local youth not to leave the settler community, missionaries would encourage them to be reliable and loyal workers in the future.

In February 1924, after only six months, the agreement was changed and re-signed by both parties. With De Vecchi, fascism arrived in the colony and the anti-clerical liberal leadership left Somalia. First, the ban over evangelization was removed. Missionaries were appointed to open morning elementary schools for European children and evening (after-work) elementary schools for indigenous adults, with preference for those working for the colonial government. The curriculum for indigenous students was the same as that attached to the previous agreement, with no mention of the subjects to be taught to Europeans. Also, while missionaries teaching the indigenous could be assisted by non-licensed evangelists, as established by the former contract, in the elementary schools for Europeans all instructors had to have earned a teaching license in the metropole. The funds provided by the government increased to 4500 rupees per year.³⁴

After another ten months, in December 1924, the agreement was replaced with a new contract, this time between De Vecchi and Consolata missionaries. Elementary schools would provide day classes to, respectively, European and indigenous with assimilated children.³⁵ The assimilated now appeared in the school hierarchy together with indigenous students. Regarding the teaching contents, classes would “follow the Italian national curriculum by and large with appropriate accommodations according to the students’ age” and, as for evening classes, to the “practical aim” of those. Each father could be assisted by two nuns who were not required to have earned a diploma but only to be “expert at teaching.” In addition to elementary schools, the mission would start vocational programs and a nursery school for both “mixed-race” foundlings (meticci) and Somali orphans, whose admission and religious education would be established by the government. The curriculum of vocational schools included woodwork, cabinet making, metalwork, and tinwork. Public funds remained at 4500 rupees per year, an amount that would increase over time had the governmental budget grown and “the school system been better organized [by missionaries].”³⁶

In comparison with earlier prescriptions involving liberal authorities and Trinitarians, De Vecchi and Consolata missionaries negotiated several changes involving curriculum, funding, religious instruction, new categories of pupils (assimilated, meticci), qualification of instructors and the opening of vocational and nursery schools. Primary schooling was expanding (see Table 6.1) and provided assimilationist teaching (national curriculum, religious proselytism). Missionaries imported textbooks from Italy: teaching materials were national, not colonial.³⁷ Yet, classes were increasingly segregated in accordance with racial categories. The appearance of vocational schooling and the “practical” character of native elementary education confirmed that, like for liberal authorities, the primary aim of missionary teaching among the native youth was to train skilled laborers and by doing so resolve the labor question in Italian Somalia. Expansion, centralization, and a combination of assimilation and segregation marked the emergence of the first school system in the colony.

Table 6.1 School Enrolment in Italian Somalia, 1924–1940^a

Private letters and reports by Consolata missionaries illustrate how the cruce et aratro project and its legalization translated into everyday life. I focus on the years 1924–1928 (when the December 1924 agreement was in place) and proceed in accordance with school orders: nursery school, elementary, and post-elementary education.

In 1925, Consolata missionaries established an orphanage and nursery school for foundlings in Mogadishu. Their purpose was to provide charity to the socially marginal segment of the urban population and consequently “pacifically penetrate in” and “establish a direct contact with” local communities.³⁸ Unable to propagandize their faith among Muslim families, missionaries turned to that segment of Somali society that occupied a liminal position: foundlings. The orphanage was thus a tool for missionaries and De Vecchi to self-fashion themselves as benefactors and practice evangelization. On Christmas 1926, forty meticci were publicly baptized. Abandoned by their Italian fathers, they were raised by their Somali Muslim mothers. Missionaries intended to baptize twenty Somali orphans too but De Vecchi asked them to postpone their conversion. He believed that public baptisms of orphans from Muslim families could find the dissent of the Muslim community. It was a critical moment for the internal stability of the colony as the Italian Army was occupying its Northern borderland and tension was high. Eventually, missionaries baptized only the forty meticci.³⁹ The twenty Somali orphans whose baptism had been denied by the governor were baptized two months later, in February 1927, after the Italian Army had completed the occupation of the Northern borderland. Another forty Somali orphans and five meticci were baptized in 1928.⁴⁰ One of them was baptized in Italy, when missionaries organized a school trip to the metropole.⁴¹ However, in 1929 a nun recounted that she had secretly baptized a Somali child in periculo mortis: secret deathbed baptisms remained the norm throughout the 1920s (see Table 6.2).⁴²

Table 6.2 Baptisms in Italian Somalia, 1925–1929^a

Sources do not provide enough information on the way children felt about conversion. Certainly, some form of coercion took place. In 1927, Gabriele Perlo wrote in a letter to a donor that Muslim mothers of meticci were forced by the governor to enroll their children in the missionary nursery school, as they were “reluctant” and “diffident” and would never do it spontaneously.⁴³ Another report says that in March 1928 thirty-four Somali orphans were baptized, which constituted a “success” given that prior to that event “many of them had repeatedly refused to be baptized.”⁴⁴ Similarly, four documents from July to August 1928 reported that two Muslim mothers implored the governor to have their respective children back from the missionary schools.⁴⁵ These passages suggest that foundlings went to schools as a result of a coercive assimilation and evangelization policy.

The number of baptisms remained small. By 1929, five years after their arrival in the colony, missionaries had publicly baptized less than 150 people. The impact of missionary activity on Muslim communities was overall negligible, as the few baptisms involved a small, marginalized segment of the population. Yet, while Trinitarians struggled with the official ban over evangelization, Consolata missionaries, supported by the governor and the Holy See, tested a new strategy that allowed for the first appearance of Christianity in the colonial society. Overall, thus, the “civilization through the cross” undertaken by missionaries proved to be successful if compared to the liberal period.⁴⁶

While legislation on proselytism corresponded to practice, this was not the case of racial segregation in elementary education. According to the 1924 Agreement, missionaries had to divide Italian from meticci and indigenous children. Yet, archival documents reveal that in Afgoi in 1925 Italian and indigenous students attended the same class,⁴⁷ and in Brava, there was a school for white and meticci separated from a school for Muslims.⁴⁸ In Mogadishu, in 1928 European and Italo-Somali students were in the same class.⁴⁹ Also, in 1928 in Merca there was a school for Indians and in Baidoa one for both Eritrean and Somali members of the African section of the Italian colonial army.⁵⁰ Classes for Indians and African soldiers, as well as the “mixing” of meticci, Italian and indigenous children did not reflect what the 1924 Agreement established. Reality reflected the overall process of slow adaptation and improvisation of missionaries to the life of the colony.

Fig. 6.1

(Courtesy of AFIMC)

A class for metalworkers (Mogadishu, 1928?)

After elementary education, settlers’ children went to middle school in Eritrea or Italy or were tutored privately by missionaries (the first middle school in Mogadishu was founded in 1932). Missionaries also opened a Latin class in Mogadishu in 1925 to allow Italian pupils to pursue their studies after elementary school, though no agreement formally mentioned Latin or in general education for Europeans after elementary schools.⁵¹ Improvisation, accommodation, and fortuity once again prevailed over prescription.

Missionaries often complained that available workers in Somalia were very hard to find. In the building of the cathedral in Mogadishu, they employed skilled free workers from Italy or local conscript laborers. They often lamented high life expenses, the absence of a printing house as well as affordable clothes and bread.⁵² The “indigenous” youth educated by missionaries would have provided for cheap skilled workforce. Thus, while elementary education was the same for all students, secondary education was divided into two different paths for Italians and Africans.

In 1925, La Consolata reported that native education aimed to “prepare the Somali to replace the Eritreans in the colonial office.”⁵³ As the Italian language school system had just been established in Somalia, there were not many locals speaking Italian or trained to work for colonial offices. As a result, colonial offices hired Eritreans, who spoke Italian because they had attended Italian schools in Eritrea.⁵⁴ For settlers, it was more convenient to employ local workers as clerks, interpreters, and skilled labor in the colonies than importing Italian labor from the metropole. It would have been even more convenient to hire Somali people, as they knew the local language, and Eritrea could not provide for further workers as it was itself experiencing a high demand for labor.⁵⁵ In Mogadishu, missionaries opened a male school of arts and crafts for woodworkers, smiths, printers, mechanics, and shoemakers, as well as a female school for sewing and domestic work (Figs. 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, and 6.4).⁵⁶ In 1927, the two schools had started, respectively, a printing house, a bookbinder, a bakery, and a textile factory.⁵⁷ Educational opportunities mirrored the labor needs of missionaries and the settler community as a whole. In this regard, in 1935 a Consolata missionary wrote about orphans that had attended missionary schools in the 1920s:

Fig. 6.2

(Courtesy of AFIMC)

A sewing class (Mogadishu, 1928?)

Fig. 6.3

(Courtesy of AFIMC)

A class for woodworkers (Mogadishu, 1928?)

Fig. 6.4

(Courtesy of AFIMC)

A class for printers (Mogadishu, 1928?)

Nowadays, they work at the building site and the printing house, they are metal workers, drivers, civil clerks, and start founding Christian families.⁵⁸

Private letters reveal that De Vecchi always agreed on missionary teaching strategies except once. In 1925 and 1926, Gabriele Perlo was rebuked by the mission’s headquarters because he did not prohibit his fellow missionaries to smoke in public. The governor believed that such behavior undermined the image of religious men in front of both the Italian community living in the colony and the students attending missionary schools.⁵⁹ Smoking was a bad habit that compromised the “holy” posture of missionaries. The reproach was probably ignored. In January 1927, a missionary published an article in La Consolata in which he described his work in the colony. “I will gladly tell you about my savages,” he addressed the readers “[they are like] raw materials that missionaries aim to shape … to Europeanize, to make them put a cigarette in their mouth,” and “to Christianize.”⁶⁰ According to the missionary, the aim of missionary education was to “Europeanize” their pupils by making them smokers and Christians. While the governor agreed on the latter, he was certainly skeptical toward the former.

Missionaries significantly contributed to non-educational activities as well. In 1924, De Vecchi assigned them a 99-year agricultural concession of four-hundred hectares in the fertile Southern region of the colony for an annual rent in rupees.⁶¹ CMI could increase funds for education and other missionary activities through agricultural work.⁶² In this respect, I found five depositions from July 1929 that document missionaries’ abusive practices toward agricultural workers. Interviewees were all local workers that had escaped from plantations and, with the help of police-appointed translators, had officially accused missionaries of providing very little money and food, as well as beating and threatening them with death if they had stopped working.⁶³ The fathers’ abuses most probably reflected the overall behavior of the Italian settler community toward local workers⁶⁴; they did not actively oppose but rather took advantage of the well-spread coercive practices of labor recruitment and exploitation.

Missionaries also had a role in the policy of morals in Mogadishu. According to an official report on “indigenous prostitution” documented sometime between 1928 and 1931, Gabriele Perlo joined De Vecchi’s wife in the active opposition to the institution of regulated brothels (case di tolleranza).⁶⁵ Through both educational and non-educational activities the fathers occupied a leading role within the settler community. While liberals considered the Catholic Church as an old, superstitious body, in the 1920s De Vecchi appointed missionaries as agents of modernization in the development of Somalia.

Towards Adapted Education, 1930s

The December 1924 contract was revised in June 1928.⁶⁶ The new governor Guido Corni (1928–1931), De Vecchi’s successor, requested Consolata missionaries to provide for at least twenty-five instructors and follow the teaching plan indicated by the colonial government (but not attached to the agreement). The governmental check was increased from 10,400 to 22,600 lire per month⁶⁷ and missionary elementary schools were proclaimed “state governmental schools.”⁶⁸ In continuity with De Vecchi’s policy, Corni encouraged the progressive expansion and centralization of colonial education by increasing funds and making missionary schools officially public. In opposition to De Vecchi, though, Corni proposed a shift from assimilationist to adapted teaching. He wrote that he was contrary to the Christian evangelization of native students,⁶⁹ and that his government would have paid greater attention to native schooling and particularly to both vocational and Arabic language teaching.⁷⁰ After 1928, missionaries had to follow not the national, but the colonial curriculum. Further, the lack of any curriculum attached to the agreement allowed the government to change it at any given time. In 1930, both Italian and Vatican authorities commanded Consolata Fathers to leave the colony due to some unspecified scandal within the mission. The Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith replaced them with Capuchin missionaries, while Consolata nuns continued working as nurses and teachers in Somalia.⁷¹

Such a new policy of curriculum adaptation did indeed proceed in the early 1930s, as shown, for example, by the publication in 1933 of the “First Italian Language Book for the Somali” (Primo libro di italiano per somali ). The author, a Capuchin missionary, included language exercises on the greatness of Italy, but also on “Allah,” as well as images of mosques and local flora and fauna. The mention of Allah would have been unthinkable in the 1920s, when Consolata missionaries and De Vecchi pushed for Christian teaching in the curriculum. One of the textbook readings, titled “Story of a gazelle” (Storia di una gazzella), told how a female gazelle, after losing her husband to hunters, wandered around in search for her friends. When she came across a village, she decided not to stop and went on wandering until a lion killed her. The story ended with a short explanation:

Teaching: we must stay united and loyal to our family, people, laws; because those who want to go vagabond in the world always … suffer starvation, meet serious risks and, like the gazelle, end up being eaten by lions, meaning by the arrogant.⁷²

The main purpose of the gazelle’s story was to alert children against vagrancy and prevent them from escaping their fate as loyal subjects and productive workers under the Italians. As under liberal rule, Corni discouraged (but never prohibited) the cross and highlighted the plow. Differentiation also reflected the up-bringing of meticci. While Consolata missionaries and De Vecchi pursued assimilationist teaching among them in the 1920s, Capuchin missionaries wrote in 1930:

For the spiritual formation of meticci, so far educated according to a teaching strategy that is not conform with their origin and future, I have disposed that the director of studies provides life regulations better fitting their social position, so that later in life they will be able to earn honestly while preserving their Catholic faith.⁷³

The colonial state opened a middle school and a high school for Italians in Mogadishu respectively in 1932 and 1937. The only educational option for non-Italians remained mission-run vocational education, lasting until the establishment of a middle school for Somalis in 1950.⁷⁴ To retrace the social and economic repercussions of the 1928 Agreement and the overall policy of curriculum adaptation remains a research perspective worth exploring in the future.⁷⁵

Conclusion

Corni’s shift from assimilationist to adapted curriculum is not surprising if placed in the broader context of racial thinking and religious policy in 1930s Italian colonialism. By then, a more rigid and biologically based racial hierarchy emerged throughout the empire, which had an impact on colonial discourse, prescription, and practice. In this respect, the treatment of “mixed-race” children is exemplary. In 1933, a law established that meticci received full Italian citizenship when they were not officially recognized by their fathers, who were to blame for that; after 1935, the fascist regime established a rigid colonial hierarchy based on biological racism and the purity of race. According to a 1940 law, the meticci were colonial subjects and could not receive Italian citizenship given their African heritage. Historians have interpreted such shift as a product of the climate of suspicion and state surveillance brought about by the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, where fascist Italy was diplomatically isolated and employed racial differentiation as a tool of governance in the Horn of Africa.⁷⁶ The matter goes beyond this essay’s research goals, but it is still important to locate the transition from assimilationist to adapted curriculum in Italian Somalia within an imperial transition toward racial legislation and segregation. Further, in the 1930s Mussolini launched a pro-Muslim and pro-Arab policy in order to find military and economic partners in the Middle East and to pacify anti-colonial unrest in Muslim-majoritarian Libya. This policy culminated in the late 1930s, when, after the incorporation of Ethiopia, about nine million Muslims were under Italian rule. Not only did fascist propagandistic publications circulated in the Arab world as never before, but in 1937 Mussolini self-proclaimed himself “protector of Islam” in Tripoli. I suggest that apparently opposite trends in colonial and foreign politics converged in the integration of Islamic elements into missionary teaching. While the emergence of racial law resulted in the increase of curriculum differentiation, Mussolini’s simultaneous pro-Arab policy allowed for the teaching of Islam among Muslim students.⁷⁷

The history of missionary education in Italian Somalia during the first decade of fascist rule is overall not surprising either when placed in the history of global education and European colonialism. As explained by the editors in the general introduction to this volume, historians have recently shown how the inter-war period constituted a transitional phase in the “civilizing mission” discourse and practice. As the League of Nations proclaimed the “well-being and development of peoples” a “sacred trust of civilization,” both British and French officials increasingly justified their policies as aimed toward native development and consequent rise in native life standards.⁷⁸ Published in 1922 and 1925, two inter-colonial reports on the state of native education in sub-Saharan Africa inaugurated a debate on colonial rule and mission.⁷⁹ The emergent model of native education—adapted education—fused developmentalist theories with practices that had been experimented with the education of African Americans in the United States in the previous decades.⁸⁰ Further, historians have highlighted how the 1919 peace treaty revising the General Acts of Berlin and Brussels established that, while native labor should be free and paid, compulsory labor could be imposed for public works that were in the general interest. Notions of “civilization through labor” and “redemptive labor” were internationally legitimized and increasingly pervaded British, French, and Portuguese plans of “civilizing mission” or “development” for future political emancipation of African lands and peoples.⁸¹

The cruce et aratro project, I ultimately argue, belongs to this history. In the inter-war Italian Somalia context, the search for labor was the very motor of public-school building and reflected worldwide practices of native education. Moreover, fascist colonial authorities in the late 1920s and early 1930s placed a greater emphasis on education and promoted a shift toward adapted curriculum. In terms of structure, aims, teaching contents, and actors, the cruce et aratro project was not unique. This essay has illustrated how it came into being as a result of the convergence of church and state agendas in a peculiar colonial context, and to what extent prescription and practice corresponded and changed in the first years of fascist rule. Further scholarship awaits on how international debates and politics informed fascist educational policy and practice in Italian colonies.