On the 2nd of December 2022 a seminar on the Italian-Eritreans of Eritrea was held at the Department of Political Sciences of the Sapienza University of Rome.
The seminar was jointly organized by Consorzio Sapienza Innovazione and the Department of Political Sciences (chair of Contemporary History and chair of History of International Relations), in the framework of the Contemporary History class held by Professor Augusto D'Angelo. The students attending the seminar met Professor Alessandro Volterra, lecturer of History and Institutions of Africa at the Roma Tre University of Rome, who talked about the historical background of Italian colonialism in Eritrea. His speech introduced the showing of the documentary "Meticci", by Professor Giampaolo Montesanto (formerly teacher at the Italian School of Asmara, Eritrea), a work that involved also Professor Volterra as historical consultant. The documentary focuses on the children of Italian fathers and Eritrean mothers who were born after the promulgation of Italian racial laws in 1938 and consequentially were not recognised by their fathers. The Italian presence in Eritrea dates back to 1882, when Italy started colonising Eritrea. At the beginning, the relations between Italian men (mostly servicemen) and Eritrean women (mostly domestic workers) were highly tolerated, and the children of such unions acquired Italian citizenship automatically. On the contrary, following the proclamation of the Italian racial laws in 1938 by the Fascist regime, and the promulgation of the May 1940 law on mixed-race, having so called “mixed-race children” (or “meticci”) became a crime for Italian citizens, who consequentially could not legally recognise their own children. Official data on Eritrea recorded the presence of 12 million colonial citizens (African Eritreans), half million Italian citizens, and besides them 6,000 so-called “meticci”, which made the latter not a demographic issue, but a political and cultural one. The prejudice against these children in Eritrea was widespread as shown in the documentary, based on official records and the memories of the interviewees on their childhood and adolescence. “Meticci” suffered of a massive stigma because of their condition of illegitimate, mixed-race, and very often also abandoned children. In fact, in Eritrean traditional society the father’s acknowledgment is an essential feature for individuals, and in addition to that most of the “meticci” ended in orphanages run by Catholic missionaries, as their mothers didn't have the means to raise them. During the discussion which followed the projection, it was highlighted that given the almost inexistent public debate about Italian colonialism the issue of Italian-Eritreans is not well known by the Italian public, and that still today some of the abandoned “meticci” and their descendants are struggling for the acknowledgement of Italian citizenship.
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