For both Gramsci and Croce, the two figureheads of post-war Italian historiography, Italian emigration was out of sight, out of mind. Emigrants had removed themselves from the movement of Italian history. In this book of historical and cultural anthropology, Alessandra Brivio brings the human element of migration to the fore, as a centrepiece of the human experience. This cultural microhistory addresses imperialism, slavery, labour organisation, racism, Fascism, and inheritance at the level of individuals, families, and communities. Italiani in Ghana reads as a case history rich with human interest and meaning.
The British African colony of the Gold Coast, today Ghana, attracted a small immigration from two Italian towns: Roasio, Piedmont, in Vercelli province, close to Biella; and Fino del Monte, Lombardy, in Bergamo province, not far from Sondrio. Like many other towns in the Italian pre-Alps, both Roasio and Fino del Monte supported a high rate of seasonal and long-term emigration. Roasio sent significant numbers not only to France, Switzerland, Argentina, and North America, but also to South Africa, Angola, Mozambique, Rhodesia, Nigeria, and the Gold Coast. Following the classical model of chain migration, an early pioneer, Agostino D’Alberto from Roasio and Bortolo Marinoni from Fino del Monte, successfully established themselves in the colony, then recruited friends, family, and neighbours to follow in his footsteps. The emigrants were nearly all male and working class, staying only several years in the colony before returning to Italy with their savings. Roasio provided building contractors and Fino del Monte supplied miners in the Gold Coast. The piemontesi and bergamaschi remained separate, due to their strong local connections and because miners were considered the lowest class of European workers.
Unlike the larger and more famous Italian settlements of the Americas, Europe, and in Italian Africa, the Italians in the Gold Coast remained small in number and completely at the mercy of the local British colonial government. Brivio studies the Italian community as a white but subaltern community in the British imperial society. Italian emigrants moved back and forth between the Gold Coast and nearby British Nigeria, remaining transients even as their small numbers of one or two hundred comprised a large percentage of the white European population in the colony.
The tenuous status of Italians in Ghana became brutally apparent by 1940. Fascist propaganda, organisation, and salutes energised the Italians abroad, but quickly proved utterly disastrous to the long-term fortunes and positions of Italians in Ghana. The culmination of the book is the internment of the Italian community during Fascist Italy’s war against its longtime friend and ally, Britain. Brivio includes a photocopy of the entire list of names and occupations, nearly all miners and contractors, of the 195 Italian men, two Italian women, and one German man interned and deported to Jamaica, on 10 September 1940. Brivio highlights how the internment not only liquidated the Italian community, which never recovered after the war, but also ruined the strict colour distinctions of solidarity and privilege between white and black subjects in Ghana.
With her focus on individuals in their context, Brivio begins her chronology with an appendix on Giambattista Scala, a Ligurian merchant who served as consul for the Kingdom of Sardinia in the Gold Coast from 1855 to 1859. Scala was active in replacing the slave trade with a network of legal commerce. He illustrates Brivio’s emphasis on the role of individual agency, rather than monolithic national institutions, or fixed categories of race and gender, in this history.
As the Italian migrants were male and the colour line in force, gender relations with African women were governed by ambiguous social norms. European society treated African prostitution or concubinage as an economic transaction, reserving the role of wives and mothers for European women. The payment of concubines, however, matched the dowry payment of traditional marriage. Italian men could thus locally marry Ashanti women and, in European terms, be married to only one wife in Europe. Far from being ostracised, their children in the Gold Coast remained part of Ashanti matrilineal society. Brivio emphasises how the legacy of these Italians proved enduring in West Africa and in their two home towns in Italy, even though this history of colonialism and migration did not influence Italy on a national level or shape the global context of millions of ‘Italians abroad’.
Brivio organises her anthropological study along local lines. She uses the National Archives of Ghana at Accra and Kumasi to great effect, as well as the British Colonial Office papers at the Public Record Office. From Italy she employs archival materials, diaries, memoirs, and many photographic illustrations from the Museum of the Emigrant in Roasio, as well as the local library in Fino del Monte. This is not a history of Italy per se, and Brivio does not adopt a national Italian lens or exploit Italian national archives. This choice makes sense, because the Italian community in Ghana was so small as to leave little archival trace in the Italian state, and many Italian consular and colonial archives were destroyed or scattered during the Second World War. Brivio includes excerpts from several of her interviews with the descendants of Italian marriages in Ghana, shining a light on how the family history of individuals endures much longer, and with more consequence, than the timelines of political or colonial history.
This is a short, cohesive narrative with much appeal for African, migration, and colonial studies. It deserves an English language translation and an audience of specialists and students.
