Obstacles to Eritrea Becoming a European Settler Colony

Especially in its early years, from the 1890s to the 1910s, Italy's colonial policy was, at least in part, a means of addressing the country's mass emigration phenomenon, which was becoming a national emergency. Some Italian imperialists thus presented Eritrea as a “promised land” for impoverished Italian workers, including struggling day laborers and sharecroppers. During the first half of the 1890s, Baron Leopoldo Franchetti—a politician and economist who advocated the transfer of surplus peasant labor from Southern Italy to the African colonies—played an especially active role in encouraging the migration of Italian settlers to Eritrea. However, this first attempt at promoting labor mobility met with limited success, mainly due to a lack of government incentives. One of the principal reasons why the state did not make a greater effort to push Italian workers to resettle in Eritrea was the dearth of private investment in the colony. Italy did not have sufficient capital resources to export to Africa; what it did have was an abundant workforce. The result was a contradictory approach to colonial migration: the government's actual policies were diametrically opposed to its imperialist rhetoric.

The archives covering the beginning of Italy's colonial period contain extensive evidence that many Italians believed a better life awaited them in Eritrea. They are filled with requests from would-be emigrants for help relocating to the African colony. Many unemployed Italian workers sought to emigrate to Eritrea because of a the largely unfounded rumor that the national government intended to embark upon a series of public works projects that would create many well-paying jobs in railway and road construction. The level of interest was so high by the late 1880s that in September 1889, and again in March 1890, the Ministry of the Interior dispatched a letter to local town councilors and mayors advising them to discourage emigration to the Eritrean port city of Massawa (the colonial capital until 1897) “in the interests … of the working classes.” The letter explained that “the time was not yet right” and that Massawa had already attracted “a good number of emigrants and other people looking for work in vain.”Footnote ³ Among those who had their eyes on Eritrea were Italians who were already living abroad, revealing the existence of a substantial number of Italian colonials ready and willing to move between foreign outposts in their elusive quest for a better life. But many were disappointed by the dearth of opportunities they found once they arrived in their new countries.

For example, in Egypt—home to a large Italian community since the 1820s—it was reported that “there were already a few hundred Italian nationals out of work and without any hope of finding work,”Footnote ⁴ and that in July 1889, sixty-nine of them were on the verge of departing for Eritrea.Footnote ⁵ General Oreste Baratieri—governor of Eritrea—made reference to “numerous” requests for agricultural land grants, emanating both from the Italian peninsula and from “overseas Italian colonies” and from Italian immigrants generally.Footnote ⁶ In July 1895, for example, the Italian consul at Porto Alegre, Brazil referred to “numerous requests received from colonial settlers who, disgruntled with the bad government of this country, wish to emigrate” to Eritrea.Footnote ⁷ Similar requests were received from Italians in Algeria,Footnote ⁸ the United States, and Hungary. The Italian consul in Zanzibar reported a continually growing number of Italian bricklayers and other workers who arrived at the consulate, having traveled from “our outposts in the Red Sea and in Aden,” and ended up destitute, reduced to asking for handouts.Footnote ⁹

The political and practical problems that dissatisfied Italian settlers created for the colonial administration were additional factors that weighed against Italian emigration to Eritrea. Italians were lured to the colony by procolonial propaganda that presented Italian Africa as a land of opportunity. Leopoldo Franchetti, who headed the Ufficio per la colonizzazione (Office for Settler Affairs), from 1890 to 1895 responded to the concerns of settlers by initiating a campaign of land appropriation for their benefit. Through his initiative, approximately 400,000 hectares of Eritrean land were appropriated by the colonial State, a small portion of which was redistributed among a group of twenty or so Italian families who arrived in the fertile highlands south of Asmara ready to experience their first taste of colonial life.Footnote ¹⁰ The local reaction was immediate: in 1894, Bahta Hagos, a military leader and aristocrat who allied with Italy during the initial phase of its expansion, led a revolt against the colonizers which resulted in his death.

Used with permission of Stefano Bellucci. Designed by Annelieke Vries-Baaijens, Cartographic Studio, Vienna, Austria.

On December 1, 1898, shortly after his appointment as Regio Commissario civile straordinario per l'Eritrea (Royal Commissioner for Eritrea), Ferdinando Martini issued a letter setting out draconian measures designed to limit emigration to the colony. Notably, in order to avoid the cost of repatriation, which was frequently requested by Italians who found that Eritrea did not live up to their expectations,Footnote ¹¹ Martini stated that every applicant wishing to emigrate needed to first provide a certificate proving that he had at his disposal the means to ensure his subsistence for an extended period of time. In addition, prospective colonists needed to declare that they were able to cover at least half of their eventual repatriation costs, in case their African adventures should fail to lead to economic success.Footnote ¹² Local governors and mayors throughout Italy, as well as the nation's embassies, legations, and consulates in Europe, Africa, and Asia, were informed of these new regulations.Footnote ¹³

Martini's initiative was an attempt to prevent the situation that did, in fact, develop in January 1900, when it was reported that in various parts of Eritrea “a large number of unemployed workers were milling around … without any means of subsistence.”Footnote ¹⁴ The presence of destitute white Italians was a threat to “racial honor.” To remove the Italians from view of the African population, a small outpost was set up in the town of Saati, which would provide a daily ration of bread and the equivalent of seventy-five cents in Italian lire to more than a hundred unemployed workers and destitute settlers. Once it was clear that there were no employment opportunities in Eritrea, many workers expressed their desire to move southward toward the French port city of Djibouti—“even though they had been repeatedly told that there was no work available there either”Footnote ¹⁵ —or to Suez. In fact, hardly any of the emigrants wished to return to Italy because, they explained, “we came here specifically because of the lack of work there.”Footnote ¹⁶

In 1898 the colonial government began requiring every Italian worker to contribute 10 percent of his salary to a special fund it administered until he had accumulated 250 Italian lire —enough to cover all potential costs of his repatriation should that become necessary.Footnote ¹⁷ The fact that similar measures had been put in place in Djibouti shows that the French authorities were similarly intent on ensuring compliance with Italy's efforts to contain its somewhat unruly migrant workforce.Footnote ¹⁸ Contrary to the colonial rhetoric of interventionist politicians, by the 1910s it was clear that Eritrea was not a prime destination offering golden opportunities to Italian workers.Footnote ¹⁹

Military Recruitment and Salaried Work

Wage labor—a fundamental aspect of the capitalist system—was an inevitable consequence of colonial economic policy. That is not to say that the Italian settlers were engaging in a deliberate strategy to transform Eritrean society, which until that point had been characterized by labor relations that were tributary or reciprocal nature.Footnote ²⁰ The Italian colonizers were merely bringing with them the more “modern” free labor model, already established in Europe, in which the individual worker sells his labor power to an employer. Whether it was intentional or not, this transformed the largely agricultural, noncommodified system to which native Eritreans were accustomed.

There had been some examples of waged labor in Eritrea earlier, under Ottoman and then Egyptian rule, primarily in the army and the administrative sector. Taking into account, as noted by Stephen Rockel, that “the study of wage labor in precolonial time is still in its infancy,”Footnote ²¹ it is not unlikely that, in the years prior to Italian domination, there were other working environments where paid labor existed in some shape or form. For example, according to studies of the caravan trade in the Eastern part of the African continent, some types of salaried labor were already in place in that sector in the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote ²² Although it may be too simplistic to state that the introduction of salaried labor within Eritrea occurred as a direct result of Italian colonialism, it is fair to say that with the Italian arrival the practice became widespread, leading to the employment of thousands of Eritreans as wage laborers for the first time.

The watershed moment in this process of labor transformation came after the Italian invasion of Libya in 1911. Italy's conquest of Libya represented a second chance for Italian colonialism, and the country did not skimp on the campaign.Footnote ²³ However, after a few months of combat it became clear that the Italian army lacked the necessary mobility to outwit the Libyan resistance. Thus, beginning in February 1912, Italy started to deploy Eritrean troops on the Libyan front, and they soon demonstrated their military capabilities. The speed of response of the Eritrean battalions, coupled with the fact that they were less costly to deploy than the Italian regulars, encouraged the army to make greater use of them. But given that the colony was small and underpopulated, the main problem became how to find sufficient numbers of Eritrean soldiers to send to Libya.

By 1912 so many of its men joined the military, that the Brussels-based International Colonial Institute (ICI) moved Eritrea from the category of colony with a “sufficient native population” to that of colony “with an insufficient native population” to meet its agricultural production needs.Footnote ²⁴ In other words, it was now believed that Eritrea lacked a sufficient workforce to sustain even an admittedly weak local economy in a manner favorable to Italian interests. The colonial authorities had to find a way to meet the growing demand for labor and food products arising from its recruitment of local workers into the army.

In the late nineteenth century, following Ethiopia's defeat of Italy in the Battle of Adwa at the end of the so-called First Italo-Ethiopian war (1895–1896), the white, Italian presence in the colonial army was progressively reduced in relation to the number of indigenous recruits. The number of Eritrean battalions was raised from four to eight during Italy's campaign in Libya,Footnote ²⁵ inspiring a radical rethinking of Italian military policy. The Eritrean Royal Corps of Colonial Troops (Regio Corpo Truppe Coloniali, or RCTC) created in 1891 were reinforced during the late-1890s. Both before and after Adwa the African natives who fought for Italy included non-Eritreans. In fact, it was standard policy to recruit Ethiopian and Sudanese soldiers; on the eve of the Libyan war, they comprised one-third of the RCTC.Footnote ²⁶

Even after the signing of the 1912 Treaty of Ouchy between Italy and the Ottoman Empire, which officially ended the Libyan War, Italy continued to rely on Eritrean troops to defend the Italian administration in Libya against guerilla fighters there. Furthermore, Italy's entrance into the First World War in 1915 meant that a good portion of its national troops were recalled to Europe. Thus, the task of defending Italy's position in Libya was increasingly entrusted to colonial troops. Three years after its first foray into Libya, the RCTC had tripled in size. The colonial war in Libya combined with the First World War created a significant demand for laborers in Eritrea and in Italy's African colonies generally, transforming regional labor relations in a manner comparable to that produced by the introduction of the market economy in Kenya, Ghana, and Cameroon.Footnote ²⁷

Used with permission of Stefano Bellucci. Designed by Annelieke Vries-Baaijens, Cartographic Studio, Vienna, Austria.

The Eritrean soldiers serving in the colonial army were free-wage workers—that is, salaried employees who chose to enlist in the army for the economic advantages it offered: a daily, weekly or monthly salary paid in Italian lira, which was then a strong currency that could easily be converted to the Maria Theresa Thaler (the official currency of Ethiopia), the British pound sterling (used in British Somaliland), or the French franc (circulated in Djibouti). The importance of having a salary paid in hard currency shows how the monetized market economy was rapidly expanding in the colonies, replacing, at least in the urban context, the tradition of bartering and labor relations of a tributary nature.

A numerical account may help to clarify the extent of the phenomenon. In 1916 there were nine Eritrean battalions and three mixed Ethiopian/Eritrean battalions. The number of men making up these battalions varied considerably, from 600 to a maximum of 800. Thus, it is estimated that there were about 10,000 Eritrean men in the Italian armed forces, a substantial number when compared to the population as a whole, which, according to the 1905 census, numbered around 245,000.Footnote ²⁸ In 1928, the data compiled in an unpublished census set the population at 510,175—more than twice the 1905 figure.Footnote ²⁹ Three years later, according to what is considered the most trustworthy census available, the Eritrean population reached 596,013.Footnote ³⁰ The fact that the Libya campaign was failing did not allow for any letup in the number of soldiers needed by the colonial army in Eritrea. In 1920, the RCTC counted 15,000 men in its ranks; the top brass were aware that a similar situation would be “difficult to find in other countries in the world … .”Footnote ³¹ Colonial officials had become aware that the recruitment of locals into the Italian military had resulted in a dearth of laborers to work in other sectors of the economy. In the 1920s, out of a population of almost 600,000 people, about 15,000 were soldiers engaged in Eritrea and in Libya.Footnote ³² Attracted by the opportunity to earn wages, young men were forsaking agricultural labor for military service.

Based on government census data collated by the Italian demographer Gabriele Ciampi,Footnote ³³ it appears that men comprised about half of the Eritrean population. If one then takes into account that the prime working age was considered to be between fourteen and forty years of age, one can extrapolate that the population of working-age men was around 200,000. Thus, an army made up of 15,000 means that approximately 7 or 8 percent of the male working population was employed in a military capacity. The figure could be rounded down to 5 to 6 percent if one discounts those soldiers coming from Ethiopia. These figures show that military salaried workers (free-wage laborers) comprised a significant proportion of the Eritrean labor force. Furthermore, a salaried soldier was often the head of a large family and, thus, the number of Eritreans dependent on a salary-based income was quite high. However, the loss to the internal labor market of such a sizeable percentage of local workers was compensated for by the influx of migrant workers from neighboring countries.

Another element to keep in mind is the fact that Italy's military operations in Libya did not only involve military personnel. As the transportation of troops and supplies required mules and camels, the military authorities assigned civilians to take charge of logistics. To that end, on July 22, 1912, seventy-one civilians, including nine Yemenis, two “Galla” (today Oromo, of Ethiopia), one Sudanese, and one Somali left from Massawa; Of this group, 21 percent originated from countries other than Eritrea.Footnote ³⁴ One can conclude that a salaried job paid in a European currency pulled migrant workers from other African nations to the Italian colony. From this data, one can estimate that the number of residents in Eritrea (both Eritreans and immigrants) employed within a European-style wage-based economy was actually 7 to 10 percent higher than the number given above.

In addition to the immediate drain on the local workforce caused by Italy's military campaigns, the local labor problem was exacerbated by the fact that not all colonial army veterans from the Libyan front returned to agricultural work even after they were discharged. As Governor Salvago Raggi observed in 1915, “The colony has sent to Libya thousands and thousands of men, some of whom have returned with savings and are not inclined to work until the need arises.”Footnote ³⁵ When they did go back to work, they did so in sectors that would allow them to receive higher incomes.Footnote ³⁶

Regional Mobility and Wage Labor

From 1912, the RCTC was one of the main employers in Eritrea. The impact on the colonial economy of the transfer of a significant proportion of the workforce to the armed forces and the corresponding increase in the circulation of currency led to a greater demand for consumer goods and spiraling inflation. In 1911, the daily wage of a manual laborer/unskilled worker was between 0.80 and 1 Italian lira; by 1915, this had increased to between 1.10 and 1.50 lira. At the same time, the cost of construction materials, such as lime and cement, increased by at least 30 percent. Thousands of camels and donkeys had been transferred to Libya for the military campaign, and this produced a noticeable increase in the cost of transportation and livestock within Eritrea. There was, thus, a progressive reduction in the investment potential of the Eritrean government, which was unable to support a budget that met the developing needs of the colony.Footnote ³⁷ The systematic reliance on a regional workforce developed in the context of what Mahmood Mamdani refers to as the dichotomy between indigenous social groups with rights that were more or less guaranteed under the Italian direct rule system, and immigrant groups (Ethiopians, Yemenis, Somalis, etc.) who had fewer legal rights than “native” Eritreans and whose juridical status as workers was manipulated to suit colonial ends (non-natives, always susceptible to expulsion, were cheaper to employ).Footnote ³⁸

The advantage of the colonial policy of employing local troops is evident: it reduced the cost of Italy's military campaigns in Libya and Ethiopia. It benefitted the local recruits as well: The askaris (as local or native soldiers were called) increased their standard of living by becoming salaried workers, thereby creating a further process of social differentiation. They and their families constituted the embryonic stage in the development of a proto-middle class in Eritrea and the surrounding regions. The disadvantages of this transformation were also obvious and were mainly linked, as mentioned above, to the reduction in rural manpower, increasing inflation, and above all, the creation of a two-tier working class, with salaried soldiers on the one hand and farm laborers/servants on the other, followed by a distinction between “immigrant” and “indigenous” salaried workers. In other words, an identity-based class system was being formed: on the one hand Eritrean-indigenous soldiers (including a considerable number of Trigrayan Ethiopians, the same ethnic group than the majority of Eritrean in the army) and peasants with the rights to land possession; and on the other hand, masses of relatively prosperous immigrant skilled workers and merchants as well as immigrant poor serfs mainly from neighboring Ethiopia working in Eritrean households and small farms.

Colonial authorities were fully aware of the drain in manpower from the Eritrean agricultural sector that resulted from Italy's military campaigns and recruited workers from neighboring countries into the military. Along Eritrea's borders, the task of recruiting in askaris from other countries was entrusted to three commercial agencies in the Ethiopian cities of Gondar, Adwa, and Dessiè.Footnote ³⁹ Somalia became the recruitment center for men coming from southern Ethiopia and from the Arabic Peninsula, particularly Yemen. Even the enlistment of men from Zanzibar, the Congo, and other parts of East Africa was considered, given that a similar far-flung approach had worked well for the Congo Free State.Footnote ⁴⁰ Lieutenant Colonel Alessandro Bodrero, regional commissioner for Alto Uebi-Scebeli (an administrative division of Italian Somalia), was in charge of coordinating the external recruitment drive. He was the point of reference for local recruitment officers, who would be paid a fee for every man they enlisted. The payment of this fee, together with the involvement of colonial “bosses” in the recruitment campaign, raises questions about the degree to which the men who enlisted did so voluntarily.Footnote ⁴¹ Be that as it may, this recruitment drive resulted in a large number of Ethiopian men enlisting in the colonial army along with a comparatively smaller, but still significant, number of Yemenis.Footnote ⁴²

The presence of Yemeni soldiers on the Libyan front did not prove successful and was of short duration. The military authorities criticized them for being undisciplined and for providing a bad example to the other colonial troops. As early as April 1915, a source noted that 100 or so Yemeni soldiers were repatriated early “because they were unsuited to the difficult requirements of war.”Footnote ⁴³ The problem was also political in nature, as it was suspected that these troops were sympathetic to Italy's enemy, Libya. The governor of Cyrenaica, Lieutenant General Ameglio, for example, was convinced that hidden within this community of soldiers were Senussi sympathetic to the Libyan cause.Footnote ⁴⁴ However, in Somalia, the Italian colonial authorities continued to make extensive use of Yemeni soldiers. In 1912, Somalis represented a modest 10 per cent of the troops, and Governor Giacomo De Martino did not, at that juncture, consider increasing their recruitment, given the various problems that he had experienced with them.Footnote ⁴⁵

That same year, the Royal Consulate of Aden entered into a contract with the Indian company Kaiky Mucherjee for the recruitment of askaris. At times of particular need this channel of recruitment was supplemented by dispatching colonial agents rather than going through an intermediary. This made it possible, in the period between 1912 and 1913, to recruit around 100 new men every four weeks.Footnote ⁴⁶ Once their obligatory two-year commitment was over, the majority of these recruits tended to remain in the Italian colony, regardless of whether they chose to remain in the army.Footnote ⁴⁷ In 1922, out of nearly 2,700 men in the Somali RCTC, 67 percent, or 1,674 men, were Yemeni; only in 1924 was it possible, though with some difficulty, to increase the percentage of Somali soldiers to 45 percent.Footnote ⁴⁸

The migration of workers into Eritrea that the colonial system had sought to encourage was not directed exclusively to the military. The Italian invasion of Libya, as well as Mussolini's subsequent invasion of Ethiopia in the mid-1930s, had the effect of attracting workers to Eritrea's agricultural and service sectors, as well. As a result, the colony experienced “economic repercussions due to the damaging loss of local laborers engaged in agriculture, sheep farming, industry and commerce,”Footnote ⁴⁹ and colonial authorities took measures to reboot the local production system.

Nonmilitary Labor Mobility

The records kept by the employment office in Asmara, though incomplete, shed some light on the scale of the cross-border influx of workers from Ethiopia. Eritrea's Gubernatorial Decree No. 2768 of March 7, 1917 provided for the creation of an employment office in Eritrea for “indigenous workers.”Footnote ⁵⁰ This was a response to the Italian government's decision to extend to the colonies the metropolitan system of establishing intermediaries between employers and workers. Footnote ⁵¹ The first opened on April 1, 1917, in the market area of Asmara.Footnote ⁵² To publicize it, the colonial administration distributed a promotional message written in Tigrinya, a language spoken in northern Ethiopia and southern Eritrea, to all the commissaries and official residences in the colony.Footnote ⁵³ The urgency behind the effort to ensure that Italian commercial agencies in Ethiopia received the message shows the extent to which the initiative was intended to include workers from beyond Eritrean borders, Ethiopians in particular.

A review of the correspondence between the Dessiè Agency in Ethiopia and the Secretariat of the Eritrean Colonial Government provides other useful information about the flow of workers between the Italian colony and its neighbors. Giuseppe Brielli, a commercial agent in Dessiè, recommended that the Eritrean colonial administration avoid making their requests for foreign workers in too official a manner for fear that the Ethiopian authorities might deny potential emigrants permission to leave their homeland. In advocating this approach, Brielli was echoing recommendations that had been made back in 1915 by Colli di Felizzano, who had considered it

Despite a lack of funds to support an “official” recruitment campaign, Brielli expressed confidence that, slowly but surely, thanks to word of mouth, there would be a spontaneous flow of workers to Eritrea. He recalled having observed “in a number of places in Abyssinia that small groups of migrant workers, starting work on a casual basis (in mining, railway construction), in a short space of time form small colonies made up of their co-nationals, who have come from faraway countries at their instigation.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Brielli's comments point to another aspect of this initiative. He was less interested in finding possible recruits for the RCTC than in attracting workers interested in employment in agriculture. Brielli spoke, in fact, of “farmers” being lured to work in Eritrea, specifying that the ultimate objective was to “encourage” them to “remain in order to engage in farming work.”Footnote ⁵⁶ The way to attract these workers was the offer of steady and salaried employment that compared favorably to the realities of the Ethiopian labor market, which offered little more than subsistence.

The colonial authorities were well aware of the close relationship between the demand for agricultural manpower and the rise in military enlistment. In 1920, in the Seraè province, a particularly abundant harvest resulted in many workers deciding to look for employment in the fields rather than join the army. That same year, the government in Rome had been expecting a consistently substantial contribution from the Milizia Mobile (Reserve Army) for the recruitment of askaris, but what it received was the “minimum, almost nothing.”Footnote ⁵⁷ This was, however, an exception in the history of labor in Eritrea and was due in large part to the above-mentioned agricultural super yield. Meanwhile, the employment office in Asmara prepared a daily report, addressed to the Secretariat General of Colonial Eritrea, which compiled the requests for employment and information about those job seekers who had found work. From the start, the authorities distinguished between data pertaining to local, Eritrean workers and those pertaining to workers from “beyond the frontier” (“oltreconfine”), a generic term used to indicate Ethiopian workers in particular. A series of 147 of these daily reports for the period, although covering only five months of activity, from July 29 to December 31, 1917, show that the services of the employment office were mainly used by workers from outside Eritrea.

Foreign workers turned to the employment office in their search for work in far greater numbers than their Eritrean counterparts during this five-month period. The office registered 318 non-Eritrean workers—61 percent of all applicants—compared to 200 Eritreans—37 percent of the total. During the period under review, 785 non-Eritrean workers found work through the employment office, compared to only 403 Eritreans. The non-Eritrean workers thus represented 66 percent of the total number of job seekers placed in work.

EMPLOYMENT OFFICE OF ASMARA

Source: Data compiled by the authors, based on the only surviving colonial documents of the employment office in Asmara from July 19 to December 31, 1917.Footnote ⁵⁸

This extensive use of the employment office suggests that the labor situation had significantly changed, and salaried work had started to spread throughout the Horn of Africa and beyond, creating a regional workforce.Footnote ⁵⁹ In this regard, Colonel Dusnani's observation from 1920 is particularly apt. He noted that

For example, on August 10, 1920, a contingent of 151 Yemeni askari discharged from the military in Libya arrived in Massawa. Of this number, twenty-six asked—and were allowed—to remain in Massawa, mainly to work in the salt mines. Another 110 asked to be transferred to Asmara, “some in order to remain and work there and the rest in order to receive a permit from the Honourable Civil Affairs Directorate to travel, over land, to Tokar, Suakin, Port Sudan, Kassala.” It is unclear from the archives whether these permit requests were granted, but it is recorded that fifteen members of the group left Massawa “to travel by sea, some to Djibouti, some to Jedda, and some to Jazan.”Footnote ⁶¹ This movement of workers through the Horn and Red Sea region is evidence of the important role of Italian military recruitment in creating a regional migrant labor force.

The Yemeni Contribution to Labor in Eritrea

Yemeni workers constituted a fundamental component of the nonmilitary workforce of Eritrea, particularly after the arrival of the Italian colonial regime. The Yemeni community in Eritrea has recently been the subject of study by various scholars, including Jonathan Miran, who has researched the Hadrami people's movements from the Arabic Peninsula across the Red Sea.Footnote ⁶² It is clear from this research that this community has played a significant role in the economic, social, and cultural life of Eritrea. The exact number of Yemeni workers is hard to determine, but various sources refer to their consistent presence, particularly in the lowlands and in the port of Massawa. This assertion serves to back up the observation of Leif Manger, who underscored how by the end of the nineteenth century one could speak of a veritable “Hadrami labor diaspora” in the Red Sea region.Footnote ⁶³

Of particular importance, for the purpose of our analysis, is the presence of Yemeni workers in the field of transportation. The record shows a strong Yemeni presence in the caravan, port, and road transport sectors. When not working in caravans,Footnote ⁶⁴ the Yemenis were predominantly involved in the loading and unloading of goods. In Asmara, the Yemeni presence was especially prominent among market porters (hammāl, or, in Italian, raffa) whose traditional four-wheel cart (‘arabiyya) was, for many years, a frequent sight throughout the city.Footnote ⁶⁵ In the port city of Massawa, the Yemeni workers comprised the majority of dockworkers (a situation that continued until the late 1960s).

The colonial system was based on an extended taxonomy covering nearly all aspects of daily life. In the labor context, efforts were made to distinguish the “lazy races,” from to the more “active races” – Arabs for example – whose arrival in Eritrea was greatly encouraged. In this racialized discourse, Italy attributed to Yemeni workers physical characteristics suited to hard labor in difficult working environments.Footnote ⁶⁶ This racial characterization thus became a basis for work assignments.

From the 1890s until the 1920s in the Massawa port, where the working and climate conditions were very tough, the Yemeni made up the largest group of transport and dockworkers. They worked in groups of five (referred to locally as mano) and in hourly shifts (referred to locally as tocca), although they were paid for services rendered rather than by the hour. Footnote ⁶⁷ (The shifts were instituted to enhance efficiency; the combination of physically draining work and extremely hot climate meant that workers slowed down and even collapsed under the strain.)Footnote ⁶⁸ The relations and interests of the porters were managed and overseen in an organized manner, through “a type of trade union,” according to a resident of the area at the time. No doubt, the “union” did not possess much power, and perhaps it only served to recruit workers and maintain order in the workplace, but it is significant that the proponents of the union were immigrant workers.Footnote ⁶⁹

Finally, road construction was another arena where Yemeni workers played an important role. Here, their employment was especially prevalent in the lowlands, where harsh climate conditions made it difficult for Italian companies to recruit construction workers. It is not known, however, if the employment of Yemeni workers in this sector was compensated with a standard daily or weekly salary. Records show that workers employed in the construction of the Assab-Sardò-Dessiè road,Footnote ⁷⁰ built between 1936 and 1939, were salaried, but that is after the period under consideration here.Footnote ⁷¹ This does suggest, however, that the institution of salaried work was already in place.