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Records from the Italian Military Tribunal in Mogadishu (1915–1941): Archival Note

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 September 2026

Iman Mohamed Open the ORCID record for Iman Mohamed [Opens in a new window]
Iman Mohamed*
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Department of History, University of Minnesota , Minneapolis, MN, USA
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Email: moha0489@umn.edu
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Abstract

In Somalia Italiana, Africans and Arabs employed in the security forces were critical to the expansion and maintenance of the colonial state. Despite their significance, there is little research on these soldiers due to the scarcity of archival records and oral histories that sheds light on their lives and labor in the colonial military. This article examines colonial military tribunal records, the only available archive with substantive information on individual soldiers, and suggests possible themes for future research.

Résumé

Résumé

En Somalia italiana, des Africains et des Arabes employés dans les forces de sécurité se sont montrés critiques de l’expansion et de la continuation de l’Etat colonial. Malgré l’importance de ces soldats, très peu de chercheur·es se sont penché·es sur l’histoire de ces soldats à cause du manque d’archives et de sources orales qui pourraient apporter un éclairage sur leur vie et travail au sein de l’armée coloniale. Cet article examine les archives du tribunal militaire, les seules archives contenant des informations significatives sur des soldats individuels, et suggère de possibles futurs thèmes de recherches.

Keywords

Italian colonialismmilitary lawcolonial soldiersSomalia

Information

Type
Archival Report
Information
History in Africa , First View , pp. 1 - 13
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This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
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© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of African Studies Association

Introduction

As African military historiography demonstrates, local and migrant soldiers were critical to every facet of the military and administrative apparatus in colonial Africa and are thus integral to any understanding of colonial history.Footnote 1 In Somalia Italiana, Africans and Arabs in the security forces included the askari (regular soldiers), gogle and dubat (irregular soldiers), and zaptié (military police).Footnote 2 Along with the civil administration, the Italian colonial security forces were among the largest employers of native workers and an important institution in the commodification of labor during the colonial period.Footnote 3 However, unlike the case of the Eritrean soldiers in the Italian colonial troops, research on soldiers in and from Somalia Italiana has been rather underdeveloped.Footnote 4 This stark gap in the literature is in part a result of the paucity of archival records about these soldiers. In the Italian military archives, nativeFootnote 5 soldiers appear only as numbers or data points in the few military reports that survived, without comprehensive information on individual service records. Outside of formal archives, there was no systematic attempt to collect oral histories of surviving veterans when many of them continued to receive pensions at the Italian embassy in Mogadishu before the start of the Somali Civil War.Footnote 6

Absent firsthand accounts of the lives and trajectories of these soldiers, the most important archival depository for researchers studying native soldiers in Somalia is the collection of judgments from the military tribunal of Mogadishu. These documents form part of military tribunal records from Italian East Africa (Africa orientale italiana) housed in the Italian Central State Archive (Archivio centrale dello Stato). The original records were transferred to this archive by the Military Attorney General’s Office (Procura generale militare) between the 1970s and the late 1990s.Footnote 7 There is a total of thirty-three files in the archival collection. The bulk of the cases in the archive are from the height of the Italian military presence in the Horn of Africa, the invasion of Ethiopia and its aftermath (1935–40), and abruptly end following the outbreak of the Second World War in East Africa (1940–41).Footnote 8

For those interested in the military or legal history of Italian colonialism, this archive is an invaluable source that has yet to be fully utilized.Footnote 9 It is the most comprehensive archival record of courts in Somalia Italiana during the colonial era.Footnote 10 It is also an important source for labor and social history, enabling historians to understand the lives of soldiers and police beyond troop numbers, battalion names and locations, and tactical maneuvers, as is available in existing military reports.Footnote 11 These legal records have their limitations: the voices of individual soldiers are mediated through interpreters, clerks, advocates, procedural rules, and the biases of military judges.Footnote 12 Nonetheless, these tribunal cases contain a wealth of information that can shed light on how individuals were recruited, their lives before and during their military service, and their role in colonial administration.

This archival note is divided in two parts. The first part offers an analysis of the records from the military tribunal in Mogadishu and explains the basic structure of the court’s judgments. The second part probes the historiographical possibilities that these records can offer for the study of the social, environmental, legal, and broader colonial history of Somalia Italiana.

The Cases

The application of the Italian military penal code was extended to the colony of Somalia Italiana from the earliest period of Italian occupation.Footnote 13 The military tribunals that applied this code were initially established on an ad-hoc basis.Footnote 14 The first permanent military tribunal in Mogadishu was instituted with the promulgation of the civil legal code for the colony.Footnote 15 Both Italian and native soldiers, as well as Italian noncommissioned officers, were subject to the jurisdiction of this court as well as to military penal and disciplinary codes.Footnote 16 Civilians were also tried in the military tribunal in relation to crimes that had tenuous connections to the military.Footnote 17 For example, when the colony was at war, the military could seize property from civilians for the war effort. A number of pastoralists were brought before the war tribunal when they refused to give up their livestock.Footnote 18 In addition, because the colony’s security forces (zaptié) were tasked with enforcing forced labor conscription, those who refused to be recruited to work on Italian-owned plantations or as corvée labor for the construction of infrastructure could be tried in military courts.Footnote 19 These are only some of the many different ways that civilians ended up in the military tribunals.Footnote 20

The permanent military tribunal in Somalia Italiana was located in the capital, including after the colony was incorporated into Italian East Africa following the Ethiopian campaign.Footnote 21 Aside from exceptional circumstances, all transgressions of military law in Somalia were therefore tried in Mogadishu. This meant that detained individuals could be incarcerated for long periods while awaiting transport to the capital.Footnote 22

The colony’s governor appointed the judges that oversaw these cases.Footnote 23 The tribunal was composed of a president, a rapporteur judge (giudice relatore), and several military officers, as well as a court clerk and a public prosecutor. The judicial panel of each case was formed by a president and three judges. The judges were senior military officers in the colonial forces of lieutenant rank or higher.Footnote 24 The investigating judge (giudice istruttore) on each panel who conducted the investigation on behalf of the court was the local vice prosecutor of the colonial military. There were also interpreters for cases involving African and Arab soldiers.Footnote 25

When considering the volume of cases that the tribunal adjudicated per day, it may be concluded that trial hearings were relatively quick. Giorgio Rochat found a similar trend in his investigation of two thousand cases in Italian military tribunals during the Second World War, with those courts handling approximately six cases per day.Footnote 26 In Somalia Italiana, at the height of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia (1935–36), the military tribunal’s case volume increased significantly and there were occasionally more than a dozen cases tried on a single day. This was accompanied by gubernatorial and military decrees legalizing speedy trials, confiscation of property, and suspended sentences due to the colony’s state of war.Footnote 27 Based on available records, the tribunal adjudicated approximately two to four cases per day.Footnote 28

The accessible documents in the military tribunal collection are the judgments of the court. Each one contains: (1) information on the accused (name, parents’ names, where they were born, age, clan or ethnic background, religion, military rank and regiment, whether detained or free); (2) the charges brought by the military prosecutor; (3) a summary of the incident(s) at the heart of the case and information on the investigation by the police or court; (4) summary of what occurred during the public hearing (e.g., testimony of the accused and any witnesses, the arguments of the prosecution and defense); (5) the panel’s findings of the facts and the law; (6) the court’s judgment and sentence. In some cases where the accused was a fugitive, the court used a form to grant a default judgment against the accused. This was especially the case for desertion charges when the accused was still on the run.

The sentences given by the tribunal ranged from fines and a few months in prison to the death penalty. During the Ethiopian campaign, many punishments were suspended, and some were granted amnesty after the end of the war. Italians could make an appeal to the supreme military tribunal in Rome.Footnote 29 In rare cases when the court imposed the death penalty, the governor could intervene and suspend the sentence.Footnote 30

Historiographical possibilities

Although they are not verbatim transcripts of court proceedings or investigations, the judgments alone have a wealth of information hitherto unknown about military life, native soldiers, and Italian colonialism in Somalia more broadly. For example, the biographical information contained in the judgments gives a sense of the diversity (or lack thereof) of military recruitment to the colonial security forces. Using racial criteria, the colonial state restricted enlistment to so-called “martial” or “warrior” clans. However, the judgments demonstrate far greater diversity in the actual composition of the security forces.Footnote 31 In official colonial discourse, still based on this racial criteria, there was a strong push to recruit people from “servile” backgrounds into the engineering corps (corpo del genio) or porterage due to their alleged “greater physical strength and habit of heavy labor.”Footnote 32 However, the cases involving soldiers from this corps show that people from all Somali clan groups worked within it, regardless of their place in the indigenous racialized social hierarchy. Similarly, other “martial” regiments also had people from so-called “servile” or nonmartial clans, thus belying the notion that Italians limited military recruitment to a certain segment of the Somali population. The cases can thus illuminate how colonial racial ideas were applied in practice, both in regard to the racialized social hierarchy of the colonized as well as between Italians and colonized subjects.Footnote 33

The tribunal records also offer significant insight into the legal regime in the colony. In his treatise on colonial law in Somalia Italiana, chief judge Guglielmo Ciamarra emphasized that colonial courts had the goal of reconciling the different legal orders existing in the colony in order to “safeguard the moral authority of the law” and, by extension, that of the colonial state.Footnote 34 Military law was not exempt from this obligation to mediate different moral and political rationales in order to uphold colonial public order. Indeed, it was the military police – the zaptié and Carabinieri – that was charged with policing duties in the colony. The military tribunal also had overlapping jurisdiction with civilian courts, which could result in different outcomes for accused soldiers.Footnote 35 Although both legal codes incorporated the principle of protecting the legitimacy of the colonial state, it was only civilian courts that included native intermediaries, namely qadis (Muslim jurists) and state-employed native chiefs (capi stipendiati), in the adjudication while military tribunals had no colonized subjects in their judicial panels.Footnote 36 The jurisdictional distinction was extremely sensitive in relation to criminal offenses that had severe penalties under Italian law but minor or no penalties under customary or Islamic law. The military tribunal usually attenuated the penalties in the military penal code when applied to native soldiers by referencing article 36 of the colonial legal code: “when the guilty is a colonial subject, the judicial authority, in the application of pecuniary criminal laws and in any other kind of law or regulation, can apply lower sentences than the normal minimums.”Footnote 37 The court further justified this with allusions to a civilizational or racial defect that divided colonized and Italian soldiers, with the latter being the intended target of the Italian military penal code. For example, one judgment declares that due to “the deficient moral and cultural conditions of the accused, the Court deems it possible to grant [the defendant] the benefit of the mitigating circumstances” to grant a lower sentence.Footnote 38 These cases thus open possibilities for thinking through the negotiation of power at the heart of legal adjudication in any political context. It is not only that the tribunal judgments involved racist ideasFootnote 39 in the legal reasoning, but it is also a recognition of the limited power of the court or state to impose colonial hegemony on a population that had different understandings of legal norms and legitimacy.

The judgments also offer a unique perspective on military life inside and outside of barracks and encampments. Why did soldiers enlist? How did they survive the brutal conditions of war and expanding colonial occupation? Despite the significant historiographic interest in the Italian invasion and occupation of Ethiopia, scholars have not sufficiently examined the southern front of the war, Somalia Italiana, and the experience of soldiers, porters, and other workers who were part of that war effort. The bulk of the tribunal cases in the archive begin with the mobilization for the war and could offer scholars material to understand how the state organized the colonial economy and colonized population for the war effort, above all in the process of mobilizing and recruiting new soldiers and workers. In the early years of the war, desertion was one of the most common charges that the military prosecutor brought against native soldiers.Footnote 40 This was a reflection of the state’s need to embark on a mass mobilization of soldiers and other workers for the war, which might have lowered their standards for military recruits. Although there was no mandatory conscription, once soldiers enlisted, they could not leave the barracks or their divisions without prior authorization.Footnote 41 These desertion charges applied both to those who did not respond to the December 1934 mobilization order for discharged troops and to those who deserted after being recruited for this war. The cases thus reveal some features of the colonial situation in that period. For example, the time it took for soldiers to be found after they were declared deserters by their unit gives us a sense of the scale and degree of colonial occupation in different parts of the territory. In addition, deserters who left barracks within days of enlisting (sometimes before receiving their uniforms) argued in their defense that they had not been aware of the difficulty of military life or that they had been misled about the kinds of labor they were expected to perform (e.g., I signed up to fight not to build roads).Footnote 42 Indeed, these cases highlight the nonmartial, manual labor involved in soldiering, with many recruits unaware that they had been enlisted not just as fighters but also as workers (drivers, bricklayers, cooks, etc.).Footnote 43 We can also learn from the many other reasons soldiers gave for desertion: from illness and wounds that they believed were better treated with traditional medicines, to financial and care obligations to family members.Footnote 44 Although soldiers without strong social networks in the colony could not easily escape military service, there are also some colorful cases of Italian, Arab, Ethiopian, and Eritrean deserters.Footnote 45

Life in the military, as the deserters attested, was often difficult. This was because the colonial military, like the rest of the colonial state, operated on a limited budget subsidized by the metropole.Footnote 46 Therefore, the “troops had to always be able to live, maneuver and operate for [long periods] of time … lacking provisions for their [daily] needs.”Footnote 47 Despite Italian military officers believing that Somali pastoralists were ideal soldiers because they had a naturally austere endurance due to their traditional arid environmental conditions, there are many cases where soldiers refused orders or deserted because they were hungry.Footnote 48 In one case, the court dismissed a dubat soldier’s claim that he deserted because he had never been fed at the military camp and found the “justifications [to be] manifestly childish and cannot be taken into any consideration given the traditional sobriety of the native.”Footnote 49 The drastic food insecurity experienced by colonial subjects also had an impact on the military both in terms of recruitment and in the life of soldiers once they enlisted. Another case involved a fight that broke out after soldiers working as drivers refused orders to unload the trucks at their destination because they were too hungry to do work after a long drive.Footnote 50 This theme of food insecurity is a critical one in regional eco-social history due to the arid and drought-prone ecosystems of the Somali territories.Footnote 51 Military planners were keenly aware that it was precisely these conditions – including major droughts and famines in the 1920s and 1930s – that compelled many men to seek waged labor in the first place. Reading these cases can give historians a richer understanding of the quotidian impacts of changing environmental and economic conditions of the last century.

Timothy Parson’s argument that “the colonial African soldiery was a kind of labor aristocracy” that accrued material benefit in exchange for military discipline has a lot of resonances in the history of Somalia Italiana.Footnote 52 It is in these cases that we learn, however, that despite desiring the social and material benefits of military labor, soldiers also resented the racial, social, and political implications of military discipline and obedience.Footnote 53 The training recruits received was supposed to inculcate them with a new subjectivity as workers and soldiers.Footnote 54 The regulation for native troops specified extra-judicial punishments that could be applied by superior Italian and native officers.Footnote 55 One of the most common ones – referenced time and again in cases involving disobedience or insubordination – was i ceppi, referring to the practice of putting the ankles of an individual in wooden blocks that were then chained with a padlock, thus restricting their movement. The regulations specified that this punishment could be applied for one to five days for a duration of twelve hours in four-hour intervals. In a number of cases, soldiers were brought before the court on charges of insubordination, refusal of orders, defamation, or desertion for contesting this punishment.Footnote 56 In addition, soldiers revolted against many other forms of discipline – from the imposition of flogging at the start of the Italian campaign in Ethiopia to the regulation of their conduct outside of military barracks.Footnote 57 Conversely, few Italian officers were charged for abuse of authority against native soldiers and even fewer were found guilty.Footnote 58 These cases thus offer a lens through which to examine how soldiers experienced and contested military discipline and colonial power more broadly.

In addition to contributing to our understanding of colonial history, these legal records can be useful to scholarship on colonial legacies in anti-colonial liberation struggles and postcolonial martial law. As the historiography of anti-colonial liberation struggles in other African contexts have shown, veterans of colonial military forces drew upon their military sacrifice to make moral claims upon their former colonial masters.Footnote 59 The role of veterans from the Italian colonial military is conspicuously absent in the recent literature on decolonization in Somalia despite there being a strong veterans organization that advocated for Italy’s return to Somalia in the post-World War II peace settlement and eventually won pensions for veterans and their families.Footnote 60 These legal records, particularly mutiny cases, could serve as a helpful companion to the British and Italian archival records from the 1940s and 1950s to understand the impact military service may have had on soldiers’ modes of solidarity and resistance.Footnote 61 The legacy of Italian military doctrine and discipline also extends to shape the military junta that ruled Somalia for most of the second half of the twentieth century.Footnote 62 For postcolonial military and political historiography, these colonial-era legal records could shed light on the military culture and environment in which leaders like President Mohamed Siad Barre, a former zaptié, were formed.

Conclusion

Military court records are documents that provide a unique vantage point into military life, war, and the law. They are a limited snapshot into the life of a small subsection of soldiers: the defining feature of military life is discipline, and most soldiers remain within the bounds of military law.Footnote 63 In addition, most transgressions of military discipline never give rise to a legal case. As exceptional as these cases may be, however, these tribunal records are invaluable for studying everything from social relations within the military to the broader structural dynamics of colonial rule. This is even more so in the case of Somalia Italiana where the archival record on military aspects of colonial rule is sparse, and oral history has not been systematically collected. These military tribunal records are therefore an important resource for deciphering the history of African and Arab soldiers in Somalia Italiana.

Footnotes

1 Charles G. Thomas and Roy Doron, “Out of Africa: The Challenges, Evolution, and Opportunities of African Military History,” Journal of African Military History 1, nos. 1–2 (2017): 3–23; Michelle R. Moyd, “African Military Historiography,” War & Society 42, no. 1 (2023): 34–43; Timothy Parsons, “African Military History and Historiography,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History (Oxford University Press, 2018).

2 While the askari included soldiers from Eritrea, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere, the gogle and dubat were recruited exclusively from the local Somali population. Jacopo Romano, Ascari, Dubat e Bande Irregolari. Somalia 1891–1941 (Edizioni Chillemi, 2024). The zaptié (“Il corpo degli zaptié somali”) were the native gendarmerie modeled on the Italian Carabinieri. On their role in labor discipline, see Il Tribunale di Guerra d’Intendenza Sezione di Mogadiscio, 22 febbraio 1936, n. 388. Archivio centrale dello Stato, Rome (henceforth ACS), Tribunali Militari Territoriali e tribunali territoriali di guerra in Africa Orientale (henceforth TMAO), Busta 5.

3 Alessandro De Cola, “Money and the Regularisation of African Soldiers in the Early Phase of Italian Colonialism in Eritrea,” War & Society 42, no. 2 (2023): 140–156; Stefano Bellucci and Massimo Zaccaria, “Wage Labor and Mobility in Colonial Eritrea, 1880s to 1920s,” International Labor and Working-Class History 86 (2014): 89–106.

4 Eritrea was the main colony that provided the bulk of Italy’s colonial troops across the empire. Cesare Cesari, Contributo alla storia delle truppe indigene della Colonia Eritrea e della Somalia Italiana (Tipografia dell’Unione arti grafiche, 1913); Alessandro Volterra, Sudditi coloniali: ascari eritrei 1935–1941 (F. Angeli, 2005); Massimo Zaccaria, Anch’io per la tua bandiera: il V Battaglione Ascari in missione sul fronte libico (1912) (Giorgio Pozzi editore, 2012). The work of Jacopo Romano is exemplary as the first systematic study of troops in Somalia Italiana. Romano, Ascari, Dubat e Bande Irregolari. See also Massimo Zaccaria, “In Search of Soldiers: Yemen as a Military Recruiting Ground for the Italian Colonial Army, 1903–1918,” Northeast African Studies 22, no. 1 (2022): 11–43; Aldo Giuseppe Scarselli, “Truppe coloniali di Italia e Regno Unito in Africa Orientale: una comparazione (1924–1939)” (PhD diss., Università degli Studi di Firenze, 2018).

5 In the Italian colonial legal lexicon, “native” or “indigeno” referred to all non-Europeans in the colony. Ordinamento della giustizia nella Somalia italiana, art. 2.

6 I have done oral history with children of veterans who told me about these payments. See also Volterra, Sudditi coloniali, 19.

7 Matteo Dominioni, “I tribunali militari dell’Africa orientale italiana 1936–1940,” Asti contemporanea 9 (2009): 9.

8 The first file covers cases from 1914 to 1934, the years preceding the invasion, but only has less than thirty judgments from the military tribunal in Mogadishu. ACS, TMAO, Busta 1. The majority of the cases in the archival collection cover the period 1935–1941. The final case in Somalia found in the ACS records was tried on February 7, 1941, two weeks before the British military captured Mogadishu. Tribunale di Guerra d’Intendenza presso il Comando Superiore A.O. Sezione di Mogadiscio, 7 febbraio 1941. ACS, TMAO, Busta 33. While this article focuses on the records from the military tribunal of Mogadishu, the ACS collection includes judgments for Somali soldiers stationed and tried in other military tribunals in Italian East Africa.

9 Matteo Dominioni is the only scholar to have written extensively about these cases, with a focus on Italian soldiers tried in colonial military tribunals. Dominioni, “I tribunali militari dell’Africa orientale italiana 1936–1940.” On Italian colonial military tribunals, see also Carlo Adorno, “Fra i dubat col tribunale di guerra del Corpo di spedizione operante in Somalia,” Ateneo veneto. Atti e memorie dell’Ateneo veneto. Rivista mensile di scienze, lettere ed arti 121 (1937): 122; Alessandro Volterra, “I tribunali militari nel primo tempo dell’Italia coloniale,” in Militari italiani in Africa. Per una storia sociale e culturale dell’espansione coloniale. Atti del convegno di Firenze, 12–14 dicembre 2002, ed. Nicola Labanca, Società italiana di storia militare – Quaderno 2001–2002 (Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2004); Alessandro Volterra and Maurizio Zinni, Il leone, il giudice e il capestro: Storia e immagini della repressione italiana in Cirenaica (1928–1932), Saggi (Donzelli editore, 2021). For a comparable examination of the utility of colonial military records in the Belgian Congo, see Benoît Henriet et al., “Archives of Military Courts in Colonial Congo: New Sources for the History of Violence and Agency in Central Africa,” History in Africa 50 (2023): 259–274, https://doi.org/10.1017/hia.2023.9.

10 The only published collection of legal cases from Somalia Italiana is Guglielmo Ciamarra, La giustizia nella Somalia: Raccolta di giurisprudenza coloniale (Ed. Francesco Giannini & Figli, 1914). There are a few unpublished cases that can be found in the colonial archive (Archivio storico del Ministero dell’Africa Italiana, henceforth ASMAI) or the archive of Governor Guido Corni, both held at the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

11 See annual military reports in ASMAI I Posizione 85/6, Posizione 85/10, and Posizione 89/14.

12 As Henriet et al. note, “One should be … wary of the many distortions these ‘fragments’ of indigenous voices underwent before being consigned” in legal documents, including the role of interpreters and clerks as well as the possibility of duress in the production of confessions or testimonies. Henriet et al., “Archives of Military Courts,” 270.

13 Decreto governatoriale 26 dicembre 1904. Decreto commissariale 1° maggio 1906, n.1. Decreto commissariale 30 luglio 1906, n.92. Decreto commissariale 20 ottobre 1906, n.111. Carlo Rossetti, ed., Manuale di legislazione della Somalia Italiana: Documenti 1892–1908, vol. 2 (Tipografia dell’Unione Editrice, 1912), 89–90, 145–75, 500–501, 511. Furthermore, the military played a role in the application of civil law due to the prevalence of military officers acting as civil functionaries in the early colonial period. See Alessandro Volterra, “Federico Piano e il Tribunale di arbitrato di Asmara,” in Governare l’oltremare: istituzioni, funzionari e società nel colonialismo italiano, ed. Gianni Dore et al. (Carocci, 2013), 73–74.

14 For example, the first case in the ACS tribunal records derives its authority from a gubernatorial decree. Il Tribunale Militare della Somalia Italiana, 28 settembre 1915, n.3. ACS, TMAO, Busta 1. See also Sentenza del tribunale straordinario di Mogadiscio, 26 gennaio 1906. ASMAI I 75/9 fasc. 101; Ordinamento della giustizia nella Somalia italiana, art. 62–72; Ciamarra, La giustizia nella Somalia, 11–12, 97–111; Ernesto Cucinotta, Istituzioni di diritto coloniale italiano (Tip. Castaldi, 1930), 217.

15 Vincenzo Mellana, L’amministrazione della giustizia nei territori oltremare. Tomo I. L’amministrazione della Giustizia in Eritrea e in Somalia (1869–1936), L’Italia in Africa. Serie giuridico-amministrativa (Istituto poligrafico dello Stato, 1971), 2:208–210. This was reaffirmed in a separate law promulgating the extension of the military and naval penal codes to the colonies in 1929. Estensione alle Colonie dei Codice penale per l’esercito e dei Codice penale militare marittimo ed approvazione dell’ordinamento giudiziario militare per le Colonie. R.D. 23 dicembre 1929, n.2377.

16 Africans and Arabs working in the customs and prison corps were also under the jurisdiction of the military courts. Cucinotta, Istituzioni di diritto coloniale italiano, 219n1. There were special regulations for the prosecution of Italian officers. Ordinamento giudiziario militare per le Colonie, art. 24.

17 When the colony was in a state of “grave public disorder” – as it was in the early years of pacification and expansion of colonial occupation – the civil law allowed for the imposition of the military penal code on civilian colonized subjects. However, there are not many cases from this early period in the ACS tribunal records. See Mellana, L’amministrazione della giustizia nei territori oltremare, 2:190–91, 197, 205.

18 Il Tribunale di Guerra della Somalia italiana, Mogadiscio, 7 dicembre 1935, n. 299. ACS, TMAO, Busta 3.

19 Il Tribunale di Guerra d’Intendenza presso il Comando Superiore A.O. Sezione di Mogadiscio, 22 febbraio 1936, n. 388. ACS, TMAO, Busta 5.

20 Women who engaged in sex work were also tried by military tribunals for crimes connected to soldiers (e.g. stealing from a soldier, hurting a soldier, etc.). Il Tribunale di Guerra d’Intendenza Sezione di Mogadiscio, 16 novembre 1935, n. 209. ACS, TMAO, Busta 3.

21 After the establishment of Italian East Africa, a new military judicial decree was instituted. Ordinamento giudiziario militare per l’Africa Orientale italiana. R.D. 6 luglio 1939, n.1317.

22 For example, an individual was arrested in Baardheere on April 30, 1917, and tried weeks later in Mogadishu on June 4, 1917. Il Tribunale Militare della Somalia Italiana, 4 giugno 1917, n. 63. ACS, TMAO, Busta 1.

23 This paragraph summarizes the general framework established in articles 2, 5–7, 10 from the Ordinamento giudiziario militare per le Colonie.

24 Cucinotta, Istituzioni di diritto coloniale italiano, 218.

25 Although the interpreters are rarely named, they are sometimes mentioned in the summary of proceedings.

26 Giorgio Rochat, Duecento sentenze nel bene e nel male: la giustizia militare nella guerra 1940–1943 (Gaspari, 2002), 11.

27 Decreto governatoriale n°10961, 10 agosto 1935. Bando del Comandante Supremo A.O. n°11481, 3 ottobre 1935. Ordinanza n°11482 del Comando Superiore A.O., 3 ottobre 1935.

28 As mentioned in Footnote note 8, the majority of the records in the collection cover the period between 1935 and 1940.

29 The law specifies that “the military prosecutor and the convicted individual can appeal to the Supreme Military Tribunal in Italy within five days from the day the sentence was pronounced.” However, I have not found evidence that non-Italian soldiers ever appealed their cases. This right was later suspended at the start of World War II. Ordinamento giudiziario militare per le Colonie, art. 25; Dominioni, “I tribunali militari dell’Africa orientale italiana 1936–1940,” 18–19.

30 Ordinamento giudiziario militare per le Colonie, art. 25.

31 Art. 33(3) of the Dubat law, for example, required all those enrolled to belong to a “warrior” clan. Regolamento generale delle bande armate di confine. ASMAI IV Fondo Caroselli, Pacco 12, Busta 6. On the idea of “martial races” in the Italian colonial imaginary, see Iman Mohamed, “Defining Soomaalinimo: Race, Labor, and Nation in Somalia Italiana” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2024), 156–160. On “martial” races, see Myles Osborne, ed., Making Martial Races: Gender, Society, and Warfare in Africa (Ohio University Press, 2024).

32 R. Governo della Somalia Italiana, Relazione sulla mano d’opera agricola, November 13, 1939. ASMAI III, Busta 127.

33 Military judges contemplated the “extreme delicateness of relations with the colored troops” in the context of the war. They were concerned with maintaining racial hierarchy between Italians and the colonized and enforcing military discipline and hierarchy among the colonized. Il Tribunale Militare Coloniale di Mogadiscio 31 luglio 1935, n. 112. ACS, TMAO, Busta 2. See also Il Tribunale Militare Coloniale di Mogadiscio, 29 luglio 1935, n. 109. ACS, TMAO, Busta 2; Il Tribunale Coloniale di Mogadiscio, 9 settembre 1935, n. 127. ACS, TMAO, Busta 2.

34 Ciamarra, La giustizia nella Somalia, 69. Ciamarra raised this point in relation to a case in which a colonized subject received a one-year prison sentence for rape, which was below the three-year minimum under Italian criminal law. The military tribunal had to attend to this issue in rape cases as well. In one case, two Somali soldiers were accused of raping a young Somali woman and shooting their military-issued firearms at her relative who rushed to defend her. The soldiers argued that Italian criminal law should not apply because as colonized subjects they should only be subject to customary law. The judicial panel dismissed this defense. Ultimately, the soldier accused of rape was absolved due to insufficient evidence. Il Tribunale Militare Coloniale di Mogadiscio, 4 settembre 1935, n. 123. ACS, TMAO, Busta 2.

35 The military tribunal had jurisdiction over any crime committed by or against a native soldier. Cucinotta, Istituzioni di diritto coloniale italiano, 163. There were sometimes dual proceedings against individuals in these separate courts, although the military tribunal respected outcomes from the civilian courts and vacated charges if those trials took place first. See Il Tribunale Militare Territoriale Coloniale di Mogadiscio, 10 giugno 1935, n. 56. ACS, TMAO, Busta 2.

36 This applied in criminal and civil cases involving only Muslim colonized subjects. See R. Decreto 20 dicembre 1923, n.3036; Ordinamento della giustizia nella Somalia Italiana, art. 18–19, 27–28, in Ciamarra, La giustizia nella Somalia, 365–382.

37 Ordinamento organico per l’Eritrea e la Somalia, art. 36.

38 Il Tribunale Militare Coloniale di Mogadiscio, 18 maggio 1935, n. 21. ACS, TMAO, Busta 2. In a different case, the court affirmed that the native soldiers in the colonial corps were “heterogeneous in race and in relation; all their feelings, aspirations and consequent manifestations are certainly not those that inspired the legislator to impose the penalties that instead refer to a national army, to citizens who are imposed with strict duties deriving from common rights.” Il Tribunale Militare della Somalia Italiana, 4 giugno 1917, n. 63. ACS, TMAO, Busta 1.

39 Il Tribunale Militare Coloniale della Somalia, 13 marzo 1934, n. 123. ACS, TMAO, Busta 1.

40 On desertion in the Ethiopian campaign, see Alessandro Volterra’s work on the desertions in the Ethiopian and Italian armies during the war. Uoldelul Chelati Dirar et al., eds., “Disertori e patrioti. Soldati africani tra guerra e passaggi di fronte (1935–36),” in Colonia e postcolonia come spazi diasporici: attraversamenti di memorie, identità e confini nel Corno d’Africa (Carocci, 2011). Note that the number of desertion cases in the tribunal records is significantly higher than the number cited in this chapter.

41 Codice penale per l’esercito, art. 95, 98–99, 137–162; Cucinotta, Istituzioni di diritto coloniale italiano, 162.

42 Il Tribunale Militare Coloniale di Mogadiscio, 23 settembre 1935, n. 135. ACS, TMAO, Busta 2; Il Tribunale Militare Coloniale di Mogadiscio, 28 maggio 1935, n. 42. ACS, TMAO, Busta 2. Soldiers also used this defense against insubordination and mutiny charges. Il Tribunale Militare Coloniale di Mogadiscio, 12 June 1935, n. 58. ACS, TMAO, Busta 2.

43 An important aspect of military discipline was about inculcating in the recruit the fact that soldiering involved difficult manual labor beyond fighting or killing. “The general aversion of Somalis, belonging to ‘free’ clans, to any type of heavy labor or cleaning work, judged suitable only for slaves or freedmen, made it necessary to establish in the [troop] regulations the obligation for the askari to perform any type of work required by the necessity of military service.” Massimo Adolfo Vitale, L’opera dell’Esercito (1885–1943), Italia in Africa – serie storico militare (Istituto poligrafico dello Stato, 1960), 1:117. See Il Tribunale di Guerra del Corpo di Spedizione Operante in Somalia, 1 dicembre 1935, n. 269. ACS, TMAO, Busta 3. See also Samuel Fury Childs Daly, “War as Work: Labor and Soldiering in History,” International Labor and Working-Class History 103 (2023): 376.

44 Il Tribunale di Guerra d’Intendenza – Sezione di Mogadiscio, 19 ottobre 1935, n. 149. ACS, TMAO, Busta 2.

45 Il Tribunale di Guerra d’Intendenza – Sezione di Mogadiscio, 19 ottobre 1935, n. 150. ACS, TMAO, Busta 2; Il Tribunale Militare Coloniale di Mogadiscio, 25 maggio 1935, n. 34. ACS, TMAO, Busta 2.

46 The colonial state in Somalia Italiana was never able to raise enough revenue to cover its annual expenditure. Robert L. Hess, Italian Colonialism in Somalia (University of Chicago Press, 1966), 160–162, 185–186; Guido Corni, Somalia italiana (Editoriale Arte e storia, 1937), 2:59–112.

47 Vitale, L’opera dell’Esercito (1885–1943), 1:32.

48 Ulderico Barengo, “Zaptiè Somali,” Rivista dei Carabinieri Reali 7, no. 1 (1940), 11. Comando Generale dell’Arma dei Carabinieri, Direzione dei beni storici e documentali, Rome, Documentoteca 358.10.

49 Il Tribunale Militare Coloniale di Mogadiscio, 28 maggio 1935, n. 44. ACS, TMAO, Busta 2.

50 In this case, the soldiers also argued that this was not within their job description. Il Tribunale Militare Coloniale di Mogadiscio, 12 giugno 1935, n. 58. ACS, TMAO, Busta 2

51 Carlo Scaramella, “La carestia del 1931–34 nell’alto Giuba, Somalia italiana,” Africa: Rivista trimestrale di studi e documentazione dell’Istituto italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente 52, no. 4 (1997): 536–577.

52 Timothy Parsons, The African Rank-and-File: Social Implications of Colonial Military Service in the King’s African Rifles, 1902–1964 (Heinemann, 1999), 5.

53 Il Tribunale Militare Coloniale di Mogadiscio, 9 settembre 1935, n. 128. ACS, TMAO, Busta 2.

54 As one military report noted, many of the soldiers who were referred to the military tribunal “often belonged to clans that had not previously had many of their members who served in the military [and] had not understood, given that they had only recently joined the military, the full gravity of refusing to obey, of insubordination, and of desertion.” Comando del R. Corpo Truppe Coloniali della Somalia Italiana, Relazione sull’andamento generale del R. Corpo nel II trimestre dell’anno 1927-V, 75. ASMAI I Posizione 89/14, fasc. 53.

55 Regolamento unico per il Corpo di truppe indigene, art. 86–102. Rossetti, Manuale di legislazione della Somalia Italiana, 2:383–385.

56 In one case, a soldier was accused of saying to his superior, “if you put me in chains, one of us must die.” Il Tribunale Militare Coloniale della Somalia Italiana, 29 luglio 1933, n. 106. ACS, TMAO, Busta 1. See also Il Tribunale Militare Coloniale di Mogadiscio, 28 maggio 1935, n. 41. ACS, TMAO, Busta 2; Il Tribunale Militare Coloniale di Mogadiscio, 31 maggio 1935, n. 49. ACS, TMAO, Busta 2; Il Tribunale di Guerra d’Intendenza Sezione di Mogadiscio, 9 novembre 1935, n.198. ACS, TMAO, Busta 3; Il Tribunale di Guerra d’Intendenza di Mogadiscio, 15 gennaio 1936, n.26. ACS, TMAO, Busta 4.

57 Massimo Vitale, the official chronicler of the colonial military, claimed that while flogging was common disciplinary practice in Eritrea, it was never implemented in Somalia because Somalis considered that was a punishment only applicable to slaves. Vitale, L’opera dell’Esercito (1885–1943), 1:116. However, there were several cases involving flogging in the tribunal records. Il Tribunale di Guerra del Corpo di Spedizione Operante in Somalia, 17 ottobre 1935, n.148. ACS, TMAO, Busta 2; Il Tribunale di Guerra della Somalia Italiana, 15 settembre 1936, n. 658. ACS, TMAO, Busta 9.

58 Moreover, judges tended to regard the testimony of Italians as irreproachable while second-guessing statements of African and Arab soldiers. Il Tribunale Militare Coloniale di Mogadiscio, 9 giugno 1935, n. 79. ACS, TMAO, Busta 2; Il Tribunale Militare Coloniale di Mogadiscio, 9 agosto 1935, n. 113. ACS, TMAO, Busta 2; Il Tribunale di Guerra d’Intendenza Sezione di Mogadiscio, 13 novembre 1935, n. 204. ACS, TMAO, Busta 3.

59 Thomas and Doron, “Out of Africa,” 16; Gregory Mann, Native Sons: West African Veterans and France in the Twentieth Century, Politics, History, and Culture (Duke University Press, 2006).

60 Antonio M. Morone, L’ultima colonia. Come l’Italia è tornata in Africa 1950–1960 (Editori Laterza, 2011); Annalisa Urbano, “‘That Is Why We Have Troubles’: The Pro-Italia Movement’s Challenge To Nationalism In British-Occupied Somalia (1946–9),” The Journal of African History 57, no. 3 (2016): 323–344.

61 Il Tribunale di Guerra della Somalia Italiana, 15 settembre 1936, n. 658. ACS, TMAO, Busta 9; Il Tribunale di Guerra della Somalia Italiana, 26 novembre 1936, n. 1840. ACS, TMAO, Busta 10.

62 On militarism in postcolonial African military regimes, see Samuel Fury Childs Daly, Soldier’s Paradise: Militarism in Africa After Empire (Duke University Press, 2024).

63 Thank you to Samuel Fury Childs Daly for this reminder.

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