“Il segno di Menelik”: Enrico Corradini, the Protocolos, and the Re-Staging of Adwa in São Paulo

Abstract

This essay brings to light how the Italian loss at Adwa of 1896 inspires Enrico Corradini to reimagine the dream of an imperial Italy in his novel La patria lontana (1910). By turning to a little-known episode in the history of Italo-Brazilian relations that forms part of the backdrop for La patria lontana, this essay reveals that Brazil functions as a stand-in for Ethiopia in Corradini’s imaginary. In this highly Africanized, tropical, South American country, where large numbers of Italians had confronted hostile and resistant natives at the turn of the twentieth century, Corradini discovered a space that offered an opportunity to restage the First Italo-Ethiopian War as one in which Italians emerge victorious.

Keywords:

• imperialism
• emigration
• Italy
• Brazil
• Menelik

Notes

1 Although critics of Corradini’s oeuvre generally acknowledge the Italian defeat at Adwa as a turning point in his literary politics, (Labanca 2007, 106; D’Orsi 2007, 3; Choate 2008, 159; Re 2010, 19), one notable exception is Carlo Alberto Madrignani, who points out that in Corradini’s debut novel Santamaura, which appeared in 1896, “il narratore è ben lontano da ogni tematica nazionalistica” (Madrignani 1981, 236).

2 The most detailed, albeit partial, account of the Mario Anatra’s incident and the Italo-Brazilian protests of the years 1892 and 1896, which are both lumped together under the term Protocolos in Brazilian historiography, is the 1967 novel by Afonso Schmidt O Passadiço: (no tempo do Protocolo). Schmidt subscribes to the view that the Captain died of yellow fever, though he acknowledges that he was indeed beaten by the police.

3 In 1891 fourteen Italians were lynched in New Orleans. The Italian government asked for monetary reparations to the victims of the family and for the mob leaders to be prosecuted. The US government refused. In a scenario that would be repeated during the Protocolos, the countries’ diplomatic relationship hung in the balance until the US ultimately agreed to pay $25,000 in reparations (Gambino 1977, 126-127). For more background on the racial implications of the lynchings see Peter Vellon’s “Italian Americans and Race During the Era of Mass Immigration” (2017) and Jessica Barbata Jackson’s Dixie’s Italians (2020).

4 In his 2017 doctoral thesis, Os Protocolos Italianos (1892-1898), Marcos Rafael da Silva offers the first historical reconstruction of the discussion surrounding the Protocolos at the various levels of Brazilian government, with a special focus on the role played by the Ministry of Foreign Relations. Da Silva (2017, 20-25) also provides a cursory bibliographical overview of other historians who have touched upon the Protocolos.

5 In O Passadiço (1967), Afonso Schmidt casts what happened in Largo São Francisco as a mere misunderstanding: one of the students, eager to show the Italian pushcart peddler from whom he had taken the flag that its colors were in the wrong order, accidentally dropped it, causing it to get stuck underneath the cart’s tire. The peddler, aptly named Giuseppe, then yells “Estão rasgando a nossa bandeira!”(Schmidt 1967, 60), which became the opening salvo of the weekend-long protests.

6 On the one hand, the defacement of Fanfulla’s headquarters gained the attention of not only the Italian press in São Paulo, but also in Italy as well. The sensationalist columnist Ferruccio Mosconi rushed a wire to the Italia del Popolo di Milano in which he exaggerated what happened, speaking of a “nvasion” and “distruzione” of the newspaper (Latini 1896, 41). However, the Brazilian press downplayed the attack, insinuating that the newspaper had staged it.

7 In his book The Battle of Adwa, historian Raymond A. Jonas (2011) considers the silence surrounding what took place at Adwa within the African and the African-American press (278-281). In the former case, he attributes the lack of news about Menelik’s victory to the fact that Europeans owned most of the newspapers. Regarding the African-American press, he suggests that in deeply segregated Jim Crow America “any discussion of black military triumph or humiliating European defeat might have been discreetly reserved for times and places that escape the historical record” (Jonas 2011, 281). It was a Haitian intellectual, Benito Sylvain, “already a pan-African visionary,” (Jonas 2011, 282) who understood the importance of Adwa and Menelik II for the Black diaspora. When he heard about Menelik’s victory, he linked Haiti to Ethiopia, imagining the emperor as “a redemptive figure” (Jonas 2011, 282). However, Menelik, who did not regard himself as Black, dismissed Sylvain’s attention. That said, the status of Ethiopia in the Black diasporic imaginary only increased over time, so much so, that, in the aftermath of WWI, W.E.B Du Bois proposed that a new African state called Ethiopian Utopia be formed with what was left of Germany’s colonial territories (Jonas 2011, 284). By the time of Mussolini’s revanchist invasion of Ethiopia in 1935-36, Black diasporic consciousness had reached a new level and many Blacks throughout the world raised their voices in opposition. See William R. Scott’s The Sons of Sheba’s Race (1993) and Adriane Lentz-Smith’s Freedom Struggles (2009)

8 For more on this see: Lamonte Aidoo’s “Diluting the African Nation: European Migration, Whitening, and the Crisis of Slave Emancipation” (2018); Augusto Sales dos Santos and Laurence Hallwell’s “Historical Roots of the ‘Whitening’ of Brazil” (2002).

9 The decrees passed by Crispi—the first-ever law on emigration of 1888 (Legge Crispi 30/12/1988 n.5866), which gave a name to the infamous “emigration agents,” and the subsequent amendments of 1889 and 1892—had more to do with policing than protecting Italian migrants (Freda 2014, 6).

10 First Ippolito Nievo, in his Confessions of an Italian (1867), introduced Italian audiences to a Brazil populated by “demons, savages, and cannibals.” (de Marchis 2017, 116) Second, the numerous translations and interpretations of Brazil’s Indianist romance par excellence José de Alencar’s O guarany and the two translations of Gonçalves de Magalhães A confederação dos Tamaios in 1857 and 1882 respectively, sanctioned Brazil as the “quintessential country of cannibals” (de Marchis 2017, 116). At the same time however, de Marchis proposes a provocative interpretation of the “indianimso” in Italy, linking the struggle of the indigenous population to that of the Italians fighting for their independence during the Risorgimento (de Marchis 2017, 119).

11 This was actually the second diplomatic regiment he had sent. He had dispatched the first aboard the cruiser Lombardia, but it never docked: they remained unmoored in the Guanabara Bay as the ever-present yellow fever killed most of the crew and officials on board. According to Domenico Rangoni (1902), of 240 men, 234 had the fever and 134 died (111-112). Trento’s numbers are slightly different; he reports 117 deaths (1984, 296). For more, see Afonso Schmidt’s O Passadiço, chapter XII (1967, 138-143).

12 Rangoni (1902) has a lengthy footnote on the breakdown of the 4,000 reais (125-126).

13 In an article in Il Manifesto from March 25th 1996, historian Valter Zanin writes of how “la vicenda etiopica era […] a lungo rimasta scolpita nella memoria degli afrobrasiliani” (5). He mentions specifically how Italians themselves are partially to blame for this. They began to refer to Black Brazilians as “menelik.” Zanin explains how despite the contradiction—Menelik did after all defeat the Italians—the use of this term underscores the Brazilian social hierarchy, in which Italians “occupavano un gradino superiori agli ex-schiavi” (Zanin 1996, 5). At the same time, Zanin (1996) also acknowledges that “chiamare i neri col nome del sovrano etiopico che aveva ripetutamente sconfitto gli italiani fa trasparire la percezione della forza sovversica del segmento nero della popolazione brasiliana che gli stessi italiani avevano potuto osservare nel corso della campagna abolizionista” (5). I am indebted to Clarissa Clò for drawing my attention to this article.

14 At the end of Corradini’s novel Una guerra lontana (1911), the protagonist Ercole Gola, a journalist who resembles Buondelmonti, is forced to leave Italy for São Paulo, Brazil where he takes over an Italian newspaper.

15 For an analysis of the masses aboard the steamer see Verdicchio (2016) 31-34.

16 The foremost proponent of the Mediterranean race theory (or Eurafrican thesis) was anthropologist Giuseppe Sergi who published in 1898 his controversial Arii e italici as a response to theories of Aryan superiority. Sergi argued that “that the racial roots of all European whites were in black Africa, and that Aryans had brought nothing to Mediterranean Europe” (Fogu 107). Employing Lombroso’s methodology of cranial morphology, Sergi concludes that “racial mixing was […] the condition for racial evolution not its demise” (Fogu 104). For more on notions of mediterraneità see Claudio Fogu’s comprehensive cultural history of the Mediterranean The Fishing Net and the Spider Web (2020) and Camilla Hawthorne “Mediterraneanism, Africa, and the Racial Borders of Italianness,” (2022, 62-91).

17 I thank Lina Insana for helping me to elucidate these insights about Tanno’s relationship to Africa.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Giulia Riccò

Giulia Riccò is Assistant Professor of Italian in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her book manuscript, tentatively titled “New World Italians: The Invention of a Brazilian Identity,” traces the discursive production of a modern, racialized Italian identity in São Paulo, Brazil. Her articles, book chapters, and essays have appeared in Cultural Dynamics, Forum Italicum, Radical History Review, Literature and (Im)migration in Brazil, and Public Books.