Onyinyechi C. Ukaire (Ukay)
CST 010: Visualizing Colonialism
Prof. Kamran Rastegar
Final Assignment
10th May 2018
URBANISM IN ETHIOPIA AND ITALY’S COLONIAL ARCHITECTURE
የነፃነት ተምሳሌት
[yenetsante temsalet]
Ethiopia is the epitome of freedom
Ethiopia has been held up emblematically as a free nation, both within the country and internationally. Common narratives of Ethiopian history in contemporary Africa paint a picture of great strength and resilience. A running theme in learning the history of African countries is that Ethiopia was never colonized. There are shortcomings however in simplifying Ethiopian history. A simple look at the current buildings and city plans that currently exist in Ethiopia presents an account that is commonly erased in this discourse, the occupation of Ethiopia by Italy. The heavy influence of the Fascist regime’s imperial ambitions in Ethiopia is undeniable, and the architecture and urban plans for the city appear consistent with some of those observed in other colonial spaces. Based on these preliminary findings, this paper presents arguments that challenge popular narratives of Ethiopia in post-colonial Africa, as well as complicate the ideas of colonization that present themselves in the field of colonial architecture and inevitably make their way into post-colonial development. This essay looks at the history of the Italian occupation of Ethiopia from 1935 to 1942 following a discussion of how that occupation compares with other colonial cities, and how the development of the built environment in Ethiopia aligned with the development of the fields of architecture and urban planning in Italy. I also explore what it means to be occupied versus to be colonized, and whether they are indeed one in the same thing, and how does the study of occupation as opposed to colonization complicate the field of colonial architecture.
I. HISTORY OF CONTACT
It is important to begin with the history of Ethiopia’s social and economic context to understand why it is viewed in such high regard in discussions of colonial histories. Abyssinia, which was the earlier name of the Ethiopian empire, was founded in 850 B.C. This makes Ethiopia one of the earliest civilizations in the world, and sub-Saharan Africa’s oldest state. It is located in Eastern Africa. The history of contact between Italy and Ethiopia started in the nineteenth century. At a time when most European powers had already secured their colonial territories in Africa, the Italians selected Ethiopia as a possible territory since it hadn’t been captured yet. The attempts were futile, as they were defeated by Ethiopians at the Battle of Adwa. The victory happened under the reign of Emperor Menelik II, who was known as a diligent leader determined to bring progress and development to Ethiopia (Marcus 91). The battle went down in history as the first time an African country emerged victorious in the age of empire. It became a symbol for African and African American resistance and was said to set in motion the long unraveling of European domination of Africa.
Despite their loss, Italy still remained in pursuit of Ethiopia, and this was fuelled under the Fascist regime. In 1935, they succeeded in invading Ethiopia with authority from Benito Mussolini, the Prime Minister of Italy at the time. They were able to capture Addis Ababa which was the center of most activity and Ethiopia briefly became a part of Italian East Africa. This lasted until 1941, when Emperor Haile Selassie was restored to the throne after the Italians were defeated yet again and ousted from the country (Marcus 130). Despite the short period of occupation, the Italians were able to implement urban plans and construct buildings that had a lasting impact on the built environment of Ethiopian cities.
II. UNDERSTANDING THE COLONY AS URBAN LABORATORY
The eurocentrism that was inherent in urbanism practices were characteristic of several colonial cities on the African continent. Colonial urban policies and urban planning regimes were about creating the spatial form of an essentially European racial order and making systems of labor control in cities. Racist and classist ideologies impacted African city forms under colonialism through official policies separating groups from one another in a hierarchy of dominance (Myers ‘Eurocentrism’ 196). In Zanzibar for instance, the British began to impose their own vision of order in the 1920s. Colonial ideas of separation were heavily seen in Zanzibar’s organization. There emerged a dichotomous broad distinction between Stone Town, the peninsular historic core of the city, and Ng’ambo (the other side), the area that became stereotyped as the native quarter (Harris and Myers 478). Ethiopia was no exception, as the Italians went on to conduct different experiments in architecture and urban planning on a vast scale (Fuller ‘Building Power’ 455).
FASCISM AND THE THIRD ROME
In trying to understand what influenced the character and form of Italian occupation in Ethiopia, it is important to understand the cultural climate in Italy at the time. It was not until 1920 that university training in architecture became available in Italy (Fuller ‘Moderns Abroad’ 87). Architecture then grew as a discipline in the 1920s, as it continued being recognized as a field of study that was separate from art and art history. Also, this period coincided with the reign of Benito Mussolini who was the founder of Italian Fascism. The period was initially marked by artistic freedom, experimentation and open debate; however, the coming decades saw increasing artistic and architectural uniformity and subservience to the government’s totalitarianism (Fuller ‘Moderns Abroad’ 23). This is also mirrored in the development of plans for Ethiopian cities.
The idea of the ‘Third Rome’ represents that some city, state, or country is the successor to the legacy of ancient Rome. This school of thought is consistent with colonial efforts to build a colonial city that was an extension of Fascist Italy, which Mussolini constantly referred to as the true Third Rome (Kallis). The trajectory with which colonial cities in Ethiopia developed very much embodied the imperial ambitions of the Fascist regime, and colonial architecture had a significant place in architectural journals, shaped according to national and colonial agendas (Fuller ‘Moderns Abroad’ 23). This encouraged architects and planners alike to consider colonies as ground where they could experiment and test out their ideas. Its hardly accidental that the development of the fields of architecture and urban planning during the fascist regime and the development of colonial cities in Ethiopia happened concurrently.
Architects and planners preoccupied with designs for the new empire saw Ethiopia as a blank slate where they were at liberty to test out the impact of their plans and designs before implementing them in Europe. The idea of Ethiopia as a tabula rasa (blank slate) was prevalent in the plans and writings of architects and urban planners. The territory was an ideal place to display the architecture and urban planning capabilities of Italy. This saw the submission of several plans, which were published in architecture magazines like Architettura, Casabella and Etiopia. Where they received criticism, the creators were open to revising the designs or abandoning them completely (Woudstra). The designs were motivated by ideas of colonialism.
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier, is a renowned Swiss-French architect who is considered one of the pioneers of modernism as an architectural style. After the capture of Addis, he wrote to Mussolini to offer his services and present an idea for the colonial capital. He presented it as “how a city for modern times is born” (See Fig 1). Le Corbusier’s plan for Addis Ababa was superimposed; all signs of humanity and centuries of history and culture were erased (Woudstra). Although the idea was never realized, his participation in colonial architecture speaks to the extent to which renowned architects and planners essentially viewed the colony as an urban laboratory, their own architectural playground waiting to be transformed into Italian territory (Demissie 75).
In a report on the development of Italian East Africa, the Italian authorities stated that
“The results so far obtained convey the definite impression that Italy-continuing the tradition of ancient Rome- has come to stay and means to carry out in full her own constructive contribution to the development of Africa and to the welfare of the African peoples” (Quaranta 96).
The representation of Ethiopia as a non-urban space which Italy would transform into a modern and upscale city is consistent with arguments that were made to justify the colonization and occupation of African nations. What they failed to show however was that Ethiopia had a thriving socio-economic environment. It was a large trading empire, and Addis Ababa was an active market hub that participated in the world economy. It hosted a Saturday crowd of around 50,000 people, offering imported goods from North America, Britain and Indian traders and attracting an international crowd (Fuller ‘Moderns Abroad’197). This just shows that not only was the execution of the plans themselves flawed, architectural and urban representations were handicapped in many respects.
COLONIAL ELEMENTS IN THE DESIGN OF ETHIOPIAN CITIES
In comparing the plans for different cities, it is lucid that the changes the Italians made were intended to disrupt already established environment and system of living that the natives had. Control, of inhabitants and the movement of traffic, as well as of the construction of buildings following a systematic plan, was the predominant concern (Fuller ‘Building Power’ 477). Looking at the landscape plan for Addis Ababa (see Fig. 2), we see a grid-like plan, developed around a central group of buildings which belonged to the Italian administration. Italian residential spaces were concentrated next to the center whereas the natives’ residential areas were not even indicated in the plan, detaching them from their own city. In the plan for Jimma, another Ethiopian town, the spaces are delineated (See Fig. 3). Paths in Jimma do not appear to be as accessible as in the city of Addis, and the buildings were clustered into enclaves, constructed in a manner that kept outsiders out. The buildings would prevent outward expansion and integration.
The plans facilitated the manifestation of social hierarchy and segregation between Italians and the rest of Ethiopians. The ruling guideline for planning was that of race, to ‘keep blacks away from whites, keep blacks invisible from whites but keep whites visible to blacks (Fuller ‘Building Power’ 479). Indigenous living areas were referred to as quarters, a term normally used to refer to rooms allocated to people in domestic service. This was in contrast to the Italians “city” or “center”, which reflects the extent to which they held themselves in high regard and their condescending attitude towards the natives (Fuller ‘Building Power’ 481). This degree of separation was not only restricted to residential areas, but applied in the control of movement within the city center. There were some roads which were declared independent from the ‘indigenous traffic’ and were strictly for use by the Italians (Fuller ‘Building Power’ 479).
The degree to which the careful use of zoning and landscape was applied alongside in order to further segregate the space was extensive. It bears strong similarities to characteristics of other colonial cities—like French New Orleans, where the colonizers efforts to engineer nature very much represented efforts to engineer society (Dawdy 66) and Gaza settlements, where Israel’s reluctant attitude to evacuation was tied to metaphors of Israeli architecture under Palestinian control (Hilal et. Al 17). In looking at the plan of Addis, it is visible that they were able to manipulate landscape in order to make the segregation appear natural. The riverbeds and vegetation were used as frontiers for the separation of the Italian spaces from the native spaces (See Fig 4). This implies that it was in the natural order of things to separate the natives from the white colonialists. They construed spatial and racial divisions as natural, reinforced by the use of natural elements (Fuller ‘Moderns Abroad’ 206).
Architecture stood as evidence of the fascist regime’s ambitions and to perpetuate imperial power. There were several largely symbolic gestures that fulfilled the fascist regime’s demands for ideological representations. After the capture of Addis Ababa for instance, the Obelisk of Axum was taken as war booty and moved to Italy, to commemorate the conquest of Ethiopia (Marcus). The removal of an important piece of the Ethiopian empire was a way of indicating dominion over the country. Construction also took place in a manner that overshadowed important elements of the Ethiopian empire. Italian planners frequently laid out boulevards that joined a significant new building representing the fascist empire to an iconic historical structure representing the Abyssinian Empire, symbolically reinforcing the transfer of imperial power. The articulation of space and power is very visible in even the naming of the streets and buildings, which were assigned Italian names.
The Italians succeeded in the creation of cities that resembled the metropole even despite the short duration of their occupation. Images of the piazza in Addis Ababa and the Rome display glaringly similar characteristics (See Fig 5 & Fig. 6). The degree of symmetry in the buildings, the stone curtain wall façades are common features. In a sense, Addis Ababa could be said to have served as a model for cities built throughout the Italian empire (Rifkind 504). In reconciling colonial urbanism and practice of architecture in Italy, it is worthwhile to note that as they imposed control over colonial territories, parallel attempts were made to reorder Italy in the resettlement of populations, rehabilitation of cities and promotion of agriculture and industry. Throughout Italy, architects developed residential building typologies calibrated according to the social class of their inhabitants, and they designed neighborhoods and cities with clearly delimited class identities (Rifkind 496).
The colonial project sought to build model communities based on the neighborhood concept of European planning as in Zanzibar (Myers ‘Eurocentrism’ 206). Similarly, the Italians had a plan for the replacement of the natives’ traditional form of housing with a more modernized version. The plans would also allow a great degree of surveillance over the colonial subjects by the colonizer, an aspect not unique to colonial architecture (Fuller ‘Moderns Abroad’ 210). Before the Italians arrived, the tuluk was the most common form of housing in Ethiopia. It was a cone shaped mud hut, usually with a thatched roof. What the Italians wanted was to build a modification of the tuluk using concrete as opposed to mud, since they considered concrete of better quality (Fuller ‘Moderns Abroad’209). These ambitious plans fell through due to the large native population and the expensive costs involved which were less than ideal. The result was a bizarre city with heterogeneous mixtures and familiarities between black and whites (Fuller ‘Moderns Abroad’ 199). The Italians managed to construct some concrete tuluks, but left the rest to the natives who constructed the traditional mud tuluks.
In thinking about how the Ethiopians negotiated the imposition of the Italians’ defined and spatial order, it is valid to say that they were incorporated as participants in the building of the city. The Italians also ended up encouraging the use of locally sourced materials which were conducive to the environment and also affordable (Rifkind 502). Despite the grand visions of order and imposition of Italian order, both Italians and Ethiopians carved out their own spaces, and Ethiopian cities like Addis Ababa ended up as hybrid spaces, partly Ethiopian and partly Italian. Mia Fuller suggests calling Addis Ababa an imperial city as opposed to a colonial one, seeing as the Italians were not keen on adapting the plans to the original city’s fundamental configuration (‘Moderns Abroad’ 151). However, even if their intention was not for the city to be a hybrid space, it ended up as one.
Despite bearing strong similarities to other colonial cities, Ethiopia is still hailed as the country that was not colonized. Engaging all the discussed factors definitely challenges this popular narrative. Even if the Italian occupation lasted for a relatively short amount of time in comparison to other settler colonies, the effects of the built environment as constructed at the time persist until today. The roads being used in present day Ethiopia were built by the Italians and some Italian neighborhoods are still referred to by their Italian names. This lasting impact of the plans raises interesting questions as to whether establishing a settler identity in a space is synonymous with colonization, regardless of whether or not the settler stayed for a long while or not. There is not a definite answer to these questions, but this exploratory essay attests to the role that settler occupation plays in having a lasting impact on planning of cities which trickle into the post-colonial era. The cities that developed in Ethiopia are the embodiment of Italian colonial policy, as well as the growth of architecture and urban planning as fields of study. The city as an urban laboratory was a colonial effort and therefore cities in Ethiopia fall under the umbrella of colonial cities.
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