The Missionary at the Gates of “Dawn”: Educational Continuities from Fascist Somalia through the UN Order (1920s–50s)

Abstract

This article explores the history of Italian-language education in Somalia from fascist rule through the early years of the UN Trusteeship (1922–50s). It relies on the rich unpublished documentation produced by Catholic missionaries, who played a crucial role in the organization of schools throughout the period under examination. Under fascist rule (1922–41), the state did not issue any school-focused law, so missionaries remained the primary leaders in the organization of schools, refining social and conceptual engineering strategies intended to transform students, mostly orphans, into skilled workers. By the outbreak of World War II, missionaries had become the “experts” in education in Somalia. After a decade of tensions with British administrators, missionaries were tapped in the 1950s by the new Italian administration of the UN Trusteeship of Somalia to help create a postcolonial school system. The latter grew out of the preexisting missionary school network and incorporated colonial-era buildings, teachers, and pedagogic methods—thus sustaining these elements beyond the fascist period and into the new UN order. This history shows that missionaries acted as skilled migrant workers specialized in professional education under colonial and postcolonial regimes in northeast Africa, emphasizing the continuities in educational discourses and practices from the prewar to the postwar period. Ultimately, it uncovers the primary role nonstate grassroots actors played in the construction of Somalia, both as a colony and as a soon to be independent Trust Territory.

Introduction

Published in Rome in 1951, the Italian textbook for first-grade Somali students, Alba radiosa (“Radiant Dawn”), offers a journey through the different professions performed in Somali society at the time.¹ Readers meet a fisherman and a baker, a construction worker, a mechanic and an upholsterer, two soldiers “happy [to serve under] their commander,” traders, a peasant, a water porter, a muezzin, an artisan and a “wise, loyal, honest” judge or qadi, a weaver, tailors, teachers, a healer and a matting worker, medical doctors, and a tanner. This survey appears in the context of an exaltation of work and work-related aspects of everyday life, like the notion of private property and clock time.² Here and there, passages celebrate the enhancement of technology and productivity under Italian leadership. For example, the textbook invites readers to admire a truck and be grateful to the Italians for having built such a “handsome and important work.”³ It applauds an Italian airplane “shipping medicines from Rome to Mogadishu in 18 hours only,”⁴ encourages readers to “love” agricultural work, and, once again, to be grateful to Italians: “Italians, who are a people with a millenarian civilization, have been the first to work and make our lands burnt by the sun fertile. . . . Therefore, son, love this work and be always grateful to those who have taught it.”⁵ According to a well-established paternalistic colonial logic, the Italians of Alba radiosa always appear as higher-status workers (e.g., medical doctors, military commanders), whereas Somali perform the lower-status work of soldiers, peasants, and artisans: the “advanced” Europeans are there to teach the “backward” Africans.

Yet, when the textbook appeared in 1951, Somalia was not an Italian colony anymore. In 1941, the British Army had conquered all Italy's colonies in northeastern Africa, including Somalia, as part of the war effort against the Axis's military block, to which fascist Italy belonged.⁶ Then, British authorities either imprisoned or expelled former colonial authorities, putting an end to Italy's colonial rule in the region. Eight years later, in 1949, the United Nations (UN) inaugurated a top–down decolonization project and entrusted Somalia to the postfascist and republican Italian government in the form of a ten-year long protectorate or “Trusteeship.” In this period (1950–60), Italy's duty was to prepare and lead Somalia to independence under UN scrutiny and supervision. Emphasizing the chronological gap between 1941, the year in which fascist Italy's colonial rule formally ended, and 1949, the year in which the UN entrusted Somalia to republican Italy, historians have framed the new Italian administration in Somalia in the 1950s as Italy's “return” to Africa.⁷

The publication and circulation of Alba radiosa among first-grade students took place in the context of this return. At least three of its primary authors, however, never “returned” to Somalia, because they had never left it. They were Sisters Emanuella Dominici, Salesia Rossino, and Tullia Mosele,⁸ three nuns of the female branch of the Consolata Missions Institute who had worked as teachers at missionary schools in Somalia under Italy's colonial rule and, unlike most of their fellow settlers from Italy, did not abandon the former colony during the period of British administration in the 1940s.⁹ Drawing from both archival sources and printed materials like Alba radiosa, this article explores their history as grassroots experts in the field of education across different administrations, from the 1920s through the 1950s. It retraces the leading role of both Catholic fathers and nuns in the organization of schools and in the production of education-related materials in Somalia in this period. At the same time, it provides a close analysis of the representation of labor in the curricula set up by missionaries.

Following these two narratives (grassroots experts’ agency, significance of labor in school curricula), the article pursues two goals: first, it aims to show that missionaries were skilled migrant workers—a designation historians rarely apply to this population due to their dominant position vis-à-vis colonial society and the temporary nature of their move. And yet, as this article shows, the case of missionaries in Somalia perfectly fits the definition of labor migrants, and especially, to use Leo Lucassen and Aniet X. Smit's framework, of “organizational migrants” or “people whose migratory behavior is primarily determined by the interests of the organization they have joined.”¹⁰ Missionaries were skilled workers whose collective task was to expand the Catholic community through on-site evangelization on behalf of their European headquarters as well as the provision of services (e.g., schools) on behalf of colonial authorities. Their preparation and sphere of action gave them the power to adapt the policy set by their headquarters and by authorities to local contexts, both for personal gain and evangelizing purposes.¹¹ They were professionalized intermediaries, negotiating among missionary headquarters, state authorities, colonial settlers, and targeted communities. This article contributes to the history of education, colonialism, and labor in northeastern Africa the case study of a specific group of Catholic missionaries that functioned as an experienced and highly skilled labor reserve on which local elites and administrations colonial and postcolonial, fascist and liberal, all relied as consultants, educators, and mediators.

Missionaries not only acted as skilled migrant workers from Europe to Africa, but also as creators of pedagogies centered on specific notions of labor and work.¹² The second goal of the article, then, is to demonstrate how the main aim of colonial schools run by Catholic missionaries—to “civilize” and evangelize students by turning them into docile and productive workers under a given gendered, racial, and social hierarchy—outlived colonialism, and that this was the case also due to missionaries’ uninterrupted work as teachers during World War II and decolonization. In the colonial period, authorities of Italian Somalia assigned Catholic missionaries a full monopoly over the organization and management of schools for colonial subjects.¹³ Afterwards, in the 1940s and 1950s, the same missionaries lost the monopoly—but continued working as teachers and health-care providers: major changes in political power did not go hand in hand with changes at the grassroots level. In other words, the missionary archives do not conform to political periodization, but run uninterruptedly from the 1920s well into the postcolonial period. A careful analysis of these archives reveals a direct link between colonial education and postcolonial projects of cultural cooperation in an era of decolonization.

In pursuing these two goals, the article ultimately places nonstate actors at the center of the history of Somalia adding a new lens on colonialism, Italy's “return” to Africa, and decolonization absent from state-centered analyses that dominate the scholarly record. Sources produced by nonstate actors has been virtually impossible due to the combination of local oral-based systems of knowledge preservation and a long civil war that has prevented safe travel to Somalia since 1991. In light of these constraints, scholars have mostly had to rely on official documentation produced by the Italian or British state.¹⁴ Although these materials have helped reconstruct the political, economic, and diplomatic agendas of European powers in the region, they tend to obscure the voices and agency of grassroots historical actors involved in creating the colony of Somalia and, later, in turning colonial Somalia into an independent nation-state.¹⁵ Missionary sources and printed materials like Alba radiosa, as well as correspondence on, to and from missionaries preserved at Italian and British governmental archives, not only allow for a long-term history of education but also provide a window into everyday interactions at school—a privileged terrain of exchange between settlers and locals—and thus uncover a variety of religious and political projects at the core of the colonial and postcolonial history of northeastern Africa.

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The article has three sections. In the first, I show how and why the colonial state turned to missionaries as skilled migrant workers who could help resolve the “labor question” that, according to Italian officials, was holding back the newborn colony of Somalia. The second section explains how, as a result of their monopoly over the field of education during the colonial period, missionaries became increasingly skilled educators specializing in the social transformation of students according to specific notions of “work” and “workers.” Finally, the third section reconstructs the organization of schools under the British administration and the UN Trusteeship in the postcolonial period. As we will see, Alba radiosa is one of many archival traces of both the colonial legacy and the missionaries’ agency in postcolonial Somalia.

Missionaries at the Intersection between the Labor and School Questions

The Catholic missionaries at the heart of this article worked in a context in which labor and education were mutually connected. As in most colonial Africa,¹⁶ in Italian Somalia the lack of local labor was a major concern for colonial authorities, who aimed at instituting a plantation system in the fertile regions of the colony. The state enacted often violent practices to attract and reproduce local labor under their influence and control. Scholars have shown these practices to range from the deployment of former slaves as forced unpaid workers in the early twentieth century to the development of ad-hoc contracts that obliged families to supply workers—and prohibited them from leaving plantations—across generations in the 1920s.¹⁷ The state did not lack only agricultural workers, but any form of local labor, including artisans, clerks, domestic servants, and military workers, as shown in Massimo Zaccaria's contribution to this special issue on military labor mobilities in the Red Sea.¹⁸ In short, the labor question—the need to solve the shortage of labor for the purposes of resource extraction and industrial production—was a perpetual “colonial emergency” in Italian Somalia, pushing the colonial state to adopt various, often coercive, strategies to overcome it.

In addition to short-term strategies such as ad-hoc labor contracts, forced labor, and labor mobilities from outside the colony, the colonial state turned to education as a long-term solution to their dilemma. However, the Ministry of the Colonies (renamed Ministry of Italian Africa in 1937) failed to define or enact any centralized policy, issuing not a single law to regulate the field of education for colonial subjects in Somalia. The governors of Somalia, pushed by the colonial emergency of the labor question, increasingly urged the creation of a large school network for colonial subjects, but could not rely on Rome for the necessary funds.¹⁹ Strapped for resources, governors turned not to local teachers or school personnel from Italy, but to a third group of skilled workers: Catholic missionaries, and in particular Consolata male and female missionaries from Turin (1924–30) and the Friar Minors of the Province of Lombardy (1930–41).²⁰ In both cases, the choice was deliberate: these missionaries already had experience in colonial contexts and expertise in the creation and running of school networks for students in Africa.

The first fascist governor of Somalia, Cesare Maria De Vecchi (1923–28), called on Consolata missionaries, both men and women, to work in Somalia in partnership with the colonial state. He selected this group for the loyalty they had showed to Italy during World War I, but also and most important for their field experience as teachers and providers of medical services in British East Africa (Kenya) and southwestern Ethiopia in the previous years.²¹ When a scandal hit the male branch of Consolata missionaries and De Vecchi's successor Guido Corni (1928–31) was seeking other missionaries to replace them, he tapped the Friar Minors of the Province of Lombardy for their previous work with Muslim-majoritarian colonial subjects (like in Somalia) in Italy's Libyan colonies of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica.²² Among Friar Minors, Benardino Bigi, the soon-to-be bishop of Mogadishu, was the former bishop of Cyrenaica,²³ and the missionary directing the primary schools for Muslim children, Daniele Gorlani, was in the process of graduating in Islamic Studies at the Oriental University of Naples, a center for the study of Africa and Asia and the training of Italian colonial personnel.²⁴ Consolata missionaries first, and then Friar Minors, moved to Italian Somalia as skilled—in Bigi's and Gorlani's cases, highly skilled—migrant workers with professional experience gained within and beyond Italy's empire in Africa.

From their respective headquarters’ viewpoint in Turin and Milan, the central task of both Consolata missionaries in the 1920s and Friar Minors in the 1930s was to provide religious services among the settlers and convert the local colonial subjects into Christianity. The colonial authorities of Somalia prohibited missionaries from any activity of proselytism in order to prevent a negative response from local Muslim-majoritarian communities—a destabilizing prospect when the Italian presence in the colony was so weak. The only sections of colonial society missionaries could openly (“directly”) evangelize were Christians (settlers from Italy and Eritrea), Italo-Somali children born to a Muslim mother and a Christian father (known with the denigratory term meticci during the colonial period), and orphans—the marginalized youth who existed outside of the social protection and religious influence of local communities. If Catholic missionaries aimed to expand Christianity among Muslims beyond these groups, they had to devise subtle, strategic evangelization strategies that did not involve any explicit reference to Christianity.

In the 1920s, Consolata missionaries followed the directives set up by Popes Benedict XV and Pius XI. According to these documents, Catholic missionaries working in “pagan” contexts had to exercise an “indirect” apostolate by attracting the local youth under their influence through charity and the provision of free schooling and health-care services.²⁵ By providing students with marketable skills, Consolata missionaries would help them overcome unemployment and find a good position in colonial society. In the long run, the evangelizing scheme went, students would develop strong feelings of attachment and gratitude towards the mission and Christianity in general. Well into the 1930s, the bishop of Mogadishu invited Friar Minors to address education as the “main field of evangelization,”²⁶ and in 1939 he responded to a questionnaire on conversions circulated by the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith that Muslim communities finally “loved” the missionaries, thanks to the educational activities offered to the local youth.²⁷

The centrality of professional education in missionary agendas did not owe solely to external forces like papal directives from Rome and the needs of colonial authorities, but also to the practical necessities faced by the missionaries themselves. Since their arrival in Somalia in 1924, Consolata missionaries frequently complained about the lack of local, cheap labor and its negative impact on the activities of the mission. In the late 1920s, they organized professional training courses to teach students the skills lacking in the labor market at the time, such as shoemaking and printing.²⁸ In the 1930s, Friar Minors also turned to their students when in need of labor, organizing missionary schools in response to the colony's shortages; one even (unsuccessfully) attempted to employ a boy as his domestic servant.²⁹ An article in the monthly missionary periodical Somalia Cristiana, printed in Mogadishu starting in 1934, invoked the labor question as still far from being solved in 1939.³⁰

As much as the connection between the labor question and colonial schooling is not unique to the case of Italian Somalia—it is of course present across colonial Africa and even in Asia and the Americas³¹—this context is particularly interesting due to the key role and sustained influence of nonstate actors. The lack of ad-hoc legislation on the part of the state allowed Catholic missionaries to act independently from any form of strict discipline and chain of command, provided they respected the prohibition against evangelizing Muslims through “direct” apostolate. These skilled migrant workers—and especially Friar Minors and the female branch of Consolata missionaries, who remained in Somalia from the colonial period until the outbreak of civil war in 1991—experimented over the course of many years with strategies to build schools that would professionalize the local youth. Colonial schools run by missionaries would thus serve both social and conceptual engineering agendas aimed at the transformation of students into workers and at the propagation of given notions of work.³²

Missionary Teachers’ Social and Conceptual Engineering Skills and Agendas

Social engineering involved the transformation of students into workers and their division along legal, racial, social, and gendered lines. To better understand this carefully organized school network, created by missionaries with the logistic and financial help of the colonial state, I have drawn together scattered information from numerous missionary sources. The resulting table represents the demographic, curricular, and outcomes distinctions, as well as the postschool professional trajectories, of students in Italian Somalia, 1923–1941 (see Table 1).

Primary schools for male colonial subjects offered a five-year formal curriculum similar to the one offered to both male and female children of Italian settlers. This curriculum diverged from Italian standardized curricula in that it did not include any reference to religion, as requested by the colonial state.³³ After primary education, male children could only attend professional schools, contrary to their Italian counterparts who went either to Italy to attend professional or academic secondary schools or, after 1937, to an academic-focused middle school and high school in Mogadishu run by certified lay teachers and dismissed soldiers from Italy.³⁴ Separate trajectories for citizens and subjects were intended to forge a dual society in which the former would perform higher-status jobs and the latter lower-status, but nevertheless skilled, manual jobs.³⁵

Thus, professional schools for male colonial subjects would specialize students in the professions most needed by settlers. The most urgent needs came from the military. The Italian Army trained the local male youth in the military camp of Baidoa. Boys who attended military training sessions received primary-level education from Catholic missionaries, who ran a school next to the camp starting in the 1920s. At the time, the need for military labor came from the colonial state's project of creating larger and stronger colonial troops. The expansion served two purposes. First, Governor De Vecchi had embarked on what he called the “pacification” of Somalia, namely a series of military operations aimed at the conquest of the sultanates of Hobyo and Majeerteenia and of the Ogaden region along the border with Ethiopia in 1925–26; in the mid-1930s, colonial authorities deployed more troops from Somalia in the conquest of Ethiopia.³⁶ Second, authorities employed colonial troops to surveil agricultural workers, both forced and free, in Janale, especially in the 1930s.³⁷

Upon the completion of the “pacification” of Somalia, in 1927 Consolata Fathers opened a School of Arts and Crafts for woodworkers, smiths, printers, mechanics, and shoemakers, and a few years later, in 1934, Friar Minors inaugurated the Agricultural School in Kaytoy near the agricultural settlement of Janale. This school was intended for the children of peasant families whose parents already worked in plantations. The last professional path opened to colonial subjects was the School for the Chiefs’ Sons in Mogadishu, opened by Friar Minors in 1938, for the training of elite boys in administrative, pedagogic, and juridical subjects. The goal of this school was for the chiefs’ sons to work for the colonial state as clerks, teachers, and judges.³⁸

The gradual shaping of professional education demonstrates the priorities of colonial authorities and settlers: first, they needed military personnel to “pacify” the colony and surveil labor; second, they needed manual workers to provide everyday services in the urban settlements; and third, they needed agricultural labor for an emerging plantation-based economy. The adaptation of the school calendar to the agricultural season in 1940—with breaks planned during the harvest period—further confirms the centrality of the students’ supply of labor in plantations.³⁹

The social engineering agenda of colonial education run by missionaries was not dictated only by material labor needs, but also by ideology concerning the division of labor along social status and gender. The peasants’ sons would become peasants, whereas the chiefs’ sons would be integrated into the colonial administrative framework in positions of command, albeit under colonial authorities’ control. This system offered social mobility only to the extremely marginalized: abandoned youth and orphans could engage in military training or training in the arts and crafts and become wage workers integrated into the emerging colonial economy. Furthermore, while male orphans formally attended primary and professional schools, the girls under the mission's influence informally received primary education and domestic training only at the orphanage. This organization mandated that male missionaries (Consolata Fathers and Friar Minors) taught boys, whereas girls’ primary and domestic education was conducted by female missionaries (Consolata nuns).

The gendered division of students’ school and professional paths as well as of educational labor between fathers and nuns went hand in hand with a strict patriarchal order in which fathers occupied positions of leadership and nuns executed the work they were assigned.⁴⁰ Fathers, for their part, occupied all leading roles at the mission, both religious and education-focused: the head of the mission was the bishop, a man by definition; school directors were all men; and religious retreats, services, and collective prayers were always directed by male missionaries.⁴¹ As the main educational authority of the colony, fathers performed all the activities such a position involved, including traveling extensively to supervise the work performed by nuns and meeting with local chiefs to convince them to enroll their children at colonial schools.⁴²

Because they were relegated to the domestic sphere, nuns were granted easy access to households, allowing them to develop a culture of maternage, or intimate, “motherly” care among children.⁴³ Care involved both the upbringing of female orphans at the mission station and health-care services performed at the colonial hospitals and inside local families’ households.⁴⁴ This privileged access to the domestic sphere gradually turned nuns into professional workers, familiar with spaces that remained inaccessible to most settlers for the entire colonial period. Over time, nuns’ experience in the classroom allowed them to improve their pedagogical skills; in 1937, upon the passing of a teaching exam required by colonial authorities, a few nuns also earned an official teaching certificate.⁴⁵ By the outbreak of World War II, both fathers and nuns had further refined their skills as educators in a gendered hierarchy in which the former acted as informal mediators between colonial authorities and local elite, and the latter interacted with local households on a daily basis.

The way missionaries regulated orphans’ educational paths is emblematic of their broader goals: to forge gendered mindsets and habits among the workers to be of the colony. Though the school network set up by missionaries did address male children of local Muslim families, abandoned youth was the main demographic target of missionary activities. By “abandoned youth” or “orphans,” missionaries meant those children who either lost one or both parents, usually to an epidemic, war, or famine, and who did not fall under the protection of local care networks. This was the case of Italo-Somali children born to a Somali mother and an Italian father who often (but not always) did not officially recognize the child, “abandoning” them upon their return to Italy. In these cases, colonial authorities would place the children in orphanages, both to prevent vagrancy and to incorporate the children into the settler society and economy.⁴⁶

Because of orphans’ marginal status, missionaries enjoyed great latitude over their upbringing, including in religious matters. Male orphans lived in orphanages in Mogadishu and Brava and then attended the School of Arts and Crafts in Mogadishu. Female orphans stayed at the orphanages of Mogadishu and Merca, learning domestic work and being trained in moral qualities such as demeanor and obedience.⁴⁷ In the missionaries’ order, education had to mold boys into strong and inexhaustible hard workers and girls into modest and disciplined housewives.

A story published in Somalia Cristiana in 1936 underscores the strictness of this order. The story recounts how colonial authorities “saved” Abiba, an orphan girl who had lost her parents due to a famine in Baidoa in 1933–34, by bringing her to a missionary station. Missionaries first sent her to the Agricultural School of Kaytoy, but only for a short time, “because [in Janale] teaching is only for males.” Then, the girl was quickly transferred from Kaytoy to the missionary stations of Merca and then Brava, where, just before dying of an extreme illness, she asked to be baptized and thus converted to Christianity. The stations of Merca and Brava, the story suggested, were run by nuns and therefore more appropriate for her as a girl.⁴⁸

The gendered division of education (and therefore of labor) is also evident in the pictures of students preserved in the missionary archives: the photographer, most likely a missionary, emphasizes gender difference by placing male and female subjects apart (Figure 1); moreover, boys tend to be represented alongside male missionaries either in the act of performing manual work or, in the case of the chiefs’ sons, dressed up in elegant, higher-status clothing (Figures 2 and 3); girls, conversely, appear clean, delicate, and orderly, and are often featured weaving or performing other domestic work under the supervision of nuns (Figure 4).

Such representations of female and male students show that, alongside addressing labor needs, the missionaries aimed to inculcate specific notions of work and influence students’ intellectual frameworks. Evidence of this conceptual agenda appears in two textbooks for first- and second-grade students compiled by Father Gorlani “with the help of” two nuns,⁴⁹ as well as in two stories appearing in Somalia Cristiana, also intended for an audience of students.⁵⁰

The textbook for first-grade students introduces readers to the alphabet, basic Italian language vocabulary, a Somali-Italian dictionary, short readings, and samples of letters, whereas the textbook for second-grade students presents advanced grammatical exercises and longer readings. In addition to introducing the letter “l” with, among few others, the word lavoro (“work”), the former includes many references to “good” work, associated with strict discipline, hygiene, and productivity, technology imported by the Italians, and the exploitation of “useful animals.” Readings mention “European” clock time and the alternation between working time and holiday time.⁵¹ At the end of the book, two out of three sample letters are a “Letter to a Superior. Letter to the Resident to obtain for a permit” and a “Short report by a detached Iuz-Basci.”⁵² Both sample letters present appropriate, respectful, and polite expressions a future peasant and future soldier, respectively, should use when addressing colonial authorities, reinforcing the concept that students were destined to perform agricultural and military labor under a strict hierarchical order.

The textbook for second-grade students is also full of passages exalting the importance of work. Among the Italian verbs indicating agency, for example, lavorare (“to work”) is the first to appear, and a short story titled Lavoro (“Work”) reads: “All must work. Where there is no work, there is no life; well-being lacks. The peasant works in the field, the worker in the workshop, the clerk in the office, the teacher and the student at school. The King too works in his palace and thinks about the wellbeing of the Kingdom and of the Colonies. . . . He who does not work is useless for his motherland and for society. Animals too work.” Another story, titled La terra ci nutre (“The land nourishes us”), states: “Listen, children, to the wonders produced by agricultural work. . . . Upon the Italians’ arrival, the Somali peasant learned how to use agricultural machines, with which labor has doubled, and harvest has become much easier.” Similar edifying stories published in Somalia Cristiana reinforced these notions about work. In particular, they emphasize the marginalization and stigmatization of the unemployed, destined to a life of hunger, vagrancy, uncertainty, and death; this fate is contrasted to that of prosperous colonial employees, represented as efficient, well-paid, and thus destined to a happy life. This is the case of a story centered on the trajectory of a boy, Alì Bestèn, published in sixteen episodes from July 1937 to February 1939.⁵³ The orphan Alì, “son of the forest” and “nomad from the woods,” was under missionary care at the male orphanage of Mogadishu until he stole alms from the Cathedral of Mogadishu and fled. Upon escaping, the story continues, he exclaims: “They want to make me son of the Government. Ha, what do you think? Alì Bestèn is son of the forest. Forest, fooorest! Here is life!”⁵⁴ Alì then goes through a lively sequence of adventures and improbable encounters with crocodile and snake hunters, involving many attempts at escaping both the Italian police (Carabinieri) and informal colonial troops (gogle). When, episode after episode, he realizes that such a vagrant life holds nothing but hunger and is too dangerous for a boy like him, he decides to go to the military camp of Baidoa, enroll in the formal colonial troops (Primo Battaglione del Benadir), and become an askari. But then, not enjoying the tiring life of military trainees, constantly taking orders and being obedient, he flees again—only to fall sick as soon as he leaves the camp. Once again, he changes his mind: as the sickness takes over, spurred on by the fear of dying, Alì returns to Mogadishu, where the story began, imploring missionaries to baptize him so that he can die a Christian. The author of the story, Daniele Gorlani, presented the account as “true” and “collected with the help of my boys.” Whether Alì’s story happened or not, the message is clear: only a sedentary life between missionary care and a skilled, albeit tiring, job loyally performed for the colonial state—in this case military labor—provide a secure destiny. Nomadism and vagrancy, conversely, promise a future of danger, loneliness, sickness, and even death.

Another story, titled “The fire of Iscia Baidoa” (Il rogo di Iscia Baidoa), celebrates the good work performed by the colonial troops.⁵⁵ This time, the story is not about a child, but about Maàllim Mussa Dère, an old Muslim teacher living at the time of the famine in Baidoa in 1933. Local “holy men” (santoni) and “sorcerers” (stregoni), the author recalls, not only cursed and preached against the Italian government, but offered no help to the people affected by the famine and even disrupted the effort Italian authorities put into the delivery of aid. The teacher, in turn, tries to convince his family, old friends, and students about the need to protect the people from and fight against these enemies of the colonial state (and therefore of the colonial subjects). As the narrator explains, soon after the outbreak of the famine, “All Residents were provided [by the Governor] food supplies, meat and even enough water . . . doctors and medicines were abundantly sent; the youth and those apt to working were placed [to work] in the flourishing agricultural companies of Janale and Villabruzzi. Only the holy men and the sorcerers did not want to move . . . a few depraved and irreducible exploiters of people's misery . . . did not want to acknowledge the truly praiseworthy and deeply humane action of the Government.”⁵⁶ In another passage, the teacher goes to visit his niece, who lives with her only child because her husband has moved to Janale to work in the fields. Horrified by the famine and the curses of local sorcerers, especially the so-called Gavàn, the niece, Abìba, shares with the teacher how grateful she is for the Italian local authority (Residente), who “has not missed an opportunity to help us” since her husband started working in the plantations of Janale. Later, the narrator introduces two heroic men plotting against the Gavàn. One works for the Italian Radio station, the other as a gogle.

Here too, the message is clear: those who collaborate with or work for the colonial government are lucky (like Abìba and her family) and heroic (like the two plotting workers). Local leaders refused to collaborate with and cursed the Italians, profiting from the people's misery, but the colonial government took care of its subjects—“saving” them from hunger and famine through the provision of secure employment, food, and cattle. Meanwhile, colonial workers protected local communities from the disruptive action of sorcerers.

The stories of Alì and Maàllim Mussa Dère reinforce a binary social and political division of the world between productive, long-lived laborers and vagrant, remorseful anti-colonialists. How did actual students respond to such instruction? Table 1 offers some answers. By the outbreak of World War II, many male and female students had undertaken the professional paths envisioned by their teachers. As shown in the table, boys worked as accountants, telegraphers, nurses, chauffeurs, postal workers, interpreters, and so on. Girls got married to Catholic boys (Somali or Eritrean) or worked as weavers at the sartorial workshop of the mission. Though the number of students in this period remained very small (see Table 2), the history of the school network set up by missionaries is important because, as we will see in the next section, it laid the basic infrastructure for the postcolonial school network that expanded in the early 1950s.

From Colonial Education to the UN Trusteeship's Schools

In February 1941, the British Army occupied Somalia as part of the war effort of the Allied powers against the Axis, thus putting an end to fascist Italy's colonial rule in the region. Somalia then fell under the Occupied Enemy Territory Administration (1941–45), the British Military (1945–48), and finally Civil Administration (1948–49).⁵⁷ The British imposed a blockade on Somalia to cut the Italian settler population off from any provisions or contact with Italy, interning the men in concentration camps and allowing for the repatriation of children and women only to Italy.⁵⁸ In this turbulent period, the new authorities favored major changes in the field of education, raising tensions and concern among Catholic missionaries.

Although lamenting the chronic lack of local labor, the British did not target schools as potential incubators of workers as their Italian predecessors did.⁵⁹ Instead, they treated schools as an opportunity for disseminating pro-Allied propaganda among locals. Since 1941, their main fear was that schools set up by the Italian administration and run by Catholic missionaries were spreading anti-Allied, pro-Italian, and pro-fascist feelings that would endanger ongoing military operations.⁶⁰ After a lively back-and-forth between different offices on the future of schools in Somalia, British authorities decided to support the expansion of grant-in-aid Quranic schools like in British Somaliland, importing teachers and textbooks from Cairo and Mombasa in Egypt and British Kenya.⁶¹ In their view, an optimal school network would be one that required little funding on the part of the administration and pleased local chiefs, Muslim religious leaders, and youth organizations. Grant-in-aid Quranic schools seemed perfectly suited to this agenda.⁶²

Suspected of plotting against the new occupants,⁶³ Catholic missionaries in turn saw their schools downsized and their local presence unprecedentedly questioned. First, British authorities imprisoned, displaced, and interned a few Friar Minors, most notably the erstwhile director of primary schools, Father Gorlani, for he had served as an official in the Italian Army during World War I.⁶⁴ Second, the new administrators evaluated the options of replacing Friar Minors with either Comboni Fathers active in Uganda and Sudan or anti-fascist Italian missionaries from Cairo; they also considered removing the bishop of Mogadishu. (They ended up discarding both options, for logistical reasons and in order to avoid a diplomatic crisis with the Vatican.⁶⁵) What they did do was force missionaries to stop all educational activities for Somali children (which would take place in Quranic schools only), and to limit their instruction to orphans and Italian settlers’ children awaiting repatriation to Italy.⁶⁶ British authorities, in short, forcibly ended Catholic missionaries’ monopoly over government-funded schools for local children, in place since the 1920s.

Missionary sources confirm that for both Friar Minors and Consolata nuns the war years constituted a difficult period,⁶⁷ but as soon as World War II was over their situation improved significantly. In the early 1940s, missionaries continued running the School of Arts and Crafts and orphanages for African Italian children,⁶⁸ as well as the schools for Italian children, and most probably even taught a few Somali children as well, in spite of the British ban.⁶⁹ With the end of the War in 1946, the tension between missionaries and British officials eased, and the bishop of Mogadishu resumed his correspondence and collaboration with the Italian state after a long wartime hiatus. Just like their fascist predecessors, the postfascist administration called on Friar Minors and Consolata nuns to contribute their knowledge and skills to Italy's present and future “mission” in Somalia. And just like in the colonial period, education would be the main field of the renewed collaboration between missionaries and the Italian state.

At first, the Italian Ministry of Italian Africa contacted missionaries to ensure the support of the missionary schools for Italian youth who did not repatriate, and to inquire more generally about the situation on the ground in Somalia in the late 1940s. In 1947, the Ministry even favored the “intensification” of missionary educational activities, and sent school textbooks from Italy to Somalia so that missionaries did not need to import them from Cairo.⁷⁰ Moreover, in 1948, the bishop surveyed local notables’ attitudes towards Italian-language schools and established a specific local committee focusing on the development of education in Somalia. Following the committee's advice and with the British authorities’ approval, in 1949 he reopened Italian-language missionary schools for Somali children and included Arabic-language teaching in the curriculum.⁷¹ The bishop kept the Ministry of Italian Africa up to date, explicitly acknowledging the key task in which both the state and the missionaries were enlisted: the creation of a new collaborative administrative model. Missionaries, in other words, consciously acted as grassroots experts (formal teachers, informal ambassadors) for the Ministry of Italian Africa even before the UN formal resolution of granting Somalia to the Italian state.⁷²

After the UN resolution passed at the end of 1949, the collaboration envisioned by the bishop turned from a hopeful vision into an institutionalized reality. By contract, since 1950 the Italian state required the Catholic missionaries to transfer to UN Trusteeship the school infrastructure built up over the previous decades with the help of the fascist colonial administration. A draft agreement dated 8 May 1950 stated that “the Apostolic Vicariate put at the Trusteeship's disposal all its schools and relative equipment, both for Nationals [Italians] and for Natives” in Mogadishu, Afgooye, Baidoa, Merca, Brava, Kismayo, and Villabruzzi (today's Jowhar). All these schools would change their name into “Trusteeship's Elementary Schools” (Scuole elementari dell'A.F.I.S.) and be maintained by the Vicariate in exchange for a governmental subsidy, as in the colonial period. The Trusteeship hired all Catholic missionaries holding a teaching diploma as school directors and teachers, allowing nuns to teach Somali children in Mogadishu, whereas fathers were preferred for teaching outside the capital. The agreement also mandated the transfer of the former School of Arts and Crafts from the Vicariate to the Trusteeship, changing its name into “School of Arts for Natives” (Scuola di Artigianato per Nativi). As in the 1920–30s, the subjects taught would be mechanical skills, with a focus on automobiles, woodwork, construction, typography, tannery, and tailoring; governmental inspectors would observe and assess the director and teaching personnel—all missionaries—on a frequent basis. Finally, the Vicariate and the Trusteeship agreed to assign the management of orphanages for African Italian children to the Vicariate, and to keep nuns as nurses employed at public hospitals, as they had been before the War.⁷³

I could not find the final agreement signed by both parties, but there are several reasons to believe that it existed and looked very similar to the above-mentioned draft. First, an official report on education in Somalia by the Ministry of Italian Africa and a letter by the first administrator of Somalia Giovanni Fornari, both dated 1951, stated that an agreement dated 31 July 1950 defined the relationship of the Trusteeship with the Vicariate, including the reopening of the School of Arts and Crafts, the use of specific buildings, and the employment of missionary teachers as part of the new school system of Somalia.⁷⁴ Second, another document dated 1950 listed the public buildings granted by the Trusteeship to the Vicariate, including colonial-era schools and orphanages in Mogadishu and Merca.⁷⁵ Third, a memo from the same year established that all orphanages for Italo-Somali children “remained” under the Vicariate's direction, and regulated their management in detail.⁷⁶ All these archival traces confirm that the incorporation of the colonial-era school system into the postcolonial school system, including primary schools, the School of Arts and Crafts, and orphanages, did not remain the vision written in the draft agreement of May 1950, but became official in the later months.

Two institutions opened and run by missionaries in the colonial period were left out of the new order: the Agricultural School and the School for the Chiefs’ Sons. Nevertheless, similar institutions appeared in postcolonial Somalia: two agricultural schools for peasant students in El Mugne, near Brava, and in Balad, along the Shebelle river northwest from Mogadishu; and an elite school for the political and administrative preparation of the Somali youth in Mogadishu.⁷⁷ The latter would later expand to incorporate the Institute of Law and Economics in 1954, and would become the National University of Somalia in 1960.⁷⁸ Though neither of these educational facilities were run by missionaries in the 1950s, both clearly recall the outlook of the Agricultural School set up by male missionaries in Janale in 1934 and of Father Gorlani's School for the Chiefs’ Sons inaugurated in 1938, further demonstrating the long influence of missionary education and colonialism on the postcolonial organization of both primary and professional education.

This legacy is also evident in the division of the student body, the missionary presence in the school leadership, and the pedagogy employed at these schools. As in the colonial period, under the UN Trusteeship schools divided the student population according to the children's citizenship, gender, and social status. Schools were either “of Italian type” or “of Somali type” for Italian and Somali students, respectively (though archival sources mention that Somali students could also freely enroll in schools of Italian type).⁷⁹ Although Italian male and female children were not separated, Somali boys and girls did attend different courses. Moreover, the postcolonial school system envisioned the coexistence of distinct educational paths for the masses and for the elites: many elementary schools opened throughout Somalia, but secondary schools were few and all concentrated in Mogadishu, mostly attended by the male children of the urban elite who would make up the political leadership of soon-to-be independent Somalia.⁸⁰

The colonial legacy in the organization of schools went hand in hand with the continued presence of both male and female missionaries in the school leadership. Most important, a representative of the Apostolic Vicariate of Mogadishu figured alongside Italian and Somali authorities and school personnel as a member of the Central School Council (Consiglio centrale scolastico), a new body studying and dispensing official advice on education in Somalia.⁸¹ Sister Emanuella Dominici, a teacher at colonial schools and one of the coauthors of Alba radiosa, became the director of the first elementary school for Somali girls in 1951.⁸² Throughout the 1950s, the Apostolic Vicariate remained a crucial interlocutor for the Italian administration with respect to education; in the 1960s, the Italian government even asked the bishop to coordinate the ambitious project of compiling the first Somali language primer.⁸³

Under the UN Trusteeship, the persistent influence of collaboration between the Italian state and missionaries was also visible in the curricula, which included the same subjects as colonial schools and preserved Italian as the language of instruction. Pedagogical materials incorporated content from colonial-era textbooks.⁸⁴ In particular, labor reemerged as a primary preoccupation in elementary and middle schools for Somali students. As the official primary school curricula noted in 1951, “labor, in all its forms, is [a] source of spiritual elevation and economic wellbeing,”⁸⁵ and for this reason authorities even established it as a separate subject, taught for six hours per week in first to third grade and seven hours per week in fourth and fifth grade.⁸⁶ The subject covered a variety of activities, from small manual works like the creation of toys, gardening, sewing, and drawing to the manufacture of wood, leather, and clay, but also included weaving, calligraphy, school trips to factories and artisans’ workshops, and agricultural and domestic works for boys and girls, respectively. As it was before the War, the teaching of manual labor was gendered, and the subject was treated as one of the most important at both the elementary and middle school levels. This status was further confirmed in UN-sponsored reports and in the five-year plan for the development of education in Somalia from 1951.⁸⁷

The state-sponsored textbook Alba radiosa of 1951, coauthored by two nuns who had served as teachers in colonial schools, also sustained the messages of previous missionary textbooks by exalting work and workers. Content-wise, the only remarkable difference between Alba radiosa and the colonial textbooks is that, whereas the latter exalted fascism, the former celebrated the UN principles. The faces of Giovanni Fornari and Giuseppe Brusasca, undersecretary at the Italian Ministries of Foreign Affairs (1946–51) and of Italian Africa (1951–53), replaced those of Benito Mussolini and the fascist general Rodolfo Graziani, former viceroy of Italian East Africa.⁸⁸ Beyond that, similarities outnumber the differences between the materials of the 1930s and those of the 1950s, especially regarding the division of labor and the relationship between Italy and Somalia.

Reprinted in 1957, Alba radiosa reproduced several passages verbatim from the two manuals published by Father Gorlani.⁸⁹ It also invoked the gendered and social division of labor at the center of missionaries’ conceptual engineering agenda in the 1930s.⁹⁰ Moreover, it echoed the “civilizing mission” narrative of colonial-era materials by listing the “achievements” of Italian colonialism in the previous decades. Examples include the frequent reference to bananas, a symbol of Italy's presence in and transformation of Somalia into a plantation-based, export-oriented economy, as well as passages celebrating Fiat cars manufactured in Turin, the beauty of Venice, the civilizing aura of Rome, the construction of a mosque in Baidoa, and the wealth produced by “courageous” Italian entrepreneurs who had set mango, banana, and cotton plantations in Southern Somalia under Italian rule.⁹¹ At the end of the textbook, a map portrays Italy and Somalia in green against a pink background, situated much closer to each other than in reality, and with a light that, originating from Italy, illuminates Somalia, reminding readers that Italy is the source of their enlightenment.⁹² The narrative reiterated in Alba radiosa, in short, invited students to be grateful, loyal, and productive workers under Italian leadership in the new UN order, just like Gorlani's textbooks and stories of Abiba, Alì Bestèn, and Maàllim Mussa Dère in Somalia Cristiana, published before the collapse of Italy's colonial empire. Alba radiosa provided historical support for the narrative of postcolonial modernization under the UN Trusteeship by linking it to colonial-era Italian “achievements.”

And yet, as much as the link between colonial education and postcolonial cultural cooperation is direct and clear, the war period did in fact constitute a turning point in the history of education in Somalia. Not only did Catholic missionaries lose their monopoly over government-funded education and UN principles replace the fascist rhetoric of the 1930s, but education also expanded as never before. For example, in the 1950s the law mandated that Somali representatives contributed to the school leadership. In addition to the school network inherited from the colonial era, the Trusteeship also sponsored a teachers’ training school, a Montessori primary school, a maritime fishing school in Mogadishu, and a leather school in Brava, as well as professional schools for typewriters, aeronautic specialists, and health-care workers, and courses offering accounting and commercial, artisanal and domestic tracks. Both formal and informal literacy schools for adults opened throughout the Territory, and nonorphan girls and children from nomadic families now entered classrooms for the first time.⁹³

The teaching personnel now included not only certified teachers from Italy and Quranic teachers from Somalia, but also local teachers and instructors from Egypt and from the Arabian peninsula. The Central School Council also had Somali members serving alongside Italian officials and the Apostolic Vicariate's representative.⁹⁴ In quantitative terms, the shift in student enrollment is remarkable: from 1,776 students enrolled in twelve missionary schools in 1939–40 to 240,000 students enrolled in the schools of the Trusteeship in urban areas in the 1950s.⁹⁵ In this context of expansion, the Italian government launched a fellowship program for excellent students,⁹⁶ giving them the unprecedented opportunity to attend Italian universities.⁹⁷ In 1953, the periodical published by Consolata nuns, Eco di Casa Madre, enthusiastically reported the “unbelievable” fact that half of the students enrolled in primary schools were girls, whereas a nun who worked in Somalia from 1929 to 1981, Sister Faustina, celebrated how, since the 1950s, Somali women even directed a few schools.⁹⁸ These extraordinary novelties nevertheless coexisted with a certain fact: the new school system of Somalia incorporated not only the physical and conceptual infrastructure (buildings, textbooks, division of the youth), but also the skilled workforce (missionary teachers) and pedagogy (curricula, language of instruction, emphasis on labor) of the prewar school network.

Conclusion

Addressed as organizational migrants, missionaries have emerged as a mobile qualified workforce employed by fascist and liberal, colonial and postcolonial administrations alike. In the 1920s and 1930s, they were the only actors on the ground to develop educational strategies with a long-term agenda, aiming to create new workers out of the local youth rather than import or forcibly employ labor, both short-time solutions pursued by colonial authorities. The missionaries’ strategies would yield an empirically tested repertoire: for decades, both jointly and separately, fathers and nuns acted not only as negotiators between settler and local communities, but also as textbook authors and teachers, directors and organizers of orphanages, primary schools, a school for the Muslim elite, the School for Arts and Crafts. In so doing, they refined a pedagogy centered on a legal, racial, social, and gendered division of students and workers, thus consolidating their reputation among Italian authorities as reliable and experienced educators.

As a result, after a decade of tensions with the British administration, in 1950 missionaries were an inescapable point of reference for the incipient UN Trusteeship of Somalia. In his assessment of education in the Trust Territory of Somalia, Antonio Maria Morone suggests that the Italian government struggled with the task of creating a school system “from its foundations,” and that the continuities between colonial and postcolonial curricula resulted from the ongoing operations of the Ministry of Italian Africa, whose personnel and practices remained unchanged since the fascist period.⁹⁹ This article has added nuance to both suggestions. First, it has shown that the school system of the Trusteeship was not built from the ground up but rather grew out of the colonial-era missionary school network. The foundations, in other words, were already in place. Second, the article has shown how the legacy of colonialism in postcolonial education derived at least in part from the persistence of nonstate grassroots experts—male and female missionaries—who shared their pedagogical equipment and expertise as well as their local connections with the new UN Trusteeship.

Although in one sense it enhances our understanding of the connections among labor and education, state and nonstate actors, and colonial and postcolonial visions and practices, the archive of missionary sources also opens up more questions. Most important, how did the students experience Catholic missionary and Italian-language education under different administrations?¹⁰⁰ Did their conception of work and labor performance change as a result of the missionaries’ engineering agenda illustrated in this article? In other words, to what extent did students model themselves on the soldiers happy to serve under their Italian commander, the wise, loyal, honest judge, or the respectable wives and domestic servants envisioned by Alba radiosa in 1951? Beyond these questions, other areas of inquiry include the relationship between missionaries and Italo-Somali children and an examination of the role played by nuns in the shaping and expansion of girls’ education in the 1950s. Unearthing these perspectives would help us further unpack not only student agencies and missionary legacies in colonial and postcolonial northeast Africa, but also the historical transition from being a colonial subject into a subject of a Trusteeship.

I first thank Valentina Fusari and Massimo Zaccaria, who invited me to present, develop, and publish this article and provided insightful feedback on its earliest draft. Intellectually vibrant audiences at the Universities of Pavia and Cagliari have also asked productive questions and shared helpful comments respectively at the workshop “Labour in Africa: Historical and Social Dynamics” (December 2021) and the research seminar “Italy and Its Former Colonies: Cooperation, Mobility, Continuities, and Criticism” (June 2022). I am grateful to them as well as to the anonymous reviewer and the people who have generously shared with me digital copies of rare primary sources—schoolbooks—without which I could have not elaborated my arguments: Roberto Sedda Delitala, Fabrizio Boasso, the librarians at the Biblioteca Comunale of Casale Monferrato, and Fabiano Pietrosanti. Finally, I thank Anna Fenton-Hathaway, who helped me formally revise the article for publication, and Filippo Petricca, for his advice on the title. The archival documentation on which the article draws includes both governmental and missionary archives in Italy and the UK. In Rome: Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Ministero dell'Africa Italiana (ACS-MAI); Archivio Storico Diplomatico del Ministero degli Affari Esteri, Direzione Generale Amministrazione Fiduciaria Italiana della Somalia (ASDMAE-DGAFIS) and Ministero dell'Africa Italiana (ASDMAE-MAI); and Archivio Istituto Missioni della Consolata (AIMC). In Turin: Archivio fotografico Missioni della Consolata (AfMC). In Nepi: Archivio Istituto Suore Missionarie della Consolata (AISMC). In Milan: Archivio storico della Provincia dei Frati Minori di Lombardia (APFML-Somalia). The latter is not ordered, so I provided the names of folders and files as they appeared in the documentation. In the UK, I consulted the archives of the War and Foreign Offices (WO, FO) at the British National Archives (BNA) at Kew Gardens.

Notes