The Infrastructure of Amnesia Coloniality Off the Road - from Massawa to Asmara and Addis Ababa
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Soroor Notash, Mouna Abdelkadous and Mauro Sirotnjak April 2020 The Infrastructure of Amnesia Coloniality off the road - from Massawa to Asmara and Addis Ababa 1. The emergence of structural amnesia Like many other mythical stories that become part of the process of building a nation or a people, so-called ‘Western civilisation’ has used infrastructure as an important basis of its myth. Looking beyond the symbolic and mythological meanings assigned to infrastructure then becomes necessary in order to explore the politics, industry and economy hiding behind this myth. In many colonial projects and practices, the notion of civilisation is widely used in order to legitimise exploitation. By expanding the heritage of so-called Western civilisation - a series of logistical and infrastructural objects - we find that they were primarily built for extraction of goods, displacing cargo, land and people to serve capitalist ventures. This was paralleled by the creation of a series of institutions that enabled the colonial1 apparatus to install its power and supremacy in distant territories, far away from the capital of the colonial power. These infrastructural objects and networks are still being used in favour of a hegemonic structure, be it Eurocentric or other, that corresponds to the narration of development2 - using the modernisation process to justify exploitation. At this moment, we point out how questioning the purpose and process of developing infrastructure might provide better insight into the reasons for colonial and imperial relations being maintained even now. We are looking for the mechanisms that facilitate exploitation and hinder the change of power relations. A process of falsification of the past has been going on, leading to what we call a ‘structural amnesia’. This structural amnesia plays a crucial role as an obstacle for any kind of change in the persistent perceived hierarchy. 2. Colonial legacies - developing interdependencies As part of the Decolonizing Architecture program at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, we travelled to Ethiopia and Eritrea to visit former sites and buildings dating from the period of Italian colonisation and occupation3. Another key contextual element was the declaration of Asmara’s inner city as a UNESCO heritage site in 2017. The two-week-trip held in February 2019 aimed to strengthen research on architectural decolonisation within the contemporary postcolonial context. 1 In this article we focus on what is considered as “exploitation colonialism” which means “that colonizers go to a “new” place and dominate a local labor force in order to send resources back to the metropole.” (Tuck, McKenzie, & McCoy, 2014; see also Hinkinson, 2012). 2 Trying to find another definition for “development” that goes beyond this narration we prefer to use Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s description: “I am asking us to allow the concept of development to overflow the interplay of capital and colony. This makes room for an acknowledgment of complicity— folded-togetherness—rather than see “development” to be conceptualized as good or evil or both after colonialism. I am asking for us to see that development as sustainable underdevelopment has a longer history and perhaps even that this history is beginning to make itself visible as the pat- tern of globalization explodes economic growth into developing inequality. I am suggesting that the conceptualization of development must be unevenly inter- disciplinary—statistics and political science folded together, complicit—with the disciplines of subject-formation, the humanities.” (Spivak in Political Concepts, 2018. p.127) 3 Italian invasion to the Horn of Africa led to colonization of Eritrea in 1890. During Mussolini Ethiopia was occupied by Italy from 1936-1941. 1 Soroor Notash, Mouna Abdelkadous and Mauro Sirotnjak April 2020 Visiting the buildings and sites, and talking with the community in ongoing projects, we engaged with trajectories in both Addis Ababa and Asmara. While in Eritrea, we had a short visit to the port city of Massawa on the coast of the Red Sea. The road trip from Asmara to Massawa was a tense experience of the landscape and provided new perspectives and insights into the meaning of the colonial interventions, through our physical presence and movement in the territory. The process of visiting and engaging led us to widen our perspective from mainly the architectural narrative to a broader discussion on the politics connecting architecture - heritage and infrastructure. Coming back from the trip, we came upon a press release4 from the EU on its plans for investments in that very road from Massawa to the Ethiopian border, calling it “Roads to peace: EU supports reconnecting Eritrea and Ethiopia.” This raised many questions and thoughts for us, one of them being the relation between Europe and Africa. We wondered what the remnants of the ‘beneficiary’ European approach might be, given Paneuropean Union founder Coudenhove-Kalergi’s statement in the 1930s that ‘Europe’s mission in Africa is to bring light to the darkest of continents ...Europe is Eurafrica’s head, Africa its body5.’ The intersection of contemporary EU policies regarding the two countries that signed a peace treaty in July 2019, and our research on the former colonial relations with these same countries, suddenly started to overlap. Tracing back the intensified European presence in the territories around the so-called Horn of Africa and the Red Sea, it goes all the way to the dismembering of the Ottoman Empire in the late 1800s and the beginning of the 1900s. Following the nominal abolition of slavery6 that was passed by law throughout the 1800s in many countries, deeming it not to no longer be of moral and civilisational value, the massive land grabbing of Africa started. With two newborn European nation-states - Italy in 1861 and Germany in 1871 - the quest for colonies and control of land in Africa became a matter of nation building. Thus, along with other European countries, the process of enlarging the market space for their economies, and eventually providing new living space for their citizens through the projects of colonisation accelerated. Subsequently, the tensions and conflicts of interest between colonial powers became more intense. The Berlin Conference7 paved the way for the elitist European diplomacy, capitalists and political groups to partition the African continent into spheres of interest, and eased the exploitation of people and land, to serve their interests. Infrastructure such as railways, roads and ports were of crucial importance in order to bring extracted goods to the coastal cities that would cater to European economies through maritime routes. Construction of the Suez Canal from 1859 to 1869 is perhaps the largest of many infrastructural endeavours that were serving European economic interests at the time. Focusing on the Italian case in relation to present day Eritrea and Ethiopia, it is useful to bring up the context of Italian colonisation that was intensely practiced from the 1880s. At that time, after failed tendencies of expansion towards Libya and Tunisia due to French and British predominance, the Italian kingdom started to develop the colonisation project in newly defined ‘Oriental Africa’ - which nowadays includes Eritrea, Somalia and Ethiopia – a project which lasted up until the second World War. Due to close relations with the diplomacy of Allied 4 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_19_868 5 Hansen, Peo and Jonsson, Stefan, “Eurafrica”, p.38 6 The sequences of abolition of Atlantic slave trade didn’t mean that it actually ceased. Apart from so- called illegal slave trade to countries such as Brazil it also meant that already enslaved people’s work force was going to be used in African territories in order to produce products that were crucial for the ever rising demand of raw material in industrial countries. 7 The so-called Kongo-conference took place in Berlin in 1884 and participants included representatives of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, Spain, United States, France, United Kingdom, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Sweden-Norway and Ottoman Empire. 2 Soroor Notash, Mouna Abdelkadous and Mauro Sirotnjak April 2020 forces in WWII and the capitulation of Italy in 1943 that led to the renouncing of colonial lands, the Italian colonial adventure in Africa was neither properly addressed in global narration of history, nor in the frame of Republican Italy after 1946, resulting the colonial history falling into national amnesia. 3. Inherited amnesia In 2017 a large part of the city centre of Asmara was listed as UNESCO heritage, the description of its authenticity being: “Asmara’s combination of innovative town planning and modernist architecture in an African context represents important and early developmental phases of town planning and architectural modernism that are still fully reflected in its layout, urban character and architecture.” 8 The relation between modernisation and colonisation is not questioned in UNESCO’s motivation, although it is the main reason why this architecture is present in the city. We visited buildings constructed during the Italian colonial occupation between 1893 and 1941 in Asmara, some of which were built under the fascist period (1922-1941). Citing the criteria: “The site has also preserved its historical, cultural, functional and architectural integrity with its elements largely intact and generally in relatively acceptable condition,” it is admitted