LA DUCE VITA
Julian Glover visits Africa's newest state to find its inhabitants surprisingly nostalgic for the days of Mussolini's occupation
Asmara THOUGH the Italian army surrendered to the British long ago at Keren in 1941, and though independent Eritrea has just crawled out from 50 years under an odious Ethiopian dictatorship, and though the busts of Mussolini are almost all gone (a marble plaque survives in the cathedral), and though the handmade shoes are these days made of village-tanned leather, Asmara, the city's capital, is still a perfect little Torino dell'orientale, a sunny playland of Fifties Fiat Cinquecento taxis, Gaggia espresso machines and prewar streamlined Agip fuel stations. The beer bottles only have labels when there is glue to spare, and for the moment there is none; but the caps are stamped with the name of the brewery's Italian founder, Mellotti — and Signora Mellotti, pushing 80, keeps up the family villa. Most of the Italians have left (there were once 90,000), but their style survives in today's Asmarinas, tall, dusky-skinned fighters whose elegant dress belies their country's position at the foot of the UN's GDP tables. They drink double macchiato, made with EU food-aid powdered milk. The red, green and white tricolour flies above the bougainvillea in the courtyard of the Casa d'Italia, and when the Italian President flew in from Rome on a visit, every ex-free- dom fighter wanted tickets to the recep- tion. Even now the street kids shout `Italiano' at white faces and — another Italian legacy — their heroes are the black champion cyclists who pant their way through Eritrea's 1,000-metre mountain passes on the latest-model titanium cycles from Europe.
Between 1921 and 1940, Mussolini's Roman empire soaked up men, machines and money, dwarfing investment in the rest of European-run Africa. Eritrea was II Duce's tropical capital, an imperium in the hills 60 miles from and two miles above the baking, grit-blasted Red Sea coast.
Now the British Library stores the yel- lowed pamphlets which in the 1930s seduced settlers from peasant farms in Cal- abria, Tuscany and the Po valley with the promise of a better, bourgeois life in Africa. There are adverts for the Gran Caffe Ettore Merlo on Piazza Martini (with `gelateria' and `pasticceria'); for clothes for `signora e bambino' at Sebastiano Parisi; and for the Hotel Villa Hamasien 'con tutto it conforto moderno'. On winter weekends the smart set decamped to Mas- sawa on the coast, where they wore white, raced skiffs round coral reefs and retired to the Red Sea Hotel for Campari. A little art nouveau opera house provided touring Rossini, but art deco was the house style of Italian fascism and Mussolini's 'Robot' drone-workers turned the centre of Asmara into an Italianate Miami South Beach in Africa.
It is all still there, in Africa's newest state. Ethiopia acceded to the inevitable and quit in 1993. A few brave architectural students have made it from Europe to photograph the art deco, but tourists are in the main absent. The wealthy retirees who now swarm around the monuments over the border in Ethiopia rarely cross into Eritrea and the country isn't yet in a backpacker's guidebook. Most of the whites are foreign aid workers, mainly on tax-free NGO contracts, driving suspi- ciously new and unmuddy Toyota Land- cruisers.
When I was there, the expats were away. With two friends, I was the only non- Eritrean to call at Asmara's Cinema Impero. Commanding Liberation Avenue, a shady route that bisects the capital and is lined with cafe bars and perfume shops, whose dusty stock lingers from the Fifties, the Impero is as proud a pre-war mod- ernist statement as can be found anywhere in Britain.
After decades under a 7 p.m. curfew, Asmara's cinemas are a little behind with foreign films. The Battle of the Bulge was about to start, 33 years after its British pre- miere (a delay which would bring Titanic to Eritrea in about 2030). As a paean to the effectiveness of the tank in modern warfare, the film at least offered the Prospect of an informed audience, for Eritrea lost 150,000 inhabitants in a 30- year civil war. Tanks must be to Eritreans what madeleines were to Proust. Every set- tlement worth the name was shelled by tanks at some point. The Eritrean People's Liberation Front captured enough tanks to outgun the army of the mad despot Mengistu, but many EPLF fighters were baked alive as their machines were blasted by Soviet MiG jets. The wreckage can be seen by the side of every road. To watch The Battle of the Bulge in Eritrea was rather like seeing Dr Dolittle in the compa- ny of zoo-keepers. Tickets to the film cost two, six and eight nakfa — one nakfa is about eight pence. We bought two-nakfa seats in the balcony and climbed a white staircase of locally cut marble into the gods. There was no informed audience. In fact, it seemed there was no audience at all. We crawled along a vast aisle of black, hinged, wooden seats and settled in the gloom. The projection box clicked behind us. A couple walked in and sat down. I could just about discern one or two more customers in the stalls; 12 people in an auditorium rather bigger than that of another Empire cinema, Leicester Square. Counting the rows down below I gave up at 25 — and they were 30 or 40 deep. ROOM for 2,500, we speculated. Before the screen was an elaborate lectern; around, above and below was a gallery's-worth of classical figures, cast in a dusty white. A crouched, naked man wait- ed, discus in hand, for an Olympiad. Oth- ers were garlanded in laurels, a celebration of Roman youth put up shortly before the fascist ideal turned out to be rather less durable than the plaster of Paris statuary it inspired. The cinema had been erected as a setting in which to flaunt Mussolini's propaganda films where, barrel-chested, he exhorted the bronzed youth of Italy to build a new Roman empire. Musso's pompous stance before the crowds, palm aloft, like a smug hamster with cheeks full of food, looks ridiculous today. All most remember of the man is that he made the trains run on time and that his carcase was hung ignominiously, head-down, in central Milan, next to that of his mistress. But his blackshirts once impressed rather more than Hitler's Bavarian posturing. `So great a man . . . so wise a ruler,' said Winston Churchill in 1935. 'If I had been Italian, I should have been on Mussolini's side 15 years ago,' he added later.
There were no advertisements before The Battle of the Bulge. For who would have advertised? ('We were Marxists when we took power,' one former EPLF fighter told me, 'but when we captured Asmara we couldn't find anything to nationalise. Now we have become capital- ists.') No ads, and not much of an audi- ence, but the film ran for three hours nonetheless. Two Eritreans walked out when Colonel Hessler, a crazed Nazi tank commander, machine-gunned a bunch of apple-pie American prisoners. In the stalls, a wooden bench banged as it flipped back. The next member of the audience fled as Hessler's tanks turned on the Yanks, the last couple as artillery crashed down on a French village. Holly- wood's glossy take on tank warfare was tactless entertainment in a country where most people had seen the real thing.
Travel can produce some odd feelings, but sitting at lunchtime in an antique and empty African cinema watching a period war film in a nation still on a high from finding peace, the sense of dislocation was more than usually intense. We sniggered — a response, I suppose, to the weirdness of it all. If that seems rude, then it was an unwitnessed discourtesy: there was no one else left at the end to complain.
Here's how we get out of the kiddy jail.'
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