Madamato: Italian Men, Eritrean Women — Race, Intimacy and Power in Colonial Eritrea

Madamato: Italian Men, Eritrean Women — Race, Intimacy and Power in Colonial Eritrea

Between 1885 and 1941, relationships between Italian men and Eritrean women became deeply entangled with the construction of race, power and colonial rule in Eritrea.

Drawing on the research of historian Giulia Barrera, this episode examines madamato, interracial relationships and the unequal domestic arrangements that developed during Italian colonial rule. Far from existing outside the colonial system, these relationships reveal how intimacy itself could become a site where racial hierarchy was created, negotiated and enforced.

During the early military occupation, Italian officers openly lived with Eritrean women, sometimes using the resources and personnel of the colonial army to support these arrangements. The episode explores how local practices such as demoz were appropriated by Italian men while the protections and obligations traditionally attached to them could be stripped away.

As Italian settlement expanded, racial boundaries were increasingly maintained through everyday mechanisms: gossip, reputation, social pressure and the policing of relationships between colonizer and colonized. Eritrean women nevertheless exercised agency within these structures, navigating colonial institutions, economic necessity, family expectations and relationships that could last for years and produce children.

But the consequences were profoundly unequal. Italian men could leave Eritrea and their families behind with few consequences, while Eritrean women and mixed-race children could face poverty, stigma and uncertain legal status. Questions of paternity, recognition and belonging therefore became central to the colonial racial order.

With the rise of Fascism and the invasion of Ethiopia, these contradictions became increasingly intolerable to a regime obsessed with racial separation. What had once been tolerated, and at times effectively incorporated into colonial military life, was transformed into a threat to the imagined racial purity of the Italian empire. By 1937, intimate relationships between Italian citizens and colonial subjects were explicitly criminalized.

Through personal stories, colonial records and changing legislation, this episode traces the transformation from the unstable military frontier of the 1880s to the rigid racial regime of Fascist rule.

It is a history in which intimacy and exploitation, agency and inequality, private relationships and state power existed simultaneously — challenging the enduring myth of the supposedly “friendly” Italian colonizer.

#Eritrea #EritreanHistory #Madamato #ColonialEritrea #ItalianColonialism #ColonialHistory #AfricanHistory #Asmara #HistoryPodcast