V - Somali Unification: The Italian East African Empire

Summary

Economic and social developments in Somalia

THE LONG-DRAWN out campaigns against the Dervishes in British Somaliland, and the gradual extension of Italian rule in Somalia, left little time or resources available for economic or social improvement. In Somalia, however, from the beginning of the period of direct control, the aim was to attract settlers from the mother country and to develop colonial plantations along the Shebelle and Juba Rivers. The scheme originally proposed by Carletti (Governor, from 1906-10) envisaged the settlement of groups of Italian farmers in co-operative colonies on the fertile land. With this in view, in 1908 Carletti instructed his Resident Commissioner at Giumbo to reserve some 10,000 hectares of arable land in the Gosha region of the Shebelle. This land had formerly been cultivated for the Tuni clan by their bondsmen and serfs.

With these resources at the Government's disposal, steps were taken to attract Italian settlers to open concessions and build farms. But those who hopefully responded to the lure of a bright future in Somalia soon found their efforts seriously impeded by the difficulties of recruiting local labour, which, contrary to all expectations, proved far from easy to attract. This led the Italian Resident in the Gosha District to force people - mainly former slaves and serfs - to work on the plantations which were being opened. Despite salaries which were not low, voluntary recruits were hard to come by, and those who were induced to work for the Italian farmers had to be supervised by guards otherwise they simply stopped work or fled. This tradition of largely compulsory labour recruitment, mainly from the sedentary Bantu tribes of the riverine regions, continued throughout much of the Italian colonial period, although the conditions of service of plantation workers gradually improved, in theory at any rate, if not always in practice.

It was not, however, only labour problems which confronted the first concessionaries. Since there were no scientific studies of local conditions to guide them, the first Italian farmers had simply to follow a procedure of trial and error, which, with their lack of adequate capital or equipment, and in the absence of any serious Government support until the end of the Great War, in most cases proved disastrous.