60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

contextualising violence in colonial africa 63
eases and the high mortality among central Africa labourers, attributing
them to a natural disposition rather than to working conditions
(Packard 1993). Labour recruitment by private enterprises mirrored
a similar strategy. Somali seafarers, for instance, were deemed to be
particularly suitable to work in the hot and humid engine rooms under
deck (Ewald 2000: 85). The French Popular Front government
resorted to ‘communal labour’ in colonies (in excess of what International
Labour Offi ce regulations permitted), arguing that without
it Africans would be denied the fruits of progress (Cooper 1996: 88,
ILO 1935). The views on Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia also changed in
context. For instance, engaging both with debates about Africa’s role
in European peace and Soviet doctrine, the assessment by the French
Communist Party shifted: from the conviction that Ethiopia was the
victim of imperialism; to views that the invasion was a stepping stone
to world revolution; a matter of solidarity with Italian workers; or
that it had to be approved of simply because it put an end to Ethiopian
feudalism (Santamaria 2002: 40, 49-51).
It is diffi cult to generalise about development doctrines in relation to
the articulation and methods of violence since these followed dynamics
of their own. In some cases, though, violence was directly related
to economic purpose. How to coerce labour was primarily a function
of what to coerce it for, even if the methods used also bore out colonial
assumptions about the engineering of social relations in Africa. Resistance,
too, was sometimes a direct response to production methods,
land-holding patterns, resettlement schemes and the like. As coercion
met with resistance, and African labour movements invoked standards
used in the imperial centre, oppressive colonial practices could
become impeded (Cooper 1996). However, such schemes could also
become less expedient simply because they failed to be competitive in
export markets, as was the case with Britain’s state-induced colonial
development in the late 1940s.
As for the conduct of colonial war and counter-insurgency methods,
these would need to be contextualised, as warfare generally, in
terms of factors such as technological innovation and the available logistics,
techniques and means. It has been argued, for instance, that
Italy might not have had the resources to attack Ethiopia if oil sanctions
had been imposed (Ristuccia 2000). The Ethiopian war also
put heavy pressure on Italy’s foreign currency reserves, and prompted
the devaluation of the lira (Legnani 1985: 28-29). However, it is also
assumed that even the limited economic sanctions imposed by the
League of Nations in 1935 did give fascism a boost across the Italian
political spectrum (Toniolo 1980: 282).