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94 4 w฀฀ Violated Domesticity in Italian East Africa, 1937–40 martina salvante On 5 October 1938 the young Ethiopian Destà Agos asked for police intervention in her home against the Italian Giovanni Spano, who, she claimed, had hit her. According to police testimonies during the proceeding, the woman had already denounced the man in the previous days for mistreatment. Successive police interrogations yielded evidence that the two had been having a relationship for the previous four months in spite of the fact that racially mixed unions had been prohibited by the Italian Fascist government in 1937. On this ground Giovanni Spano was brought to court. On 19 November 1938 the criminal court accused Spano of the crime of madamato, a quasi-conjugal relationship between an Italian citizen and a native woman, banned by law. Magistrates found that The psychological element [of a relation characterized by affectio maritalis] is recurrent in this case, evidence of which is not only the cohabiting customs of the couple but also the violent possessive behavior of the man, who did not want his “madama” to talk to other men, especially white men. He prohibited her from leaning out of the window overlooking the road; he gave her a dress as a present; he expected her to go to the hospital to visit him; he escaped more than once from the hospital without permission to reach her; and he beat her, because she had been forced to “sell herself” in order to get the means of subsistence.1 Taking into account the “material element”—that Agos and Spano lived together—and the above-mentioned psychological, or spiritual, element, Violated Domesticity in Italian East Africa, 1937–40 w 95 the court explained that “there could hardly be imagined a more complete form of ‘more uxorio’ cohabitation.”2 This statement indicates that, paradoxically, Spano’s abuse of Agos provided evidence of his possessiveness, which was taken as proof of his affection toward the woman. The court was not interested in the alleged physical abuses but only that these acts incriminated the defendant, showing that he had committed an offense against “the prestige of the race of superior civilization” by carrying out a relationship with a native woman. At the core of Italian Fascist policing of its racial policy in East Africa was the belief that domestic violence paradoxically proved the existence of prohibited conjugal-like relationships. According to current views, as outlined in particular by the 2005 WHO study on domestic violence, behavior such as Spano’s would be classified as “controlling behaviour” and therefore a form of domestic violence.3 My chapter therefore focuses on the role of colonial courts in defining the place of domestic violence in racially mixed unions. The courts’ action took place under the rule of the Fascist dictatorship, which was seeking to formalize its racial policies in its new African empire and to outlaw racial diversity in the metropole. definitions and interpr etati ons In another document by the World Health Organization, published in 2002, violence is classified as “an extremely diffused and complex phenomenon. Defining it is not an exact science but a matter of judgment. Notions of what is acceptable and unacceptable in terms of behaviour, and what constitutes harm, are culturally influenced, and constantly under review as values and social norms evolve.”4 To measure domestic violence at specific times in history is even more complex. At the end of the 1930s, domestic violence was a concept not yet fully developed in either social or legal worlds in Italy. Italian legislation at the time proscribed certain violent acts but evinced greater tolerance toward the behavior of the person invested with auctoritas in his dealings with “subordinates ” (women, minors, and servants) living in the same household. Patently abusive behavior was sometimes punished, but it was more often condoned in the case of the paterfamilias, according to a traditionally patriarchal set of rules.5 The situation was even more complicated in the colonial context, where the conventionally unequal relationship between men and women was compounded by differences in race and class. Studies of domestic violence should, therefore, take into account variations in family structures over time and the complexity of family configurations in different cultural and geographical contexts. In particular, families in colonial territories were often the result of interracial relationships and, thus, of intercultural interactions. Reconstructing the history of domestic violence in Italian colonies is hindered by the lack of appropriate sources. Single episodes of domestic violence [3.133...

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