ERITREAN COLORISTS

Evening Star, Issue 22619, 10 April 1937, Page 21

ERITREAN COLORISTS

RACE PURITY PROBLEM ONE-THIRD HALF-CASTES The Fascist Government is now engaged in a campaign to ensure the ■racial purity of tIL Italian people m North Africa (writes the Rome correspondent of the ‘ Christian Science Monitor’). , ■ , ~ A law has been approved by tna Fascist Cabinet making it a crime ion Italians to marry natives of Italian! East Africa. The absolute necessity,: it is declared, of guaranteeing the defence of the race from the promiscuity] to which it might be subjected ut Italian East Africa in consequence pfi, the demographic colonisation that is being carried out on an increasingly, vast scale makes it opportune to provide for penalties against the Italian citizen who enters into such a relationship. • This, it is added, is meant as a warning rather than as a punitive measure, because the Fascist Governtnent rehea absolutely upon the conscience, cma dignity, and the political maturity ofl the Italians living in the territories of the Empire. . The punishment laid down in the law; is imprisonment for a period ranging between one and five years. In commenting upon this measure the Fascist Press makes it clear that the new law, is directed only against irregular; unions. There is no reference in the law to marriages between whites and natives not only because such legitimate unions were rare, but also because in regard to matrimonial matters the Italian State, as a signatory of the Lateran Treaty, accepted the law of the Roman Catholic Church. One leading Fascist newspaper, however, stated editorially that certainly the Vatican was not less anxious than the Fascist Government to preserve ip “ white” Roman Catholics their “ original spirit, which can never be that of the blacks.” It was even hinted that, if necessary, repressive measures would be taken against mixed marriages either by the State and Fascist Party against officials and holders of the party ticket, or by the police. “A PAINFUL SORE.” An article illuminating the Fascist Government’s policy concerning the purity of the Italian race has been written by Alessandro Lessona, the Minister for the Colonies, in the’Turin ‘ Stampa.’ This problem. Signor Lessona holds, is of the greatest social importance, and a timely solution should be found. He is evidently impressed by tbe statement made to bhn by an Italian missionary that, in Eritrea, Italy’s oldest African colony, which adioins Ethiopia, there were oyer 1,000 half-castes out of a total Italian white population of less than 3,500. Signor Lessona refers to the reporta on the problem of half-castes submitted in 1923 to the Brussels International Colonial Institute by the Dutch, French, Belgian, and Portuguese delegates. The general tendency of half-castes has hitherto been neither to be raised to the European status of the_father, or to be reabsorbed in the native population. The creation of a special class of halfcastes “ with fixed characteristics,”, which had been looked upon by soma people as a useful link, was impracticable, Signor Lessona concluded# There was universal agreement that a half-caste population represented a painful sore; it was a nursery of unhappy beings who had no proper place, and were a trouble to both races, a source of restlessness, and”an element of weakness in the colonial structure. Signor Lessona concluded his article by saying that the near future would inevitably bring with it a flourishing family colonisation in Italian East Africa on the vast scale rendered possible by Italy’s exuberant population, by the old traditions of health, solidarity, and fecundity which characterised Italian families, and by the favourable conditions that were being created for the settlers. This Signor Lessona said, would not be conv promised.