Tilly Lyons, a PhD student in Italian and History, gives a brief overview of the history of Africans in Italy between 1922 and 1945. In this episode, she contextualises the discursive landscape in which they found themselves in a colonial time when anti-Black propaganda was rife and discusses two case studies from the Ministry for Foreign Affairs archives in Rome.

Primary Sources:

‘Anna and Aden Bin Mohamed’, Ministero Africa Italiana vol. I 1857-1939, Posizione 35/9, Archivio Storico del Ministero degli Affari Esteri.

‘Osman Rorá’, Ministero Africa Italiana vol. I 1857-1939, Posizione 35/9, Archivio Storico del Ministero degli Affari Esteri.

Lidio Cipriani, Per un censimento delle genti di colore residenti in Italia, Ministero Africa Italiana Gabinetto Archivio Segreto 1925 – 1942, busta 70, Archivio Storico del Ministero degli Affari Esteri.

Secondary Sources:

Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2019).

Margherita Sarfatti & Brian Sullivan, My Fault: Mussolini As I Knew Him, Enigma Books, 2013.

Alberto Sbacchi, ‘Italy and the Treatment of the Ethiopian Aristocracy, 1937-1940’, The International Journal of African Historical Studies 10(2) (1977), 209-241.