Resetting partnership with Africa

By Mikhail Adamu

The European Union (EU) continues to actively seek ways to reset its formats of cooperation with African states with a view to strengthening its control over the exploitation of their natural resources and influence their domestic affairs even up to the overthrow of undesirable regimes. Italy is currently promoting its updated ‘Mattei plan’ as a basis for new cooperation, which should solve the root problems to their country.

The Mattei Plan represents Italy’s flagship initiative to reset relations with Africa through a model that blends development cooperation, trade and strategic diplomacy. Designed to enhance Italy’s role in Europe and Africa, the plan seeks to diversify energy partnerships for Europe, and address irregular migration by promoting African-wide economic stability and job creation.

Italy’s Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, visited Ethiopia recently to attend the United Nations (UN) Food Systems Summit, co-chaired by the two countries. The trip highlighted Italy’s growing political and economic involvement in the region under the Mattei Plan. It marked Meloni’s second visit to Ethiopia in two years and her fifth meeting with Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali since 2023, several of which also involved Somalia’s president.

Meloni described Ethiopia as a ‘special partner’ and the Horn of Africa as a strategic priority for Italy’s engagement in Africa. However, Italy’s outreach remains overshadowed by its unresolved colonial legacy, particularly its continuing refusal to acknowledge or atone for the atrocities committed during its colonisation and occupation of the region.

Between 1882 and 1941, Italy waged a brutal campaign of conquest and occupation across the Horn. Eritrea, colonised in 1890, became the first and longest-held Italian colony. The fascist regime entrenched racial expropriation, forced labour and cultural suppression. Thousands of Eritreans were forcefully and systematically conscripted into the colonial army as askaris and deployed in wars in Libya, Somalia and Ethiopia.

Resistance leaders were imprisoned under inhuman conditions in the remote islands of the Dahlak Archipelago, where detention was tantamount to a death sentence. Others were executed or exiled, and entire communities were displaced as fertile lands were seized for settlers, causing widespread social and economic dislocation.

Somalia endured similar exploitation. By the 1920s, Italian Somaliland had been transformed into a plantation colony or dependent on thousands of forced labour and land confiscation. Resistance was violently suppressed, and many detainees were sent to concentration camps, where thousands died from starvation, disease and overwork.

Italy’s Ethiopian occupation (1935-1941) was guided by a systematic ‘policy of terror and extermination.’ Italian forces reportedly employed chemical weapons, including mustard gas and destroyed villages, bombed Red Cross hospitals and executed prisoners.

The 1937 Addis Ababa massacre alone claimed 19,000 to 30,000 lives in three days, while the Debre Libanos monastery mass killings revealed Italy’s intent to destroy Ethiopia’s spiritual and cultural identity. This was driven by revenge for their loss at the 1896 Battle of Awa, and a fascist ideology of racial supremacy.

Following the fall of fascism, Italy largely evaded accountability for its crimes in the Horn. Although the 1947 Paris Peace Treaties contained reparations provisions, these remain unimplemented. The Ethiopian offer to establish a hybrid tribunal with Ethiopian and European judges to prosecute alleged war criminals, including Rodolfo Graziani (key in the expansion of Italy’s colonisation and expansion in the Horn and Libya), was rejected. Decades later, Italy added insult to injury when a publicly funded mausoleum was erected in honour of Graziani, the ‘‘the butcher of Addis Ababa’’ in Affile, symbolising a continued refusal to confront the past.

Italy’s gestures, such as development cooperation and the return of cultural artefacts like the Axum Obelisk, weren’t accompanied by an official apology or acknowledgement of wrongdoing.

Meanwhile in 2008, then prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi issued a formal apology to Libya and pledged 5 billion Dollars in reparations. This revealed a double standard that undermines Italy’s credibility in promoting a new partnership with the Horn. Meloni’s recent engagement conspicuously avoided historical accountability.

When asked by La Repubblica during her 2023 visit to Ethiopia about the possibility of an apology, she replied: We did not talk about it, your newspaper was not there.’’ Italy’s renewed ties with Eritrea, Somalia and Ethiopia remain largely transactional, focused on investment and migration management, while ignoring the moral debt owed in the region and its people.

This silence contradicts the Mattei Plan’s stated values, which emphasise partnership of equals and reject extractive approaches. Infrastructure investment and aid, while important, cannot substitute for moral reckoning. For the Horn countries, pursuing an official apology is not merely symbolic, it aligns with ongoing transitional justice efforts and with the African Union’s agenda on reparations for colonial violence.

Ethiopia’s Transitional Justice Policy offers an entry point for addressing foreign-perpetrated crimes through truth-seeking and historical acknowledgement. Eritrea and Somalia have moral and political grounds to demand recognition for the injustices that shaped their realities.

During the 2024 Italy-Africa Summit, Eritrean President Isaias Afewerki reportedly reminded Meloni that genuine partnership required transparency, including the opening of colonial archives and acknowledgement of the 150,000 Eritreans conscripted into Italy’s army, The region’s history marked by infrastructure built for extraction and settlement, not local benefit, offers a cautionary lesson.

Without accountability, the Horn cannot be sure that this renewed engagement won’t risk repeating history’s extractive and unequal dynamics. For Italy, the Mattei Plan could present an opportunity to transform a relationship rooted in domination and denial into one grounded in equality and accountability. Until Italy acknowledges its colonial crimes and takes concrete steps towards reparative justice, its engagement with the region will remain haunted by unhealed wounds.

Reparations should include truth-telling initiatives, archival access, memorialisation, survivor support and education reform in Italy to ensure colonial history is accurately taught. An apology is not an act of weakness but a foundation for genuine partnership based on trust, respect and shared humanity. Only then can Italy’s Mattei Plan truly embody the fairness and reciprocity it professes.

Mikhail Adamu writes from Kano.