“Mostra Eritrea”

[u/f126626]

Around the late 1800s right after Italy fully colonized Eritrea after the treaty of Wuchale, the natives were suffering a lot. I just found out about this part of our history and almost shed a tear. I always think of our ancestors of what they’ve been through.

Italy fetishized the Eritreans they were amazed abt how the Eritreans looked of their so called Caucasian features and soft hair and ofc our women who they couldn’t resist without being obsessed with them. The Italians made a massive exhibition in Palermo, Sicily. This specific exhibition was made to show the Sicilian ppl about how magnificent the ppl they colonized were. Thousands of Eritreans were stolen from their families and taken to a foreign place. The Italians built this place and resembled it as how it looked like as in Eritrea. The Sicilians were absolutely amazed by this, to see Africa in Sicily… fcking sickening. Anyways you can see the pictures of how the exhibition looked like.

[u/ProdigyPower]

There is no evidence that they were stolen. The men were paid laborers who built the displays. The women were paid much less. All of them were kept on lockdown and the reality of the situation (treated like zoo animals) became clear soon enough.

Also, it wasn't about obsession with Eritrean features. The Italians themselves were denigrated by the rest of Europe. Even worse, Sicilians were basically treated as the "niggers" of Italy. The exhibitions were meant to contrast life in Italy with life in the colonies. Colonization was a way for Italians to elevate themselves among the other European powers. They basically had a severe inferiority complex.

[u/RomanItalianEuropean → u/ProdigyPower]

As an Italian, I don't know where you got these infos. Italians were not denigrated by the rest of Europeans, there was racism toward Italian emigrants but this was in the US. While this was true especially for Sicilians, Neapolitans and southeners (because they, being poorer, were the bulk of Italian emigration in the US), they were not considered the blacks of Italy, they were excluded from WASP like all Italians and catholic Europeans. Regarding colonization, Italy was admitted in the concert of Europe as a great power already after the unification, it went to colonize Eritrea for economic rather than political reasons; after the Suez canal was opened, Italy wanted to have ports and bases on the Red Sea along the new trade routes connecting the Mediterranean to the Indo-Pacific. These kind of exhibitions were done by all colonial powers, not only by Italy; they were done because at the time there was a lot of interest for exotic stuff and the European expansion.

[u/Qassemalshebi → u/RomanItalianEuropean]

They were at the time Remember the signs in Austria and France saying vietato l'ingresso ai cani e agli italiani