Seminar – “Fascist Italy’s Education Campaign for Ethiopia and its Unexpected Consequences, 1932-1938”
Seminar – “Fascist Italy’s Education Campaign for Ethiopia and its Unexpected Consequences, 1932-1938”
By Caterina Scalvedi
Friday 16th May, 2 PM
At CFEE Library Berhanu Abebe, 50m before the entrance of Jan Meda
Biography
Caterina Scalvedi is a historian of Italian colonialism in Africa. Beginning in August, she will be EU Marie Skłodowska Curie European Postdoctoral Fellow at the Free University of Berlin. Previously, she held visiting positions at Indiana University Bloomington and Wake Forest University, and, during her PhD (completed at the University of Illinois Chicago in 2023) she spent a semester as chercheure invitée at the Université Paris Descartes. Her presentation at the CFEE will focus on chapter 5 of her first book project “Subjects of Empire: Colonial Education and Imperial Crisis in Italian Africa, 1890-1960.”
Summary

This image is a propagandistic advertisement in an Italian colonial paper, published during the second Italo-Ethiopian war. “We and the Others. Educational Colonization.” L’azione coloniale, 5-6 June 1936, 3.
This talk explores fascist Italy’s political use of education to prepare the ground for and legitimize the aggressive military campaign against Ethiopia in the mid-1930s. In the years leading to the war, Italian ministers to Ethiopia mobilized primary schools in rural Ethiopia to infiltrate (or, as they said, “peacefully penetrate”) and propagandize pro-Italian attitudes among Ethiopian youth.
Within the same strategy, and in competition with French and British initiatives, the Italian state also offered fellowships for Ethiopian students who wished to attend secondary schools and universities in Italy. Yet, when Mikael Tessemma, one of the awardees, wrote a controversial doctoral thesis on the political relations between Italy and Ethiopia at the University of Rome, Italian authorities realized that their financial effort aiming to co-opt Ethiopian elites via education not only did not pay out, but created trouble.
Still, during and after the war, Mussolini unleashed diplomacy and the press to consolidate the image of Italy as a legitimate, good, and avant-garde colonizer among the most various audiences: African, European, and Middle Eastern. Carefully instructed by the Italian state, journalists depicted Italian schools in Ethiopia as “scientifically” planned and “adapted” to the student needs — both being requirements of empire-building on the international scene.
Fascist Italy’s education-centered propaganda had proved so powerful that it pushed teachers and students from the Arabic world to personally overwhelm Mussolini with myriad letters asking to teach at Italian schools in Ethiopia — another unforeseen outcome that worried officials from Rome to Addis Ababa.
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Secrétaire Scientifique (12 mai 2025). Seminar – “Fascist Italy’s Education Campaign for Ethiopia and its Unexpected Consequences, 1932-1938” UN ŒIL SUR LA CORNE / AN EYE ON THE HORN. Consulté le 16 janvier 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/13wkq




