The Century of Angelo Del Boca, uncompromising historian of contemporary Italy

Cover of the book "Italiani, brava gente?"

by Angelo Del Boca.

© Biblioteca Neri Pozza

Text by: Olivier Favier

5 mins

Partisan, reporter, independent historian, the Italian Angelo Del Boca died on Tuesday July 6, 2021, in Turin, at the age of 96.

For decades he had opened up and invigorated the field of Italian postcolonial studies. 

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He was “

the irregular child of his time

” wrote about him the historian of fascism Mimmo Franzinelli at the news of his disappearance, on July 6, 2021, in Turin, at the age of 96 years.

Born in 1925 in Novara in Piedmont, Angelo Del Boca was forcibly recruited into the troops of the Italian Social Republic, a puppet fascist state created in September 1943 in Lombardy after the Italian armistice with the Allies.

Sent to Germany in a training camp, he deserted on his return and joined the Resistance in October 1944. Lieutenant Angelo chose a partisan formation of Giustizia e Libertà, close to the Action Party which brought together a large part of the anti-fascists of the first hour, after a negative experience with the Communist resistance fighters.

Reporter, socialist and visionary

After the war he joined the socialists of the PSIUP, became editor-in-chief of the weekly

Il lavoratore

in his hometown of Novara, in Piedmont, before working for

La Gazzetta del popolo

and

Il giorno.

This life as a great reporter makes him maintain a lucid and close relationship with the history of his time. It is from there that he draws the strength to write two important biographies on two capital and controversial contemporaries, the Negus Halié Selassié and Mouammar Gadhafi.

Despite the uncompromising portrait he paints of the latter, in 2011 he condemned the Western intervention in Libya, seeing in the overthrow of the dictator an open door for Islamist groups, a risk of deep destabilization of the Sahel region with the scattering of the Libyan military arsenal and what he calls a probable “

somalisation

” of the country, in other words the loss of its unity and its political identity.

His socialist companionship ended in 1981 when he broke with the liberal line and the figure of Bettino Craxi.

Continued twelve years later in “Operation Clean Hands”, the latter ended his life in exile in Tunisia, leaving a bloodless party and a country soon ruled by his ex-communications advisor, Silvio Berlusconi.

The master of Italian postcolonial studies

Angelo Del Boca therefore devoted himself almost entirely to his pioneering work as an independent researcher on Italian colonialism, begun in 1965 with a book on

La guerra d'Abissinia 1935-1941

where several points, consensual today in the academic world, are then scandal, which is more when they are put forward by a non-professional historian.

Supporting documents, it indeed shows that the war to ensure the occupation of Ethiopia never ceased in six years - classical historiography reducing the event to military conquest, between 1935 and 1936. His book also testifies to the extent of the crimes committed by the Italian military, including the use of toxic gases, prohibited by international conventions, even on civilian populations.

It was not until 1996, and the public apologies of the journalist Indro Montanelli, who for a long time opposed the yet implacable demonstrations of Angelo Del Boca, for the Italian state to finally publicly recognize the use of gas in what remains one of the most brutal conquest of Western colonization in Africa.

Beyond this fight, Angelo Del Boca writes two river stories of Italian colonial history in East Africa - Eritrea, Somalia, Ethiopia - and in North Africa - from the failed colonization of Tunisia to the interminable Italian war. - Libya, its massacres, its destruction, its concentration camps which have also been hidden for a long time.

Deconstruct the myth of the easygoing Italian people

In 2005, at the age of 80, he published his master book 

Italiani, brava gente?

 where with a dizzying erudition, a vigorous pen and an irreproachable historical and moral rigor, he attacks the myth of an Italian people naturally good-natured, and therefore incapable of delivering themselves to the horrors committed by the other European nations.

From the bloody repression of brigandage in the south of the country in the years following Unity to the mass colonial massacres already mentioned, through the evocation of the incapable and bloodthirsty staffs of the First World War and genocidal tendencies fascist generals in the former Yugoslavia, the journey made by this book dates back to the point where the ironic formula of its title becomes proverbial.

In 2008, Angelo Del Boca again published his autobiography,

Il mio novecento

[My twentieth century], with this subtitle: “biography of a journalist and a rigorous intellectual”. This very Piedmontese rigor, outside any university training, but rich in an early commitment to resistance, he shares it with his contemporary Nuto Revelli then recently deceased, who was a pioneer of oral history and an excellent exegete of fascism.

By its strength and scope, the work of Angelo Del Boca not only paved the way for several generations of historians, writers, directors, who in turn faced the colonial history of the Italy, but he produced works which, several decades after their publication, remain essential.

In his fight for the truth, the historian he was has doubly written the history of his time.

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