Reluctant Decolonisation: Italian Secret Activities in the Horn of Africa 1947-1953,

The first aim of this paper is to focus on the strategies that the Italian Ministry of Colonies (Ministero dell’Africa Italiana, MAI) put into place in order to shape Eritrean nationalism. It does not address the complex relations between the MAI and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that arose from the fact that colonial issues were taken over by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs after the Italian expulsion from Africa in 1941. The second aim is to reconstruct the building blocks of Eritrean nationalism as they were articulated during the period being examined. This is necessary insofar as the concepts of nation and nationalism are still fluid and in the process of either transformation or consolidation. The third aim is to assess how the nationalist discourse of the 1940s was selectively utilized by nationalist historians in the late 1980s and 1990s. As nationalism deals with the construction or reconstruction of an imagined community, a selective memory of the past is an essential ingredien