(This takes 4⅔–6⅓ minutes to read.)

The first folder mentions Francesca, who moved to Benghazi in January 1927 with her mother, husband, and five children.⁹ Shortly after their arrival, for reasons related to domestic violence, the couple filed a request for consensual separation with the Benghazi regional tribunal and obtained it relatively quickly.

As a separated woman in the colony, Francesca was instantly subjected to strict surveillance by the colonial police, which resulted in a report sent to the Governorate of Cyrenaica on August 25, 1928:

Francesca, legally separated from her husband, conducts a notoriously marital life with Abdel. She gives herself to Italian, Jewish, and indigenous men in his absence. Some time ago, Francesca went to a shoe store where the mentioned Abdel bought her a present, and she was heard explicitly stating her affection for him. In another instance, she accompanied Abdel to a friend’s wedding. […] Many metropolitans who happened to be there strongly criticized her behavior on this occasion. […] This report is intended to depict Francesca’s moral conduct, who deserves some punishment.¹⁰

In this quote, we see that some [Fascist] settlers saw Francesca behaving ‘immorally’ in the company of a local man, leading the police to suspect that she might be engaged in a ‘marital relationship’ with him. Settlers’ interest in it represents a critical mechanism of informal social control amounting to an indirect regulation of non-acceptable intimacies.

As argued by Barrera (2002, 335) for the Eritrean context, it suggests the existence of ‘a common colonial ethos, and [that] by and large settlers did not need the colonial government — or even less the central government from Rome — to tell them how to run their sexual lives without endangering racial hierarchies.’

It is also relevant to underline how the police accused Francesca of prostitution — echoing the early-twentieth-century widespread assumption that white women in relationships with racialized men were either sexually deviant or prostitutes (see, e.g., Bland 2005) — and, therefore, worthy of punishment and expulsion from the city:

Given the report provided by the police to this office on Francesca’s moral conduct, the undersigned Vice-Governor learned that the woman in question had behaved immorally for a metropolitan citizen, as she is engaged in a marital relationship with the native Abdel. She did not even have the decency to hide her affair from the public. […] This government rules that Francesca, for reasons related to prestige and morality [my emphasis], shall be swiftly expelled from the colony and repatriated to her metropolitan city of origin.¹¹

The mentions of prestige and morality should be understood here as a will to both enforce public order and proper morality in the city by punishing a woman guilty of adultery and to demarcate racial boundaries. As I argued elsewhere (Tarchi 2021), morality was never invoked in the [protofascist] presence in Libya for cases of mabruchismo involving Italian men and Libyan women.

While the Italian population was low in numbers and comprised mainly of military males, racial purity was not perceived to be in danger, and therefore issues of morality were not raised, because of the military need for sex in the colonies. As the colony transitioned to a settler-colonial space with more Italian women, the biopolitical stakes of maintaining colonial boundaries became more pressing, and morality and prestige became a primary source of concern for the colonial state.

[…]

The second instance of an Italian woman in colonial Benghazi who defied the standards of ‘morality,’ or racial ‘purity,’ is Gabriella’s.¹³ She first arrived in 1928 with four children to join her husband, who had moved to the colony in 1926. Two years after her arrival, her presence started arousing suspicions in Benghazi’s colonial police ranks, as testified by this 1933 document, written by the Vice-Governor of Cyrenaica Rodolfo Graziani himself:

The aforementioned metropolitan citizen engaged in an intimate relationship with the Arab Muhammad, a driver, with whom she was even seen strolling around in a carriage through the streets of this city. An investigation started, but seeing that trouble was brewing, the woman fled the colony with her children in February 1930, leaving her husband behind.

In November of the same year, she reappeared in the city, and even if the police warned her about adopting a better moral standard, she started seeing Muhammad again. They were the cause of great concern for the city administration as Gabriella and Muhammad exploded in fits of jealousy on more than one occasion, mainly since Muhammad had chosen an Arab mistress alongside her.

The police intervention was necessary, and the husband of Gabriella was consequentially reprimanded and warned that if he did not restrain his wife, she would be expelled from the city. Only then did Gabriella’s husband suggest that she depart immediately. Given all the outlined circumstances, this government suggests that the Ministry of Colonies never allows the woman back in the colony again.’¹⁴

[…]

The [Fascist] colonial state’s urgency to enforce stricter control over the separation of the ‘indigenous’ from the newly arrived [Fascist] settlers appears particularly evident in the 1932 master plan for the extension of the city:

Since it is necessary to avoid too great of an expense for the Municipal administration, it is necessary to circumscribe the construction of infrastructure to the Italian quarters, as the indigenous habits do not make it necessary to implement new ones in the native’s quarters. […] The newly arrived Italian settlers need to be encouraged to build their property in the assigned lots and abandon the indigenous neighborhoods they have too often dwelled, creating reproachful promiscuity with the indigenous element. To this end, we have tried to make clear that this new masterplan attempts to separate, as strictly as possible, the indigenous part of the city from the one that is or should be inhabited by the metropolitans.¹⁷

This report shows how infrastructures were part of a racializing logic, with ‘natives’ seen as not needing them due to ‘their habits,’ and also that [Fascists] had initiated a claim for the spatial expansion of the settler community. The racial segregation of the city went hand in hand with the amelioration of the settler areas of the city to claim its space as inherently belonging to the ‘civilized’ settlers and not the racialized Libyans.

Moreover, the report’s reference to ‘reproachful promiscuity’ seems extremely important to the urban development that the Fascist political elites envisioned for Benghazi. On more than one occasion, they reinforced the absolute need to keep the new [Fascists] settlers separated from the ‘indigenous element.’

The importance of this excerpt is thus twofold. On the one hand, it informs us that, as the stories of Francesca and Gabriella testify, Italians had already mixed in Arab neighborhoods, disproving the notion that ‘the Arab population itself was very isolated’ (Pergher 2017, 197). On the other hand, it shows the Fascist administrators’ increasing anxiety for the racial promiscuity that physical proximity between colonizers and colonized could lead to.