Gender and Migration in Italy

A Multilayered Perspective

Elisa Olivito, Elisa Olivito

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781134803132
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Public Law
• Index: Law

Recent migratory flows to Europe have brought about considerable changes in many countries. Italy in particular offers a unique point of view, since it is possible to observe not only the way migration has changed specific features of the country, but also how it is intertwined with gender relations. Considering both the type of migration that has affected Italy and the consequent measures adopted by the Government, a variety of distinctive elements may be seen. By providing a broad and more complete picture of the Italian perspective on gender and migration, this book makes a valuable contribution to the wider debate. The contributions consider the problematic linkage between gender and migration, as well as analyse particular aspects including Italian colonial past, domestic work, self-determination, access to social services, second-generation migrant women, family law, multiculturalism and religious symbols. Taking an empirical and theoretical approach, the volume underlines both the multifaceted problems affecting migrant women in Italy and the way in which questions raised in other countries are introduced and redefined by Italian scholarship. The book presents a valuable resource for researchers, academics and policy-makers working in the areas of migration and gender studies.

PART I:

Migrant Women and Social Mobility in a Historical Perspective

Chapter 1

The ‘Worker Nuns of Nigrizia’: The Pious Mothers of Nigrizia between Italy and Africa during the Imperial Age (1872–1950)

Francesca Di Pasquale and Chiara Giorgi¹

Introduction

From 1872, when the Comboni women’s institution was established, and all throughout the period of the European colonial occupations of Africa, the ‘Pious Mothers of Nigrizia’, that is, the nuns of the religious order founded by Daniele Comboni, were key players of the missionary project for the African evangelization.² According to the ambitious and, at the same time, extremely pragmatic Comboni view, women played a key role for the conversion of Nigrizia,³ fuelled by the belief that, unlike priests, nuns could fit into African society, penetrating the core of native families.

Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, within the entangled history of missions in Africa that combined evangelization with ‘civilization’ – imperialism with the hierarchization of race and gender – the history of the Comboni mission displayed very distinctive features.⁴ We can consider, for example, the primitive form of ‘inculturation’ that Comboni, in the light of the previous and mainly ruinous missionary experiences, tried to implement to spread the Catholic creed among natives (Romanato, 2003: 296). The centrality of the ‘Worker Nuns of Nigrizia’⁵ in Comboni’s plan was certainly one of the most significant features of his project. ‘Created’ by Comboni for the primary aim of devoting their lives entirely to the conversion of Nigrizia, starting in the second half of the nineteenth century, dozens of women, mainly from Italy, began journeying to Africa. In turn, some African women were involved in the missionary project from its beginning, according to the guiding principle of the Piano per la rigenerazione dell’Africa (Plan for the regeneration of Africa) by Comboni, which is ‘saving Africa with Africa’.⁶

The history of the ‘Pious Mothers of Nigrizia’ represents a fruitful perspective from which to analyse female mobility during the imperial age, and our chapter looks into their history through this specific point of view. More precisely, here we use the word mobility, on the one hand, referring to its spatial meaning, that is, to the history of migrations and exchanges between Europe and Africa, which characterized the history of the Pious Mothers. Their history was transnational indeed, not uniquely for the history of women on the move between Italy and Africa. Daniele Comboni was born in the Austro-Hungarian Lombardy-Venetia, and the Habsburg Empire was his main political and social point of reference. The Comboni mission raised funds and obtained political support mainly in that territory. Therefore, the European boundaries were the first to be crossed.

On the other hand, we aim to explore if and how the Comboni missionary activities triggered social mobility in both Italian and African nuns alike. In Comboni’s letters, the woman’s role is exalted, even astonishingly so. However, through a deeper analysis, other features also come to light, in particular his view of women. If at first it may seem far-sighted, at the same time it also included some discriminatory features. Notwithstanding the preeminent position that Comboni assigned to nuns in terms of African evangelization, on the whole in many respects it subverted the role of women, as established by European bourgeois imaginary in the second half of the nineteenth century.

As mentioned above, the Comboni female congregation admitted African women to the mission from its onset. Fortunata Quascè, from Sudan, was the first African woman in the Comboni mission to take her nun’s vows. She experienced all the tribulations characterizing the history of the first decades of the Comboni sisters in Africa, not least of which, the captivity by Mahdi ‘rebels’ during the Dervish revolt in Sudan (1882–86).⁷ During the colonial age, on the other hand, the mode of relating to African women seemed to change in accordance with the political imperatives of the Italian government and, in particular, to native African politics. Indeed, in colonial Eritrea, not until July 1939 did the first six young Eritrean women take their vows as ‘Pious Sisters of Nigrizia’. They represented the first group of ‘native novice women’ (novizie indigene).⁸ In 1942, four other Eritrean women also took their vows. In May 1946, six native nuns (including one of mixed ‘race’) joined the congregation. In the following years, the number of Eritrean women aspiring to join the mission constantly increased.

In sum, the Combonian sisters’ experience was at the centre of multiple dynamics concerning not only the question of women’s mobility between Italy and Africa and within Africa itself, but also more general themes like gender relations and the conflicts this sparked, including with those opposing missionary nuns and priests, the men who embodied colonial power and the ecclesiastical hierarchy. After Comboni’s death, the difficulty of securing any formal recognition of the congregation’s autonomy – which existed de facto across Europe and Africa – was principally due to the various kinds of resistance put up by their male counterparts. The various representatives of the male counterparts, including their highest-ranking leaders, seem to have been rather alarmed by the autonomy that a female congregation brought to the expansion of its activity beyond the central African mission initially planned for it. The fear also concerned the foundation of other European bases helping it to recruit and train personnel ready to join its African missions.

In many regards, this history requires the deployment ‘in the field’ of an analysis depsychologising and resocialising – as Judith Butler put it – the role of the Nigrizia nuns in the plan conceived by Daniele Comboni. The subjectivity of the women working in the service of this project (whether Italians or Africans) should thus be analysed in light of numerous factors and protagonists – convinced as we are that this is an important chapter in the history of gender, the history of Africa and, at the same time, the history of Italian colonialism.

‘True Women’ for Africa: The Nuns in Daniele Comboni’s Missionary Project

In terms of the results attained, that is, the number of ‘outposts’ and of Africans involved, and for the intensity of its penetration, the Comboni mission certainly achieved much more than previous missionary experiences had in the Curacy of Central Africa.⁹

Daniele Comboni first travelled to Africa in 1857 with five other missionaries of the Verona Religious Institute, founded by the priest Nicola Mazza, where Comboni himself entered the seminary. In the following decade, he travelled widely throughout Africa, as his assignment, bestowed onto him by Father Mazza, was the liberation of enslaved boys and girls. He also travelled throughout Europe as well, particularly in Germany; here he established contacts with the ‘Society of Cologne’, the humanitarian institute which became one of the main sources of funding for the Comboni missionary activities. In 1867 he wrote the first edition of the Piano per la rigenerazione dell’Africa (‘Plan for the Regeneration of Africa’), which was his project, but also his manifesto for the mission in Africa. In his plan, Daniele Comboni sought to work for Africa, availing himself of men and women capable of dealing with the massive African environmental barriers and to interact with African ‘otherness’ in a way that also proved fruitful for the evangelization project. To this end, he envisaged establishing intermediate outposts, which were later founded in Egypt, in order to allow the missionaries to gradually come into contact with the African climate and culture. The continent would have been converted and ‘civilized’ by Africans themselves; the training of native clergy and the integration of African people into the missionary project was aimed at fully penetrating the continent. Following the proposal advanced by Propaganda Fide,¹⁰ in 1872 Pope Pious IX appointed Comboni Pro-Vicar Apostolic of Central Africa. Five years later he became bishop (Romanato, 2003: 248–70).

In many respects, women were the keystone of the Comboni missionary plan: ‘A Sister of Charity in central Africa is worth three priests in Europe and this century of persecution of the Church … is the century of the catholic woman’.¹¹ According to Comboni, his mission was successful, whereas previous ones had been less so, because of the frontline involvement of the ‘omnipotent ministry of the woman bringing the Gospel and of the Sister of Charity, who is a shield, power, and a guarantee of the Missionary’s ministry’.¹² The ‘Pious Mothers of Nigrizia’ order was established in 1872, even before the Comboni Fathers order, because nuns were the key to the evangelization of Africa.¹³ In 1877, five years after the Pious Mothers were founded, the first five missionary sisters arrived in Africa; they were ‘the vanguard of the new Institution whose mission is to foster its apostolic activities in the many regions of central Africa’.¹⁴

In his view, women were not exalted by their spirituality or purity, but, instead for very concrete features, starting with their physical resilience to the African climate, which, according to Comboni, was greater in European women than in men.¹⁵ Comboni sought nuns who were like ‘soldiers’,¹⁶ ready to sacrifice themselves and even die for Africa: ‘cannon fodder’¹⁷ for the evangelization of Nigrizia, according to the crude definition of the Vicar Apostolic. They had to be ‘saints’, but without bigotry, because in Africa it is necessary to instead be tolerant.¹⁸ After all, Comboni was not predominantly a mystic or a theorist, but an extremely pragmatic man. Throughout his missionary activity he combined very innovative features with others which were a legacy of the traditionalist culture, based on a ‘granitic faith’ that was not at all undermined by the Age of Enlightenment (Romanato, 2003: 8, 367).

In the Piano, the position of women originated from a utilitarian view of their contribution to the mission, rather than aiming at women’s liberation or at the subversion of the gender dynamics that defined women’s roles in nineteenth-century Europe. Comboni sought ‘instruments’ for the conversion of Nigrizia and looked for ‘true women’, that is, first of all educated but also ‘trustworthy, handsome and judicious’¹⁹ women, and, if possible, with a handsome dowry. The woman with all of these qualities was the ideal candidate for the entrance enrolment in the Pious Mothers, even if she were an illegitimate child, who were usually not admitted to the mission: as Comboni explained ‘every rule is subject to exceptions … because suckers do not go to heaven’, expressing frankly the pragmatism mentioned above.²⁰ On the other hand, admittance to the mission was forbidden for the ‘lowly female servants’: those who ‘came to escape starvation’, because ‘Africa will not be converted by the household help from Verona’.²¹

According to Comboni, the presence in Africa of the Pious Mothers was an instrument for the ‘civilization’ of the ‘barbaric’ populations and the ‘infidels’, and this idea originated, first of all, from his view of the condition of ‘ignominy’ of the African women, in particular for those living among Islamic populations, where they were regarded ‘only as a domestic tool, an instrument of immorality’.²² Taking into account the subjection of women, but also the practice of slavery, Comboni’s view of Islam was not exempt from intolerance, denoting disregard and rejection of the populations which embraced Muslim faith. On the whole, if, on the one hand his judgment of African populations was seemingly advanced, on the other hand it resulted from an extremely stern culture according to which the territories of ‘infidels’ were marked by backwardness and immorality, whereas conversion to Christianity meant civilization. After all, in the European colonial culture, women’s conditions among natives were one of the main cultural markers indicating the gap between colonists and colonized and between ‘barbarity’ and ‘civilization’ (Levine, 2004; Sorgoni, 2000).

Nine years after founding the Pious Mothers, four Comboni Sisters missionaries’ outposts were already operating in Africa, and specifically in Kharthoum, el-Obeid, Gebel Delen and Malbes. The latter was a Christian village established by Comboni missionaries, modelled after the Jesuits’ Reducciones in South America and populated by families trained by the mission to live in a Christian way.²³ The presence of the nuns in this village, which was the most ‘advanced’ and, at the same time, violent experiment with African populations by Comboni missions, further demonstrates Comboni’s absolute faith in the evangelizing capabilities of the Pious Mothers.²⁴ His project to evangelize Africa through women originated from his understanding that only women could fully penetrate African society, through their female African counterpart, and, thus, instil the first seeds for conversion. In his Piano, the Corpo delle giovanette negre (‘Corps of the young black women’) was made up of female preceptors, to educate in the Catholic religion ‘the dissolute female African society’, of ‘expert teachers and family women, which have to promote female education in reading, writing, arithmetic, spinning, sewing, weaving, taking care of the sick, as well as practicing all the more practical female skills for central Nigrizia’.²⁵ Finally, among those not pursuing marriage, the ‘Virgins of Charity’ would have been selected to constitute ‘the most distinguished phalanx of the women’s Corps whose mission it...