Italian farm owners whipped Somali workers while the colonial commissioner watched approvingly

Evidence

The injustice meted out to Warsame paled in comparison with the brutality Cossu visited on a Somali farmworker. The farmworker came to petition the commissioner about his Italian employer’s refusal to pay his wages. Cossu decided to visit the plantation and investigate the problem. He took Osman and the worker with him. When they reached the site, the plantation owner, Peraglia, claimed the worker had not followed the owner’s instruction in performing the task. When the employee contested the owner’s claim, Peraglia started whipping the worker. Instead of interceding on the poor man’s behalf, Cusso watched the odious affair and then heaped more abuse on him. Cusso’s humiliation of Somalis was not limited to such instances. The commissioner often abused Somalis in the streets and sometimes called the local police to publicly flog them. — Abdi Ismail Samatar, Africa’s First Democrats, 155

Categorization

• XREF: Feeds the narrative of how colonial labor exploitation shaped Somali political consciousness in the independence generation.