Somali workers received no trial or investigation under Italian colonial justice.

Evidence

As a teenager, Osman keenly felt for the Somali plantation workers and the humiliation they faced under Italian rule. He and one of his Somali friends quit working on a plantation as a result of a conflict they had with white workers and their unfairness. The employer accused the two Somalis of stealing money, claiming that their salaries could not support the boys’ standard of living. The police rounded up the two in Merka without investigating the employer’s accusation. The white man’s justice was such that the two boys were kept in prison for fifteen days without trial. When the resident commissioner, De Rege, saw them, Osman vigorously contested the accusation. The officer slapped Osman for being too talkative in his self-defense and for challenging colonial superiority. The accepted norm among the Italians was that any one of them could attack the perpetrator of such a “crime.” — Abdi Ismail Samatar, Africa’s First Democrats, 141

Categorization

• XREF: Concrete example that later helps explain Osman’s anticolonial politics and the origins of Somalia’s independence movement.