ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the concept of decolonisation itself: the process of transferring power, often to ‘strong men’ or charismatic leaders; the controversial issue of immigration, best symbolised perhaps by Enoch Powell’s exclamation in 1968 that mass incursion of dependent peoples would lead to ‘rivers of blood’; and the comprehensive study of memory, which becomes a common theme in reassessing the relationship between past and present. The Italian colonial empire was mainly a casualty of the Second World War, though with Italian Somaliland as one of the exceptions. Giuseppe Finaldi makes clear that the Mogadishu massacre of January 1948 was devastating to the Somali population. When news reached Mogadishu (the capital) that the UN General Assembly was discussing the possibility of re-establishing the Italian administration, violent riots broke out leading to a battle ‘with bullets, arrows, broken bottles and knives’.
