Africa Is a Country

When Italian politicians threaten to move to Africa

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

When Italian politicians threaten to move to Africa

By
Donata Columbro

Africa is really attractive in different ways to many former Italian politicians, it seems.

The Italian center right politician, Walter Veltroni. Image by Tommaso Tani, via Flickr CC.

What would you do with old politicians who just won’t give up their seats in the Italian Parliament after too many years of service? Tell them to go to Africa. That’s what people on Twitter and Facebook suggested after Walter Veltroni, the first leader of the center-left Italian Democratic Party, confirmed that he won’t present himself as a candidate in next year’s parliamentary elections for the first time in 19 years. But the idea of traveling to Africa after his political career ends had been brought up by Veltroni himself, when in 2003 he promised during an interview on French TV that “he would leave for Africa with his wife in 2011.” Veltroni even wrote a book called Maybe God is sick: Diary of an African journey, but so far no journey to Africa has been organized by or for Walter. Yet.

News website Il Post has published a list of Veltroni’s party members who have made a fuss of retiring only to postpone that decision.

But back to the Africa excuse of Italian politicians. Africa is really attractive in different ways to many former Italian politicians. Romano Prodi, Prime Minister of Italy from 1996 to 1998 and from 2006 to 2008, has been appointed as Special Envoy for the Sahel by the UN Secretary-General and he will be sent to Mali to discuss the military intervention by Ecowas (or by a French-led, it depends on the day of the week).

And the same enthusiasm is also found on the opposite side of the political spectrum. Emilio Fede, anchorman of the news program on Rete 4–a channel owned by Italian tycoon and former premier Silvio Berlusconi—recently revealed his plans: “Next June, when I’ll turn 82, I’ll tear up the contract I have with Mediaset [the network of the Berlusconi family] … I want a better life. And If I didn’t have a family, I would go to Africa.”

The American dream is over. Italian politicians have legitimized the African one.

Further Reading

On Safari

On our annual publishing break, Gaza’s genocide continues to unfold in real time yet slips from public grasp. This is not just a crisis of politics, but of how reality is mediated—and why we must build spaces where meaning can still take root.

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.

The grift tank

In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.

Kagame’s hidden war

Rwanda’s military deployments in Mozambique and its shadowy ties to M23 rebels in eastern Congo are not isolated interventions, rather part of a broader geopolitical strategy to expand its regional influence.