Prisoners

Over 370 Ethiopians were forcibly taken from their land and imprisoned in Italy following the Yekatit 12 massacre of 1937. Here, we honor their memory and document their lives and stories.

This archive is dedicated to the memory of the Ethiopian prisoners incarcerated on the prison island of Asinara by the Fascist government of Italy from 1937–1939. The names listed here were drawn from the Campi Fascisti (campifascisti.it) research database, a scholarly Italian resource documenting fascist-era internment sites. Each record represents a life interrupted, a person torn from family, community, and country by an act of colonial violence. Our work is to restore what history has obscured: their names, their stories, their descendants.

What you will find here today, as we begin this project, is a small number of carefully documented records that represent the first layer of a much larger undertaking. Our long-term objective is to build as complete an archive as possible: one that captures not just names and dates, but photographs, family histories, oral testimonies, and the living memory of descendants. We actively seek help in correcting any errors in the existing records and identifying any prisoners whose names may have been left out. Ultimately, this archive is intended to grow into a resource substantial enough to inform the construction of a permanent memorial on Asinara itself, a place where the prisoners' story deserves to be told.

The archive belongs to everyone with a stake in this history. If you wish to stay informed as new records and publications are added, we invite you to subscribe. If you are a descendant, researcher, or community member with documents, photographs, oral histories, or corrections to contribute, we invite you to register as a contributor. All submitted material is carefully researched and vetted before it appears in the archive.