Prisoners

Over 370 Ethiopians, officials, scholars and clergy, resistance fighters, and, alongside them, women and children, were torn from their land in the weeks following the Yekatit 12 massacre of February 1937. Arrested by the hundreds across Addis Ababa and beyond, they were marched to the coast and shipped across the sea to Italy. There they were imprisoned between 1937 and 1939, the majority on the prison island of Asinara, off the coast of Sardinia, and the rest at other detention sites across the country.

Here, we honour their memory and document their lives. Each record is a life interrupted, a person taken from family, community, and country by an act of colonial violence. Some returned home after years of exile; many never did, dying far from Ethiopia, most without a grave, an inscription, or any public trace.

This archive is dedicated to these prisoners. The names gathered here are drawn from several sources: Zekre Neger (ዝክረ ነገር), the book of Mahteme Selassie Wolde Meskel, himself deported to Italy, whose account preserves a list of the prisoners, together with the Campi Fascisti research database and Italian state archives. What you see today, as the project begins, is a small, carefully documented first layer of a much larger undertaking. We aim to build as complete an archive as possible, not only names and dates, but photographs, family histories, oral testimonies, and the living memory of descendants. We actively seek help to correct errors in the existing records and to identify prisoners whose names were left out. In time, we hope this archive will grow into a resource substantial enough to support a permanent memorial on Asinara itself, a place where this 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.