Italian rule in Africa. Exploitation and brutal repression of African people.

 Italian colonization of Africa was marked by exploitation and brutal repression of African people. Italy's colonial experience forced Italians to confront the presence of non-Europeans within the Italian Empire, and the presence of black Africans led some Italians to construct racial hierarchies in which Italians and other Europeans stood at the top, Arabs and North Africans somewhere in the middle, and black Africans at the bottom in terms of rights and privileges

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. On many occasions, Italians acted brutally and murderously towards the indigenous populations

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.The conquest of Ethiopia in 1935 was particularly brutal, and many Italians were sympathetic with its inhabitants and critical of racist laws and policies

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. Italian forces used chemical weapons and committed war crimes in Africa, but the country's sordid history is not taught in schools and is rarely discussed by politicians or intellectuals

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. Italian colonial policy during the period 1930-1939 was shaped by Fascism, and fascist tenets related to governance and social policy were used in the administration and treatment of the African population in Libya, Eritrea, Somalia, and Italian East Africa

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.Because of these initial massacres, Italy committed major war crimes during the conflict, including the use of illegal chemical weapons, episodes of refusing to take prisoners of war and instead of executing surrendering combatants, and mass executions of civilians. Italian authorities committed ethnic cleansing by forcibly expelling 100,000 local Cyrenaicans, almost half the population of Cyrenaica, from their settlements, slated to be given to Italian settlers

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.The colonizers' wartime priorities and the large-scale abuses they unleashed exposed the colonial state's exploitative capacities on a new scale. Many African polities fought to challenge or overturn the colonial order, and the case of Volta-Bani resistance against the French in West Africa offers a particularly trenchant example of how African peoples recognized shifts in colonial wartime priorities and acted on them in hopes of reconfiguring regional political authority

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