At that moment the mayor’s son, an eleven-year-old boy, rushed to Said-ou-Ali and asked him for help and protection. He took it, put it gently in front of the saddle, said a few good words. Reassured, the boy begged him to save his father too … “too late,” Said replied, hastening the horse’s pace. The unfortunate mayor, a few steps away, was offering money to Amar-ben-Kerkoud. Who, in response, fired a rifle shot at him and finished him off with his flissa, the long and razor-sharp saber of the Kabili.
Thus he died on April 21, 1871, exactly one hundred and fifty years ago, as French historian Louis Rinn would write in the book two decades later The 1871 uprising in Algeria, the dream of Domenico Bassetti. The irredentist patriot from Lasino, in the Val dei Laghi, who for the love of Italy had left his Trentino land dominated by the Austro-Hungarian Empire a dozen years earlier to participate in the Risorgimento and join the Sardinian-Piedmontese and French troops in the 1859 in the battle of Palestro. And with him died the dreams of about fifty families mostly from Trentino who had followed Bassetti in the emigration to the French-occupied Algeria and in the foundation seventy-two kilometers from Algiers of a town called Palestro in memory of that Risorgimento victory.
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He was very proud, Domenico Nico Bassetti, of having fought there, between Vercelli and Mortara, alongside the Berber Zouaves framed among the transalpine troops. To the point that, unable to return to his valley because he would have been arrested as a traitor to Austria, he had enlisted in the Foreign Legion to finally end up in that verdant plain at the foot of the Atlas, at the entrance to the gorges of the Isser river, which it looked so much like his land.
It really seemed the right place, to our grandparents, to build in that part of North Africa a village similar to the one they had left in Italy, to build a small church with the Italian curate as in the pre-alpine villages, to plant the same vineyards, to sow the same potatoes, in short, to lay the foundations for their future. They did not know for the pitfalls. Those new lands, so welcoming and destined for them by the French government at a good price to settle as many Europeans and Christians as possible, had been snatched by the colonial army from those who lived there before and that is, as the French historian Raphalle Branche will explain in the essay The Palestro Ambush (Armand Colin edition), to various tribes of Kabylia: The development of the European village and crops is based on the systematic dispossession and brutal impoverishment of the local population. In fact, war taxes were added to the seizure of the land. To pay for them, the inhabitants had to sell, often at ridiculously low prices, livestock and crops, and even rent their own arms to work their lands, recently assigned to the settlers. A war between the poor. Destined, as often happens, to end in tragedy.
In that spring of 1871 the drought predicted a season of famines. And to light the fuse of the revolt was the clash on a precious source of water of 160 liters per minute, assigned for two thirds to the settlers and only for a third to the cabili of the surrounding districts. Nico Bassetti, whom the French had chosen as mayor, understood that tensions could degenerate, ran to Algiers to report the risks to the authorities, warned people from Trentino, Italy and France against any provocation. Useless.
Things fell apart when a large group of rebels led by Mohammed el-Hadj el-Moqrani, linked to the Islamic Rahmaniya brotherhood, unleashed the revolt by attacking various villages of black feet, the European settlers. First the village of Bodav, then that of Igisier … Finch Bassetti, increasingly worried, entrusted his wife Virginia Ursula Solvini and two daughters to a fellow countryman to take them to Algiers and give the alarm so that the French would send immediately, before it was too late, a rescue expedition.
The raid on the village of Italian immigrants arrived, we said, the morning of April 21: The able and well-armed men were in the Presbytery; in the other house were women, children and a few men, I wrote two weeks later La Voce Cattolica, Si fought for a whole day, killing a large number of Arabs. Towards evening they came to make proposals for capitulation. They offered to lead everyone to the Alma, returning their weapons and ammunition two kilometers from this village. These oral proposals were immediately accepted by the besieged, at the head of which were the Gendarmerie squad and the mayor Bassetti … An agreement overwhelmed by the bellicose fury of the rebels thirsting for revenge.
A door was opened; but then it was invaded, and the slaughter began. The unfortunate betrayed fought to the extremity. Bassetti, an energetic man with Herculean strength, killed five assailants with a dagger; a gendarme killed three. But in the end they succumbed to the number, and fell one after the other. Then a horrible scene begins. The victims were stripped, the corpses were desecrated, and those who were still alive were inflicted a thousand tortures before killing them.
When the emergency column from Algiers arrivedAfter a tiring seven-hour march without interruption, there was nothing more to be done: Oh, horrible sight !, Colonel Alexandre Fourchault would have written in the report, The village destroyed, the houses looted and burned, and 46 corpses scattered here El out of the village, all men in the prime of life, for no woman and no child, and the fate of the latter is not yet known, in any case it seems that they have been taken prisoner and led into slavery where they cannot expect a mournful future.
A few women and a few children, it seems to understand, were then left to go. Others disappeared into thin air. Swallowed by silence and bad memory, broken only by distant hints in diocesan magazines, from Trentino emigration by Aldo Gorfer, Renzo Gubert and Umberto Beccaluva (Manfrini, 1978) and finally by the generous decision six years ago of two marble entrepreneurs, Silvio Xompero and Franco Masello, already known for donations to the City of Hope, to finally give Lasino, the town from which Bassetti departed, a statue that reconstructed the one dedicated by the French to our emigrants massacred in Palestro. Statue where Nico, with torn clothes and intrepid air, held the bayonet in the last defense with a child and a young woman clinging to his legs. Statue destroyed by the Algerians after independence. But it certainly did not recall colonial triumphs but rather the tragedy of so many innocent people annihilated in a war between the poor.
April 21, 2021 (change April 21, 2021 | 9:09 pm)
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