Vittorio di Africa

Vittorio di Africa (originally called "Vittorio d'Affrica" or simply "Vittorio") was a small town in southern Italian Somalia, created by Italian colonists in the late 1920s near the southern Shebelle river.

The Genale dam on the river Shebelle, together with an extensive network of canals, was built in the south of Somalia in the late 1920s. It was strongly promoted by Cesare Maria De Vecchi -Italian governor of Italian Somalia from 1924 to 1928- in order to provide water for irrigation of a vast territory of 20000 hectares between Genale, Merca and Vittorio d'Africa, to be given in concession to Italian colonists.

One hundred of those colonists created in the south of the Genale concessions (called in Italian Concessioni agricole) a small city named "Vittorio d'Africa", that had a population of nearly 1200 inhabitants in 1940. It was located 11 km from Merca. The city was linked to the Port of Merca by a decauville railway, used to transport the huge production of bananas of the farms around Vittorio d'Africa.

Vittorio d'Africa was founded on March 5, 1928 by prince Umberto di Savoia (that in 1946 was the last King of Italy) on a hill at 70 meters of altitude and nearly 15 km from the Port of Merca. It had a small hospital and buildings for processing local food products.

During the Italian colonial period Genale and Vittorio di Africa were the center of a vast area of agricultural concessions for the cultivation of banana, cotton and other subsidiaries. The bananas were the main product and were marketed by the "Royal Company Monopoly Bananas" (abbreviated RAMB) that had, in fact, a monopoly of the export to Italy granted in order to safeguard banana production in Somalia on the Italian market. Consequently, until the 1950s all the bananas consumed in Italy came from the area of Genale and Vittorio.

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