Zeray Deres: Eritrean Martyr of African Dignity and Anti-Colonial Resistance

Zeray Deres and the Crime of Dignity: Colonial Violence, Moral Defiance, and the Politics of Memory

By David Yeh

Introduction: When an Empire Panics at One Man

In February 2026, the City of Rome dedicated a garden near the Dogali monument as Giardino Zeray Deres. This gesture carried symbolic weight. Transforming a public space associated with colonial memory into a garden bearing Zeray’s name signaled a shift from imperial triumph to reflective acknowledgment. A garden symbolizes growth and healing. Pairing it with the memory of resistance invites dialogue rather than denial. It suggests that confronting history honestly is a form of maturity, not self-condemnation.

Empires fear armies—but they panic when confronted by conscience. On 15 June 1938, in the very heart of Fascist Rome, a young Eritrean man stood before a stolen African monument and refused to move. He did not command soldiers. He did not carry a flag. He did not issue demands. He simply refused humiliation. That refusal—quiet, solitary, and morally uncompromising—exposed the fragility of Italian colonial power more clearly than any battlefield defeat.

Zeray Deres did not threaten the Italian empire with violence; he threatened it with dignity. And for that, the empire responded with erasure, distortion, and confinement. Declared insane, stripped of political meaning, and buried in institutional silence, Zeray’s act was transformed by colonial authority from resistance into pathology. This was not justice. It was damage control.

In February 2026, when the City of Rome renamed a public garden near the Dogali monument Giardino Zeray Deres, it quietly acknowledged what Fascist Italy had worked so hard to deny: that Zeray was not a madman, not a criminal, and not a footnote—but a moral witness. The gesture signaled a long-delayed reckoning with Italy’s colonial past, replacing triumphalist memory with reflection. A garden, after all, grows where monuments once glorified conquest.

For Eritreans, this recognition affirms that their history does not end at national borders and that their resistance belongs to global memory. For Italians, it poses a harder challenge: to confront colonial violence not as abstraction, but as lived experience—inflicted, resisted, and remembered. Honest remembrance is not inherited guilt; it is historical responsibility.

Who Was Zeray Deres?

Zeray Deres (1 March 1915 – 6 July 1945) stands as one of the most compelling moral figures in the history of Eritrea and in the broader narrative of African resistance to European colonial domination. His life, though brief, unfolded at the crossroads of empire, race, identity, and conscience. To some, he is a hero; to others, a controversial figure surrounded by myth. Yet beyond exaggerations and political appropriation, what remains undeniable is that Zeray Deres embodied a fierce devotion to African dignity at a moment when fascist ideology sought to reduce Africans to subjects of humiliation and subordination. His defiance in Rome on 15 June 1938 was not an act of monarchism, nor a glorification of any imperial lineage. It was a protest emotional, moral, and political against colonial violence and the degradation of African humanity.

To understand Zeray, one must begin in the highlands of Eritrea, where he was born in the village of Adihiyis in the now Debub Zone, subzone Emni Hayli in 1915. Eritrea had been formally colonized by Italy in 1890, making it one of the earliest and most enduring Italian colonies in Africa. By the time of Zeray’s birth, colonial structures had reshaped local administration, land use, education, and labor. Italian architecture rose in Asmara, roads extended across the plateau, and mission schools introduced European curricula. Yet beneath these visible transformations lay an entrenched racial hierarchy. Africans were legally inferior to Italians, barred from equal political participation, and segregated socially. Colonial modernity arrived intertwined with inequality.

Zeray’s father died when he was very young, and he was raised by his mother in Hazega, her ancestral village. In this environment, he absorbed the moral framework of Eritrean communal life honor, accountability, and solidarity. Village society was sustained by mutual obligation. Elders mediated disputes, oral tradition preserved memory, and identity was anchored in land and lineage. These early influences cultivated in Zeray a deep sense of personal responsibility and pride. The injustice of colonial hierarchy would later collide with this cultural grounding.

His education in Italian schools and at a Capuchin mission in Segeneiti provided him fluency in Italian and exposure to European thought. Unlike many Eritreans recruited into colonial regiments, Zeray was not an ascari soldier. He was educated, literate, and intellectually agile. Eventually, he became an interpreter, a role that required navigating between languages and power structures. This distinction is crucial: Zeray was not a uniformed combatant in Rome. He was a civilian employee of the Italian Ministry of the Colonies, tasked with assisting Abyssinian nobles deported after Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia known internationally before 1945 as Abyssinia.

Fascist Italy and the Logic of Terror

The invasion of Abyssinia in 1935 marked a turning point in both Italian and African history. Under the leadership of Benito Mussolini, Fascist Italy launched an aggressive campaign to expand its empire and avenge its earlier defeat at Adwa in 1896. The war of 1935 – 1936 was brutal. Italian forces deployed aerial bombardment and chemical weapons, violating international conventions. By May 1936, the conquest was declared complete, and Italy proclaimed the creation of Africa Orientale Italiana, merging Eritrea, Abyssinia, and Italian Somaliland into a single imperial entity. Rome celebrated this as the rebirth of Roman grandeur. For Africans, it ushered in intensified repression.

In February 1937, after an assassination attempt against the Italian Viceroy Rodolfo Graziani in Addis Ababa, by two young Eritreans living in Ethiopia, Abraha Deboch and Mogos Asghedom. Fascist forces launched a wave of retaliatory killings in Addis Ababa in what is now remembered by Ethiopians as the Lekatit 12 massacre. Thousands of civilians were slaughtered. Monasteries were burned. Intellectuals were targeted. News of the atrocity spread across East Africa. For young men like Zeray, these events underscored the violent core of colonial ideology. Colonialism was not simply administrative control; it was domination maintained by terror.

For Eritreans like Zeray, the message was unmistakable: colonial rule was sustained not by administration, but by violence.

Rome, 1938: The Refusal

In 1937 Zeray traveled to Rome as an interpreter. There, in the imperial capital adorned with propaganda banners and monuments to conquest, he witnessed firsthand the racial arrogance that accompanied fascist triumphalism. Africans were exoticized or demeaned. The Lion of Judah statue taken from Addis Ababa stood as a trophy, symbolizing conquered sovereignty. It was in this charged environment that Zeray’s conscience collided with humiliation.

On 15 June 1938, just days before his scheduled return to Eritrea, Zeray approached the monument and knelt—not in submission, but in defiance. This gesture has often been misread as monarchist devotion. It was nothing of the sort. Zeray was not venerating dynastic rule; he was confronting imperial theft. His act protested the systematic looting of African symbols that adorned Rome’s public spaces—the Axum Obelisk seized on Mussolini’s orders in 1937, the Venus of Cyrene taken from Libya in 1913, and the Egyptian obelisks that punctuate the city’s grand squares, including the Vatican Obelisk in St. Peter’s Square. These were not artifacts of shared heritage; they were trophies of conquest, displayed to normalize domination and erase origin.

When an Italian officer ordered Zeray to stand, he refused. The refusal itself was intolerable. The confrontation escalated, reportedly intensified by racist insults hurled at Africans. In that charged moment, Zeray drew a blade and struck those attempting to remove him. Several individuals were wounded before he was shot and apprehended. What followed would reveal less about Zeray’s actions than about the empire’s fear of what his defiance exposed.

What happened next reveals as much about colonial narrative construction as about Zeray himself. Fascist newspapers sensationalized the event, claiming that he had killed numerous people. Such claims, however, remain unsupported by verified archival evidence. In a heavily guarded area of Rome, surrounded by carabinieri and security forces, the notion that a lone African civilian could have killed many before being subdued strains plausibility. Available scholarship indicates that injuries occurred, but definitive proof of multiple deaths has not surfaced in accessible judicial archives. The issue, therefore, is not whether Zeray was courageous, but whether later accounts inflated the scale of violence.

The Italian authorities declared Zeray mentally unstable and confined him to psychiatric institutions rather than prosecuting him in open court. Labeling him insane depoliticized his act. It transformed protest into pathology. For seven years he remained institutionalized, first in Rome and later in Sicily. Throughout his confinement, he reportedly insisted that he was mentally sound and that his actions were deliberate. He died on 6 July 1945, shortly after the collapse of fascism, at the age of thirty.

The empire collapsed. Its diagnosis did not.

Bringing Zeray Home: Memory Restored

Zeray Deres had an older brother, Tesfazien Deres. Tesfazien played an important role in preserving Zeray’s legacy after his death in 1945. Following the collapse of Fascist Italy at the end of World War II, Tesfazien worked to locate and repatriate Zeray’s remains from Italy back to Eritrea. This act was deeply significant, not only as a family duty but as a national one. Bringing Zeray home restored dignity to a man who had died in confinement far from his homeland.

Zeray was eventually buried at St. Mary’s Church (Kidane Mehret) in Hazega, where a monument honors him. Tesfazien’s efforts ensured that Zeray would not remain forgotten in a foreign land and helped transform his brother’s story from suppressed colonial incident into a recognized chapter of Eritrean resistance history.

By returning Zeray home, Tesfazien reclaimed his brother from colonial erasure and reinserted him into Eritrean history, not as a madman, but as a man of conscience.

The Uncounted Dead: Ascari and Colonial Amnesia

Zeray’s story cannot be isolated from the broader colonial experience of Eritreans, particularly the approximately 150,000 Eritrean ascari who served in Italian forces over decades. These men formed the backbone of Italy’s East African military apparatus. They fought in Libya, Somalia, and Abyssinia. Some enlisted for wages; others were pressured by economic necessity or administrative coercion. Their loyalty was praised in Italian military accounts. Yet when they died, their memory was not preserved with the same institutional reverence afforded to Italian soldiers.

Today, Italian military cemeteries stand marked and maintained, listing the names of fallen citizens. In contrast, there is no comprehensive public registry documenting how many Eritrean ascari died, where they were buried, or how they were commemorated. Many graves remain unmarked in foreign soil. This disparity reflects colonial hierarchy even in death. Recognition was racialized. Memory was stratified. The absence of records does not mean absence of sacrifice; it signifies neglect.

This imbalance raises legitimate questions of historical justice. Colonial rule extracted labor, land, loyalty, and blood from Eritreans while denying them equality. Discussions of reparations must address this structural exploitation. Reparations need not be limited to financial compensation; they can include formal acknowledgment, archival transparency, educational reform, and collaborative historical research to identify burial sites and honor the dead. For Eritrea, raising the issue of reparations is not hostility, it is a call for moral reckoning.

For Eritreans, this recognition resonates deeply. It affirms that their history extends beyond national borders and that their sacrifices are part of global memory. For Italians, it represents an opportunity to engage critically with the past. Honest remembrance is not about inherited guilt; it is about acknowledging truth.

Zeray Deres and the Courage of Refusal

Zeray Deres’s legacy rests not on mythical casualty numbers nor on exaggerated narratives. It rests on conscience. He did not command armies. He did not organize rebellion. He stood alone, refusing humiliation. Whether his act wounded several or killed none, its moral essence remains: a refusal to accept racial degradation. His protest challenged the illusion of fascist invincibility and exposed the fragility of the empire when confronted by conviction.

In remembering Zeray, we are also called to remember the unnamed thousands, the ascari whose graves are unmarked, the civilians whose deaths were unrecorded, the communities reshaped by colonial policy. Memory must be equal to justice. The dignity afforded to one group in death must extend to all.

The life of Zeray Deres stands as a moral landmark in Eritrean and African history. Born under colonial rule and dying in confinement, his journey reflects both the violence of the empire and the resilience of African identity. His act in Rome was not about monarchy or dynastic loyalty. It was about dignity. It was about refusing to bow. The regime attempted to silence him by declaring him insane; history has restored his agency.

Resistance often begins not with armies but with conscience. Zeray Deres reminds us that even in the heart of an empire, one individual can transform humiliation into protest. His story challenges us to examine not only what happened, but how it has been remembered and whose memory remains missing. In that examination lies the path from silence to dignity, from myth to truth, and from historical imbalance to justice.

Conclusion

Zeray Deres did not defeat an empire. He exposed it. His act on 15 June 1938 was not fanaticism, nor dynastic loyalty, nor mythic heroism. It was the moral response of an Eritrean, and an African, who refused to accept racial humiliation as fate. In confronting colonial power at its symbolic core, Zeray shattered the illusion of Fascist invincibility. The empire responded as empires often do: by silencing, pathologizing, and erasing.

History has begun to reverse that erasure.

The naming of Giardino Zeray Deres in Rome signals not absolution, but accountability. It acknowledges that resistance was never insanity, and that dignity was never a crime. Yet Zeray’s legacy also demands more. It calls for remembrance equal to sacrifice, for the ascari whose names are missing, for the civilians whose deaths were unrecorded, for histories buried under imperial convenience.

Zeray Deres endures not because of legend, but because of clarity. He reminds us that resistance does not always arrive with armies. Sometimes it arrives with refusal. And sometimes, that refusal is enough to force history, slowly, reluctantly, to tell the truth.