History

Luigi Amedeo of Savoy, the Duke of the Abruzzi, was a mountaineer and polar explorer before he turned to colonial agriculture. He first reached Africa in 1905 and in 1920 founded a farming settlement on the middle Shabelle, backed by the Società Agricola Italo-Somala. The estate was conceived as a self-contained agro-industrial colony: irrigated plantations of sugar cane and cotton, workshops and food industries, and the infrastructure to serve them. The Duke raised funds to build dams, roads, a railway, schools, hospitals, a church and a mosque; by 1926 the settlement had grown into sixteen villages holding roughly 3,000 Somali and 200 Italian inhabitants.

The place became the most agriculturally developed part of pre-war Somalia. A 1935 newsreel shows its signature economy in motion: cotton pressed into bales and carried on the estate’s narrow-gauge railway to a collection point. When the colonial state created the Regia Azienda Monopolio Banane (RAMB) in 1936 and reorganised the banana trade toward the coast, it terminated the inland colonisation consortia, Villabruzzi among them, and export dominance passed to the Genale–Merca district downstream.

As with the other colonial estates, the output rested on a coerced labour system: Somali farmers were pressed into plantation work, and forced labour spread through the hut tax. The Italian settlement dissolved after the Second World War. The trusteeship years and early independence kept much of the fabric in use; the state collapse of the 1990s did not. Jowhar is now a Somali city built on an Italian plan.