An Italian Count who eloped to Africa to seek ivory with another man’s wife before WWll desperately tried to beat the British administration in Kenya to become what he hoped would be the colony’s first locally-invested king.
With the utmost of secrecy, he is believed to have flown by private aircraft in 1939/40 to plead his case with Italy’s Fascist Dictator, Mussolini.
I first met Count Mario Rocco a few years after the war when he was still plain ‘Count Rocco,’ bereft forever of any royal connections. In spite of this, I was, however, fascinated by the story he recounted to me when I worked in Africa as a foreign correspondent and journalist over 60 years’ ago.
As a young man he lived in Rome and there he met a French lady artist and sculpturist, Gissele Bunan-Varilla, who was already married. After falling in love with each other, the couple decided that they should elope to the wilds of Africa to seek their fortune through the international ivory trade.
They ended up buying a 5,000 acre property on the shores of the pink flamingo- ridden Lake Naivasha in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley. Here they personally built a castle-style mansion surrounded by Giselle’s many entrancing sculptures, an art she had previously learned as a student of the famous French sculpturist, Auguste Rodin, the maker of the world-renowned piece, ‘The Thinker.’
When Britain declared war against Hitler and his fascist ally, Mussolini, Count Rosso was later reported to have secretly left Kenya by private aircraft to meet with Mussolini, the ‘ll Duce’ of Italian politics at the time.
He knew that Mussolini already had substantial military forces in nearby Ethiopia and believed that the dictator would simply sweep through Africa to claim the continent from the relatively few British administrators there.
Before returning home from his meeting with Mussolini, Mario Rosso saw himself as the leader of all the peoples of Kenya, a country which he wished to establish as an overseas Italian possession.
Little did he know, however, that the principal British spy agency in London had heard of his treacherous meeting with Mussolini and was just waiting for him to return to the Rift Valley from overseas.
According to Government documentation, as soon as his aircraft landed, he was duly arrested and sent to a prisoner of-war camp in South Africa for five years until the end of hostilities. He duly returned home with his tail between his legs and without the king’s crown he had always wanted and had set his heart on.
The history of the times shows that Mussolini’s army was severely defeated in East Africa by the British in spite of the Fascists having been heavily aided by Hitler’s Field-Marshall Rommel and his powerful desert-oriented forces.
In what is known as the East African Campaign, the British Army pushed their Fascist enemies into Egypt before they were finally defeated with no hope of winning Africa — or establishing a King of Kenya. In fact, the joint Nazi and Italian armies were sent into a disastrous headlong retreat and quick defeat at El-Alamein by a consortium of Allied armies, including battalions of men and fighting machines from Australia.
The one positive thing that the adventurous Count Rocco did for Africa was to father a daughter he named Mirella. As Mirella Ricciardi she, unlike her father, managed to finally capture Africa, not by the force of arms but through the lense of her camera.
Today, Mirella Ricciardi is internationally known as the celebrated “Great Photographer of the African continent.” Since the post-war years, she has armed herself with a camera and has devoted herself to capturing the last vestiges of African tribal life together with the now dying customs of a quickly changing continent.
Mirella has also become a noted film actress and author of many books holding her precious work, such as her highly praised volume entitled “Vanishing Africa.”
Although Mirella’s father — Africa’s only aristocratic Italian Count of historic note — died some 30 years ago, he is still referred to in Kenya as the eccentric adventurer who mistakenly attempted to create a ‘Little Italy’ over the plains and mountains of Africa.