Citizen by Right: Cécile Kyenge, Italy's First Black Cabinet Minister

In April 2013, an eye doctor from Modena walked into Rome's Quirinale Palace and took an oath that no Black person had ever taken in Italy. Cécile Kashetu Kyenge became minister for integration in Prime Minister Enrico Letta's government. Within weeks, she was also the most insulted politician in the country. Her ten months in office showed how far Italy had come, and how fiercely some Italians fought to keep it from going farther.

From Katanga to Modena

Kyenge was born on August 28, 1964, in Kambove, in the Katanga region of what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Her father had several wives and dozens of children, and she has often said that a big, crowded household taught her to argue her case. She came to Italy in 1983 on a student visa, studied medicine at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Rome, and trained as an ophthalmologist. For years, she lived the uncertain life of a foreign student whose papers could lapse, an experience that later shaped her politics.

She settled in Modena, in the Emilia-Romagna region, married an Italian engineer, raised two daughters, and built a medical practice. She also began organizing. She founded DAWA, an association promoting exchange between Italy and Africa, and worked with migrant groups in local government. In 2004, she won a seat on a district council in Modena, then moved up to the provincial level for the Democratic Party.

A Minister Without Precedent

In February 2013, voters in Emilia-Romagna sent her to the Chamber of Deputies. Two months later, Letta named her minister for integration. The appointment was symbolic, but she refused to treat it as only a symbol. Her central cause was citizenship. Under Italy's 1992 law, a child born in Italy to immigrant parents generally could not become a citizen until age eighteen, and only after an unbroken record of legal residence. Kyenge argued for a form of ius soli, citizenship by birth on Italian soil, so that the roughly one million children of immigrants growing up in Italian schools would be recognized as Italians.

She also pushed to close Italy's detention centers for migrants and to repeal the crime of "clandestine immigration" created under Silvio Berlusconi's government. These were not radical positions in most of Western Europe. In Italy, they set off a storm.

The Insults Became the Story

The abuse came from the top. In July 2013, Roberto Calderoli, a vice president of the Senate from the anti-immigrant Northern League, told a rally that when he saw Kyenge he could not help thinking of an orangutan. A League local councilor, Dolores Valandro, posted on Facebook that someone should rape the minister; she was later convicted. That same month, during a speech at a party festival in Cervia, someone in the crowd threw bananas toward the stage. Kyenge answered by calling it a waste of food at a time of economic crisis.

Her calm became part of her public image. She did not demand Calderoli's resignation in angry terms, and she kept returning to policy. But the attacks revealed what many Black Italians already knew: that Italy's self-image as a nation of "good people," italiani brava gente, had never fully reckoned with its colonial past in Libya, Somalia, Eritrea, and Ethiopia, or with the Black citizens and residents living inside its borders. Calderoli was eventually tried for defamation aggravated by racial hatred and, in 2019, convicted and sentenced to eighteen months, a sentence suspended under Italian law.

The Reform That Stalled

When Matteo Renzi replaced Letta in February 2014, the integration ministry was not continued, and Kyenge left the cabinet. That spring she won a seat in the European Parliament, where she served until 2019, working on migration, asylum, and civil liberties, and serving as rapporteur on the parliament's report on the situation in the Mediterranean.

The citizenship reform she championed passed the Chamber of Deputies in 2015 in a moderate form, but it died in the Senate in 2017 amid a political climate hardened by the migration crisis. In 2018, the League entered government, and Matteo Salvini, as interior minister, made closing ports to rescue ships his signature policy. A 2025 referendum that would have shortened the residence requirement for naturalization failed for lack of turnout. A generation of young people born and raised in Italy still waits.

Why She Still Matters

Kyenge was not the first Black person elected in Italy, but she was the first given the authority of a national ministry, and the reaction to her was a test the country partly failed. Her story belongs alongside other firsts across Europe, from Britain's Diane Abbott to France's Christiane Taubira, whose visibility drew both pride and organized hatred. Each of them showed that representation alone does not end racism. Sometimes it brings racism into the open, where it can finally be named.

For Black Italians, especially the young activists of the "second generations" movement, Kyenge became proof that someone who looked like them could govern. The bananas in Cervia were meant as humiliation. They became evidence instead.

Read the deep-dive feature in Black Thread: Contested Belonging: The Replacement Myth and the People Who Fight ItBlack Thread · Members examines how nationalist movements from Rome to Paris weaponize replacement rhetoric — and how Black and migrant organizers are pushing back. Arrives November 1 in Black Thread Issue One.