Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

The results achieved at the Giggiga experimental farm with crossing, artificial insemination, feeding diets, and pasture rotations were to demonstrate the viability of such an enterprise for white settlers in the whole territory. Settlers maintained close relations with experiment stations in order to guarantee the success of their own farms. To respect and follow the mating decisions made by the technical experts was a pre-condition for owning a Karakul farm. The experimental station would supply a pureblood Karakul ram or its sperm, and the settler had to keep good records of all the progeny, using forms supplied by agricultural officials.[120] Each farm was assigned a series of numbers to mark its animals resulting from crossings, using the right ear for the register number and the left one for its degree of purity—for example, a mark of 1/2 would mean half-blood Karakul. Male descendants were to be slaughtered after the first three days, or castrated if kept for meat production. Females could be kept for further crossings, their number limited by the carrying capacity of pastureland, a number also defined by the agriculture technicians. The owner had to record each animal’s date of birth, genealogy, grade of purity, register number, general physical features (tail and neck), and quality of fur, following the University of Halle’s standards based on the nature of curly hair (form, density, brightness, etc.). It didn’t prove easy to find Italian settlers able to conform to such demands. Needless to say, there was no possibility that indigenous people would own Karakul farms.

As the dimensions of the Giggiga undertaking suggested, the experimental Karakul farm was conceived both as a scientific site and as a demonstration exercise. Besides acquisition of land and animals, the farm also had to deal with labor relations. German South West Africa was invoked explicitly in the Giggiga project as having developed an exemplary virtuous indigenous labor regime responsible for freeing natives from their indolence and leading them to discover the virtues of wage labor.[121] The experimental farm should thus be seen as an outpost of colonization experimenting with every dimension of colonial life: taking pasturelands by force, acquiring local animals at low price, crossing them with pureblood Karakul following the rules and recording practices established by the experimental station, and dealing with indigenous populations as a pool of cheap labor for white settlers’ commercial farming operations.

Much of the construction work was to employ military resources. Military personnel were to help with the building of stables, and military vehicles were to be used for all transportation needs. More tellingly, Karakul farms demanded great quantities of barbed wire, which was readily available in Ethiopia as a result of the military occupation. If originally the military had adapted barbed wire to war aims from cattle ranching, the experiment station was now to take the opposite direction and use it to demarcate land establishing colonial settlement.[122]

Circulating Karakul III: South West Africa and Angola

World War II would abruptly end Italy’s imperial dreams, and on May 5, 1941—less than a year and a half after the approval of the Giggiga project—Emperor Haile Selassie reentered Addis Ababa. Grande Italia soon disappeared from the map, and the Karakul farm with it. But while Italians were losing their empire, Salazar’s regime in Portugal, profiting from its neutrality in World War II, was engaging in southwest Angola, in the Namib Desert, in a late war of pacification.[123]