Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

As the Libya experience made clear, the success of the settlement in Ethiopia depended on acquiring enough land to bring in Italian peasants from the mainland. The quickest way to acquire land was to confiscate the estates belonging to the former emperor, the church, and rebels and transform them into lands belonging to the Italian colonial administration. But this was more complicated than just dispossessing the previous elite, for it also entailed displacing a multitude of lifelong sharecroppers who worked the lands of absentee owners. To make things worse, the colonial state took over any land for which Ethiopians couldn’t show proof of ownership or show that it was not under exploration, such as communal lands or lands lying fallow. According to Haile Larebo, “few confiscations were preceded by a proper study of the status of the land.”[11] In the area of Lake Tana alone, around 1,000,000 hectares were transferred to the colonial administration to make space for the planned Italian settlements. Also, in order to avoid fragmentation and dispersion of white settler farms among natives’ holdings, colonial agencies promoted exchanges of land offering Ethiopians plots in alternative locations. Because Ethiopian agriculture had been largely under some system of sharecropping, Italian experts argued that although this meant that the property of the land changed hands, most indigenous peasants would actually remain in place working now for the Italian settlers instead of paying a lease as before to the traditional backward Ethiopian elite. This was a complicated process, and in spite of the proclaimed good intentions of respecting local populations more than the French in Algeria or the British in Kenya, local resistance was the norm.[12] Yes, there was plenty of land, but, as Maugini pointed out, “it was not vacant but densely populated and intensely cultivated.”[13]

The first challenge for Maugini and his Florence disciples in Ethiopia was to feed the military and the Italian workers arriving in the colony for the purpose of building a road system. By the end of May 1936, the Commissariat for Migration and Internal Colonization had already dispatched about 92,736 workers for such projects. It is thus no surprise to find that historians of Italian colonialism, when dealing with agriculture, have paid close attention to the problem of increasing wheat production in Ethiopia.[14] In spite of promises published in the regime-controlled press of Ethiopian plateaus producing enough cereals to feed both the entire colony and Italy, in 1936 Ethiopia imported at least 75,000 tons of wheat. In the next year, 128,000 tons of wheat would be imported from Italy. Instead of becoming the granary of Italy, Ethiopia swallowed most of Italy’s food exports. In 1938, without a clear idea of the actual supply needs of the recently conquered colony, Mussolini simply ordered that the empire become self-sufficient in wheat.[15]

Following the example of the measures undertaken in Italy, both settlers and indigenous cultivators were mobilized for a local version of the Battle of Wheat. And, as in Italy, agriculture scientists were expected to play a major role. The Experimental Agricultural and Zootechnic Center for Italian Oriental Africa (Centro Sperimentale Agricolo e Zootecnico per l’Africa Orientale Italiana, abbreviated CSAZAOI) began to operate in 1938, but experiments had been initiated in 1936 at the Agrarian Bureau (Ispettorato Agrario) of Addis Ababa, led by A. D. Benedictis and answering directly to the government of Italian Oriental Africa (Africa Orientale Italiana, abbreviated AOI).[16] The first conclusion of the scientists of the Department of Genetics and Plant Breeding of the CSAZAOI was the great confusion of wheat varieties being cultivated by the natives leading to large fluctuations in annual yields.[17] Their breeders’ eye and their obsession with pure lines imposed an obvious research program: to undertake pedigree selections of local wheats to produce pure lines selected for resistance to lodging and to rust resistance and their yield. In 1938 experiments were initiated in about 350 lines, which were then distributed through the multiple experimental fields located in the plateau areas—those deemed more appropriate for cereal cultivation and where the first big settlement schemes were established. The strong rusts of 1940, although highly problematic for that year’s production, led to the discarding of most of the lines selected in the previous years and thus constituted a major push for the identification of the most interesting ones. We don’t know how these new breeds were then distributed among white settlers and indigenous population, for it wouldn’t take long for the works to be interrupted by the Italian retreat from the territory in 1941.