Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

In the west, in the Galla-Sidamo region, conditions were very different. Coffee cultivation here was described as not being far from a recollection activity taking advantage of the profusion of wild plants in the area. This was after all coffee’s center of origin, “an immense region in which coffee inhabits the slopes and the bottom of the valleys between 1,500 and 2,500m above sea-level…. [It] constitutes the most beautiful coffee park in the entire world.”[24] The types produced were the Caffa (from which the word ‘coffee’ derives) and the Ennara, usually sold in international markets as Abyssinian coffee, and that reached much higher values than the Harari.

The diversity of situations posed different challenges to the Italian agricultural scientists arrived in 1936 trusted with the task of increasing Ethiopian production. They had to deal with native populations collecting coffee from the forest in the west; decaying productions by small native cultivators in the east; a few large European capitalist plantations; inexperienced Italian peasants who had no previous knowledge of coffee culture coming into new settlement schemes. Indeed, although coffee is usually associated with the plantation system as was then practiced in Brazil—large monocrop fields making intense use of wage labor—in Ethiopia it should also contribute to make polycultural small white settlements economically viable. As Maugini noted, “the settler didn’t come to Africa to have a miserable life and limit himself to survive. He must, naturally, find the ways to constitute the savings that justify the difficulties he faces.”[25] Coffee embodied for the white settler the promise of a way out of the miserable peasant life of metropolitan Italy. But of course, in Maugini’s view, he couldn’t dispense with the expertise of breeders to make significant progress. To summarize, coffee production condensed all different forms of colonial practices in the territory: capitalist colonization in the form of large plantations, with lands granted to white investors and native populations used as cheap wage labor; settler colonization—Maugini’s preferred type of colonization—with large-scale transfers of peasants from impoverished and overpopulated regions of Italy to farm the lands of the Empire in small holds; natives mobilized to cultivate their own plots of land with cash crops and integrated in the imperial economy.

Edoardo Carlo Branzanti from Maugini’s Florence Colonial Agriculture Institute, later to be a member of the Ispettorato Agrario of the AOI at the capital Addis Ababa, was the scientist responsible for defining the program of coffee research in Abyssinia. This program would constitute the basis for the work undertaken at the experimental post of Malcó established, not surprisingly, in the western region of Galla and Sidamo to take advantage of the area condition as coffee’s center of origin.[26] The problems limiting the productivity of natives’ plots were obvious for Branzanti. In the east, cultivators seldom pruned their plants leading to asymmetrical trees with asymmetrical morphologic, physiologic, and production characteristics, making harvesting more complicated as well. In the west, things were even worse with total absence of pruning and the development of excessively tall plants with long thin branches. To the lack of horticultural care one had to add the habit of delaying picking season to reduce labor, thus leaving the fruit to dry in the tree itself or, even worse, picking it from the soil which produced the bad earth taste typical of low-quality coffee.[27] The grim picture offered by Italian experts of local practices also included the non-standardized procedure of drying fruits, mixing green ones with those already dried in the tree, as well as poor extraction methods unable to sufficiently remove impurities from coffee beans. At Malcó, agricultural trials should identify the best practices to be used in the plots of the natives, as well as in those of the Italian settlers.

^{Figure 5.2 Coffee cultivation in Galla Sidama, Italian Oriental Africa, 1939.}

^{(Annali Africa Italiana 2, no. 3, 1939: 304–305)}