Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

But the major effort was directed at changing the plants themselves. For Branzanti there was no more pernicious practice than that of the Galla and Sidamo natives of cultivating their plots with coffee plants taken directly from the forest or with seeds collected randomly.[28] This explained the great heterogeneity observable in the fields of local peasants, with a great mess of types with different properties concerning yield, maturation, or size of beans, leading to great oscillations in productivity as well as laborious preparation processes. The most important task of a program for increasing coffee production in Ethiopia was allegedly to distribute among cultivators, indigenous or white, homogeneous plants produced by plant breeders at Malcó. In subsequent years, the main activity at Malcó was thus to identify the best-producing coffee plants by their resistance to pests, distribution of flowers and maturation period, annual production of beans, and form and color of seeds.[29] The best exemplars were then to be multiplied in nurseries that should supply coffee cultivators’ plots.

Homogenization doesn’t mean diversity didn’t play a role. The point is that instead of having natives tapping directly into it in the Galla Sidamo forests, diversity was to be brought into the Malcó experimental fields as an experimental resource for plant breeders. Indeed, Italian breeders couldn’t have been more enthusiastic about the opportunity of tinkering with coffee diversity at its center of origin where variability was the highest. After domesticizing diversity through their registration techniques, breeders distributed their selected plants by an extended network of nurseries controlled by the colonial agrarian services and intended to standardize the coffee plots of Ethiopia. Every new white settlement and capitalist plantation counted with coffee plants from such nurseries to sustain the new operation. And, again, standardization was not limited to white-owned lands.

By 1940 the Malcó nursery was distributing among indigenous cultivators about 300,000 coffee seedlings starting the replacement of their heterogeneous fields by the selected material of Italian breeders.[30] The strategy was to establish a sort of model plantations among indigenous chiefs (capi indigeni) to whom the plants were distributed, while technicians from the Ufficio Agrario (Agrarian Office) tabulated distances between trees, pruning techniques, harvest schedule, and other details. The success of the program relied on the ability of co-opting indigenous elites. According to the wishful thinking of the agriculture experts, “these oasis of coffee rationally planted” were to convince the rest of the indigenous population to change their cultivation methods.[31] Besides supplying seedlings and offering technical advice, Italian authorities were also to control indigenous coffee fields in order to guarantee the reproduction in local plots of the order first established at the experiment station.

The brevity of Italian rule in Ethiopia doesn’t allow us to take many conclusions about methods of imposing this new order on natives’ plots. Official documents constantly refer the need to respect local costumes. Graziani himself pledged to govern Ethiopia as the First Roman Empire had governed its provinces, with the participation “in the imperial organ of the Consulta of the best representatives of the native peoples.” But, as historians of Mussolini’s empire have insisted, the aim of politica indigena (native policy) was to subordinate native population interests to metropolitan politics: “no power-sharing with the ras,” as Alessandro Lessona, Minister of the Colonies overtly confessed, implicitly alienated all local elites that had helped Italians in seizing power from Emperor Haile Selassie.[32] In fact, the delineation of a new entity, the Africa Orientale Italiana (Italian East Africa) bringing together Eritrea, Somalia and Ethiopia, meant elimination of the latter as geographic unit and dismemberment of its previous administrative structure. Also, although the issue of forced indigenous labor is totally absent in the historiography of Italian colonialism in Ethiopia, a few authors do suggest that the scarcity of available workforce would forcefully lead to coercion disguised by the usual rhetoric of the irrational and lazy native trying to escape work.[33]