Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

The Berlin Conference of 1885 that officially launched the scramble for Africa granted Portugal formal control over the territory of present day Mozambique. Portuguese presence in the territory in the first decades of the twentieth century was nevertheless limited, as it had been in the centuries before, ceding large plots of land to chartered companies formed by international capitals with discretionary power inside concessionary areas. Most of the income of these companies derived from extracting taxes from African populations living under their domain and exporting conscripted labor to South African gold mines or Katanga copper mines. The economy of Mozambique was totally dependent on its neighbors, with railways transporting ores from South African and southern Rhodesian mines to be shipped at the Mozambican ports of Lourenço Marques and Beira, and returning in the opposite direction carrying conscripted laborers to work in the mines. Salazar’s New State would demand more from a territory that was supposed to provide raw materials and markets for metropolitan industries.[93]

The enthusiasts of the imperial vision were not limited to industrialists dreaming of colonial markets. Young army officers also called attention insistently to the danger of occupation by rival European powers of the country’s African possessions due to scarce Portuguese presence on the ground. These officials would be instrumental in the military coup of 1926 that inaugurated the dictatorship, which assumed as one of its main tasks the “nationalization of the empire.”[94] The phrase meant not only that Portuguese national life would be geared toward the empire but also that life in the colonies would have Portugal as its main referent. In 1930, the Colonial Act, issued when Salazar assumed temporarily the post of Minister of the Colonies, solemnly institutionalized the relations between Nation and Empire: “It is in the organic essence of the Portuguese Nation to undertake the historical function of possessing and colonizing overseas domains and to civilize indigenous populations.”[95] One could find this same imperial rhetoric among the leaders of the previous Republican regime, but the push for Empire would be greatly intensified under Salazar’s dictatorship. In fact, the building of an imperial bloc would become one of the defining features of Portuguese fascism. Significantly enough, the regime would not end until 1974, when there was a “red carnations revolution” led by young military officers refusing to keep fighting the independence movements in Guinea Bissau, Angola, and Mozambique. With the empire in question, the regime finally disintegrated.

When Salazar first came to power in 1928, the fast-growing Portuguese textile industry—it quadrupled its size between 1901 and 1924—was getting no more than 1 percent of its ginned cotton from the African colonies, buying huge amounts of North American and Egyptian cotton in the world market thus decisively contributing to the negative balance of payments of the State.[96] The above-mentioned charted companies in Mozambique were repeatedly denounced in Portuguese press, both because of their foreign capital basis and their inability to transform Mozambique into a territory supplying Portuguese industries. Already in 1926, the newly inaugurated dictatorial government launched legislation to bring to an end the domain of the chartered companies, replacing it in large areas with the so-called cotton zones. Inside these perimeters, concession holders had purchasing exclusivity over peasants’ production at prices fixed by the government. The holders bought, ginned and exported to Portugal all the cotton produced inside their zones. Concession holders were entitled to force local native populations to cultivate cotton through physical coercion, an arrangement directly inspired by the Belgian colonial rule in Congo, which according to Portuguese colonial officials had achieved “brilliant results.”[97]

Through the new labor legislation issued in 1928, the previous system of forced labor of rounding up natives and displacing them to plantations was replaced by forced crop cultivation requiring agriculture workers to remain in their own villages and work their own land, producing cash crops to be sold to the concession holder. In spite of the joint efforts of concessions’ overseers and colonial agents, the main objective of incorporating indigenous population into capitalist production of commodities for the metropole was hard to achieve, with only 80,000 peasants, out of a total population of more than 4 million, incorporated into the cotton system by 1937.[98] The colonial authorities were especially concerned with the provinces of northern Mozambique and its population of two and a half million people occupying an area four times the size of the Metropole and with no visible contribution to the economical welfare of the Portuguese empire.