Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

Together with the scientists responsible for the network of experimental fields, CICA researchers surveyed the territory of Mozambique in function of cotton production. During the rainy season botanists and soil scientists collected and analyzed data available on climate, geology, vegetation, and demography of the colonial province. When dry season arrived brigades of scientists crossed the country collecting samples of soils and plants, making socio-economic inquires to local populations, and marking areas for cotton cultivation in topographical maps. In 1955 all this work would be brought together in the thick volumes of the “Ecological-Agricultural Survey of Mozambique,” the first of such surveys to be completed for Portugal’s colonies.[106] The research center was thus able to produce an invaluable tool in the form of maps detailing the areas more suitable for cultivating cotton.

The Portuguese scientists, led by Quintanilha, were following the example of experiment stations in neighbor regions whose experience they were aware of by constant trips to Egypt, Congo, Sudan, Uganda, Nigeria, Rhodesia or South Africa. Portuguese scientists published detailed reports of research facilities of the British Empire Cotton Growing Corporation (ECGC).[107] The ECGC and its network of experiment stations in the British colonies was in fact the main international model for the Portuguese center. Probably the most direct influence of the ECGC was the import of breeds developed by its Barberton station, in the Union of South Africa, which accounted for the vast majority of cultivated cotton in Mozambique. The great advantage of the breeds developed at Barberton by F. Parnell in the 1920s, particularly the famous U4, was their resistance to Jassid, an insect pest that constituted one of the main obstacles to the success of cotton in Africa, and that it was thought inhibited any cultivation in the southern region of the continent.[108] The fascist regime liked to emphasize the continuous presence of the Portuguese in Africa since the fifteenth century, but its most ambitious colonial undertaking, the cotton scheme, relied not only on the example of the Belgian scheme but also on British initiatives.

^{Figure 5.7 The experimental network of the Centro de Investigação Científica Algodoeira.}

^{(F. Neves Evaristo, “The assessment of losses caused by insects on cotton in Mozambique,” Agronomia Moçambicana 1, no. 4, 1967: 191–199)}

As the officers of the Board of Export of Colonial Cotton delimited cotton zones, state and cotton companies’ officers registered natives inside those areas as cotton producers. Each producer received a card which he should always carry with, documenting age, residence, size of cotton field, type and qualities of seeds received, number of times the field had been weeded, quantity and quality of the produced crop, and other details.[109] Thus, as in many other examples of designed agriculture schemes throughout the African continent, indigenous individual identity was indistinguishable of the condition of cash crop grower.[110] Indeed, this was the core of Portugal’s civilizing mission, transforming “lazy natives” into proud hardworking laborers, even if for that, as the board officials dully observed, physical coercion had to be employed.[111]

The U4 cotton looked like the perfect tool to attain such objective. In spite of the disadvantages of this strain of producing short cotton fibers and small capsules (which meant low productivity), the U4 was resistant to Jassid (its main characteristic) and proliferated under very different climatic and soil conditions.[112] If it were not for the qualities of the U4 it would be hard to explain how Mozambican cultivators, growing the crop entirely manually, in small plots of scarcely more than 1 hectare, without the aid of any farming implements, and dealing with an unstable climate, were able to produce those quantities of cotton in the 1940s that thrilled both Salazar and the Board technicians.