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]
However, colonial archives do reveal that Italian authorities used monetary incentives for natives to cultivate their lands with coffee, following the rules publicized by the technical services. In the Harar region, in order to revive the locals’ interest in coffee cultivation, a decree of January 1937 established a plantation prize of 0.50 to 1 lira per tree of coffee whenever this showed the “rational requirements established by the Agrarian Department.”[34] This 1937 law, together with the above-mentioned reports of distributed coffee plants for 1940, suggest that at the ground level, Italian authorities did count on local previous structures and didn’t just start their imperial undertaking from scratch as the literature tends to emphasize. The willingness to build on preexistent indigenous social structures didn’t necessarily lead to virtuous colonial systems, as we know for many other colonial empires. References made in the Malcó experiment station reports to the future building of a “control system for surveillance of cultivation” and prizes for best practices, are not conclusive about the level of coercion involved in the undertaking.[35]
On the other hand, we know that the expropriation of lands to bring in new Italian settlers or to demarcate capitalist concessions created a class of landless peasants whose only way of paying colonial taxes was to work as wage laborers in cash crop operations either in big plantations or in smaller white settlers’ schemes.[36] Coffee concessions contracts granted by the colonial government to Europeans interested in investing in Ethiopia were very clear about how to deal with local populations: “the indigenous population resident in the territory of the concession may be relocated anywhere inside it.”[37] It was expected that these displaced people would now work in the area of the concession. Designs by Italian architects for plantations in Ethiopia show a central section for white farmers including only one room for natives doing the domestic service, while the rest of the indigenous workforce was housed in the outer zone of the perimeter, their huts consistently placed as the first zone of contact in case of attack.[38]
The few settlement schemes undertaken in the brief period of Italian presence in Ethiopia also help clarify the nature of relations that colonial planners had in mind. Italian peasant settlements deserved more elaboration from planners than the capitalist concessions: eight adjoining holdings with triangular shapes were grouped together forming a large square. At the center of the square eight settler houses disposed around a vast courtyard formed the nucleus of a community sharing a bakery and providing the security of about forty armed peasants. In case of attack, the compound could easily be converted into a fort. The 50–60 hectares of land that each settler was entitled to was divided as follows: closer to the house, a small patch for vegetables and fruits for auto consumption; at the periphery, about 20 hectares for foraging and cattle grazing; at the center, the arable land where cash crops could be cultivated, to be worked with indigenous wage laborers. These were housed in huts about 2 kilometers from settler houses.[39] Such scheme, as imagined by the architects of the settlement agency, Opera Nazionale Combatenti (Veterans Association), avoided for security reasons the fragmentation of dispersed farms as the ones the same planners had designed for internal colonization in Italy in the Pontine Marshes. It prevented also the formation of concentrated villages forcing settlers to cover large distances every day, making them vulnerable to indigenous attacks. It is apparent that planners were well aware that white settlement was not appreciated among the local population and that colonization was to be thought of as a military operation even after the territory had been allegedly pacified. The typically fascist military tone was not lost in these projects designed for the reproduction of armed peasants, demonstrating in hostile land the courage and bravery of Italian settlers. As in all other fascist empires dealt with in this book, the empire was thought to reveal the best characteristics of European races.
32
Larebo,
33
Flora Bertizzolo and Silvia Pietrantonio, “A denied reality? Forced labour in Italian colonies in Northeast Africa,”
34
Governo del Harar, Provvedimenti a favore degli indigini coltivatori di caffé, AOI, Fasc 1811.
36
Irma Taddia,
38
Mia Fuller,
39
“La Valorizzazione agraria e la colonizzazione,”