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.
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.
Much of the initial breeding work held at CICA was thus to adapt the Barberton varieties to local ecological conditions by using selections of the U4 strain aiming to enhance productivity and the technological properties of the fiber. A constant selection effort was also necessary to avoid the degeneration of the cultivated varieties resulting from crossings with previously planted varieties by insect pollination or poor seed isolation, in order to keep the good properties of yield, fiber quality, and resistance to diseases or plagues. Each of the regional experiment stations, controlled by the Research Center, performed essays testing different selected seeds under different conditions of fertilization, pest control, sowing timing or rotation of cultures. Until the CICA began to operate in Mozambique, the U4 seeds were imported from South Africa, with two big deliveries in 1937 and 1940.[113] In subsequent years, in addition to imports from Barbeton as well as from Namulonge in Uganda, CICA breeders released their own strains from selections of the British Empire ones, produced in the several experimental fields operated throughout the territory. Beginning with a overwhelming presence of the U4 in the 1940s, maps produced by CICA researchers for the different regions showed in subsequent years many other strains: A618, A637, A455, SB8, and so on, each of them chosen in function of different local conditions. The big challenge was to increase the length of the fiber produced without diminishing resistance to Jassid. In fact, maps were also produced that showed the quality of the fiber produced in each area of cotton cultivation as measured by their micronaire index (air permeability of compressed cotton fibers which indicates fiber fineness and maturity).[114] The entire territory was now translated in function of the regional variations of the technological index of the cotton fiber.
Not only did Quintanilha supervise everyone’s work; his cytogenetic knowledge wasn’t wasted. He assembled a major collection of cotton varieties in the facilities of CICA and surveyed the Mozambican countryside in search for more.[115] He was able to demonstrate that, contrary to what botanists had believed, not only was there no presence of the species Gossypium arboreum in the territory; in addition, the plants of the Gossypium herbaceum species were different from the ones in central Africa, having originated from exchanges with the Indian subcontinent much before the arrival of the Portuguese. Most of the spontaneous growing cotton plants in Mozambique were Gossypium barbadense or Gossypium hirsutum, meaning they originated from the Americas, and were thus brought by the Portuguese from Brazil. More than a historical interest, the importance of such taxonomic work was to guide the hybridization work of the breeding department. The main issue is that Old World species (G. arboreum and G. herbaceum) are diploid (n = 13) whereas the New World ones (G. barbadense and G. hirsutum) are tetraploid (n = 26). Breeders trying to tap on the diversity of both worlds when crossing cottons native from the Americas with those from northern India would thus produce sterile triploid descendants. And here is where Quintanilha’s cytogenetics came in. By treating chemically cells with colchinine it was possible to duplicate the number of chromosomes and convert the sterile triploid into hexaploid.[116] This was then crossed with a cultivated Asian variety (diploid), producing a fertile tetraploid, which could finally be crossed with an American variety of the G. hirsutum (tetraploid) species. By producing a collection of hexaploids—tools for the crossing of varieties with different number of chromosomes—Quintanilha thus offered CICA breeders the possibility of tapping into the whole range of species across the different continents. By 1958 there were more than 1,500 of these interspecies crossings under observations in the network of CICA experimental fields.[117]
106
Soon the scientists of the Cotton Center were making surveys for the rest of Portugals colonial territories. See Centro de Investigação Científica Algodoeira,
107
António Jose da Silva Teixeira, “A Estação Experimental Algodoeira de Namulonge, Uganda,”
108
Aurélio Quintanilha, Manuel Guerreiro Beatriz, Luiz Salazar d’Eça, “Variedades de Algodão Cultivadas em Mocambique,” in
110
Cristophe Bonneuil, “Science and state building in late colonial and postcolonial Africa, 1930–1970,”
112
On the qualities of the U4, see Quintanilha et al., “Variedades de algodão cultivadas,” p. 21.
114
Instituto do Algodão de Moçambique, “Departamento de Classificação de Algodão,” Relatórios, Actividade do Instituto do Algodão de Moçambique nos anos de 1962 a 1967: 43–53, Arquivo do Instituto de Apoio ao Desenvolvimento (AIPAD). MU/PP/20.
116
Aurélio Quintanilha, “Homologias cromossómicas no Género Gossypium” (Instituto do Algodão de Moçambique, 1966).
117
António Cabral, “Relatório do Departamento de Citologia e Genética relativo ao ano de 1957,” JEA, Centro de Investigação Científica Algodoeira, 1958, AIPAD 5.2260.