Capitalism in Decay

The spectacle of modernity was as much a display of power as an edifying tale for Ethiopians:

In the eyes of the natives that follow the tractor in the furrow drawn on the plain, the traditional individualism of the hand that plowed the land gives way to the harmony of the engine that encompasses all forces. All around, it’s silence. (Fossa 1938, 494, 492)

Reality, though, was not rosy as fascist propaganda claimed it to be. The total acres sown in Chercher went down from 1,700 in 1938 to 1,200 in 1939 to 640 in 1940. Settlers managed to grow only two ‘minor’ cereals such as durra and maize (2,500 and 700 quintals), complemented by smaller quantities of wheat, barley, teff, and potatoes. There was barely a trace of the production that high‐yield wheat varieties, chemical fertilizers, and mechanization had promised.

Forty‐two of the original settlers were repatriated in the first two years for various misdemeanors or their ‘ineptitude’. In a letter to Italy that censorship intercepted, one of the farmers lamented:

I have moved my family to Bari of Ethiopia for fifteen months now and still not a single agricultural tool nor the cattle, mules, cows they promised they would give to us have been provided. To give some milk to our children we have to buy canned condensed milk at the local store. On a farm, this is the ultimate shame. The colonial houses are a disaster; it rains inside, and everyone suffer from rheumatic diseases. We are treated like slaves in the very place where our beloved Duce ended slavery [Ethiopia]. (Ertola 2014, 75–76)

Raw numbers testify to the failure of mass colonization in Bari of Ethiopia: by 1940, as few as ninety‐two Italians lived in the settlement (Sbacchi 1985).

Why, notwithstanding the massive deployment of applied scientific research and state investments, did the fascist plans for settler colonialism fall short not only of providing any relevant food exports to the motherland but even to feed Italian settlers in Ethiopia?

The first reason was that the fascist biopolitical plan was too ambitious to fulfill. For all the propaganda to the contrary, environmental conditions were difficult for European farmers in a diverse tropical country like Ethiopia.

The transfer of rural technologies was considerable — in 1941, nineteen agricultural experimentation offices, twenty nurseries, two zootechnical stations, and twenty‐two livestock insemination stations had been established across Italian East Africa — but they were not up to the challenge of transforming Ethiopian soil into farmlands for Italians’ favourite crops. Italian farmers’ last wheat harvest in Ethiopia in 1940 was the most disastrous: an invasion of grasshoppers and the infection of cereal rusts caused by the fungus puccinia graminis destroyed much of it.

The transplantation of the hybrid wheats that were the pride of Italian applied genetics, Mentana and Quaderna, produced a disappointing output. Mechanization, also, was implemented in too limited a manner for the magnitude of the task. By 1940 there were less than 400 tractors in all of Ethiopia (Del Boca 2014, 210).

The second factor was poor colonization policy. [Fascists] were ill‐informed about Ethiopia’s societal organization and unprepared to enter in a cooperative relationship with rural Ethiopians. They found securing available land and native labour difficult.

Abyssinian farmers lacked any incentive to provide their labour to the realization of the imperialists’ crop economy, as they equated working the land for others to slavery. Many of them had little use for wage money, especially when that came in Italian lire, a paper currency they did not trust (Pankhurst 1972). Overall, [Fascist] colonization policy was fragmentary and contradictory, with different plans and models supported by different state agencies.

Thirdly, the imperialist war of aggression and the racist, exploitative, and repressive approach to native relations fostered Ethiopian armed resistance, which made life in remote settlements uninviting.

[Fascists] generally managed to control towns and the main roads by patrolling settlements and convoys, but just a few miles from these relatively safe havens they were under threat from Ethiopian guerrillas. Farmhouses had to be ‘built close together in military strategic positions, with surrounding walls and defensive works’ (Sbacchi 1985, 97). Fear and uncertainty dominated the experience of everyday life for [Fascist] settlers.

Most depressing for Italian peasants settling in Ethiopia were the hardships required to upgrade to landownership. As an old colonial officer explained:

These people come from Italy prepared to work hard, but they also look forward to making some money quickly, and with the system we are adopting there is no quick money to make here. The settler gets fifty or sixty acres of land to plough and the essential tools. In exchange, he [sic] enters into an obligation to grow certain crops like wheat, corn, and teff, and pay an annual fee in kind to the Ente or the concession‐holder.

After twenty‐five years, if all installments are paid, the small farmhouse and the land will become the settler’s property. The latter, who came to Africa because he was starving, who was disoriented in a foreign environment, lacking the skills to cultivate the land profitably and deal with natives, realizes that he faces years and years of scarcity; the land is hard to plow, perhaps it has never been plowed. Meanwhile, he sees other Italians getting rich with a small business of any kind, with little effort. He is unhappy, demoralized, and at the first opportunity he leaves. (Pierotti 1959, 36)

Prospects were also gloomy for younger settlers who wanted to start a family on their colonial farm because at any time during the occupation of Ethiopia Italian women were never more than ten per cent of the Italian population.²

Finally, the most serious mistake colonial planners made was to start mass settlement before the completion of an effective infrastructure of food logistics. The latter was the prerequisite of the former; yet, because of critical bad timing inspired by fascist political ideology and propaganda, road and public works construction ended up killing [Fascist] rural colonization in the cradle even before World War II terminated Mussolini’s ‘place in the sun’.

The fascist plan for demographic colonization all over Ethiopia required a mobility system transporting migrants to their settlements and crops to the ports on the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. Paving the way to Italian cars and trucks was strategic to circumvent the critical problem that the only viable railroad that gave Ethiopian exports access to the sea, the Addis Ababa‐Djibouti railroad, ended in French territory, and goods were subjected to French customs: ‘tariffs so high’, Poggiali lamented:

… that the transport of a load of wheat or coffee from Addis Ababa to the sea cost between twenty and thirty times more than what the same transport cost from the American places of production to the seaports of Santos, Buenos Aires, and New Orleans. (1938, 162, 173)

But the construction of roads, bridges, and overpasses across Ethiopia involved hundreds of building and logistics firms, dozens of civil engineers, and thousands of workers. While [Fascist] highways did realize an unprecedented unification of Ethiopia, they diverted a large share of financial and labour resources from agriculture.

The impressive program of road infrastructure stimulated truck transport micro‐business (at the expense of off‐road vehicles that were vital in rural development) as well as thriving workers’ salaries (Guardia di Finanza 2005). Migrant construction workers in Ethiopia typically measured their satisfaction with the job opportunity that imperial mobility had landed to them in terms of food security:

The first time I went to Africa, they sent us to work on the Massawa‐Asmara road. It was so hot that we just couldn’t stand it. Yet we ate so well; rice, cheese, pasta, and fruits of many kinds that they brought us down from the highland. At noon, we would cook eggs by placing them on the sand under the sun. (Taddia 1988, 124–125)

The truck drivers carrying food to [Fascist] settlements were also paid wages that were many times higher than they would have received in Italy. A source for the fascist secret police worried about truck drivers’ changing lifestyle as potentially revolutionary: ‘We have seen truckers that in the Fatherland would drink a glass of wine costing forty cents, drinking champagne for a hundred lire a bottle here’ (Ertola 2014, 205).

The most attractive occupation [Fascists] had to offer Ethiopian men was to enlist in the colonial troops, which fit their social ideals of masculinity, but the high need for labour in construction gave native working an edge in obtaining lucrative contracts in the trade (Podestà 2002,142).

In short, the better wages and labour conditions that the building of the road infrastructure provided Italian and Ethiopian workers crippled exactly what it was supposed to serve — white colonist settlement, the formation of a native wage labour force, rural development, and international export crop trade.

Mussolini’s highways, however, proved to be indispensable for moving food imported from Italy to feed the [Fascist] occupation army and settler market, entering Ethiopia from Port Said, the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, Massawa, and Eritrea.