Plans for the fascistizzazione of colonial agriculture resulted in the introduction of systematic practices of forced labor and recruitment. Throughout the 1920s, labor recruitment was organized by the concessionaires who generally offered temporary seasonal occupations, from one to six months, mainly to male laborers.

Initially, labor recruitment drew upon the communities living in nearby Janaale.⁸⁵ As laborers frequently abandoned colonial plantations to return to their villages, concessionaires extended their search for labor to northern areas, especially in the regions of Buur Hakaba and Baydhabo.⁸⁶

There is little archival evidence on how labor recruitment was carried out by private concessionaires in the 1920s. Surely, successive colonial governors admitted that this “chaotic and disorganised recruitment” generated degrees of “resentment” and “disruption” into the lives of sedentary riverine communities.⁸⁷

It also seems likely that the search for new recruits coupled with labor mutinies in the concessions generated a considerable movement of laborers in the area. In this way, the colonial government estimated that overall, between 1924 and 1929, about 100,000 laborers had been employed for some time in colonial estates in Janaale.⁸⁸

In 1929, the colonial government drafted a new labor contract with the aim of regulating labor mobility, which by then was seen as the major obstacle to the development of the colonial economy.⁸⁹

Modeled on the resettlement scheme implemented at SAIS [Società Agricola Italo‐Somala], the new contract introduced a quota system. This required each community living in the proximity of cultivations to provide concessions with a certain amount of laborers for a fixed and renewable term.

Moreover, the new contract called for the recruitment of entire farming families, rather than single laborers, in the hope that this would hinder labor mutinies.⁹⁰ To facilitate this process, the fascist régime began arranging forced marriages.⁹¹

[…]

The resettlement of entire farming families in private concessions would create, Barile claimed, a new ethnic group whose offspring will constitute the future generation of laborers of the fascist “Greater Somalia.” It was further argued that the resettlement scheme provided many impoverished families with an opportunity to improve their standard of living.⁹⁴

But, as at SAIS, employment in private concessions became questionable: laborers were required to work six days per week, harvesting commercial crops while devoting the remaining time to their own crops; laborers’ retribution was allocated by piecework; a laborer’s piecework was not transferable to another; and the completion of piecework did not necessarily provide laborers with salaries.⁹⁵

In the 1970s, social historian of Somalia, Cassanelli, collected vivid memories of abuses and coercion in the colonial plantations, bitterly remembered by Somalis as the tragic “years of colonya.”⁹⁶

Although the [Fascists] have later denied these charges before an international commission of the United Nations, reports about the abuses in colonial plantations were well known among colonial circles and brought the colonial government under closer scrutiny in the 1920s.⁹⁷

Critiques came from within the Fascist Party. The federal secretary in Mogadishu, Marcello Serrazanetti, for instance, published a review of slavery‐like conditions in colonial plantations in 1933, where he accused the colonial government of offering little assistance to laborers; of promoting forced marriages that were often arranged before the resettlement scheme; and, more generally, of covering up the abuses laborers endured in the concessions.⁹⁸

It seems likely that the assistance the colonial government provided to concessionaires went beyond the regulation of labor recruitment. Colonial police was also used to hinder laborers’ mutinies, to chase laborers who had abandoned the fields, and to bring them back to the concessions.⁹⁹ Sometimes, colonial assistance was also sought for punishing laborers.

Pictured: Four colonial military police (zaptié) who worked on behalf of Fascist Italy in Somalia. Dated 1939.

Although the colonial government assisted and facilitated labor recruitment and surveillance in the plantations, its relations with Italian concessionaires did not come without problems.

Officials in the field often complained that the brutality and violence concessionaires inflicted upon laborers compromised the results and credibility of the entire project of valorizzazione in Somalia. Reporting on labor relations in the plantations, one political officer asked for the colonial government’s intervention in favor of Somali laborers.

In this way, the officer explained, “the population would believe that the government endeavours to promote their wealth and not their destruction”; “it [was] only through these [development plans] that we can justify our presence in the colony in political and economic terms.”¹⁰⁰

Yet, these critiques remained isolated voices. In fact, the officers that tried to oppose the concessionaires, like Federal Secretary Serrazanetti, were later removed from their posts.¹⁰¹

(Emphasis added. See here for more on Somalia under Fascism.)

Events that happened today (August 7):

1926: Spain and Fascist Italy signed a Treaty of Friendship, Conciliation and Judicial Settlement.
1937: Emil Nolde, Fascist artist, was born.
1942: The Battle of Guadalcanal began as the United States Marines initiated the first American offensive of the war with landings on Guadalcanal and Tulagi in the Solomon Islands.