By 1926, the Villaggio Duca degli Abruzzi was less of a village and more of a city. It had absorbed sixteen townships, and counted on 3000 Somali and 200 Italian resident workers, making it a true agricultural colony. Beyond the Villaggio, private [Fascist] plantation land coverage in Somalia also rose rapidly, from 53 hectares in 1927, to 617 hectares in 1930, to 2,130 in 1932, and then to 4,000 in 1935.²⁹

The colonial government financed a new railway to connect the Villaggio directly to Mogadishu, with 114 km of track.³⁰ Development connected the fertile valley between the Juba and Shabelle rivers to the sea. This area would soon become the centre of colonial Fascist banana plantation agriculture.³¹

Labour, not land, presented the foremost problem for Fascism’s colonial agro‐industry in Somalia. Many Somalis in the Italian‐occupied south had their own small farms. During the laborious planting season, many Somali farmers left Italian plantations to prepare their own fields or help on their relatives’ farms, while many farmers refused to engage in wage labour for the plantations as a matter of anti‐colonial principle.

Lacking willing labour, De Vecchi introduced harsh methods to engage Somali farmers in rural projects. Fascist state strategies to obtain labour for the expanded agricultural ventures ranged from socially invasive incentive systems at the SAIS agricultural scheme to the physical threats and legal coercion at Jenaale, a port town with access to Indian Ocean steamship routes.

Cassanelli notes that forced labour also spread through the hut tax, a new annual tax on Somali farmers that pushed many to move to plantations. It was, he further observes, ‘the first time [that] the colonial state assumed a leading rôle in recruiting labor for private as well as public enterprises’.³² In 1920, Italians operated four agricultural concessions in Somalia. By June 1933, they operated 115 concessions. Over 30,000 hectares of Somali land were now under [Fascist]‐run cultivation, and much of it was devoted to bananas.

Fascist colonial law and infrastructure drove land and labour on Somali banana plantations towards the régime’s goals for hyper‐productivity. Industrial banana farming boomed in the early 1930s, when [the Fascists] dammed the Uebi Scebeli river at Jenaale. At the Jenaale concession, plantation recruitment was difficult, with many European plantation owners competing for little Somali labour. [Fascist] colonial recruitment methods became increasingly severe. Planters often offered workers a week’s or month’s advance.

In theory, this looked like a sign‐on bonus, a common enticement for tight labour markets. In practice, advance payment brought the force of the colonial legal system to bear on farmers. Now, abandoning the plantations to care for their farms made them liable for breach of contract. Colonial law could compel their return to the [Fascist] plantations. By 1933, Jenaale would export 126,500 quintals of product each year, ten times more bananas than any other Somali plantation centre.³³

The Banana Boat Flotillas

During the 1930s, the geographic focus of [Fascist] colonial interventions shifted from labour and infrastructure on plantations in inland Somalia to Mediterranean trade networks and maritime technologies for food preservation. At first, industrial banana production was impeded by overland transport issues, stretching from plantation to port.

Only two companies, the Compagnia Italiana Transatlantica (CITRA) and the Libera Triestina, offered steamships to ply the waters between [Fascist] Italy and Somalia, and their tiny, refrigerated holds were built for meat, not fruit. Exportation could not keep pace with production, and bananas rotted in the fields.³⁴ Some planters sold the bananas at low prices locally, or pushed them onto Somali workers in lieu of cash wages.³⁵

(Emphasis added.)