Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

And the Karakul story also starts with cattle. In 1940 a Portuguese funante (an ambulant vendor trading with indigenous populations) from the port town of Moçâmedes, after getting three Kuvale drunk, marked the cattle of the indigenous herd with his sign, allegedly as a form of payment for previous debts.[134] When they woke up, realizing they had been tricked, the Kuvale decided to follow the trail of the funante through the desert, killing two of his servants and getting their cattle back. This western script wouldn’t be complete without the arrival of the cavalry to settle the scene: two detachments of about a thousand Portuguese soldiers and another thousand African troops, and two airplanes, were mobilized to put an end to cattle theft in the area. From September 1940 to February 1941 the Portuguese army undertook a “hunt of the Kuvale” all over the entire semi-desert area of southwestern Angola stretching between the sea and the Chela sierra. From a population of no more than 5,000 people, about 3,500 prisoners were taken, and men, women, and children were displaced into detention camps. Reports mention the use of violence during detention, including sadistic executions. To those reports we should add the deportation of about 1,200 men, half of them to the cocoa plantations on the island of São Tomé and the other half to the diamond mines of Diamang in northern Angola. The Kuvale had 95 percent of their cattle either killed or distributed among Portuguese white colonists of Moçâmedes and Sá da Bandeira and African troops. In a typical story of white settler violence, indigenous people suffer cruel repression under the accusation of being cattle robbers and, in the end, get robbed of their cattle. Among the Kuvale the war would be remembered as the kokombola war—kokombola meaning total uprooting, not leaving anything behind.[135] In current terminology, a genocide.

The last frontier of the Portuguese empire had at last been pacified, with the colonial government in full control of the territory. But what should be done with this desert? With the example of German settlers in South West Africa just south of the border, one didn’t have to be very imaginative to begin envisaging ways of making this desert area contribute to the imperial economy. The continuities between the two contiguous territories were obvious: not only were the climate and the soil similar, but the exterminated indigenous population was the same: the Kuvale are no other than the Herero of Angola. Thus, the governor of the region, Captain Bustorff Silva, after a leisure visit in 1944 to South West Africa, demanded that the veterinarian Manuel dos Santos Pereira, who was responsible for the Animal Experiment Station of Humpata (Estação Zootécnica da Humpata), located in the plateau not far from Sá da Bandeira, investigate the possibility of reproducing the German experiment with Karakul in Angola. The veterinarian didn’t take long to answer positively and to point to the recently pacified desert fringe between the sea and the highlands as the perfect location for the undertaking.[136] His words leave few doubts about the importance of the German example south of the border:

The South West, mainly due to Karakul, which constitutes by far its main wealth, was able to occupy more than two thirds of its arid territorial extension. More than 50% of its 40,000 Europeans and the majority of its 300,000 indigenous people live from husbandry and related industries…. It is a symbol and an example worth of imitation.[137]

Santos Pereira became so enthusiastic about the project that he gave up his post at the Humpata experiment station, on a comfortable and temperate plateau, for the harsh and arid conditions of the dry lowlands. In 1948 he became the director of the new Karakul Experimental Post (PEC—Posto Experimental do Caracul) located in the Namib Desert, 78 kilometers from the sea in the foothills of the Chela sierra. The isolation of the place was broken only by the railway line that connected the port of Moçâmedes with Sá da Bandeira on the plateau. Much as we have seen in the German and Italian cases, the PEC was built in what was perceived to be empty barren land. That perception was, of course, a result of a previous extermination of local populations. Only by ignoring the existence of semi-nomadic people such as the Bedouins in Libya or the Herero in South West Africa, and by denying their entitlement to the land, was it possible to dream of gigantic estates marked by barbed wire fences holding millions of Karakul sheep. The presence of Karakul is a good marker of colonial genocides.