Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

The same year the Posto Experimental do Caracul was founded, a decree was issued regulating conditions for land leasing for prospective settlers in the so-called Karakul Reservation.[138] Individual concessions occupied 5,000 hectares, the same extension of the Karakul farms first granted to the German veteran soldiers in South West Africa, later to be expanded to 10,000 and 15,000 hectares. Settlers didn’t pay for the land, which become private property after the herd reached 700 animals and after the building of a permanent house. The Karakul Reservation had a total area of about 9 million hectares, about the size of Portugal. According to calculations by Santos Pereira, it would be able to sustain 1,600 settler families and about 2 million Karakul sheep. This far-west area, previously dominated by the Kuvale cattle thieves, was now to become a source of income for the imperial economy.

At an exhibition organized in Lisbon in 1959 to convince metropolitan investors and future settlers, the director of the Posto Experimental do Caracul promised the president of the republic that the Reserve would be able to provide Portugal with about 11,000 pelts from Karakul. The pelts not consumed in Portugal were to be exported and would guarantee the empire a much-needed source of international currency. There is no comprehensive study of luxury consumption under Salazar, but photographs confirm the presence of Astrakhan coats among the wives of the dignitaries of the regime and among well-off urban dwellers.

The layout of the Posto Experimental do Caracul indicates that more was at stake than just imperial import/export balances. The 16,000 hectares of the experiment station were projected as the first element of an exemplary white settlement plan, a model farm to be replicated throughout the desert. The grid covering the Reserve was to be occupied with farms radiating from the PEC located at its center.[139] The notion suggested earlier of looking at experiment stations as outposts of empire has in the case of PEC its clearest application. Experiment stations were the first materialization in the landscape of the fascist colonial project, of the alternative modernity of settlers attached to the land through the reproduction of technoscientific organisms. And if the Kriwoj Rog station in the Ukraine and the experimental farm of Giggiga were early gone with the destruction of Hitler’s and Mussolini’s regimes, the longevity of Salazar’s regime allows for full exploration of this experiment in settler sociability.

Indeed, soon the Posto Experimental do Caracul would earn the status of obligatory stop for every visitor to South West Angola interested in the Portuguese civilizing mission. In January of 1952, the Brazilian anthropologist Gilberto Freyre would stop at the Posto Experimental do Caracul as part of a world journey through Portuguese colonies sponsored by Salazar’s government. Since the 1930s Freyre had been probing his theory that the Portuguese had developed a particularly benign form of imperialism—lusotropicalism—that was based not on racial differentiation, as the empires of northern European countries were, but on miscegenation of whites and tropical populations; Brazil was the best historical example.[140] Under growing international isolation after the defeat of fascist powers in World War II, Salazar’s regime would incorporate Freyre’s lusotropicalism in its official discourse from the 1950s on, for this Portuguese exceptionalism offered a justification for keeping colonies after independence was granted to other European possessions in Africa.

^{Figure 6.12 A map of the Karakul reservation in southwest Angola. The numbers correspond to planned concessions; 1 indicates the Karakul Experiment Station.}

^{(O Caracul, Agência Geral do Ultramar, Lisbon, 1959)}

^{Figure 6.13 A 1963 photo taken at a Karakul exhibition, with President Admiral Américo Tomás at the center and the veterinarian Manuel dos Santos Pereira, head of the Karakul experiment station, to his right.}

^{(Diário da viagem do Presidente Américo Thomaz às províncias de Angola e S.Tomé e Príncipe, 1963, Agência Geral do Ultramar, Lisbon, 1964)}