Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

By 1950 there were no more than 2,500 Kuvale in the area of the reserve, and only 700 of them were adult males.[148] According to Santos Pereira’s calculations, each native shepherd was to be responsible for 100 sheep, meaning that in the long term the reserve would need 20,000 natives. Migrant wage laborers had to be brought in from the more densely populated plateau of Angola. Santos Pereira demanded from the Indigenous Affairs Agent a labor contingent that would guarantee the survival of his scheme for white settlement.[149] We thus should add Karakul farms to the cotton and coffee concessions, mines, and public works that were constantly asking colonial authorities for supplies of native laborers. Indeed, the creation and violent management of an indigenous workforce pool constituted one of the main tasks of the Portuguese colonial state, at least until 1961, when labor legislation was revised. Only after the clash of independence movements and after strong international pressure did Portuguese authorities officially abolish the infamous native-labor regime (estatuto do trabalho indigena), replacing it with general rules of peasant labor and putting an end, at least on paper, to the previous practices of forcing indigenous population to work in commodity-production schemes and violently punishing those who refused to do so or who dared to break their working contracts.[150]

After five years during which a labor force was to be provided by the colonial administration, Santos Pereira argued that the conditions at the farm should be good enough that the compulsory regime could be dispensed with. The natives working at the farm were to be clearly separated from those outside. Always obsessed with the smuggling of animals by the Kuvale, dos Santos Pereira even devised a scheme under which each employee at the farm had to carry colored cards with which to identify himself to the armed sepoys policing the area.[151]

The layout of the Posto Experimental do Caracul included a native village of fifteen huts and was supposed to serve as model for the farms to be established throughout the Karakul Reserve. Santos Pereira didn’t conceal his pride in a new model hut he had designed, which he called “Karakul style.”[152] Bricks and mortar were used for the conical roof, instead of the traditional thatch. Despite the uniform exterior appearance of the huts, there were three different interior typologies: one “with no division for married niggers and already assimilated,” one with “one central division for two couples with no children,” and one with “three divisions for 4 single natives.”[153]

As in the Arab villages planned by the Italians in Libya, the apparent respect for indigenous life embodied by the native village of the Karakul experiment post in fact denied indigenous sociability. Domestic space was organized and regulated only in function of the married/single opposition and of the wage labor condition of natives. It is interesting to compare the PEC’s village with a onganda, the most stable of settlement forms of the Kuvale in South West Angola, as described by anthropologists:

[The onganda] is limited by a circle made of shrub that may reach a diameter of 70 m and inside which cattle overnights and houses, conic and short, are distributed. There is also a smaller enclosure for calves. Each onganda shelters two or three family groups that may be relatives or not and that may count or not with the presence of adult children, or nephews, or other dependents, of elder men who lead them, establishing relations among them of partnerships for the common exploration of cattle.[154]