Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

The director’s house, stables with pureblood Karakul, the artificial-insemination laboratory, herds of ewes ready to be fertilized, practices for recording breeding, the model natives’ village, and the 16,000 hectares enclosed by barbed wire were all brought together to reproduce white settlers. The characterization of Kriwoj Rog and Giggiga as colonial outposts is confirmed in full by the Karakul experiment station in South West Angola, which was designed to produce, sustain, and expand colonial fascist life. It was through technoscientific Karakul sheep that Portuguese in the desert of South West Angola could be faithful to “the organic essence of the Nation to undertake the historical function of possessing and colonizing overseas dominions and of civilizing indigenous populations.”

However, the literature of postcolonial studies has warned us repeatedly of the actual failure of scientific colonization schemes.[159] Planners’ repeated failures to recognize the complexities of local dynamics and their overestimation of their power to control every social and natural variable resulted in a sad succession of aborted projects. The ambitious project of the Karakul reserve was no exception. In 1962, a report on the “social-economic aspects of the Karakul sheep husbandry industry” by two social scientists from the recently founded Angola Institute of Scientific Research (Instituto de investigação Científica de Angola), although not doubting that Karakul would soon become “one of the major resources of the territory,” bluntly asserted that in the reserve there wasn’t “the slightly existence of anything one may call settlement.”[160] The problem was that instead of new settlers the wealthiest people of the two urban areas of Moçâmedes and Sá da Bandeira acquired the concessions, hired wage laborers, and let the farms be run by foremen. Instead of model settlements there were absentee large landowners. The area occupied by the few farms (no more than seventeen) was to be sure enormous. In contrast to the initially planned 5,000 hectares, each individual unit now consisted of 15,000 hectares, making a total of 271,000 hectares (including the experiment post).

^{Figure 6.16 A building at the Karakul Experiment Station designed according to “Portuguese house style” as codified by the Portuguese fascist regime, ca. 1960.}

^{(Arquivo Instituto Português de Apoio ao Desenvolvimento / MU / DGE / RRN / 1548 / 06127)}

The total of seventeen farms raises the question of the historical relevance of Karakul farming to colonial relations in Angola. True enough, the Karakul experiment post didn’t reproduce Karakul farmers, but that doesn’t mean it had no important historical consequences. Independently of the absence of “brave settlers,” Karakul farms were exemplary of a more generalized land grab that occurred all over the south of Angola, aimed at replacing the semi-nomadic societies of the cattle complex with large, white-controlled industrial husbandry operations occupying thousands of hectares. Such replacement demanded a violent military repression and the introduction of industrialized organisms to be sold in international markets. The latter was made possible by the work undertaken at the Karakul Experiment Post.

This replacement was eloquently described in the critical verdict concerning the value of the Karakul experiment by Ruy Cinatti in his unpublished Itinerário Angolano of 1972, a unique mix of phytogeography, agronomy, ethnography, and poetry.[161] Cinatti, a poet who had worked as an agriculture expert for the Portuguese empire, was disheartened by the “radically endogamy of the sheep-human settlement of Karakul.”[162] He despaired at the length of the barbed wire fences that forced the Kuvale to take long detours to have access to water points or else to illegally break the fences: