South West Angola has rightly received close scrutiny from historians dealing with this so-called Third Portuguese Empire—the African Empire of the twentieth century that followed the First Empire of the sixteenth century in Asia and the Second Empire in Brazil of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.[127] Such interest is due to the large proportion of Portuguese settlers in the region relative to the rest of the colony. Both in colonial propaganda and by present-day historians, the region was the scene of a clash between African nomadism and Portuguese settlement.[128] In fact, since the middle of the nineteenth century descriptions of the Huíla plateau had emphasized its climatic similarity to Portugal and the absence of the most feared tropical diseases, pointing to the area as well suited for white settlement. The same climate that prevented South West Angola from participating in the colonial rubber and coffee booms promised an alternative to the model of plantation colonization, instead basing the colonization on small and medium-size properties owned by Portuguese settlers originating from impoverished areas of the Metropole. The herds of the local semi-nomadic tribes—the Nyaneka-Nkhumbi, the Ambo, and the Kuvale—were to give way to the cultivated fields and orchards of the Portuguese, whose identity, as was obsessively repeated by the regime’s propaganda machinery and as was discussed above in chapter 2, was formed by virtuous hard tilling of the land. In an alternative formulation, and keeping the reference to the work of the anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard, the African cattle complex was to give way to the Portuguese settlers’ horticultural complex.[129]
As we have seen from previous examples, and as recent literature on colonial relations has emphasized, things are always more complicated.[130] To tell the story of the area through the simple opposition between the pairs nomads/animals and settlers/plants doesn’t get us far. The most successful settlers of Sá da Bandeira (today Lubango), South West Angola’s largest city, made their fortune by trading with local shepherds and using cattle as currency.[131] Until the middle of the twentieth century, most of the animals owned by white colonists were actually conserved in African herds to be sold later or simply as capital (stock) accumulation. Instead of a replacement of the black nomad by the white settler we have a relation that would better be described as parasitism.[132] And if anthropologists, following Evans-Pritchard’s example, have explored in every detail the forms of social organization of indigenous communities built around cattle, there has been not enough of an effort to take seriously the role of non-human animals in the building of colonial sociability.[133] In South West Angola, besides cattle, Karakul sheep were the animals trusted with organizing settler life in the arid strip of land between the coastline and the high lands, the northern stretch of the Namib Desert.
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]
127
William Gervase Clarence-Smith,
128
João de Almeida,
129
Edward E. Evans-Pritchard,
130
Among many possible examples, see Ann Laura Stoler,
131
Eduardo Cruz de Carvalho, “Traditional and modern patterns of cattle in southwestern Angola: A critical evaluation from pastoralism to ranching,”
132
Not until the 1950s did Portuguese begin to acquire systematically large tracts of land (tens of thousands of hectares) to establish enormous cattle ranches according to the rules of modern husbandry. On use of the notion of parasitism to describe colonial situations, see Ricardo Roque,
133
Ruy Duarte de Carvalho, probably the most inspired author engaging with the region, in order to describe how Kuvale sociability was intertwined with cattle raising coined the notion of “social bull.” See Carvalho,
136
Manuel dos Santos Pereira,