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.
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.
Freyre’s travel journal was published under the title Adventure and Routine: A Journey in Search for the Portuguese Constants of Character and Action.[141] In India, Mozambique, or Angola, Freyre sought to confirm his theory by describing the adaptation of Portuguese colonists to the most disparate situations, forging a new original culture—lusotropicalism—that joyfully hybridized Tropical and European elements. Such a joyful perception also informed his description of the PEC in South West Angola:
The vision of the post combining stables and a very modern laboratory was unforgettable. In the pastures thousands of animal heads already adapted to the desert. The crossings revealed an ecological type of sheep: the desert sheep.[142]
In the conclusion of the book, Freyre recounts his delivery of a gift from the Portuguese President to his Brazilian counterpart: a chest containing an old rare edition of Luis de Camões’ Lusíadas—a sixteenth-century epic poem recounting the voyage of Vasco da Gama from Lisbon to India in 1498, which launched the Portuguese Empire in the Indian Ocean. The materials from which the chest was made summarized Portuguese presence in the world: “Angola diamonds, ivory from Mozambique, gold from Guinea, silver from Portugal, pearls from the Portuguese Orient, wood from Cape Verde—it irradiates Portugal, the Portuguese Overseas, and the panluso affection for Brazil.”[143] The interior of the chest was lined with Karakul fur, suggesting that Karakul embodied the “Portuguese constants of character and action” and thereby making them lusotropical animals.
For Freyre, the “ecological sheep” was the result of the crossings undertaken by Santos Pereira between pureblood imported Karakul and local breeds. The hybrid sheep demonstrated the ability of Portuguese culture to adapt to conditions found in the tropics, and thus Freyre thought they deserved the same appraisal as the plants he found in the Lisbon Overseas garden (Jardim do Ultramar). Such plants were responsible for “a revolution on the plan of vegetable life sociology…. New ecological adjustments were accomplished. Those transplantation adventures were always favored by the pantropical sense of life that from very early on, and even today, characterizes Portuguese actions overseas.”[144] Freyre thus established a direct relation between plant-breeding and animal-breeding practices and the pantropicalism that allegedly constituted the nature of Portuguese presence in the world.
139
Ibid. For other examples of experiment stations guiding the patterns of settlement in Africa, see Christophe Bonneuil, “Development as experiment: Science and state building in late colonial and postcolonial Africa, 1930–1970,”
140
Cláudia Castelo,
141
Gilberto Freyre,
143
Ibid., p. 444. I thank Claudia Castelo for this reference to Karakul in Freyre’s work.