In a seminal article by Cristiana Bastos, the “joyful luso-tropicalism” of Gilberto Freyre is read in parallel with the better-known Tristes Tropiques (Sad Tropics) of Claude Lévi-Strauss, published in 1955, which was highly influential in cultural anthropology in the second half of the twentieth century.[145] According to Bastos, Freyre offered an alternative to the anthropology of Lévi-Strauss, de-emphasizing notions such as “otherness, contradiction, dualism, [and] opposition.” Bastos doesn’t suggest taking Freyre’s path and looking for continuities and miscegenation where previously only otherness was seen. She invites us instead to revisit the “icons and themes” of luso-tropicalism, recommending critical distance in relation to “the myth of non racism and great humanism of the Portuguese,” and puts forward a research program exploring that peculiar iconography of imperialism made of “Albuquerque’s soldiers marrying Indian women” and “varied natives hand in hand with a permanent smile in their faces.” Karakul—whose furs accommodated the luso-tropicalist reliquary offered by the Portuguese president to the Brazilian president Getúlio Vargas, with Freyre officiating at the ceremony—belong to the family of such icons that one has to explore in detail when trying to understand the nature of Portuguese colonialism during Salazar’s regime.
As has been suggested throughout this book, plant breeding or animal breeding, when examined closely, illuminate more general historical points. Apparent insignificant technicalities may suggest ways to overcome Freyre’s rosy visions of Portuguese colonialism and to place it in a continuum with the frontier experiences of other fascist regimes—a move that would have been anathema to a Brazilian anthropologist always emphasizing Portuguese exceptionalism, as is still done in most Portuguese scholarship.[146]
As we now know, any Karakul project begins with the importing of pureblood Karakul to be crossed with local sheep. Manuel dos Santos Pereira’s travels in South West Africa made it clear that acquiring purebred animals from breeders in that territory would be impossible, owing to their fear of future competition from their northern neighbor. The first rams were not acquired until after the end of World War II, and then from the US Department of Agriculture’s flock. Only after a second import of Karakul sheep from Germany in 1952—ten rams and two ewes, descendants of the Halle flock—did more encouraging results begin to appear.[147] The Italians in Libya and Abyssinia, and the Germans in South West Africa, had been able to find a suitable local breed to cross with Karakul. No such breed was found in Angola. After several failed attempts to use sheep from other parts of Angola, a large contingent of animals was imported from Tanganyika (current Tanzania), making the operation much more expensive than had initially been predicted. And indeed, importing suitable sheep for crossing would be a constant problem for Karakul farms in South West Angola.
Pureblood Karakul originating in Uzbekistan and arriving in Angola via Halle, crossed with animals from Tanganyika with the idea of reproducing German South West Africa settlement of the desert, are actually strange candidates for embodying lusotropicalism. There were crossings and hybrids, but that doesn’t mean that differences were diluted in a process of acclimation. On the contrary, purity was a central principle of Karakul husbandry. Only pureblood Karakul rams were allowed to inseminate ewes, and male offspring were slaughtered immediately after birth (with the exception of a few lambs that were castrated and then raised for their meat). Decisions whether to castrate or slaughter male progeny were based on evaluation of the quality of their pelts according to the hair standards established by Halle scientists. Pureblood males were separated from the herd, contacting females only for reproduction; hybrid males were slaughtered or castrated.
The same recording practices that were used in Italian colonies, where each animal’s degree of purity was marked on its ear, were also followed in Angola. But what was no more than a plan in Giggiga actually took place in South West Angola. The Posto Experimental do Caracul kept the Halle pureblood rams in its possession and lent them to settlers for purposes of reproduction, thus guaranteeing the distribution of superior germplasm in the entire reserve. By the early 1950s, when the PEC began its operations, artificial insemination was a common technique in animal husbandry. The laboratory that Gilberto Freyre mentioned in his description of the experiment post was actually an artificial-insemination facility in which Manuel dos Santos Pereira analyzed, diluted, and stored Karakul rams’ semen. In contrast with Bonadonna’s air drops, dos Santos Pereira used a Chevy truck to traverse the Karakul reserve and distribute the sperm of the PEC rams. Not only did the new settler community of the Karakul Reserve expand in the landscape from the first nucleus defined by the PEC property; it also grew as a result of the steady supply of pureblood sperm that Santos Pereira distributed. The maintenance, reproduction, and distribution of purity sustained the entire settlement.
The strict surveillance over purity and controlled hybridization of nonhuman animals had direct consequences for colonial relations. The demands of capital and recording operations excluded any consideration of indigenous people owning concessions. The standards defining what constituted an economically sustainable Karakul farm—standards for land extension, management, and genetic purity—limited Karakul farming to white settlers. As in South West Africa, the black population was seen as a pool of cheap wage labor. Blacks, having had their communal lands expropriated, had to work on settlers’ properties.
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]
145
Cristiana Bastos, “Tristes trópicos e alegres luso-tropicalismos: das notas de viagem em Lévi-Strauss e Gilberto Freyre,”
145
To my knowledge, there is no example in the literature that puts Portuguese colonialism in the context of fascist expansionism.
147
Manuel dos Santos Pereira,
149
Manuel dos Santos Pereira, “Plano de Acção para o desenvolvimento do Caracul de Angola,” Arquivo do Instituto Português de Apoio ao Desenvolvimento (AIPAD), 1957, p. 19.
150
On Portuguese colonial labor regimes, see Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, “Das ‘dificuldades de levar os indigenas a trabalhar’: o sistema de trabalho nativo no império colonial portugues,” in