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]
The onganda’s enclosure also included graves and sacred sites. One doesn’t need more to conclude of the over simplifiaction associated with the process of mimicking indigenous life embodied in the faked native’s village.[155] Santos Pereira’s huts were as shallow as those reproductions of villages built for colonial fairs and world exhibitions ready to be consumed as postcards by urban dwellers in Europe or North America. Independently of one’s position on the virtues and problems of the sociability of the Kuvale, the point is that the joyful lusotropicalist rhetoric attached to the PEC’s native village, with its claims about the unique Portuguese sensitivity toward traditional societies and their customs, consisted of empty words hiding a violent conversion of indigenous population into impoverished wage laborers working on white settlers’ farms. The acknowledged resistance of the Kuvale to being mobilized for such undertakings only confirms their understanding of what was at stake.
The natives’ village was not the only element of the Karakul experiment station to be presented as exemplary of lusotropicalism. Gilberto Freyre also saw evidence of the unique adaptive nature of Portuguese settlers in the house of the director, which, he suggested, demonstrated that “it was possible for a Portuguese to live in Caracul in a true Oasis”:
Such was the residence of the Post’s director, all involved by creepers and a trellis with bunches of grapes so Portuguese fresh they looked fake…. The vines burst in fat grapes by the balcony at children’s hands and of grown ups nostalgic of the fruits and scents of Portugal.[156]
While Manuel dos Santos Pereira drove relentlessly through the reserve distributing genetic purity, inspecting barbed wire fences, evaluating pastures, and measuring the water levels of improvised ditches, his wife served ”magnificent lunches with the grace and dignity of someone who overlooked a dinner in Lisbon or Oporto.”[157] Compensating for the nomadism of a frontier life always on the move, and for the 9,000 miles dos Santos Pereira put on his Chevy truck every month, his wife and children, through their performance of metropolitan life, displayed the stability repetitively invoked in publicizing the joys of white settlement. Already in 1940, Bronislaw Malinowski called attention to this phenomenon of white settler communities not limiting themselves to reproduce metropolis habits but of overdoing them—a point emphasized in more recent work in which Anne Laura Stoler has explored the constant intimate surveillance work that was done to keep colonizers and colonized separated.
The overdoing of metropolitan life was evident not only in the exquisite housekeeping of Manuel dos Santos Pereira’s wife but also in the architecture of a house built according to the principles of the “Portuguese House” style already mentioned above when describing the building of the National Agricultural Experiment Station directed by Sousa da Câmara. According to the technicians of the Office of Colonial Urbanization (Gabinete de Urbanização Colonial), which was responsible for the design of government buildings in Angola and Mozambique, there was in fact an “overseas Portuguese House” style, distinguishable for being even more Portuguese than the “Portuguese House” of the metropole. The Posto Experimental do Caracul was designed as a model settler home aimed at performing, in dos Santos Pereira’s words, “the reproduction of Karakul breeders.”[158]
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).
154
Ruy Duarte de Carvalho,
155
For a more extensive discussion of mimesis and colonial violence associated with Karakul farming in Angola, see Tiago Saraiva, “Mimetismo colonial e reprodução animaclass="underline" carneiros caracul no Sudoeste angolano,”
159
See, for example, James C. Scott,
160
José de Sousa Bettencourt e José Gonçalves Cotta, O Aspecto económico-social do empreendimento da indústria pastoril dos ovinos caracul (Instituto de investigação Científica de Angola—Luanda) (21/3/1962), AIPAD.