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was eloquently described in the critical verdict concerning the value of the Karakul experiment by Ruy Cinatti in his unpublished Itinerário Angolano of 1972, a unique mix of phytogeography, agronomy, ethnography, and poetry.[161] Cinatti, a poet who had worked as an agriculture expert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:
Ranch Montemor! Texas in South West Angola!… But the wire doesn’t end. Here is another ranch…. There is no Texan ranch in the Angolan South West more valuable than a Mucubai,[163] nor dream of being a rancher when done as here: legalized robbery… And I, here proclaiming the vitality of Angola, as if Angola were the USA 1800 style, forgetting the Indians (Mucubais, Cuanhamas), forgetting that Indians are history and the Mucubais are making it.[164]
There was no exemplary white settlement to brag about. But the few remaining Kuvale or Mucubai, forced to drive their much-reduced herds between rows of barbed wire, their trans-human routes cut, and their access to water limited, surely knew that Karakul were historically meaningful.[165]
In 1975, less than a year after the overthrow of the dictatorial regime in Portugal, a big auction of Karakul skins in the city of Sá da Bandeira (the last of its kind) provided white Portuguese settlers of South West Angola with a safe source of currency for their escape through Namibia and South Africa amid the violent turmoil of the independence period and the rapid devaluation of Portuguese currency.[166] Karakul farmers joined the exile that followed. In all, over a million Portuguese arrived in Portugal after the Portuguese African colonies became independent. The Karakul farms, not surprisingly, were ransacked, and the sheep that survived were mixed promiscuously with local breeds. The anthropologist/novelist Ruy Duarte de Carvalho imagined a sacrifice of a Karakul ram by the Kuvale as a ritual destined to bring the old equilibrium back to the region.[167] Nowadays the area is again the territory of the Kuvale and their cattle herds.
Conclusion
The end of the story of the Karakul in Angola implies a profound interdependence of Karakul sheep and fascist regimes. It coincides with the end of the dictatorship in Portugal. But it also demands careful exploration of the nature of such relations. In following Karakul in the frontier territories of the three regimes, this narrative never suggested a direct causal relation, never suggested that whenever one has a Karakul farm one has a fascist regime. One can think of Karakul without fascism. The first producer of Karakul furs was, after all, the Soviet Union. Why, then, should one follow the sheep and care about the work of breeders dealing with curl patterns and artificial-insemination techniques?
This chapter has made the case that Karakul were interesting not only for scientists interested in developmental genetics but also for historians dealing with the imperial dimensions of fascism. By exploring the historical trajectories of these organisms, one is able to understand how the expansionist ambitions of fascist regimes were to be materialized in frontier landscapes. It is fair to say that the labor and racial relations being established in these frontier areas were more colonial than fascist. In contrast to the stories of wheat and pigs, it is not easy to grasp what was specifically fascist in the Karakul farms in Cirenayca, the Namib Desert, or even the Ukraine. The argument developed here points in the opposite direction, suggesting that colonialism is a crucial feature of fascist regimes performing the tasks of national destiny, racial superiority, and economic independence. To study fascism and leave aside its colonial dimension is to leave aside one of its central aspects, a flaw that is too common in the literature on fascism. Furthermore, much of the scholarly and popular interest in the study of fascism has to do, justifiably, with its violent nature, and it is now clear that it was in the colonies that fascist regimes unleashed their more radical forms of violence. Karakul is a good point of entry to the larger history of fascist frontier genocide. Chronologically our story begins with the Herero genocide in German South West Africa and ends with the escape of Portuguese settlers from the contiguous territory of South West Angola, and via Karakul we were taken to the genocides in the Ukraine and in Cyrenaica, thus emphasizing the continuity between fascist violent experiences and white settler colonialism.
The claim for integrating nonhuman animals in the narrative is well in tune with suggestions by environmental historians to build historical accounts by paying attention to bison, dogs, or mosquitoes. Here, I suggest also looking in detail at the experimental practices that standardized animals, not taking them as stable entities. Had we ignored the work undertaken by animal geneticists at the University of Halle, we would not have been able to understand how Karakul traveled from Uzbekistan to South West Africa, or from Germany to Italy and from there to North Africa. The circulation of Karakul was enhanced by the experiments in hair development at Halle, but also by the trials on crossing with local sheep breeds and the research on artificial insemination undertaken in the experiment stations in Libya and Angola. More than that, experiment stations as exemplary settlements were experimenting with colonialism at large, materializing fascism dreams of Lebensraum and Grande Italia, and “Portugal is not a small country.”
Conclusion
In the fascist era, rituals followed a tight calendar. Nazis celebrated the 1933 seizure of power in January, the anniversary of the founding of the Party in February, National Mourning Day in March, the Führer’s birthday in April, National Labor Day in May, and so on.[1] Among the continuous succession of mass events, the notorious September General Gatherings of the Party in Nuremberg have rightly received more attention than any other Nazi ritual. Notions such as the “aestheticization of politics” and “political religion” have been fruitfully associated with these carefully staged rallies.[2] The rhetoric of the Führer, magnified by Albert Speer’s lighting effects and Leni Riefenstahl’s camera work, allegedly transformed the amorphous members of German society into purposeful organs of the national community.
161
On Cinati’s
162
Ruy Cinatti,
165
On the effects of colonial occupation on the Kuvale, see Ruy Duarte de Carvalho,
1
Richard Grunberger,
2
Roger Griffin,