Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

From the very early stages of the dictatorial regime that came out of the military coup of 1926, the empire had been one of its central features, as was confirmed by the appointment of Salazar as Minister of the Colonies in 1930 and the issuing of the Colonial Act that same year. As mentioned above, the law put the colonies under stricter control by metropolitan interests, curtailing any intentions of autonomous policies and affirming that the “organic essence of the Portuguese Nation” entailed “undertak[ing] the historical function of possessing and colonizing overseas dominions and of civilizing indigenous populations.” The Colonial Act made colonialism a constitutional obligation of the regime.[124] Through its implementation, Salazar was able not only to satisfy Portuguese capitalists and industrialists who saw African colonies as source of cheap raw materials and as a protected export market but also to please the most radical supporters of the new regime: the young army officials for whom the nation existed only if it had colonies.[125] The plea of the latter for a more aggressive colonial policy was justified by invoking the ambitions of expanding their countries’ possessions at the expense of Portuguese territories that Italians and German had held since the end of World War I. In order to counter such intentions, a consensus was formed around a need to demonstrate that Portugal effectively controlled its empire either by extracting more resources from its colonies or by increasing the white presence in them. And indeed, with the Colonial Act came new plans for white settlement of Portugal’s colonies.[126]

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.