Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

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.

^{Figure 6.14 The Karakul Experiment Station in the Namibe Desert in Angola, ca. 1960.}

^{(Arquivo Instituto Português de Apoio ao Desenvolvimento / MU / DGE / RRN / 1548 / 06127)}

^{Figure 6.15 Manuel dos Santos Pereira’s instructions on how to build “indigenous huts,” 1958.}

^{(Arquivo Instituto Português de Apoio ao Desenvolvimento MU / DGE / RRN / 1548 / 16195)}

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]