The Colonial Epoch in Africa

Gregory Maddox

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138482135
• eBook ISBN: 9781351058537
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

The articles collected in this study, first published in 1993, concentrates on the transformation and continuities in African societies during the height of the colonial era, and explores the struggles by Africans to find space – socially, politically, or economically – within the confines of colonial rule. This title will be of interest to students of African history and Imperialism.

“COTTON IS THE MOTHER OF POVERTY”: PEASANT RESISTANCE TO FORCED COTTON PRODUCTION IN MOZAMBIQUE, 1938–1961

Allen Isaacman, Michael Stephen, Yussuf Adam, Maria João Homen, Eugenio Macamo, and Augustinho Pililão

During the past decade historians have increasingly come to recognize the dominant role that capitalism has played in shaping the twentieth-century history of Africa. They have given particular attention to the mechanisms of capital accumulation and the related process of underdevelopment. What has often been overlooked or understated has been the struggle of workers and especially peasants¹ against the appropriation of their labor. As Colin Leys has noted, “in one critical respect underdevelopment theory tends to resemble development theory—it concentrated on what happens to the underdeveloped countries at the hands of imperialism and colonialism, rather than on the total historical process involved, including the various forms of struggle against imperialism and colonialism which grow out of the condition of underdevelopment.”²

In its most extreme form this economistic tendency has had the effect of reducing the subordinate classes to mere producers of surplus value whose own history lacked any meaning or significance within the colonial-capitalist context. It denied them the dignity of historical agents who played a role in shaping their own destinies and instead cast them as either impotent or impassive victims.

This interpretation acquires a certain logic in the context of peasant resistance because of the weak competitive position of the peasantry vis-à-vis the union of the colonial state and capital. Peasants divided from each other by space, ethnicity, religion, primordial kinship affiliations, the tyranny of their work schedule and a host of other factors were relatively powerless and generally failed to mount large-scale opposition which lends itself to detailed historical analysis.³ Instead peasant protests tended to be isolated, covert, and often passive, their limited aims and systemic importance hard to measure and easy to ignore.

The nature of the sources available to historians reinforces the tendency to neglect peasant resistance in the literature. Colonial officials and representatives of European capital were often unaware of the hidden forms of peasant protest which could only succeed if they remained clandestine. Moreover, when discovered, actions such as work slowdowns and boycotts were treated as yet one more indication of the “lazy and uneconomic nature of the African” rather than being carefully treated and documented as serious expressions of rural discontent. Oral data, on the other hand, is often replete with examples of peasant protest, but these accounts do not tend to be situated precisely in time or space and the motivation for a specific action is often blurred or overly generalized. Ex post facto explanations to satsify contemporary political realities pose an additional problem.⁴

Given these deficiencies in the data it becomes extremely difficult to reconstruct with any precision the frequency and geographic scope of peasant resistance, or how it changed over time—questions of considerable importance to historians. Yet neither the data problem nor the dominance of capital is sufficient reason to ignore the struggle of peasants. Acting within the serious constraints imposed by the colonial-capitalist system, they were, to varying degrees, able to alter their living conditions and in some cases the outcome of their history. From this perspective, the example of peasant resistance to the cotton regime in Mozambique, an extremely controlled and repressive system, is particularly instructive.

The Cotton Regime—An Overview, 1938–1961

As in other parts of Africa, the Portuguese colonial regime sought to extract from its colonized people cash crops or other exchange value commodities which could be sold on the world market. The failure of the Republican government (1910–1926) to exploit effectively the colony’s human and natural resources and thereby reduce Portugal’s balance of payments deficit and national debt was one of the factors that precipitated the military coup in 1926 and two years later brought Salazar to power.⁵ Under his regime Lisbon exercised close supervision over the colonies which, whenever possible,⁶ were to be reserved for exploitation by Portuguese capital and in all cases were to provide significant economic benefits to the metropole. These principles were enshrined in the Colonial Act of 1930.⁷

The expansion of cotton production in the colonies figured prominently in the Salazar regime’s economic plan. In 1927 only 5 percent of the ginned cotton used in the Portuguese textile industry came from Lisbon’s possessions; the remainder was purchased on the world market.⁸ Salazar’s objective was to reverse this tendency and to make Portugal self-sufficient through her colonies. This, in turn, would reduce the balance of trade deficit and facilitate the expansion of the textile industry. Because of its fertile soils, good rainfall, accessible ports, and minimal contribution to the colonial economy, Portuguese officials designated Mozambique as the center of overseas cotton production with Angola assuming a subordinate position.

In 1926, the colonial regime opted for a labor-intensive system based on forced peasant production and requiring minimal investment.⁹ The system was modeled on the Belgian Congo which, Portuguese officials noted enviously, “had achieved brilliant results, and raised cotton production within a ten-year period from 4 to 4,000 tons.¹⁰ The Portuguese regime passed legislation establishing cotton zones and granting concessions to local commercial interests each of which received the exclusive right to purchase at fixed prices the cotton that peasants within the region were compelled to grow. The concessionary companies were then to sort and gin the cotton and sell it overseas, preferably to the Portuguese textile industry.

For more than a decade, this legislation was not vigorously implemented in Mozambique. The low fixed price paid both to the peasants and the concessionary holders, competition for local labor with higher paying sisal, tea, and sugar plantations within Mozambique, and the South African mines and Rhodesian farms, and the fact that much of the best land in northern Mozambique initially remained outside the concessionary system all combined to undercut Lisbon’s plans. The inability or unwillingness of many local administrators to force peasants to grow cotton also affected output.¹¹ Thus in 1931, five years after the system had been introduced, production was down by 50 percent from the 1926 level, and most of the Mozambican cotton was sold on the higher-priced international market, compelling the Portuguese textile industry to purchase 99 percent of its ginned cotton abroad.¹²

To help remedy this situation, Lisbon agreed the following year to pay a bonus to the concessionary companies on all cotton exported to the metropole on Portuguese ships.¹³ This neomercantile policy narrowed the price differential and redirected most of Mozambique’s cotton to the Portuguese market.¹⁴ It had no impact, however, on the more fundamental problem of the relatively low level of colonial production vis-à-vis rapidly expanding metropolitan industrial requirements. In 1935, for example, 80 percent of the 2.5 million kilograms of cotton produced in Mozambique went to Portugal, which nevertheless had to purchase an additional 21 million kilograms at a cost of more than $10 million.¹⁵ Although Mozambican output increased substantially in 1936 and 1937, the shortfall remained largely unchanged. As a result, the powerful textile industry, provoked by paying substantially more for foreign cotton, demanded vigorous state intervention. In 1938, the Salazar regime, itself concerned about the balance of trade deficits and continued dependency on external cotton sources, initiated a far-reaching program designed to put teeth in the earlier legislation and insure a basic shift in rural production.

At the heart of this policy was direct state control over all aspects of production and marketing. A State Cotton Board (Junta de Exportação de Algodão Colonial) was established to oversee the development of cotton production throughout the colonies.¹⁶ The Board began a vigorous campaign to distribute additional concessions to local companies which had sufficient capital to construct and maintain ginning mills and markets and to pay the salaries of a small number of European field agents (propagandistas) and overseers (capatazes).¹⁷ Within a few years, agreements had been signed with twelve firms, each of which received substantial territory in which it enjoyed a buying monopoly (see Table I).

The Junta, working closely with the Portuguese textile industry and the concessionary companies, both of which had representatives on the Board, fixed mandatory dates for planting the cotton, determined the type of seeds to be distributed, and defined the various qualities of cotton. It also recommended to the provincial governor-general the price per kilogram to be paid to the peasants by the concessionary companies and to the concessionary companies by the Portuguese textile industry. At the district level, local Board representatives suggested to state officials the minimum acreage that each peasant had to cultivate. Unlike the earlier system, the Cotton Board also prohibited export of Mozambican cotton to foreign countries.¹⁸

TABLE I

CONCESSIONARY COMPANIES

...

Name of Company	District	No. of Cotton Zones
Algodeira do Sul de Save, Lda.	Gaza and Inhambane	10
Companhia do Buzi, S.A.R.L.	Manica and Sofala	1
Companhia Nacional Algodeira	Manica and Sofala	6
Companhia da Zambezia, S.A.KL.	Tete	1
Sociedade Algodeira de Tete, Lda.	Tete
Companhia Agricola E Comercial Lopes e Irmaos	Zambezia	1
Sena Sugar Estates Ltd.	Zambezia and Manica and Sofala	2

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Introduction
• Volume Introduction
• Colonial Policies and Administrations in Africa: The Myths of the Contrasts: M. Semakula Kiwanuka
• Indirect Rule: The Establishment of “Chiefs” and “Tribes” in Cameron’s Tanganyika: James D. Graham
• Colonialism and Social Structure: Iheanyi J. Samuel-Mbaekwe
• The Growth of the Pan-African Movement, 1893–1927: P. Olisanwuche Esedebe
• Archbishop Daniel William Alexander and the African Orthodox Church: Richard Newman
• Race, Science, and the Legitimization of White Supremacy in South Africa, 1902–1940: Paul Rich
• Peasants, Capitalists and Historians: A Review Article: Frederick Cooper
• The Emergence and Decline of a South African Peasantry: Colin Bundy
• The Madman and the Migrant: Work and Labor in the Historical Consciousness of a South African People: John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff
• Mtunya: Famine in Central Tanzania, 1917–20: Gregory Maddox
• Kenya’s Primitive Colonial Capitalism: The Economic Weakness of Kenya’s Settlers Up to 1940: Paul Van Zwanenberg
• Depression, Dust Bowl, Demography, and Drought: The Colonial State and Soil Conservation in East Africa During the 1930s: David Anderson
• Colonialism and the Legal Status of Women in Francophonic Africa: Marlene Dobkin
• “Cotton Is the Mother of Poverty”: Peasant Resistance to Forced Cotton Production in Mozambique, 1938–1961 Allen Isaacman, Michael Stephen, Yussuf Adam,: Maria João Homen, Eugenio Macamo, Augustinho Pililão
• Colonial Chiefs and the Making of Class: A Case Study from Teso, Eastern Uganda: Joan Vincent
• Colonialism in Angola: Kinyama’s Experience: David Birmingham
• Some Origins of Nationalism in East Africa: J.M. Lonsdale
• The Origins of Nationalism in East and Central Africa: The Zambian Case: Ian Henderson
• The Sources of Collective Rebellion: Nationalism in Buganda and Kikuyuland: Meddi Mugyenyi
• Missionaries, Colonial Government and Secret Societies in South-Eastern Igboland, 1920–1950: Ogbu U. Kalu
• Acknowledgments