Roberts A.D. The Cambridge History of Africa, Volume 7: from 1905 to 1940
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PRODUCTION FOR EXPORT
that the rapid rise in production owed more to metropolitan
pressures than to African self-interest. (This is separate from the
more general question, which will be discussed later, of coercion
to take part in the exchange economy as such.) It is certainly true
that compulsory cotton-growing was the proximate cause of the
great insurrection of 1905 in German East Africa and that in the
British East African territories the element of compulsion, though
rather more tactfully applied, was no
less
present in the early stages
of cotton development. It is also true that the crop was en-
thusiastically promoted by the young Winston' Churchill, then
under-secretary for the colonies and MP for Oldham; that the
British Cotton-Growing Association, a body formed by Lanca-
shire interests and enjoying a small government subvention,
helped to initiate production in both East and West Africa; and
that it was succeeded in
1919
by a fully state-financed organisation,
the Empire Cotton-Growing Corporation, which imparted a bias
towards cotton in agronomic research and extension work all over
the British tropical colonies. The corporation's medallion, which
showed Britannia sitting on her throne while straining black and
brown figures laid bales of cotton at her feet, was a gift to critics
of British colonial egotism. Yet neither the Colonial Office nor
the colonial administrations were in any simple way instruments
of metropolitan business interests; and the administrations had
interests of their own which sometimes pointed in a contrary
direction. For their own part, they would want their subjects to
produce whatever paid them best, because that would make them
more contented and so more easily governed, and also because
the maximising of taxable incomes was conducive to the well-being
of the government
itself.
Thus, though London wanted the
peasants of Northern Nigeria to grow cotton, when most of them
decided to grow groundnuts instead the Nigerian authorities did
nothing
to
impede their choice. And the East African governments
remained keen on cotton-production even when metropolitan
pressures had died away; it is ironic that by the 1920s, when
African cotton-growing really got going, the Lancashire industry
had entered its terminal decline, and most of the new output went
to feed the mills of India and Japan.
The other significant fibre crop was sisal hemp, among whose
functions was to supply the vast amounts of twine that were
needed at that time for the harvesting of temperate-zone cereals.
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ASPECTS OF ECONOMIC HISTORY
320
280
240
200
160
120
80
40
0
40
30
20
10
COCOA
-
-
/Gold Coast'
/
/
A ; Sao Tome and Principe
/ Nigeria , ,' '
/'. .A
y
v'
\
,-A
»"VFr.
W.
Africa
1910
1920
1930
1940
COFFEE
*•••• Madagascar
" Angola
•ooo Belgian Congo
_ Uganda
Tanganyika
Kenya
Cameroun
Ivory Coast , ,
Ethiopia
1910
1920
1930
1940
80
60
40
20
COTTON
o-o-o Belgian Congo
French Equatorial Africa
*-— Mozambique
Nigeria
— Sudan
Tanganyika
__- Uganda
1910
1920
1930
1940
Fig. 4. Exports of cocoa, cofFee and cotton (thousand metric tons) from
selected countries
Source:
(cocoa, cotton) M. J. Herskovits and M. Harwitz, eds.,
Economic
transition
in Africa (London, 1964), 157, 159; (cofFee, and cocoa from
S. Tome) Mitchell, International historical statistics: Africa and Asia,
199—200
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PRODUCTION FOR EXPORT
Introduced by German entrepreneurs
to
East Africa,
it
became
the principal export of Tanganyika and a very important product
of Kenya as well.
It
had the great advantage that, being adapted
to semi-arid conditions,
it
could be grown in large areas of East
Africa that were good for little else.
In the production of the crops so far mentioned Africa had no
very special advantage over other regions
of
the tropics
and
sub-tropics; and insofar as African countries had
an
edge over
competitors
in
Asia and South America, or even over southern
Europe and the southern United States, it was because their labour
was cheaper. The same holds
for
tobacco,
the
most valuable
export crop of the Rhodesias.
It
was with certain tree products
that parts of Africa had
a
more truly distinctive role, and
it
was
these that provided the most obvious agricultural success stories.
Cloves had been introduced
to
the hot, wet islands
of
Zanzibar
and Pemba in the early nineteenth century. Despite the fears of
many, the industry survived the abolition of slavery and continued
to provide about
90
per cent
of
the world's supply until
the
expansion of clove-production
in
Madagascar in the late 1930s.
By
a
reversal which might well have become proverbial, large
quantities were shipped
to
Indonesia, the original homeland
of
the spice. Tea was found to grow very well in the wetter western
parts of the Kenya Highlands as well as in the hills around Lake
Nyasa (Malawi), and production was rising rapidly towards the
end of the period. But the main commodities of this kind were
coffee and cocoa. Forest species
of
coffee, native
to
equatorial
Africa, were produced in large quantities, especially on the shores
of Lake Victoria
in
Uganda and Tanganyika,
in
Angola and
in
the Ivory Coast. Mountain coffee, producing fine-flavoured beans
for the European and American markets, was much more exacting
in its requirements. The subtle combination of soil and climate
needed for the production of the most lucrative kinds was found
on the slopes
of
Mt Elgon
in
Uganda, the Aberdare mountains
in Kenya and Kilimanjaro and Meru
in
Tanganyika, and these
became districts of quite exceptional prosperity, though in high-
land Ethiopia the value of the crop was reduced by lack of quality
control. Both kinds of coffee could be grown in the eastern part
of the Belgian Congo, and in 1937-8 this territory produced more
than any other
in
mainland Africa. Still better rents accrued
to
those Africans who had access to land that was favoured by the
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ASPECTS OF ECONOMIC HISTORY
cocoa tree, a plant of the American tropical lowlands that does
well in parts of the West African forest zone and in few other
places in the world. By 1905 cocoa-growing had been developing
in the Gold Coast for about three decades and it went on
expanding rapidly for another two, by which time this one
country was producing not far short of half the world's supply.
Cocoa in fact did even more than gold to make the Gold Coast
easily the richest of the ' black' African dependencies; and it also
made south-west Nigeria a much more than averagely prosperous
region, though here the crop was slower to establish itself and
output barely reached a quarter of the Gold Coast total.
In the organisation of colonial agricultural extraction there was
in principle a clear choice of method: primary production could
be left to African smallholders working on their own lands in their
own time, or the producers could be assembled in large enterprises
under capitalist direction. The choice was not easy and the
outcome of competition between the two systems was usually
hard to predict. There was little difference at this time between
alien planter and African cultivator in the equipment or the
techniques of cultivation; insofar as higher output was obtained
on the plantations it was because the work was better organised
and disciplined, not because it received any large application of
capital, and it was often doubtful whether the gain would be
enough to offset the heavy costs of the foreign management by
which it was secured. On the other hand, from the African point
of view it was by no means always clear that
a
higher income could
be gained from independent production than from wage-earning,
and even the non-monetary advantages were not all on the side
of the homestead, when account is taken of the boredom suffered
by young men in rural communities where war had been abolished
and politics had been reduced to triviality.
It was in the processing of the product that advantages of scale
sometimes became significant. Certain specialised crops, namely
tea, sugar, sisal and flue-cured tobacco, were strong candidates for
the plantation mode, because harvesting and processing needed
to be closely linked. (Tea must be treated within hours of plucking
sugarcane and sisal leaves are too bulky to be carried to distant
factories.) Sugar was chiefly grown in Natal, though it was also
produced in Uganda, mostly for local consumption; tea, tobacco
and sisal were mostly grown in East and Central Africa. Cotton
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PRODUCTION FOR EXPORT
on
the
other hand lent itself with special ease
to
cultivation
on
African smallholdings.
It
fitted well into many systems
of
subsistence farming, and the necessary labour, most of which was
needed briefly
for the
picking
of the
ripe bolls,
was
most
economically supplied by the farmer's family. Moreover there was
no compulsory connection between cultivation
and
processing,
as the raw cotton could be carried
to
small independent ginneries
spaced around the countryside. The Gezira scheme
in
the Sudan,
where cotton was grown
on
newly irrigated land, was
a
special
and interesting variant; here
the
crop
was
produced
by
small-
holding tenants
of a
private company,
the
Sudan Plantations
Syndicate, which provided processing, marketing
and
technical
services,
and the
proceeds were divided between
the
cultivators,
the company
and the
government, which
had
carried
out the
major irrigation work. Elsewhere irrigation was neither necessary
nor usually feasible. In its absence, and without either slave labour
on
the
one hand
or
effective boll-picking machines
on the
other,
there
was no
case
for the
large plantation.
So the
economics
of
cotton, the crop most coveted by the metropolis, helped to ensure
that Uganda especially developed as a nation of sedentary peasants
rather than
of
migrant wage-earners.
Similar considerations applied
to
groundnuts, which were
never even thought
of
as
a
crop
for
large-scale cultivation before
the ill-considered East African venture
of
1947,
and
to
cocoa,
which fitted easily into
the
traditional forest-gardening systems
of West Africa and needed only simple processing before export.
The story
of
cocoa, however, serves
to
correct
any
notion
of
an
absolute distinction between the' plantation' and
the'
peasant' (or
'petty-commodity') modes
of
commercially oriented production,
or of the synonymy
of'
capitalist' and ' non-African'; many of the
Gold Coast growers, especially, hired labour
and
operated with
a business style
and
objective that
put
them
in
much
the
same
category
as the
smaller European planters
in
some other African
countries,
20
as did
some African coffee-growers, notably
in
Buganda.
With coffee
the
question
of
scale
and
organisation
was
more
ambiguous.
The
indigenous
robusta
coffee already took
a
minor
part
in
many African economies,
and the
sun-dried beans could
20
Polly Hill, Migrant
cocoa
farmers
of
southern Ghana:
a
study
in
rural capitalism
(Cambridge,
1963).
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ASPECTS OF ECONOMIC HISTORY
be taken without much difficulty
to
central curing works, so there
was
no
need
to
bear
the
costs
of
foreign management
or
investment.
The
more valuable mountain coffee,
on the
other
hand, needed processing
of a
kind which gave some advantage
to units larger than a normal African holding. But the advantage
was not
decisive,
and
the
striking success of African coffee-growers
on the slopes
of
Mt Elgon (Masaba) and Kilimanjaro between the
wars showed that there
was no
real impediment
to
'native
production'
of
this crop.
The
practically exclusive control
of it
by European planters in Kenya and Angola was a function of their
political power much more than
of
superior economic efficiency.
The oil-palm presented problems
of a
rather different kind.
Here organised plantations
had
distinct advantages over
the
traditional West African method of production. Harvesting of the
fruit
was
easier because
the
palms grew less tall when they
did
not have
to
compete with forest trees; yields were higher, more
efficient processing expressed more
oil
from
a
given quantity
of
fruit,
and it
was
oil of
a higher quality, with
a
lower percentage
of free fatty acid. William Lever, anxious
for
larger
and
more
secure supplies
of
his
raw
material, sought
to
overcome
the
last
difficulty
by
setting
up
oil-mills
at
strategic centres
in
Nigeria
in
1911.
But to
make these
pay he
would have needed monopoly
purchasing rights
in
the catchment areas, and this the authorities
refused
to
grant him. After the war he returned
to
the attack, now
seeking land
for
plantations, and was again rebuffed. The episode
shows that official favour did not always go to the most capitalistic
of
the
available forms
of
production.
On the
first occasion
the
refusal reflected the Colonial Office's rooted dislike
of
monopoly
concessions, reinforced
by
opposition from Lever's mercantile
competitors;
but the
post-war controversy elicited ideological
pronouncements about
the
superiority
of
'native production'
21
and these would become settled doctrine
in
British dependencies
during
the
inter-war period, except where European interests
in
land were already entrenched.
Meanwhile Lever
had
secured large grants
of
land from
the
more complaisant Belgian authorities, and his Huileries du Congo
Beige became
the
second pillar, after
the
Union Miniere,
of the
Congolese economy. Since palm plantations were being estab-
21
See especially
Sir
Hugh Clifford, address
to the
Nigerian legislative council, 1921.
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PRODUCTION FOR EXPORT
lished in Malaya and Indonesia as well, it was feared that West
African export production must succumb to the competition of
more progressive industries. And indeed it steadily lost ground
in the world market. Yet in absolute terms the Nigerian export
at least continued to grow for a long time, even though the
producers were slow to move to more systematic cultivation. For
in fact the old methods fitted in well with their other activities,
and they had the great advantage over capitalist planters of being
able to consume their produce or to trade it locally when the
external market was adverse.
On the whole, then, the classical tropical plantation had only
a modest role to play in colonial Africa. But there were divergent
forms of European enterprise that call for special consideration.
One was the concessionary system, whereby private companies
were in effect granted control over whole populations as well as
the land they lived on. This was of course an expedient by which
metropolitan governments tried to avoid the capital expenses of
colonial development, thereby renouncing its profits and tolerat-
ing the inevitable abuses of private monopoly. The British
' chartered companies' of the late nineteenth century were obvious
examples, and in the Rhodesias a somewhat modified form of
company government persisted until 1923-4. The Congo Inde-
pendent State was a private empire of much the same kind, and
spawned
a
number of sub-empires. King Leopold's role was much
the same as that of Rhodes and Goldie in their respective spheres:
to bring a tract of Africa to the point of development at which
metropolitan finance capital would find it profitable to take over.
In the high colonial period, however, concessionary regimes
survived only under weak colonial governments and in un-
promising regions where population was sparse and few exploit-
able resources were apparent. The chief examples were in French
Equatorial Africa and in Mozambique.
22
Most of the latter
territory was misruled during the first three decades of this
century by private firms, of which the two largest and most nearly
sovereign, the Mozambique and Niassa Companies, came to be
controlled by British and South African financiers. Between 1928
and 1930 the Niassa Company and the lesser concessions were
replaced by the new Salazarist bureaucracy, but the Mozambique
Company retained its prerogatives until 1941.
21
See chapters 7 and 10.
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ASPECTS OF ECONOMIC HISTORY
Then there was that special kind
of
entrepreneur, the white
colonist. Whereas the most characteristic type
of
plantation
is
owned by
a
company domiciled
in
the metropolitan capital and
operated by a salaried manager who will eventually return home,
the ' true' colonist or settler is a working farmer who endeavours
to replicate
in a
more spacious land the agricultural patterns
of
his European homeland, thinks
of
himself as belonging
to a
permanent community of emigrants and does not envisage return
either for himself or for his descendants. In practice the distinction
was not clear-cut, for many Europeans in Africa were planters by
virtue
of
the kind of agriculture they practised (coffee-growing
for example) but settlers by virtue of the scale of their operations
and
the
source
of
their finance,
and
also
by
their political
aspirations
and
their social role.
It is
however conceptually
important,
in
that the economic decisions
of
settlers were less
strictly determined by prospects
of
financial profit.
To describe the white settler as
a
'special' type was perhaps
misleading.
It
is true that liberal commentators have commonly
looked on settler Africa, most
of
all
of
course South Africa,
as
a deviation from the norm
of
colonial development that was
represented by West Africa and Uganda and had its archetype in
the great Indian empire. But at the beginning of our period many
Englishmen would have reversed the emphasis, seeing colonisa-
tion as the ideal and the West African mode as a last resort where
malaria and dense native populations kept the door closed
to
settlers. The idea of creating an Indian type of empire in tropical
Africa had appealed only to limited sections of the business and
professional classes, but there was much wider enthusiasm for the
dream of new Australias, where British workers could find
a
better
life,
become efficient suppliers of Britain's needs and high-income
consumers of British goods, and send their strong-grown sons to
help Britain
in
her wars. Likewise the need
for
colonies where
land-hungry peasants could find living-space without being lost
to the Fatherland had played a large part in the rhetoric and some
part
in
the actual calculations of German imperialism.
It
is now
widely believed that the prime object of colonialism was to extract
surplus value from African labour, but at the turn of the century
it seemed that for many colonialists the ideal Africa would have
been one without Africans,
or
one where the aborigines played
no greater part than they did
in
Australasia
or
North America,
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PRODUCTION FOR EXPORT
or Siberia or
Chile.
This was the condition which to all appearance
the Germans were trying
to
create
in
South West Africa
at
the
beginning of our period. Only later would they regret that so few
Herero had survived to work the lands from which they had been
driven; and only later would Britons begin to assure one another,
in
a
cliche very popular between the wars, that the greatest asset
of Africa was the African.
So it was more or less taken for granted in the first two decades
of the century that the frontier of white settlement would advance
far beyond its long-established strongholds in the far south and
that European farmers would be encouraged to move into all areas
where they could live and raise children in reasonable health.
In
practice this meant the irregular but nearly continuous tract
of
malaria-free upland that stretched through the eastern interior
from the Drakensberg to Mt Kenya, inviting the intrusion of some
thousands of hopeful settlers, some of whom moved up from the
old Afrikaner and British colonies in the south while others were
newly arrived from Britain, Germany and other parts of Europe.
Here they attempted to rear crossbred sheep and cattle, to grow
wheat or, failing that, maize,
or
to plant more specialised crops
such as coffee and tobacco. But the vision of colonisation was not
firmly based
in
economic reality. The white farmers were
not
occupying
an
untamed wilderness,
as
some
of
them supposed.
They were inserting themselves into lands which were already
being exploited, if not always very intensively, by a numerous and
resilient native population.
It was not
simply that, short
of
genocide, there was no way of making room for a mass influx of
colonists, but also that African labour-power, by its mere presence,
drove down
the
market price
of
white labour, leaving
no
economic space
for
unskilled and semi-skilled emigrants,
or
for
the independent homesteaders who were the nucleus of European
colonies elsewhere.
In
East Africa, moreover, European artisans
and small traders were confronted
by
unbeatable Asian com-
petitors. Thus the people
of
European origin did not come
to
constitute whole communities as some had hoped, but formed an
upper stratum
of
landowners, urban
and
rural capitalists
and
professional people, separated from the indigenous masses
by
increasingly rigid caste barriers. The new societies north
of
the
Limpopo were formed on
a
caste basis from the outset; and the
history of South Africa in this period is essentially the consolida-
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ASPECTS OF ECONOMIC HISTORY
tion
of a
caste society,
as
nearly
all
white
men
were enabled
to
move
out of
the ranks
of
unskilled labour
in
town
and
country
and
to
become either capitalists
or a
specially privileged stratum
of
the
working class.
Further,
in the
production
of
meat, cereals
and
dairy produce
the white farmers
of
Africa were
at a
serious disadvantage
in
comparison with
the
better-established, lower-cost suppliers
in
other continents. This
did not
seem
to
matter
in our
first decade,
when world demand was rising fast,
but the
glut that developed
between
the
wars created
a
serious crisis. Thus they depended
on
local urban markets, which were
not yet
sufficiently developed
except
in the far
south.
But
here again there
was the
same
problem: Africans were able
to
provision these markets
at
much
lower cost. Technically there
was no
decisive
gap at
this time,
certainly
not a
wide enough
gap to
justify
the far
higher returns
that
the
farmer
of
European origin needed
if he was to
stay
in
business. (Ironically,
it is in the
last twenty years that effective
mechanisation, together with fertilisers, insecticides
and
herbi-
cides,
has
everywhere generated crucial advantages
of
scale
in
cereal farming,
so
that
the
professional, highly capitalised farmer
has been acquiring
an
indispensable economic role
at the
time
when his political privileges were disappearing.) Hence one
of
the
main bones
of
racial contention
in
'settler' Africa
was the
local
market
for
foodstuffs. During the nineteenth century and
the
first
years
of the
twentieth many South African tribesmen
had
gone
a long
way
towards transforming themselves into peasants,
producing systematically
for the
market and sometimes adopting
radically new techniques such as the ox-drawn plough. At the time
this trend was encouraged
by
the authorities, but after 1910k was
deliberately reversed
by
political action; from then
on, the
roles
assigned
to the
African majority were
to be
those
of
subsistence
cultivator and wage-earner, and
no
other.
23
Further north, where
the entry
of
Africans into commercial production
was
slower,
similar policies were adopted, though their application
was
less
rigorous.
It
is
clear that there
was a
close link, almost
a
symbiosis,
between white farming
and the
mining enterprise which alone
could generate
a
sufficient demand
for its
product.
In
Kenya,
13
See
especially Colin Bundy, The
rise
and fall of
the South
African
peasantry
(London,
•979>-
I
IO
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