Roberts A.D. The Cambridge History of Africa, Volume 7: from 1905 to 1940
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LAND AND LABOUR
on terms which rendered
it a
mortgageable asset
to
would-be
borrowers.
38
Thus
the
banks found
it
hard
to
discern suitable
opportunities
for
investment within Africa, and consequently
the
greater part
of
the funds entrusted
to
them
by
colonial govern-
ments
and
expatriate businesses was transferred
to
London.
So
the
repatriation
of
profits from territories dominated
by
mining enterprise was matched
by the
combined remittances
of
colonial treasuries, currency authorities and banks in the countries
where production was
in
African hands.
It
was only where there
were resident populations
of
European origin that the great bulk
of the income generated
by
international trade was kept within
the country. And this was the main reason why
it
was those parts
of Africa that achieved
the
most rapid
and
diversified develop-
ment. Elsewhere
the
funds retained were
not
sufficient
to
break
the chain
of
underdevelopment:
low
productivity,
low
income,
low demand
and low
investment.
LAND AND LABOUR
All this says little more than that Africa
had to pay
heavily
for
the capital
and the
capitalist organisation that were supplied
to
her
in the
colonial period.
The
other factors, land
and
labour,
were, as was noted earlier (p. 87), assumed by the liberal model
to
be virtually free goods, which could
be
applied
to
export
production at hardly any real cost; and that assumption now needs
to
be
qualified.
It is
true that production
for
export was
in
this
period almost entirely
a net
addition
to
total output, just
as the
compensating imports were
in the
main
a net
addition
to
consumption. Cash-crops were generally grown
as
well
as sub-
sistence food-crops,
not in
substitution
for
them; and where this
was
not
so,
as in
parts
of
the West African cocoa belt, food
was
bought from neighbouring areas, thus widening
the
orbit
of
the
exchange economy. Overall, Africa remained self-sufficient
in
basic foods. By the end
of
the period,
as
will
be
seen, there were
more people
in
Africa than
at the
beginning
and
most
of
them
38
There was a trend towards the establishment
of
individual land titles in parts
of
East
Africa (see pp. 684,696 below), and in West Africa the possibility
of
registering freehold
titles
was
discussed
in the
late 1920s
and
1950s,
but the
legal complications were
considerable
and the
registration
of
freehold
was
introduced only
in
Lagos,
in 1955.
The French
in
West Africa were less restrictive:
see
chapter
7, p. J82 and
n.67.
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ASPECTS OF ECONOMIC HISTORY
were probably eating a little better, yet food imports were still
small and consisted almost entirely of luxury and semi-luxury
items consumed by the immigrant communities and a few of the
most prosperous Africans. Nor would it be correct to say that
Africa had been de-industrialised in order to make way for the
export-import economy. The smelting of iron ores, formerly a
widespread activity, had indeed practically ceased, and blacksmiths
had been reduced to the reforging of scrap metal. On the other
hand, where cotton textile-production was well-established (that
is,
mainly in West Africa) it had maintained its position, since the
factory-made imports, though cheaper than the traditional
product, were on the whole less desirable. And losses in some of
the old crafts were at least offset by the rise of new ones, such
as vehicle maintenance, bicycle repair and tailoring (with the now
ubiquitous treadle sewing-machine), as well as the various
'modern' building trades.
At the same time, the application of land and labour to export
production was far from being a cost-free process. It is true that
land continued to seem abundant except in a few special areas,
notably in south-east Nigeria, parts of Kenya, Basutoland and the
native reserve areas of South Africa. But in a good many other
areas the extension of cultivation, brought about by the combina-
tion of the export demand and the growth of population, began
to disturb the often precarious ecological balance. Bush fallows
were shortened and the depleted soils became more vulnerable to
erosion. The removal of forest and woodland cover also promoted
both erosion and leaching of the soil, and may have altered local
climates for the worse. The alarms raised by ecologists in the
inter-war period, which led to the appearance of books with titles
like 'Africa, the dying land', seem with hindsight to have been
excessive or at any rate premature;
39
but it cannot be doubted that
agricultural activity was already causing some loss of natural
capital. By comparison the effects of mining were less serious, for
although minerals are more obviously a non-renewable resource
than surface soils the operations in our period had hardly even
begun to exhaust the reserves of any of the principal ores.
The salient feature of the colonial era for Africans was
39
J.-P. Harroy, L'Afrique,
Itrre
qui
meurt
(Paris, 1944). A soil scientist, quoted by W.
Allan,
The
African
husbandman
(Edinburgh, 1965),
585,
warned in 1941 that erosion could
put an end to organised life in the United States by the end of the century and in Africa
almost certainly before that.
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LAND AND LABOUR
undoubtedly
a
great increase
in the
total amount
of
work done
by
men, and
probably also (though this matter needs more
investigation)
by the
already heavily burdened women.
In con-
ventional analysis the cost
of
this addition would be identified
as
the sacrifice of
leisure.
But' leisure' was a concept alien
to
Africa,
and it would be more pertinent to note that many of the new forms
of labour required arduous journeying and long separation from
home
and
family
and
that nearly
all of
them, whether
in
mines,
on plantations
or on
peasant smallholdings, were repetitive
and
exhausting activities, such as no sensible person would undertake
except
by
necessity
or for
large reward.
And
here was
the
crux
of African development, quickly perceived
by
governments
and
other employers. Necessity
did not
drive, since
the
workers
possessed
the
means
of
subsistence, and high rewards could
not
be offered, because
in
most cases they would eliminate profit and
exhaust
the
revenues
of
states. African societies
in the
early
twentieth century were
not
disintegrating, overcrowded peasant
communities
for
whose members any sort
of
wage employment
was
an
improvement. They were still functioning, essentially
self-sufficient tribal societies, and 'subsistence'
in
this context did
not mean bare physical survival
but the
material basis
for a
satisfying human life, however straitened
it
might appear
to
outsiders. When
the
rains failed,
of
course, this basis collapsed,
and in the first years of the colonial system famine was sometimes
an effective recruiter
of
wage labour; but such an occasional, and
steadily less frequent, stimulus hardly provided
an
adequate
foundation for a new economic system. Wage goods were usually
not essentials,
but
were either sources
of
ephemeral pleasure
(cigarettes, beer, purchased sex) or commodities such as cloth and
ornaments that were acquired
at
least
as
much
for
status
as for
utility.
Thus
the
model
of
development with unlimited supplies
of
labour,
40
applicable
to
some other parts
of
the Third World,
had
little validity
in
early colonial Africa.
The
logical alternative
would have been development with high wages,
as in
Australia
or North America. Consumers
of
labour, however, argued that,
given
the
limited need
of the
workers
for
money, high wages
would actually reduce the amount of labour offered. The concept
40
W. A. Lewis,' Economic development with unlimited supplies of labour',
Manchester
School
of
Economic and Social Studies, 1954,
22,
139-91.
I2
3
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ASPECTS OF ECONOMIC HISTORY
of a 'backward-sloping supply curve for labour' has latterly come
under heavy fire, because it was used as an excuse for paying
abysmally low wages and because it is thought to imply that
Africans were idle or irrational. In some circumstances, however,
it implies entirely rational behaviour, and there is good reason to
suppose that those circumstances obtained in early colonial Africa.
It is true that the argument holds good only over a limited range
of possible wages. A really large increase in the income obtainable
from work, such as to make a decisive change in the African
economic environment and to open up the prospect of continuous
improvement, would certainly have produced a response of the
kind considered 'normal' in capitalist economies. But the rela-
tively primitive varieties of capitalist enterprise operating in
Africa at this time could hardly have bortie such high labour costs.
So most employers, public and private, chose instead to try to alter
the supply conditions, so as to make labour abundant even at a
low price. And to some extent at least they had the power to bring
about this change.
In the first place, imperfections in the market for export crops
in regions of peasant production were matched in regions of mines
and European farms by imperfection in the market for labour. In
South Africa the market had long been rigged against the sellers
by the notorious pass laws, which were now copied in the newer
lands of European occupation. The Witwatersrand Native Labour
Association (WNLA; 'Wenela'), set up by the South African
Chamber of Mines, went a long way towards putting the gold
industry into a position of monopoly control. Elsewhere there was
enough informal solidarity between employers to establish a
'standard wage' that was difficult to raise. Counter-action was
made extremely difficult by official discouragement of trade
unions and by the fragmented and amorphous character of the
labour force.
The most obvious solution to the problem, however, was to
deprive Africans of
the
means of subsistence, and in South Africa
this was done. From 1913 (except in urban areas and in the Cape)
none of the ' Bantu' were allowed to acquire land rights outside
reserved areas which were even then inadequate to support the
population. The solution, however, was only partially applied,
even in South Africa. For it was realised that if the workers
became full proletarians the mines, municipalities or governments
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LAND AND LABOUR
would have
to
bear
the
cost
of
feeding their families
and of
providing them with permanent housing and the other facilities
that make regular urban life supportable.
It
was thought more
expedient therefore to let the subsistence sector continue to carry
part of the cost of development. The areas set aside for Africans
were small enough
to
force most
of
the males
to
seek
at
least
temporary wage employment but not so small that they would
all have
to
bring their wives and families with them and find
other means of providing for their retirement.
Outside South Africa structural change was less
drastic.
Initially
at any rate, even
in
settler-dominated territories, Africans were
left with enough land for their subsistence. Certain other features
of
the
South African scene, however, were widely copied,
especially
the use of
direct, flat-rate taxation
as a
means
of
compelling men to enter the money economy. But tax, which was
usually calculated as the equivalent of
a
month's wages, was not
by itself
a
complete solution,
and
most colonial authorities
resorted to simpler forms of coercion, especially in the early stages
of their rule. Conscription
for
public purposes, such
as
road-
building and the carrying of officers' loads, was taken for granted
before and during the First World War, and was often justified
as an extension of traditionally sanctioned communal service, the
colonial states being deemed
to
have inherited the right
of
the
tribal authorities.
It
was condemned
in
principle
by
the inter-
national conventions of the post-war period, but loopholes were
left
for
cases
of
special need
and
were often used. The early
practice of'supplying' forced labour
to
private employers was
forbidden
by the
British government
in
1908. Administrators,
however, were still allowed and expected to 'encourage' Africans
to seek wage employment, and the distinction was lost on most
of the chiefs
and
headmen who actually
did the
encouraging.
'Forced labour', moreover, was
a
term that meant what
it
said.
Pain and humiliation are of course matters for economic history
even though there is no way of quantifying them; and
it
has
to
be recorded that the flogging of recalcitrant labourers, by private
employers as well as by public officials, was a common feature of
life wherever settlers and planters were present, at any rate in the
first two decades
of
the century, and did not entirely cease until
after the end of our period.
Nor was coercion confined to the recruitment of wage labour.
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ASPECTS OF ECONOMIC HISTORY
As
we
have seen,
the
forced cultivation
of
cotton
by
peasant
farmers
in
German East Africa was the trigger
for
the great Maji
Maji revolt
at the
beginning
of
the period;
and
though British
methods were less heavy-handed, the production of export crops
in Uganda and other territories
of
East and Central Africa was
not initiated without
an
element
of
compulsion.
In
French
Equatorial Africa and the Belgian Congo, peasant farmers were
required throughout
the
inter-war years
to
produce certain
quantities
of
cash-crops
for
sale
at
fixed prices
to
monopoly
trading companies under pain of prosecution which could lead
to
flogging or imprisonment. However,
as
Lord Hailey later drily
observed,
'It
must not...be assumed that compulsion
for the
growth
of
marketable
or
"economic" crops
had in
fact been
confined
to the
Belgian
or
French territories.
The
difference
between their practice and that of the British Administrations lay
in the fact that the latter did
not
have legal powers
to
stimulate
the production
of
marketable crops.'
41
To the extent that the exchange of African labour for the goods
and services of the West was made under duress, the liberal model
of colonial economic development
is of
course invalid;
and in
East, central and southern Africa the role played by coercion was
undoubtedly
a
large one. But perhaps
in
retrospect the real cause
for surprise is that so much labour was voluntarily supplied, both
to
the
capitalist
and to the
'petty-commodity' sectors
of
production. The most effective stimulus, as the more far-sighted
capitalists
had
always recognised, was
the
development
of
new
wants:
the incorporation of imported consumer goods, obtainable
only
for
money, into the catalogue of conventional necessities
or
of common aspiration. This development proceeded steadily
through the colonial era and allowed the progressive withdrawal
of the harsher kinds of constraint. As time went
on
the possible
rewards
for
additional work came
to
include minor pieces
of
capital equipment such as bicycles, sewing-machines and perma-
nent roofing materials, whereby genuine improvements
in the
standard
of
living could
be
secured,
and the
ideal
of
indefinite
accumulation made
its
appearance. This process
was
perhaps
assisted by an emphasis which,
it
can be suggested, was especially
characteristic
of
African cultures:
the
supreme valuation
of
41
Lord Hailey,
An
African
survey {Revised
tpjif) (London, 1957),
1370-1.
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LAND AND LABOUR
political goods — authority, recognition, power — and the use
of material possessions primarily as counters by which those
goods could be acquired.
42
It is in the nature of status symbols
that they are subject to incessant depreciation, so that when new
goods are introduced into a society addicted to such symbols it
finds itself committed to ever-increasing expenditure of acquisitive
effort. This may have been one reason why wages and peasant
income could be held low enough to allow an elementary kind
of capitalist development to proceed. Be that as it may, the
distribution of political goods was radically altered by the new
economy. One of the chief consequences of colonial trade was to
speed up the rate at which power and status, and women, were
transferred from one male generation to the next.
Another consequence was the massive geographical mobility
of labour. It is true that the combination of European capital and
African labour now took place on African soil, and not in the New
World as it had done in earlier centuries. But the application of
capital, as we have seen, was spatially very selective, so that very
large numbers of Africans could enter the exchange economy only
by leaving home for varying periods of
time.
The most spectacular
migration was caused by the insatiable appetite of the mines of
southern and central Africa for human muscle-power, so that the
whole of the region has been quite aptly designated as ' the Africa
of the labour reserves'.
43
But elsewhere too there was a steady
drift of clerks, domestic servants and general labourers, and in
West Africa also of petty traders and mechanics, into the growing
seaports and centres of government. In addition, the expansion
of commercial agricultural production, whether under European
or African control, was made possible only by large-scale emigra-
tion from the regions less favoured by nature or transport
investment or both. Every year thousands of people trekked from
Upper Volta and the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast to
the cocoa groves of the south, from outlying areas of Uganda and
from the densely populated territories of Ruanda and Urundi to
42
In a
little-noticed essay, Lloyd
A.
Fallers suggested that
in
Africa production
and
exchange have typically been undertaken 'as an adjunct
- a
means
- to
the organisation
of power,
the
field
in
which,
it
appears,
the
African genius has really concentrated
its
efforts...[There is] a tendency for economic structures and processes to be overshadowed
by
-
perhaps better, contained within
-
political structures
and
processes.' (' Social
stratification
and
economic processes',
in M. J.
Herskovits
and M.
Harwitz (cds.),
Economic transition
in
Africa (London, 1964), 115, 119).
43
Amin, 'Underdevelopment and dependency in black Africa'.
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ASPECTS OF ECONOMIC HISTORY
the rich cotton and coffee farms
of
Buganda,
as
well
as
from
western and southern Tanganyika to the sisal estates of the north
and east. By
far
the greater part
of
this movement was
at
least
formally voluntary; and indeed the function
of
the cruder kinds
of coercion was not,
on the
whole,
to
force Africans into
the
labour market but to prevent them from making optimal use of
it: not to drive them to the City of Gold but to stop them getting
there,
so
that they might work
for
lower wages
in
weaker
enterprises
of
Rhodesia, Angola and Mozambique
or
the tural
parts
of
white South Africa.
The migrations were also for the most part circular, not final.
The African worker left his homestead for
a
season, for
a
year,
for a few years, occasionally for a working lifetime. Hardly ever
did he set off for the city, the mine or the foreign farm without
the intention of returning, and rarely did he fail to return in fact.
There were exceptions.
An
increasing number
of
originally
migrant labourers managed to secure permanent farming tenancies
in Buganda. The government
of
the Belgian Congo set out
to
establish
a
small
but
significant proportion
of the
African
population in the
centres
extra-coutumiers,
the enclaves of European
economy
and
culture;
and its
principal private firm, Union
Miniere, had decided
by the
1930s that
its
long-term interests
required the creation of a labour force that was fully committed
to wage employment and urban life. Other capitalists, however,
baulked, as we have noted before, at the short-term and medium-
term costs of'stabilisation'; and British administrations regarded
what they called detribalisation as a threat to everything that they
valued. At this time, nearly all Africans undoubtedly concurred.
Nothing in the 'modern' sector of the colonial society could offer
any substitute
for
the material and psychological security pro-
vided by membership of the rural community and the land rights
that went with this membership.
At
the same time, outside the
most favoured regions of cash-crop production, the natal village
could supply men with no inducement
to
permanent residence.
The results were in many ways unhappy. Men lived
a
good part of
their lives
in
encampments
of
urban scale that lacked the rudi-
ments
of
urban civility, while women struggled
to
raise their
children without
the
material
and
moral support
of
their
husbands. However, it would probably be sentimental illusion
to
suppose that, other things being equal, African men would choose
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THE COURSE OF CHANGE
to spend all their time at home being husbands and fathers; and
the material loss from their absence was serious only in those
agricultural systems, a minority of the whole, in which the main
input had previously been male labour. Moreover the coming and
going of workers contributed to that widening of intellectual
horizons that was the main intangible benefit of the new
order.
THE COURSE OF CHANGE
The changes outlined in this chapter followed an erratic course,
with several marked alterations of pace and character even within
the limited time-span that is here held in view. The principal
regulator was the fluctuating price of Africa's exports, together
with the closely related terms of its trade with the outer world.
For individual colonial governments and foreign entrepreneurs
as well as for African communities, these were facts of life over
which they had little or no control, and so they have to be taken
as given by Africa's historians too. It need only be said that the
demand for primary products, African and other, rose and fell in
approximate harmony with the irregular rate of industrial
expansion in the capitalist countries, while the supply side of the
price equation was mainly determined at any given time by the
size of recent capital investment, not in Africa alone but
throughout the tropical, sub-tropical and mineral-bearing regions
of the world. World prices were indeed controlled by diamond-
producers in South Africa, and briefly influenced by producers of
copper, chrome and asbestos in Central Africa (through inter-
national restriction agreements in the early 1930s). But apart from
chrome (in 1929), cloves and cocoa were the only commodities
of which tropical Africa contributed more than half the world's
supply at any point in our period, and controlling buyers' prices
for these was impracticable. At the same time, almost every
country in tropical Africa was highly vulnerable to price move-
ments for one or two commodities. Such dependency varied
considerably: indeed, in contrast to most other parts of the British
colonial empire, most British territories in Africa widened their
export base between the two world wars. It was widest, in the
later
1930s,
in Nigeria, followed by Kenya and Southern Rhodesia;
Nyasaland, the Gold Coast and Somaliland (like Malaya) owed
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ASPECTS OF ECONOMIC HISTORY
around half their export earnings
to a
single commodity; while
in Northern Rhodesia and the Gambia the proportions were
87
and 98 per cent.
The figures
for
external trade were among the less inaccurate
of colonial statistics,
but
there
are
serious difficulties
in the
construction of price indices where exports are composed of a very
few commodities, the relative prices
and
volumes
of
which
are
subject
to
large
and
frequent changes. Moreover,
if
Africa
is
aggregated the picture
is
dominated
by
the price
of
gold, which
was constant
for
most
of the
period
and
then moved
in the
opposite direction to all other prices. For those African countries
that were not primarily gold-producers the fluctuations are clear
in outline, though their amplitude
is
often open
to
doubt.
At the beginning of the period export prices were on
a
rising
trend which continued until 1920, becoming very steep towards
the end, thanks
to the
monetary inflation
and the
world-wide
commodity famine induced
by
four years
of
war. The prices
of
imported manufactures were rising
too, but
until
1913
their
increase was slower, and so Africa on the whole enjoyed a decade
or
so of
markedly improving terms
of
trade,
44
following
a
long
period
of
stasis
or
decline. This therefore was a time of spiralling
activity and change. Though Africa, apart from the far south, was
still too raw to attract more than a small proportion of the capital
that was pouring out of Europe to the primary-producing regions
of the world
at
this time, there was
a
mood
of
optimism
and
enterprise,
a
sense
of
widening opportunity — for foreigners
certainly
but
also
for
many African individuals
and
groups.
'Favourable' terms
of
trade, however, were
not an
unmixed
blessing
to
Africans. They stood
to
benefit as peasant producers,
44
The reference
is to
the 'net barter'
or
'commodity' terms
of
trade, which measure
changes over time
in
the quantity
of
imports that can be paid
for
by
a
given quantity
of
exports.
In
principle, a better indication of changes in the
relative
positions
of
Africa
and its industrialised trading partners would be the 'double factoral' terms, which take
account
of
differences
in
the rate
of
growth
of
productivity
as
well as
of
fluctuations
in the price ratios. These are even harder to calculate but would certainly show a marked
deterioration
for
Africa over the whole period. (Since
it is
much easier
to
improve
productivity in secondary industries than in primary ones, there is
a
sense in which the
commodity terms ought, in compensation,
to
move continuously in favour of primary
producers,
and
this
of
course they have
not
done.)
On
the other hand, the 'income'
terms,
which include changes in export volume as well as in export and import prices,
and are therefore the best measure
of
the
absolute
gain from external trade, were on
a
rising trend throughout, except
in
the early 1930s.
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