Rural Society and Cotton in Colonial Zaire

Chapter 5 The Infrapolitics of the Cotton Cultivators

5 The Infrapolitics of the Cotton Cultivators Introduction The African initiative literature of the 1960s and 1970s paid attention to large-scale social movements, including open rebellions , social banditry, and religious movements, which negated the reality of colonialism as well as the connection of these movements to nationalism .I These forms of struggles, however, were only one facet of peasant political behavior. Because these forms of rural struggle were open, they resulted in severe repression, forcing peasants to conceal their hostility and hatred. Peasants, as we will see, engaged in various forms of hidden resistance which obliged colonial offIcials to change agricultural and labor policy and make concessions to producers. Peasants resisted cotton production in several ways. They rarely engaged in open collective rebellions, because the dangers of reprisal were great. Only occasionally, in a fIt of anger, did they attack cotton monitors , rude chiefs, policemen, crop supervisors, territorial administrators, or agronomists. Instead they protested clandestinely. Peasants undermined the production cycle, prevented the cotton economy from diverting all their labor from housework and food production, and fled into deep forests. Still others migrated to neighboring cities and countries. Peasants also engaged in calculated silence or concealed their hostility and kept colonial planners from impinging further into their intimate life. Cotton cultivation created social inequality within the households, against which women and the young struggled. The market was also a place of struggle. Here, peasants used three major tactics. Some mixed their cotton with heavy materials, hoping to compensate for prices forced below the value of their labor. Others did what they aptly called 108 The lnfrapolitics of the Cotton Cultivators 109 "taking back one's own cotton" from the company warehouses, selling it in the second or third sale sessions. Others left their cotton to rot on the stalks when they received bad prices during the fIrst sale sessions. Finally, peasants used closed associations to restore social harmony and recover local autonomy. Struggle over Control of the Production Process At the very beginning of cotton production, territorial administrators associated the "infrapolitics" of cotton producers with '~frican laziness." '~frican laziness" probably stemmed from a body weakened by malnutrition and endemic diseases such as malaria. Weak and sick people cannot work as fast and hard as healthy persons. Hence the cotton system itself, which led to malnutrition, may have caused "laziness," but it was also in part a form of the infrapolitics of cotton producers: a form of disguised, low-profIle, undisclosed resistance, whereby peasants disguised their efforts to thwart the appropriation of their labor, their production, and their property.2 More astute colonial offIcials realized the ramifIcations and the meaning of this hidden resistance . They became aware of the cotton cultivators' subtle ability to artfully avoid work obligations, and they reported that "the blacks, artful observers, are quick to discern diverse ambitions of the whites and, in turn, make the most of them by using various forms of flattery, to spare themselves maximum exertion."3 Most territorial administrators began to report that "peasants were not willing to cultivate the crop."4 Pointing out the causes of a decline of production in 1921, De Meulemeester, the governor-general of Orientale Province, observed that the main one was the "little good will that most local people show for maintenance that cotton requires from the seeding to the time of harvest."s This absence of enthusiasm on the part of the peasants was found in every cotton-producing community. In 1928, Brenez reported the limited enthusiasm of the Luba and Songye for cotton cultivation.6 What Brenez observed in the Lomami district was also happening in the lower Dele district. Commenting on that district in 1924, Sparano reported that "other indigenous peoples, once they received their seeds, either planted only a portion, or did not seed their flelds."7 Women were targeted as well as men. Native Tribunal records of Bokapo chiefdom reveal that as late as 1945, some women were sentenced to seven days in prison and fIned because they had refused to work in their cotton flelds.8 These examples illustrate the peasants' hidden hostility to cotton cultivation, despite the use of force and innumerable attempts at the hegemonic incorporation of cotton cultivators. 110 The Infrapolitics of the Cotton Cultivators The ubiquity of these forms of resistance was rooted in the structural organization of the cotton economy itself. The paucity of cotton markets forced peasants to walk distances of as...