Rural Society and Cotton in Colonial Zaire

Introduction

Introduction In the past two decades, researchers have increasingly focused on the poverty and distorted rural economics of African nations. The recognition that African nations are unable to feed themselves has led social scientists to examine the historical roots of this crippled peasant social existence. Some scholars attribute the contemporary African food crises to the destruction of "natural economies," which undermined the peasants' reproductive capacity as well as their ability to cope with ecological disasters.1 Others contend that African inability to develop stemmed from a systematic transfer of surplus value through unequal exchange.2 Researchers have recognized that peasant production , the most pervasive form of labor organization, brought the colonial state and different fractions of capital closer to remote Central and South Central African communities.3 The wide adoption of this form of production resulted from the assumption that Africans, clinging to their outmoded natural economies, underused their productive forces. In its scholarly form, the tenet was elaborated as the vent-for-surplus theory, which, simply put, maintains that prior to their integration into the international market, African societies were subject to substantial underemployment of both land and labor. International trade was assumed to provide an outlet for these idle resources. This acknowledgement notwithstanding, these researchers have paid little attention to the ways peasants produced commodities. Vent-for-surplus theorists, underdevelopmentalists , and Marxists have emphasized transnational factors in gauging the rate of surplus extraction, while neglecting the conditions under which peasants produced. To increase our understanding of what happened to peasants, we need to explore not only the conditions under which they traded and what they received in return, but also the conditions under which they worked. In short, any study of a 3 4 Introduction peasant community is incomplete without an analysis of how peasants organized work to produce commodities.4 This is particularly relevant for cotton-producing peasantries for two reasons. First, some crops, such as coffee, tea, and cocoa, despite the relative demand for labor, permitted the continued production of food crops. Cotton, by contrast, because of its great labor intensity, interfered with the production of food crops, caused food shortages and outmigrations in many places, and compensated the African peasant with low prices. Second, a comparative approach demonstrates that to fully understand these peasantries, they must be examined in relation to the global economy in which cotton was produced. In fact, the encounter of capitalism with African communities and the consequent restructuring of the latter to fIt the requirements of the former were not uniform processes. Different ecological and demographic conditions as well as varied labor requirements produced different results. In Mozambique, for example, Portugal's lack of capital and its dependency upon the exportation of African labor to South Africa and Zimbabwe partly molded the organization of cotton production, which severely exploited women's labor and determined the social outcome of the peasantry.5 The lack of minerals and the need to shift an economy based on French trade in West Equatorial Africa accounts for a "system of forced labor supervised by local chiefs [that] accomplished cotton cultivation by the local population" in Chad, the Ivory Coast, and the Central African Republic , where coton du commandant became the metaphorical expression for cotton-generated exploitation and oppression. In contrast, in Malawi and Uganda favorable ecological and market factors encouraged peasants to grow the crop voluntarily.6 Moving away from the previous economism, I examine in chapter 1 the social organization of cotton production, emphasizing the roles played by labor, land, and ecology. I highlight the ways that labor scarcity, competition among different sectors of the colonial economy, and the low level of development in agricultural technology shaped the social organization of production so that the Africans became periodic workers and eternal peasants. To ensure food security, peasants had to cultivate cotton and food crops simultaneously, a situation which heightened labor conflicts, especially during peak labor periods. In this chapter I also examine a variety of intrahousehold, local, and macrolevel strategies that peasants and the state created to cope with and overcome labor bottlenecks. As stated earlier, recent scholarship has focused on the labor process to explain the historical roots of the crippled economies of postcolonial African nations. This scholarship has pointed out the existence of a Introduction 5 variety of peasantries, including petty commodity producers, forced commodity producers, labor tenants or squatters, sharecroppers, independent household producers, and oscillating peasant workers.7 Whatever form...