Rural Society and Cotton in Colonial Zaire

Chapter 2 Forced Cotton Production and Social Control

2 Forced Cotton Production and Social Control Introduction In the past two decades, researchers have demonstrated the extent to which growing crops under colonialism was based on policies and practices that resulted in extreme brutalization of local populations.1 Whatever role the African police, state-appointed chiefs, and colonial armies had in forcing peasants to follow agricultural instructions , they were only one facet of a wide range of colonial mechanisms of social control. Force, as B. Lincoln aptly put it, "remains something of a stopgap measure: effective in the short run, unworkable over the long haul."2 This was certainly relevant in regard to forced cotton production in colonial Zaire. In this chapter I argue that to carry out cotton cropping successfully, the colonial state and cotton companies imposed a system of social control involving not only the threat and use of force, but also structural reforms , material incentives, and propaganda. As allies, the colonial state and its cotton companies sought to "manufacture" docile peasants who would create labor time from an imagined surplus of leisure time, divert labor from the food economy, and bow to a variety of overseers entrusted with the mission of enforcing agricultural instructions. Between 1917 and 1935, the objective was to force peasants to accept economic exploitation. Beatings, fInes, and prisons were used to expand the cotton economy in almost every region that offered any prospect of growing cotton. From 1936 to 1957, however, the overreaching concern became an attempt to control the rhythm of peasants' daily lives, minimize dissent, and maximize output. Structural reforms, handouts, and propaganda or entertainment became part of a program intended to 45 46 Forced Cotton Production and Social Control shape peasants' perception of their self-interest and create a new work ethic. For all its effort to rationalize the system of social control and win over the hearts and minds of peasants, the state was not entirely successful . Regardless of the handouts and persuasion, skeptical peasants understood the meaning of the exploitation permeating their daily lives and measured it by the buying power of the prices they received and the improvement of their standard of living. The daily control of their lives highlighted their lack of self-determination, however, and was universally perceived as an intolerable humiliation. During the last two effective years of the colonial regime (1957 to 1959), this led to a system that combined coercion with incentives. Force and Social Control, 1917-1935 It is not an intellectual development that brings our indigenous people to share our ideas and conform to our moral principles. The driving principle of life remains the law of the strongest. They submitted after they experienced our superiority. They remain disciplined because they have been fIrmly convinced of our force.3 Creating a servile labor force proved a complex and diffIcult process for the colonial administration. First, it involved reaching a relatively small number of cultivators scattered over a large area. Those forcibly incorporated into the system had to be carefully supervised. Though company and state agents worked together, as late as 1951 each agent still had to supervise between 3,000 and 6,000 cotton cultivators.4 Second , the diffIculty of supervising a large number of peasants was compounded by the nature of the environment, the state of the physical and administrative infrastructure, and the patterns of land use. Third, cotton production competed with peasant food production, which often offered higher prices. Fourth, taxation proved noncoercive because peasants often collected at low costs products whose prices allowed them to pay their taxes. Finally, agronomists shared the belief that Africans were a drag on commodity production. These factors convinced offIcials that force alone could make peasants decide to produce cotton. Though social control varied from region to region between 1917 and 1935, the threat and use of force remained the defIning feature of the cotton economy. Naive colonial economic planners thought at fIrst that when male and female cotton cultivators were preoccupied with the required fIeldwork, they were distracted from thinking of their plight. As the Council of Katanga Province explained as late as 1945, Forced Cotton Production and Social Control 47 "When the people are busy, they talk very little."s After 1945, however, the main argument of planners was that cotton cultivation would allow Africans to become self-suffIcient farmers who would be satisfIed as they benefIted from rising standards of ~iving. This reasoning resulted in a range...