Rural Society and Cotton in Colonial Zaire

Chapter 3 Sharing the Social Product: Peasants and the Market

3 Sharing the Social Product: Peasants and the Market Introduction We must understand that the mentality of the local people is altogether special. ... When we buy their products at higher prices, as it is the case today, we offer a reward to their laziness; the natives then produce less.1 Fighting nudity and staving off the poverty of African peasants were, in colonial rhetoric, the two major moral claims for the imposition of cotton production in the Belgian Congo beginning as early as 1917. However , African producers to this day still say that cultivating cotton did not generate a flow of resources into their households. In reality, peasants had been trapped in a marketing system based on an economic logic that propounded two contradictory premises. On the one hand, state administrators planned for an economic development based on increased cotton production, while on the other hand, they held a view that handsome prices paid to producers would "offer a reward to laziness ," and subsequently decrease productivity. Certain factors helped government offIcials translate their view into policy. First, whereas the local handicraft industry in West Africa created parallel markets that shielded cotton producers against brutal colonial exploitation, cotton companies in the Belgian Congo were the only outlet for peasants; cotton itself had no intrinsic value for the producers except in the Kasongo area and in the district west of Lake Tanganyika where cotton had been woven before. Second, the protests of peasants hardly altered the highly regulated cotton-marketing system, and for all their resistance to low prices, cotton producers remained outside the process of pricing. This re71 72 Sharing the Social Product suIted from the state's control at the point of production as well as in the market. While control over production shifted the costs of production to the peasant households, control at the markets pumped out wealth for cotton companies, establishing what J. Berger has called a "culture of survival."2 Precisely, low cotton prices encouraged peasant migrations to corporate plantations and mines when they were needed, and this excess of available workers reduced the value of peasant labor.3 As we will see, generosity and the desire to accumulate profIts did not go hand in hand. In this chapter I examine the mechanisms that the state and cotton companies used to appropriate their surpluses. I explore how these forms of material appropriation changed over the two distinct phases of the marketing system of cotton: the free market and the monopsony phase. In the free market years, dating from 1917 to 1920, though the agents of trading companies periodically handed some cash to peasants, barter dominated exchange relations and generated robbery. As territorial administrators took control of the marketplaces in 1921, the monopsony phase began and continued throughout the cotton economy until 1960. In the initial stage of monopsony, peasants were exploited not only because high prices were not available on the world market, but because the administration failed to oversee the market transactions, leading to exploitation of cotton producers beyond approved means and authorized levels: cheating on weights, misreading and rigging of scales, and manipulation of cotton grades all contributed to defrauding the producers. While these practices increased the profIts of cotton companies, the Great Depression, extending through the years 192935 , prompted changes in the economy and compelled the state and its allies to rationalize their tactics in order to maximize profIts. The bareme de prix (scale of prices) and the avance provisionnelle (advance system), which started in 1936 and 1946 respectively, expanded the cotton companies ' take. During this stage of monopsony, also known as the stabilization period, the companies' dividends soared, and the value of their shares and capital increased. Free Markets and Surplus Extraction, 1917-1920 The Belgian Congo was, with French Equatorial Africa, the major area of monopoly trade in the late nineteenth century. As a result , there was rarely a need to establish a very rigid and regulated marketing system. In colonial Zaire, the lack of market organization lasted until the second decade of this century. Indeed, between 1893 and 1918, no legislation regulated the marketing of African gathered commodities . African gathered products were traded in free markets. Trading Sharing the Social Product 73 companies' agents, moving widely from village to village, bartered cheap European manufactured goods for various African commodities. Much of the few kilograms of cotton produced during this experimental period was bartered.4 From the fall of 1917...