Rural Society and Cotton in Colonial Zaire

Chapter 4 Cotton and Social Inequality

4 Cotton and Social Inequality Introduction In the past two decades, researchers have moved away from the conception of the peasantry as a homogeneous and undifferentiated group. Most researchers agree that African peasants included both exploiters and exploited. From Mozambican data, Isaacman has demonstrated that social differentiation took place between chiefs and cotton producers as well as among peasants themselves. Concerning intracommunity differences, he argues that "preferential treatment at the market, commodity production based on unpaid labor, and a variety of other incentives all combined to enhance the economic position of the chiefs."} In his study of the Malawian peasantry, Mandala documented a similar process, showing that prosperous Zunde landowning peasants, hiring migrant labor, accumulated more appreciable resources than poorer peasants.2 Nayenga and Vincent have pointed out that chiefs in Uganda diverted luwalo labor (unpaid labor) from public work for private use on their lands and used their coercive power to collect fInes and taxes, which further differentiated the social structure .3 Finally, in a study of the formation and stratifIcation of the peasantry in colonial Ghana, Howard concluded that "it was debt relationships , incurred by the mortgage of crops or by usufruct, which provided the dynamics in stratifying peasants."4 This scholarship is a corrective to the center-periphery dichotomy that, while appropriately emphasizing the exploitation of the productive unit, ignored unequal relations within the community and household. Still for all its contribution, overemphasis on social differentiation shares the ideological parti pris of the underdevelopment theory when it overlooks the role of international factors. Internal social differentiation has real meaning only when the transfer of wealth from the household to 90 Cotton and Social Inequality 91 the center and the colonial state are explicit as well. Despite their entrepreneurship and ability to take advantage of the economic opportunity opened by cash crop production, the so-called "rich" peasants, the Zunde landowners and cocoa planters, ultimately experienced the collapse of their economic ventures, and uncertainty quickly replaced their prosperity. This is even more true for chiefs whose economic prosperity was based on their continued loyalty to the colonial regime and services to different fractions of capital. Evidence from Zaire shows that despite the privileged position these African subordinates occupied within the colonial social aggregate and despite the substantial material wealth this yielded, they remained a fragile and exploited class. In spite of their seemingly important revenues, chiefs' incomes remained insufflcient.5 In this chapter I examine the roots of inequality in the cotton-producing regions by focusing on the social gap between chiefs and cotton producers . The social differentiation that emerged between the two groups was a conscious and controlled process that primarily benefIted the state, although it did channel substantial amounts of wealth to chiefs, which they did not necessarily transform into capital. I argue that the sources of inequities between chiefs and peasants included the appropriation of unpaid labor for commodity production, the pricing system, which withheld portions of peasants' income to pay chiefs' bonuses, the reinforcement of chiefs' power through the judiciary, and the chiefs' exemption from taxes. In the second part of the chapter I explore inequities within the household, pointing to the unequal allocation of agricultural tasks and scarce resources. To assess the level of household inequality, I examine the process of decision making, the expenditures of the household, and the sites of investment and priorities. Central to this section is the view that the head of the household, by controlling the levers of power, reproduced historical inequalities in the division of labor and allotted most of a household's poor earnings to his priorities. I argue that because of poverty, inequities within the household deserve to be described not as exploitation, which implies the accumulation of wealth, but as the unequal distribution of poverty. The gap between the prosperity of the cotton companies and the poverty of cotton producers was the most important form of social differentiation created by cotton cultivation. Exploitation and Intra-Community Inequality Colonial Zaire's cotton economy paralleled that of Mozambique , where peasants to this day proclaim that "cotton is the mother of poverty." Rodney's statement that '~fricans got into colonization with a hoe and came back with a hoe" is as true of cotton producers in Zaire 92 Cotton and Social Inequality as it was of Tanzanian peasants. The assessment of the plight of peasants in Luba Country by the members of the Council of...