Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa

Chapter Six: Mozambican Miners

 Six Mozambican Miners Lourenço Marques, on Africa’s east coast, was a young city with an old name that honored the Portuguese ship captain who had traded for ivory with Africans at Delagoa Bay in 1542. The development of the port and the town began in earnest only in 1877, after Britain conceded Portugal’s right to Delagoa Bay, which lay just north of Mozambique’s border with the British Natal Colony. In March 1877, Joaquim José Machado arrived in Louren ço Marques with orders to construct a hospital, a church, a barracks, and a jail. The hospital topped the list because endemic malaria plagued the town. Conditions were still grim a decade later when the town was incorporated. A British visitor described “a land of loveliness, surrounded by rich vegetation” but inhabited by “lazy people who wallow in their filth.” Like São Tomé City and Luanda in the late nineteenth century, Lourenço Marques was poorly maintained, and it stank.1 Machado’s plan to upgrade the port and railways would also achieve the larger goal of displacing the African traders, mostly Tsonga, who transported goods over land and by raft along the coast and in the bay’s estuaries. In addition , colonial authorities hoped to undercut Indian traders, whose presence on the east coast predated that of the Portuguese. An 1894 census of Lourenço Marques counted a population of 1,059, including 591 Europeans, 245 Indians, and 39 Chinese. In October of that year, the city nearly fell to the Tsonga, who mobilized when colonial officials raised by 50 percent the “hut tax” on Africans living near Lourenço Marques on lands claimed by the state. Since the average Tsonga man maintained several grass-thatched huts for his extended family, it was an onerous increase. Tsonga chiefs, backed by three thousand soldiers, taunted panicked whites, calling them “chickens” and “women.” In January 1895, António Enes, the newly appointed high commissioner for Portuguese East Africa (or Mozambique), arrived. A month later, two thousand Portuguese commanded by Enes and “armed with machine guns” defeated the Tsonga in a battle ten miles to the north of Lourenço Marques.2 Mozambican Miners   By 1898, when the city became the capital, 4,902 people called it home. For its poorer residents, it continued to be “dirty, muddled [and] chaotic.” Yet by 1904, the population had doubled again to 9,849. Another side of the city had emerged, clean and efficient, with a busy port whose wooden wharf had been replaced by one of concrete and with paved roads served by taxis and trams. As elsewhere in Portuguese Africa, foreign investors had initially funded the public projects, but by 1905, Portugal had paid off the loans and claimed full ownership of the port and the railroad. Visitors could stay at good hotels with rooms screened to keep out mosquitoes, and they could enjoy an evening stroll along the beachfront. It was this modern city that Joseph Burtt encountered when he arrived in Lourenço Marques in February 1907.3 The transformation of the city and the development of its infrastructure were intimately linked to the gold rush in South Africa, which had begun with the discovery of rich deposits on the Witwatersrand (or Rand) in 1886. The surrounding city of Johannesburg emerged almost overnight to service the mines andtheirlaborers.In1890,fourteenthousandminerswereworkingontheRand in what was then the South African Republic (or Transvaal), an independent state governed by Afrikaners. Foreign interests, mainly British, controlled the gold mines. By the time Britain defeated the South African Republic in the 1899– 1902 war and claimed the territory as the Transvaal Colony, as many as sixty thousand Africans had migrated to Johannesburg’s mines from Mozambique.4 Fi g u r e 2 4 . Lourenço Marques, Mozambique. From Collection A2717-32, by permission of Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.   C h o c o l a t e I s l a n d s Workers had long been among Mozambique’s major exports. In the midnineteenth century, they had begun traveling to the farms of Madagascar, the large island off Mozambique’s east coast claimed as a colony by the French, and to the sugar plantations of British Natal in the south. By the end of the century, they were also laboring on the farms and in the gold mines of British Southern...