Roberts A.D. The Cambridge History of Africa, Volume 7: from 1905 to 1940
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
MOZAMBIQUE
interest.
It
was opened
in
1923
but
carried little local traffic
and
barely covered its working
costs.
A railway alone could not ensure
economic growth,
and the
necessary investment was lacking.
In
1922-3,
Smuts contrived
to
thwart efforts
to
raise loans
for
Mozambique, since
any
expansion
of
its
own
production would
undermine South Africa's ease of access to its labour. And in
1922
Smuts sought to renegotiate the 1909 convention which regulated
this labour supply. He wished
to
control the railway
to
Lourenco
Marques
and the
port
itself,
and to
these ends
was
prepared
to
block completion
of
the Benguela railway
in
Angola
and
call
on
Britain
to
send a warship
to
Lourenco Marques. The negotiations
failed, the convention lapsed
and in
1924 Smuts fell from power.
All the same, Mozambique could not manage without its invisible
earnings from South Africa,
and its men
were still willing
to go
there,
if
only
to
avoid forced labour
at
home.
Once
in
retirement, Brito Camacho deplored
the
economic
incompetence
of the
Portuguese government
in
Mozambique:
' To civilise,
for the
state, means keeping
the
heathen
in
submis-
sion, prompt
in
paying ever-rising taxes,
and
well-disposed
towards military service.'
He was
scathing about
the
lack
of
expertise — the bachelor of theology who managed one company
and
the
poet
who had
been sent
to
study cotton-growing;
he
complained that
in
1921-2
the
Lourenco Marques area actually
imported rice, oranges
and
other foodstuffs which could easily
have been produced locally.
He
pointed also
to the
economic
stagnation caused
by the
pursuit
of
the illusion
of
cheap labour:
The whites have pledged themselves not to create needs in the blacks, the need
to clothe themselves, the need to feed themselves, the need to house
themselves...in the certainty that once these needs have been created, wages
could not remain what they have been, misery and exploitation pretending to
be payment.'
In 1922 the situation was described by the British vice-consul at
Porto Amelia:
Throughout this country
a
system
of
compulsory labour
is in
force. Some
employers manage
so
far as possible to get their work done
by
voluntary labour
for which they
pay
reasonably good wages.
But in the
vast majority
of
cases
they simply send
in an
application
to the
local Portuguese authority
for a
specified number
of
labourers
and he
supplies this number
or
less, according
to
the
circumstances,
at a low
rate
of
wages.
10
* Brito Camacho,
Mozambique:
problemas coloniais
(Lisbon, 1926),
40, 46, 47, 56.
10
Hall-Hall
to
Foreign Office,
IJ
April 1922,
FO
371/8577.
513
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
PORTUGUESE AFRICA
The vice-consul went on to explain that the high commissioner,
Brito Camacho, was determined to put an end
to
this situation;
yet he had himself contracted to supply the British-owned Sena
Sugar Estates with 3,000 men from Quelimane district. Against
this background
it is
easy enough
to
explain
the
continued
attractions of seeking work in Southern Rhodesia or South Africa.
The demand
for
labour within Mozambique was accelerated
not only by the military campaigns in 1916-18 but by price-rises
for tropical products. Sisal had been planted in some coastal areas
by 1914,
but
wartime and post-war needs encouraged further
planting;
by
the late 1920s
it
was grown along the coast near
Inhambane,
in
Mozambique district
and in
Niassa Company
territory,
and
inland
on the
lower Zambezi.
In
Mozambique
Company territory, sugar continued to be the economic mainstay.
The post-war commodity boom boosted
the
value
of
sugar
exports, and in 1922 the company's total exports exceeded those
from the Colony. By this time, sugar-production was in the hands
of only two companies, which had become virtually self-governing
states:
the Companhia Colonial de Buzi and Sena Sugar Estates.
From 1920, sugar producers had
to
deposit 10 per cent of their
crop
in
Mozambique (where much was made into cheap liquor)
and sell 75 per cent of the remainder to Portugal, which by 1928
received three-quarters
of
its sugar needs from the empire.
In
1924,
out
of
100,000 contract workers in Mozambique Company
territory, one-third were
in the
sugar industry. Sugar was,
however, a shaky foundation. Prices fell in 1925; there were also
disastrous floods, and by 1926 the company's exports were worth
only one-fifth of those from the Colony. In that year total exports
from Mozambique were worth /[2.6m and the main contributor
was not a plantation crop at all but African-grown groundnuts, of
which exports increased fourfold in bulk between 1914 and 1928.
As
for the
Niassa Company's territory, conditions there
remained as bad as ever.
It
suffered more than any other part of
Mozambique from the war, which may have caused more than
50,000 deaths in the region: forced labour and food requisitions
facilitated the spread of disease, especially the influenza pandemic
of 1918, while there was a severe drought in 1919. Ironically, the
war also caused the territory to become
a
British responsibility:
in 1917 Smuts persuaded
the
British government
to
seize
the
German majority shareholding in the Niassa Company, in order
5H
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
MOZAMBIQUE
to complete the extinction of German control along the east coast.
And since Britain had helped to finance the Portuguese war effort,
it was able to override Portugal's wish to cancel the company's
charter; instead, the confiscated shares were sold in 1918 to Sir
Owen Phillips, chairman of the Union Castle shipping line. The
Phillips regime brought no relief to the company's subjects. In
1919 it launched a campaign against the Makonde, who held out
on the plateau until 1922. Men were rounded up for work in the
Zambezi sugar-fields, and also on local cotton, coconut or sisal
plantations. As in the Colony, administrative officials were grossly
underpaid and most engaged in trade or in running plantations,
despite attempts to prevent this. Yet European production was
virtually negligible. The territory's total exports in 1926 were
worth only £115,000, and of these three-quarters consisted of
African crop surpluses. Nonetheless, Phillips (who became Lord
Kylsant in 1923) refused to invest more money in the Niassa
Company unless its charter was extended, and this Portugal
refused to do. Customs revenue continued to be negligible, and
the company paid its way only by increasing African tax-rates
almost annually between 1920 and 1927, when it was reckoned
that after paying tax the people of Niassa were left with sixpence
per head per year. In real terms (allowing for inflation), the rate
of tax at first declined but then rose very sharply. Revenue rose
in real terms, but the number of tax-payers declined. Portuguese
officials and their African assistants resorted to hideous cruelties
in order to enforce payment. Flogging, rape and murder increased
the stream of emigration into British territory: between 1921 and
1931 more than 100,000 Yao and Makua may have fled to
Nyasaland while many thousands of Makonde took refuge in
Tanganyika.
1926—1940
The collapse of the Portuguese Republic in 1926 brought no
immediate change in the affairs of Mozambique. In 1927 the South
African government and mining industry contrived to prevent
Portugal from raising a £1201 loan for its overseas territories.
Thus it was clearer than ever that Mozambique would have to
continue to depend heavily on its export of labour to South Africa.
Salazar, more concerned to balance budgets than foster growth,
515
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
PORTUGUESE AFRICA
was therefore eager to negotiate
a
new labour convention while
Hertzog,
the
South African premier, was less grasping than
Smuts. The convention signed in May 1928 exchanged a guaran-
teed tonnage of South African freight through Lourenco Marques
for certain restrictions
on
recruitment
in
Mozambique. Such
labour was
to
be used only on the Transvaal mines; the annual
maximum total was to be progressively reduced from 100,000 in
1929 to 80,000 in
1933;
the initial contract was limited to one year
and
the
maximum period
of
continuous service
to
eighteen
months.
In
another sphere, however, Salazar finally asserted
Portuguese independence: he resisted all attempts by the British
Foreign Office
to
extend the charter of the Niassa Company.
It
was duly wound up in 1929, without having once paid a dividend.
In 1930, Salazar's Colonial Act obliged the Zambezi concess-
ionaires
to
surrender their pra^ps, thus losing their police and
administrative functions
and
their rights over African labour.
Meanwhile, Salazar allowed work to continue on a new railway,
crossing Mozambique district from the coast towards Lake Nyasa
(Malawi):
by
1929
it
had reached Nampula, less than
a
third of
the way.
The first impact of Salazar's regime was soon followed by that
of the world-wide depression
in
1930. This severely damaged
Mozambique's transit trade, which was now worth three times as
much as domestic trade and was largely sustained by exports from
the Rhodesias and Katanga. As elsewhere in Africa, the depression
prompted great efforts to offset falling prices by increasing output;
as elsewhere this involved much coercion
of
labour.
(In
1928
unpaid labour for the government had been abolished, but in view
of prevailing wage-rates this was not an impressive reform.)
In
1932 the value of domestic exports from Mozambique was only
two-thirds what
it
had been
in
1929 (which in terms of sterling
was £3.1111). Yet the value
of
exports would have fallen much
further had not their quantities sharply increased. This was mainly
due to the mobilisation of labour in Quelimane and Mozambique
districts, which comprised half the total population; by 1933 they
contributed
70 per
cent
of
crop exports from
the
whole
of
Mozambique. By 1936, when prices had begun
to
recover, sisal
exports from the colony had increased fourfold in bulk since 1928;
sisal now comprised one-fifth of Mozambique's exports. The price
of sugar had fallen more steeply, and
it
contributed only 12 per
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
MOZAMBIQUE
cent, even though production in the Colony had been much
expanded and was now double that in Mozambique Company
territory. Altogether, plantation produce made up 36 per cent of
total exports. The rest consisted very largely of crops grown or
gathered by Africans: groundnuts (the main export) formed
almost one-quarter of the total in 1936; much copra was
produced by African squatters on coastal concessions, while
cashew nuts were grown to meet a rising demand in India.
Meanwhile, the links with South Africa and British central
Africa were strengthened. In 1929 Britain had arranged for a
railway bridge to be built across the Zambezi at Sena, to link the
Trans-Zambezia railway to the line from Nyasaland; it was
opened in 1935. As the economies of southern Africa recovered
from the depression, so their need for labour revived. By 1934,
many Africans from Mozambique found seasonal work in Nyasa-
land, with African cotton-growers as well as white tea-planters
(who by 1940 employed about
5,000
such migrants). In 1934,
Southern Rhodesia renewed the agreement of 1913; recruitment
was held at 15,000 per year, but after 1936 it was extended outside
Tete district, while many men found their own way over the
frontier; between 1936 and 1941 the number of African workers
from Portuguese territory in Southern Rhodesia rose from 25,000
to 46,000. The labour convention with South Africa was revised
in 1934 to allow men from Mozambique to be used by sugar-
planters in Zululand as well as in the Transvaal mines. In 1936
the annual maximum for recruitment was raised to 90,000 and in
1940 to 106,000. However, when in 1936 WNLA began again to
recruit north of latitude 22°S, this did not directly apply to
Mozambique, where the Sabi river remained the northern boun-
dary of recruiting, though many men from the north crossed into
Nyasaland to sign on for the Rand.
The continued restriction of WNLA recruiting to the far south
reflected the rising demand for labour within Mozambique. This
was due partly to increased harbour traffic and public works. The
road system, much enlarged in the 1920s, required extensive
maintenance, while new railways were under construction. In the
north, the line from Mozambique advanced slowly west into
productive agricultural country; in the far south, a spur from the
Transvaal line was extended in
193 5
to serve
a
projected irrigation
scheme in the Limpopo valley. In 1938 work began on a line from
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
PORTUGUESE AFRICA
the Zambezi bridge towards Tete, with a view to exploiting the
Moatise coalfield. By this time, however, labour was wanted
above all for growing cotton. The promotion of cotton-growing
had for some years been one aim of Portuguese colonial policy.
The expansion of Portugal's textile industry in the early years of
the century had been supplied mainly from outside its empire. In
an attempt to reduce this drain of foreign exchange, the military
government introduced in 1926 a decree designed to boost
cotton-production in the colonies. Zones were specified within
which Africans could discharge labour obligations by growing
cotton, while the right to buy, process and market cotton would
be leased to companies. This scheme only began to make progress
after
1933,
when a minimum price for cotton was introduced, and
the main impetus came in 1938 when a Cotton Export Board was
set up to provide seed, train experts and conduct research.
Between 1935 and 1940 cotton output in Mozambique, mostly
from the northern districts, rose from 2,300 tons to 19,000 tons,
for which Portugal paid 30 per cent below the world price. The
advent of war intensified the drive to produce cotton, which on
the lower Zambezi caused the extortion of forced labour from
women at the expense of their own food supplies. Intolerable
conditions continued to drive many people from northern Moza-
mbique to settle in Nyasaland, especially Mlanje district; even
though the British discouraged this in the 1930s, it is likely that
in the course of the decade there were at least 50,000 such
migrants.
11
By 1940 the pressure to produce for export had placed great
strain on traditional farming methods and the ecological balance
of even the most fertile regions. The concession companies could
all command contract labour in generous quantities. As a result
they tended to increase output by essentially labour-intensive
methods. There was little technical advance and Mozambique
became a producer of primary products, many of which, like
cashew nuts, had to be sent abroad even for preliminary proces-
sing. Factories existed to make fireworks, perfume, bus bodies,
ice,
tin cans, lime, soap and furniture, and to process maize, tea,
" This estimate is based on figures for total immigrants resident in Nyasaland in 1931
and 1945, allowing for an element of natural increase: cf. R. R. Kuczynski,
Demographic
survey of the British colonial
empire,
II (London, 1949),
5
37—9.
518
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
MOZAMBIQUE
tobacco and sugar. With the exception of sugar, this odd
assortment of industries scarcely constituted a sound industrial
base.
Hundreds of thousands of men and women were compelled to
work for abysmal wages. Few, however, had developed any sense
of common identity as workers. While many men must have spent
several years, on and off, in the mines of the Transvaal, most of
those who returned were tied to rural communities which had
been maintained by the women they had had to leave behind;
indeed, in the south the role of women in local leadership
markedly increased. Officials feared that returning migrants might
have been infected with Protestantism or 'Garveyism', and they
certainly founded a great many independent churches. The more
responsible jobs open to Africans tended to go to immigrants
from Nyasaland, of whom there may have been 3,000 in 1935,
including foremen on sugar estates and also clerks. It was the
dockworkers of Lourenco Marques who protested most consist-
ently: they struck seven times in
1918-21,
and struck again in the
1920s and 1930s.
The formal aspects of European civilisation were slow to make
any impact on Mozambique. During the 1930s the resident white
population increased by a
half,
but in 1940 numbered only 27,000;
there were about an equal number of Indians, Chinese and
mestizos,
most of whom lived in Beira and Lourenco Marques. By contrast,
the total population may have been as much as five million.
Education began to make some progress after the First World
War. A state system was devised to provide free and compulsory
instruction for all African children under twelve, leading to
technical training at secondary level. European children had the
opportunity to go on to the
liceu
which was opened in Lourenco
Marques in 1918. A parallel course was offered by mission schools
but they too had to teach in Portuguese and, after 1935, state aid
was granted only to Catholic missions. In J931 there were
officially 210 state and 254 missionary schools with a combined
total of 53,394 pupils. These figures include European children
and show that even one year in school was still a rare experience
for an African child. The
liceu
had 479 pupils, three of whom were
African. The same set of statistics reveals one high-quality
hospital in Lourenco Marques, 22 other hospitals and 51 clinics.
5*9
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
PORTUGUESE AFRICA
For
the
vast majority
of the
African population, health
and
education facilities
in
1940 were
no
more
and no
less than they
had been before
the
Portuguese arrival.
As
to
what Africans thought
and
said about their condition,
we have
few
clues other than their
own
actions. There
had for
some time been printed protests among
the few
literate
mestizos
and Africans
in
Lourenco Marques.
In
1918 they
had
founded
a
newspaper called
O
Brado Africano
('
The African Cry') and in 19
3 2
this boldly announced,'
We
no longer want to suffer the bottomless
pit of your excellent colonial administration...We have the scalpel
ready.'
12
But
this outlet
for
subversive thought
was
soon shut,
and
the
best evidence
for
popular African opinion
in
these years
seems
to be
the mordant songs
of
the Chopi,
in
the
far
south, and
of the plantation workers
on the
Zambezi.
13
ANGOLA
In some ways, Angola
had
much
in
common with Mozambique
at
the
beginning
of
the twentieth century. Ancient seaports were
connected
by
long-established trade routes
to the
peoples
of
the
inland plateau;
the
Portuguese provided commercial links
to the
outside world but their effective rule was confined to
a
few trading
stations. However, there were also important differences.
In
south-east Africa the plateau
had
mostly been taken over
by the
British, whereas
in
Angola virtually
the
whole length
of the
historic trade routes was reserved
to the
Portuguese.
In the
long
run, this fact was
to
prove an asset
to
the Portuguese;
in
the short
run,
it was a
grave liability.
For in
Angola,
in
contrast
to
Mozambique, population was densest in inland areas
far
removed
from Portuguese settlements
in
coastal towns
and
river valleys;
transport problems rendered these inland areas hard
to
control
and inhibited economic expansion. Nor did Angola, at this period,
have Mozambique's advantage
of
providing
an
outlet
for
mines
in
the
interior, which had stimulated the construction
of
railways
and harbours
and
provided
the
territory with
an
income from
transit traffic
as
well as migrant labour. Thus Angola's economy
grew even more slowly than that
of
Mozambique, though
at
least
12
Quoted
by
James Duffy,
Portuguese
Africa (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), 305-6.
13
See
chapter
5,
pp.
247-8.
520
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
ANGOLA
Angola's lack of invisible earnings obliged the Portuguese there
to pay closer attention to the country's own material resources.
ipoj—1920
In 1905 Portuguese rule in Angola extended little further than
it had a century earlier, and the white population was less than
11,000. There were three main areas under Portuguese administ-
ration. In the north, there were two historic corridors of Portug-
uese occupation and settlement: the road from Ambriz to the
Kongo capital of Sao Salvador and that from Luanda, the capital
of Angola, along the line of the Kwanza river to Malanje and the
Kwango river. Further south, the high plateau east of Benguela
had lately been opened up for white settlement: in 1902-4
Portuguese forces had crushed the so-called 'Bailundu revolt'
among the Ovimbundu. The third area under Portuguese control
was the hinterland of Mossamedes. In the 1850s the town of
Lubango had been founded in the cattle country beyond the
coastal desert, and the area had been partly occupied by mission-
aries and Madeiran and Boer settlers; by 1904 the latter numbered
about 2,000. In 1905 the Portuguese completed their conquest of
the Nkhumbi, but in the previous year the Kwanyama section of
the Ovambo wiped out a large Portuguese force, and they
remained independent for another decade: they received support
from Germans in South West Africa who hoped to seize southern
Angola from the Portuguese.
The defeat of the Ovimbundu, who had long dominated the
export trade in rubber, ivory, wax and slaves, can be taken as the
end of a period in the economic history of Angola. The old export
patterns were not quickly superseded, but they clearly had no
future. Wild rubber continued to be the main export of the colony
in most years until 1916, but its price, after reaching a peak in
1910,
rapidly declined. The total value of Angola's exports also
peaked in 1910 and in 1913 was only £im, little more than it had
been in 1905. Ivory exports from Benguela had ceased by 1900,
due to the extermination of elephant, though they persisted at
Mossamedes until 1913. The export of labour was also on the
wane. Slaves captured in the far interior had long been shipped
to the cocoa islands of Sao Tome and Principe. Since the late
nineteenth century, they had had the status of' contract labourers'
521
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
PORTUGUESE AFRICA
0
N G 0
390 km
200miles
16
Angola, 1939
and over 4,000 went there in 1905, but this trade was under strain
for there was now
a
rising demand
for
labour within Angola.
Railway contractors were
the
biggest
new
customers
for
Angolan labour. Work on the
'
Trans-African' railway had begun
at Luanda in 1886; by 1909
it
had reached Malanje.
In
1904 work
began
on the
Benguela railway which
was
originally meant
to
carry
out
copper from Katanga. This project
ran
into financial
522
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008