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Internationalist Communist Forum
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#92 - How capitalism under-develops the world
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Feb 2012
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Bir önceki
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Bir sonraki
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The blood, sweat and hunger of the colonial people
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In every colony, the colonial powers sought to get the peasantry to give up its traditional subsistence agriculture so that they
could be made to work in the new plantations or mines, or to grow cash-crops for export. But the method used everywhere pushed
an already impoverished, but usually self-sufficient, peasantry into extreme destitution.
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One example of this is what happened in today's Zambia - then, a sparsely populated British colony almost three times as large
as Britain. When it came under British rule, in 1888, its fertile land provided more than enough food for its small population.
However, Cecil Rhodes' British South Africa Company needed manpower. To force reluctant African peasants to volunteer, Rhodes
instituted a tax of 3 shillings per hut, equivalent to the annual wage an African worker could earn. Having no way of earning
this money except by selling their labour, Zambia's male adults had to leave their villages and take a job. Among other things,
this transformed Zambia's traditional agriculture. The main staple food so far had been millet, a protein-rich cereal. But it
required the strength of the men from the whole village for its successful cultivation. So millet was replaced with manioc,
which was easier to grow, but a much poorer source of protein. As a result, malnutrition appeared within a generation.
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By the end of the 19th century, cash-crops and mining were the mainstay of colonial exploitation. In Africa, the main players
were large companies which made such a fortune out of their colonial plunder that they developed into some of today's largest
multinational companies. One of these, for instance, is Unilever, whose forerunner in the 1880s had been a soap business,
before becoming the United African Company which controlled 2/3 of Nigeria's imports and exports, among other things. Another
is Pinault-Printemps-Redoute, a French industrial and service group whose main component is still the French Company of West
Africa, which had a virtual monopoly over industrial exports from France to Africa. Another still, is the Bolloré group, also
a French multinational, which built its fortune on sea transport to and from Africa and on agricultural plantations. It still
controls huge assets in the former French colonies.
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In West Africa, lucrative crops like cocoa, palm trees, and later rubber, were rarely farmed given that they could be gathered
in the wild. Others, like peanuts, needed to be cultivated. Either way, African farmers were expected to attend to the
colonists' cash-crops in addition, and of course at the expense of, their own subsistence crops. No effort was ever made to
provide these farmers with appropriate cultivation techniques or tools which would have increased their productivity. So once
again, malnutrition developed in areas where it had never existed before. In some areas, like today's Mali, the particularly
intensive cultivation of cash-crops like cotton and peanuts exhausted the soil and was partly responsible for increased
desertification.
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The Belgian colony of Congo offered one of the most elaborate "models", so to speak, of colonial exploitation - a "model"
nevertheless quite comparable to what was going on in the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa. The Congo was turned into a huge labour
camp ruled by terror. A common practice when farmers failed to collect enough rubber from wild rubber trees, was to take their
families hostage, or to kill them and put their severed hands on display in the village as a warning. It was estimated that
over the 4 decades until 1920, ten million Africans died in the Belgian Congo - half of the initial population. Over the same
period, companies exploiting concessions which often covered tens of thousands of square miles, multiplied their original
investments 20-fold!
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Another common practice which claimed many victims across Africa, was to have goods carried by Africans on their heads in loads
of 30 to 40 kilos, often over 200 miles or more. Human caravans were escorted by armed guards, using whips to "wake up" those
who showed signs of exhaustion. Rebellion against such inhuman treatment was met with torture, jail or death. In fact, this
was just one of the many forms of forced labour which prevailed in Africa during the colonial period.
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Unlike the practice of slavery which has been well documented, few estimates have been made of the decimation caused by
colonisation through the exploitation of African workers. It is thought that, between 1880 and 1914, between one third and a
quarter of the initial population of Western and Central Africa fell victim to this exploitation. And there was probably
comparable decimation of the rural populations of India, Malaysia and Vietnam, which were subjected to similar exploitation.
No-one will ever know the precise figures. But the short-term and long-term human and social cost to these populations was
certainly enormous and, in fact, even higher than that of slavery itself.
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Bir önceki
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Bir sonraki
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