The hut we came to is open to the sky in several places and tinged orange with light reflected from corncobs drying on the roof. Inside there are two children, one sick and one very sick; also a fat shy woman with a young goat nibbling at her skirt. The floor is strewn with loose hay and a young chicken gets killed when it runs under our feet. The child we have come to sec is dying. Blinded with the pus running from his eyes and gasping with painful respirations. Occasionally his body is shaken with long fits of coughing. It is useless to prolong his suffering. We offer soap, which can do no harm, and eye ointment for the other child. The dying child seems to be no more than 18 months old but with his thin limbs and dried skin he looks prematurely aged. His mother says he is five years old. [1]
Today Africa faces, in the words of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, “the imminent danger of famine on a massive scale”. Already some 150 million people, or a third of the entire population, endure critical shortages of food. According to the World Bank, unless a huge increase in food aid is forthcoming, several African countries could “collapse entirely and revert to bush economies” with “disastrous consequences for world health, world trade and international security”. [2]
Much of the continent is presently in the grip of a catastrophic drought. In Ethiopia and its bordering states the landscape has in parts become a desolate wilderness, thinly littered with the horns of dead cattle. On the other side of the continent, in West Africa, the threat of a disaster eclipsing that the great Sahel drought of ten years ago has receded, but lack of rain has let loose a plague of leaf hopper insects. In Northern Mali, for instance, a three-inch-long beetle which causes blisters on the skin has ferociously attacked surviving crops of millet.
In much of Eastern and Southern Africa conditions are deteriorating as the drought enters its third year, cruelly punctuated by the occasional flash flood. Possibly the hardest hit of all is Mozambique, straining under the additional burden of a costly civil war. Even South Africa, its wealthy neighbour, has had to import several million tons of grain from abroad, in contrast to previous years when it produced substantial surpluses.
But the drought — reputedly the harshest in a century — is clearly not the only factor in Africa's worsening food situation. Per capita food production has been steadily declining over the last 20 years (by eleven per cent since 1970), drought or no drought. In this respect Africa is unique, for elsewhere in the world productivity has generally increased (though this does not mean the problem of world hunger is any nearer a solution). In the book Food First (1982) Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins stress the difference between drought and famine:
Drought is a natural phenomenon. Famine is a human phenomenon. Any link that does exist is precisely through the economic and political order of a society that can either minimise the human consequences of the drought or exacerbate them.
According to some writers the whole problem began with the colonial conquest of Africa by European powers. Walter Rodney, a Guyanese historian, epitomises this point of view:
Colonialism created conditions which led not just to periodic famines but chronic undernourishment. malnutrition and deterioration of the physique of African people. If such a statement sounds wildly extravagant it is only because bourgeois propaganda has conditioned even Africans to believe that malnutrition and starvation were the natural lot of Africans from time immemorial. [3]
While there is undoubtedly some truth in this argument, it does rest upon an idyllic view of the pre-colonial era. There certainly were famines before the colonisation of Africa, although they were admittedly less severe than those that followed. In 1520 the Portuguese priest Alvarez had this to say after returning from Ethiopia:
It seems to me that in the whole world there is not so populous a country or one so abundant in crops. And because I was amazed the inhabitants said to me “Honoured guest, do not be amazed, because in the years that we harvest little we gather enough for three years plenty in the country; and if it were not for the multitude of locusts and hail, which sometimes do great damage, we should not sow the half of what we sow because so much remains that it cannot be believed. [4]
But as the Ethiopian economist Ewinetu has pointed out, traditional Ethiopian society became increasingly unable to prevent shortages occurring from time to time. This was because the mass of the population were less and less inclined to hold reserves of food — thus leaving themselves vulnerable to drought — out of fear that such reserves would only be “an invitation to the exactions of feudal lords" in whose hands the granaries came to be concentrated. At least 23 major famines were recorded by Ethiopian chroniclers in the period 1540-1800.
Around the time Alvarez set foot in Ethiopia there began the infamous transatlantic slave trade, which lasted into the nineteenth century. Estimates of the numbers of captives landed in the Americas throughout this period vary between ten and twelve million, although this does not take into account the many millions more who died in passage, before enshipment or as a result of slave raids. Such a massive haemorrhage of people from Africa's shores — usually the more economically productive members of the community — had debilitating effects on African society and agriculture. Yet, as Marx observed, "the turning of Africa into a warren for the hunting of black skins” was also one of the “chief moments of primitive accumulation”, heralding "the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production”. [5]
In turn the emergence of industrial capitalism in Europe made new demands on the African continent. The decline of the slave trade saw a redirection of effort from the shipment of human beings into export of the fruits of their labour in the form of agricultural products. This move towards cash crops was first apparent on a significant scale in West Africa. The most important product from this region at the time was palm oil, Europe needing more and more soap as her factories grew in number and her cities in filth. The palm oil trade, initially controlled by Africans, was later dominated by European merchants on the coast with the military support of their governments.
In the final two decades of the nineteenth century virtually the entire continent was carved up by European powers in the Scramble for Africa. Belfort Bax, anticipating Lenin’s fallacious theory of Imperialism, claimed in an 1888 issue of Commonweal that this colonising presented the possibility that the capitalist world might "take a new lease of life out of the exploitation of Africa" (Britain at the time was in the throes of the Great Depression). Nevertheless this extension of European control did much to increase the spread of cash crop production at the expense of traditional subsistence agriculture.
Where an unfavourable climate discouraged settlement, African peasants were sometimes coerced by gun and whip into growing crops for export. Perhaps the most brutal application of violence to be found anywhere in Africa was in the Equatorial Zone, where cut-throat concession companies operated a ruthless system of forced labour, razing villages to the ground to compel the local population to collect wild rubber or ivory for export. More typically however, economic pressure was applied by levying taxes on land, cattle or huts for which peasants had to earn money through the sale of crops. Such revenue helped to finance the colonial administration of these territories and thus represented an additional incentive to promote cash crop production.
Sometimes huge tracts of land were acquired by European settlers themselves for the purpose of growing cash crops (Lord Delamere. for example, purchased 100,000 acres of some of the best land in Kenya at a bargain price of one penny an acre). Often this direct takeover of the land was accompanied by a prohibition on local peasants competing by producing these same crops themselves. This, combined with the reduction in the amount of land available for peasant farming, drove impoverished Africans to seeking work on European farms.
Furthermore in several African countries a significant mining sector developed which, like cash cropping, had severely disruptive consequences for traditional agriculture. As Fanning and Mueller point out:
In the advanced capitalist nations, the exodus from the rural areas which accompanied the process of industrialisation was preceded by a dramatic increase in agricultural productivity. By contrast, industrialisation in the underdeveloped countries of Africa was the cause of a massive decline in rural productivity. [6]
South Africa
Nowhere was this clearer than in the case of the "native reserves" of South Africa established by the British in the mid-nineteenth century. The first, in Natal, was attacked by the white farming community on the grounds that it represented a standing military threat— the Zulu had not yet been finally crushed — and that it would stem the flow of labourers to the farms. As late as 1903 Louis Botha, soon to become the first prime minister of a unified South Africa, threatened to break up the network of reserves in the country in order to secure a greater supply of labourers. But in fact Botha's view was already outdated, for the existence of the reserves no longer impeded the flow of labour: their purpose had been transformed from a paternalistic one of temporarily sheltering the African into providing a vast reservoir of cheap labour that could be tapped at will.
The major impetus behind this transformation was the discovery of immense mineral wealth in South Africa in the second half of the nineteenth century. The tycoon-politician, Cecil Rhodes, in sponsoring the 1894 Glen Grey Act which severely limited the size of lots Africans could farm in the Glen Grey valley of the Ciskei, pioneered the adaptation of reserves to the needs of the mining industry of which he himself was a prominent beneficiary.
But it was the 1913 Natives Lands Act which dealt the most crushing blow of all to African agriculture and laid the foundations of apartheid in legislation. In terms of this Act, Africans (who vastly outnumbered Europeans) were prohibited from purchasing land outside the reserves designated for them, which amounted to a mere 7.3 per cent of the area of South Africa. De Kiewict, in his assessment of this Act. wrote:
The congestion of the reserves, the backwardness of their methods and the exhaustion of their resources accounted for the departure each year (50 per cent in 1925) of the able bodied men to earn money as labourers . . .The natives were the victims of too few acres. [7]
Thus, undermining of subsistence agriculture dovetailed neatly with the interests of the mining sector which, because of its labour intensive nature, required an abundant supply of labour. White agriculture benefited too despite the fact that it competed with the mines (and later manufacturing industry) for labour. Firstly there was the direct benefit that went to white farmers who no longer had to face competition from Africans. Secondly the prosperity of the mining sector, which depended very much on the availability of African labour, contributed massively to government revenue. This, in turn, enabled the government heavily to subsidise white agriculture, not least because this was where its traditional power base lay.
After the war the Nationalists sought to implement a policy of separate development. Verwoerd. hoping to reverse the tide of black urbanisation accompanying South Africa’s industrialisation, entertained the idea that the reserves might become self-sufficient agrarian economies capable of supporting the populations living within their borders as well as — in due course — those resident in "white" South Africa. In this way. it was felt, the vexed political issue of how to justify the continued denial of rights to Africans might be defused.
Elsewhere in Africa the first plantation companies appeared on the scene in the early part of this century. Like the mines they relied on migrant labourers who were paid a pittance, rationalised on the grounds that the dependants of plantation workers could support themselves by subsistence farming. The reality was that subsistence farming was being eroded by the very system of migrant labour on which the plantations relied.
By establishing their own plantations these companies were able to ensure the enormous quantities of agricultural produce needed for the scale of production of European factories. Indeed, the arrival of the plantation company coincided with a massive expansion of trade in agricultural products, over 90 per cent of which was geared to external markets. But it was not the plantation itself that spearheaded such growth for by now the (tax induced) peasant production of export crops had become significant.
One of the earliest of the plantation companies was set up by William Hesketh Lever in 1911. Unilever is today the world’s largest food corporation with a turnover of $10 billion by 1978 which exceeds the combined GNP of 25 African countries. To begin with however Lever brothers, having established a foothold in the Congo, experienced great difficulty in operating plantations in Nigeria. Throughout West Africa, except in the German colonies of Togo and Cameroons, the colonial authorities were generally opposed to plantation agriculture since the peasant production of cash crops was well established in this region compared to other parts of Africa. In the case of Nigeria this policy was only reversed in the 1930s when there was a slump in the price of cash crops. Until then the British authorities in Nigeria maintained that plantation agriculture would inevitably lead to a large-scale drift from the land and that the violent resistance this would provoke could prove costly to quell. In addition, it was felt that creating a landless proletariat would pave the way to “communism” — an entirely misplaced fear at the time but one that was fuelled by the rhetoric of the Bolsheviks who had recently come to power in Russia.
Needless to say it was not "communism" but black nationalism that came to power throughout Africa, and within a remarkably short space of time. But the grinding poverty of the great majority proved as intractable in the face of so-called national liberation as it did under colonial rule. Some writers have attempted to account for this as a phenomenon called neo-colonialism. In other words. Africa's predicament today is held to be the legacy of its colonial past which served to constrain subsequent economic development along lines that worked against the interests of the African states themselves.
Robin Cox
References
1 The Growth of Hunger. R. Dumont and N. Cohen. 1980.
2 The Observer, 18/3/84.
3 How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, W. Rodney. 1972.
4 The Guardian. 27/8/80.
5 Capital, Vol.l.
6 Africa Undermined. G. banning with M. Mueller, 1979.
7 A History of South Africa: Social and Economic, W. de Kiewiet, 1941.
