“When colonial governments seized African lands, they achieved two things simultaneously. They satisfied their own citizens (who wanted mining concessions or farming land) and they created the conditions whereby landless Africans had to work not just to pay taxes but also to survive. In settler areas such as Kenya and Rhodesia, the colonial government also prevented Africans from growing cash crops so that their labor would be available directly for the whites. One of the Kenyan white settlers, Colonel Grogan, put it bluntly when he said of the Kikuyu: “We have stolen his land. Now we must steal his limbs. Compulsory labor is the corollary of our occupation of the country.”
In those parts of the continent where land was still in African hands, colonial governments forced Africans to produce cash crops no matter how low the prices were. The favorite technique was taxation. Money taxes were introduced on numerous items—cattle, land, houses, and the people, themselves. Money to pay taxes was got by growing cash crops or working on European farms or in their mines. An interesting example of what colonialism was all about was provided in French Equatorial Africa, where French officials banned the Mandja people (now in Congo Brazzaville) from hunting so that they would engage solely in cotton cultivation. The French enforced the ban although there was little livestock in the area and hunting was the main source of meat in the people’s diet.
Finally, when all else failed, colonial powers resorted widely to the physical coercion of labor—backed up, of course, by legal sanctions, since anything which the colonial government chose to do was “legal.” The laws and by-laws by which peasants in British East Africa were required to maintain minimum acreages of cash crops like cotton and groundnuts were in effect forms of coercion by the colonial state, although they are not normally considered under the heading of “forced labor.”
The simplest form of forced labor was that which colonial governments exacted to carry out “public works.” Labor for a given number of days per year had to be given free for these “public works”—building castles for governors, prisons for Africans, barracks for troops, and bungalows for colonial officials. A great deal of this forced labor went into the construction of roads, railways, and ports to provide the infrastructure for private capitalist investment and to facilitate the export of cash crops. Taking only one example from the British colony of Sierra Leone, one finds that the railway which started at the end of the nineteenth century required forced labor from thousands of peasants driven from the villages. The hard work and appalling conditions led to the death of a large number of those engaged in work on the railway. In the British territories, this kind of forced labor (including juvenile labor) was widespread enough to call forth in 1923 a “Native Authority Ordinance” restricting the use of compulsory labor for porterage, railway and road building. More often than not, means were found of circumventing this legislation. An international Forced Labor Convention was signed by all colonial powers in 1930, but again it was flouted in practice.
The French government had a cunning way of getting free labor by first demanding that African males should enlist as French soldiers and then using them as unpaid laborers. This and other forced labor legislation known as “prestation” was extensively applied in vast areas of French Sudan and French Equatorial Africa. Because cash crops were not well established in those areas, the main method of extracting surplus was by taking the population and making it work in plantation or cash-crop regions nearer the coast. Present-day Upper Volta, Chad, and Congo Brazzaville were huge suppliers of forced labor under colonialism. The French got Africans to start building the Brazzaville to Pointe-Noire railway in 1921, and it was not completed until 1933. Every year of its construction, some ten thousand people were driven to the site—sometimes from more than a thousand kilometers away. At least 25 percent of the labor force died annually from starvation and disease, the worst period being from 1922 to 1929.
Quite apart from the fact that the “public works” were of direct value to the capitalists, the colonial government also aided private capitalists by providing them with labor recruited by force. This was particularly true in the early years of colonialism, but continued in varying degrees up to the Second World War, and even to the end of colonialism in some places. In British territories, the practice was revived during the economic depression of 1929–33 and during the subsequent war. In Kenya and Tanganyika, forced labor was reintroduced to keep settler plantations functioning during the war. In Nigeria, it was the tin companies which benefited from the forced-labor legislation, allowing them to get away with paying workers five pence per day plus rations. For most of the colonial period, the French government performed the same kind of service for the big timber companies who had great concessions of territory in Gabon and Ivory Coast.
The Portuguese and Belgian colonial regimes were the most brazen in directly rounding up Africans to go and work for private capitalists under conditions equivalent to slavery. In Congo, brutal and extensive forced labor started under King Leopold II in the last century. So many Congolese were killed and maimed by Leopold’s officials and police that this earned European disapproval even in the midst of the general pattern of colonial outrages. When Leopold handed over the “Congo Free State” to the Belgian government in 1908, he had already made a huge fortune, and the Belgian government hardly relaxed the intensity of exploitation in Congo.
The Portuguese have the worst record of engaging in slavery-like practices, and they too have been repeatedly condemned by international public opinion. One peculiar characteristic of Portuguese colonialism was the provision of forced labor, not only for its own citizens, but also for capitalists outside the boundaries of Portuguese colonies. Angolans and Mozambicans were exported to the South African mines to work for subsistence, while the capitalists in South Africa paid the Portuguese government a certain sum for each laborer supplied. (The export of Africans to South Africa is still continuing.)
In the above example, the Portuguese colonialists were cooperating with capitalists of other nationalities to maximize the exploitation of African labor. Throughout the colonial period, there were instances of such cooperation, as well as competition between metropolitan powers. Generally speaking, a European power was expected to intervene when the profits of its national bourgeoisie were threatened by the activities of other nations. After all, the whole purpose of establishing colonial governments in Africa was to provide protection to national monopoly economic interests.”
– How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), by Walter Rodney
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