PEASANTS, WORK AND THE LABOR PROCESS - FORCED COTTON CULTIVATION IN COLONIAL MOZAMBIQUE 1938-1961

For much of African cotton was the premier colonial crop. Because of its importance, the impact of cotton has stimulated a great deal of discussion and lively debate. Proponents of the vent for surplus approach, the staple theory, and modernization theses all state the positive effects that the production of commodities such as cotton had on rural Africa. Underdevelopment theorists and a handful of Marxist scholars emphasize that cotton exported to the metropolitan powers at a fraction of the world market price epitomized colonial exploitation and African impoverishment. Although reaching quite different conclusions, all these schools pay insufficient attention to the organization of work, and often presume that the labor regimes which produced the commodities were inconsequential. The Mozambican cotton scheme provides an ideal case study to explore the interrelated issues of labor organization, state power, and the impact of petty commodity production on rural landscapes. This essay examines the ways in which the Portuguese colonial state sought to organize peasant labor and the ways in which peasants sought to organize themselves. One of the central premises of this study is that the effects of commodification on rural communities were not uniform. Although cotton cultivators were entrapped in the same labor regime there were differences in the way work was organized in northern and southern Mozambique. Similarly, the cotton regime impoverished, but it impoverished differently by region, household, and gender. Within some communities it also exacerbated nascent class differences.