Proposals on Portuguese Forced Labour Law in Mozambique and the African Empire (192662) MICHEL CAHEN WHEN ASKING INDIGENATO BEFORE RACE?, my purpose is quite obviously not to conclude that Portuguese colonial law organised only social discrimination and therefore was not racist. One need only read the successive Native Statutes and the Colonial Act to be convinced to the contrary. Nor is the aim to answer the question of the function of Portuguese colonial racism: it is very easy to point out that it was an ideological tool to dene who was native (and was to be compelled into forced labour up to 1962) and who was not. People were black and therefore native or not civilised (with the small exception of assimilados), or white and therefore never native and always civilised, even when completely illiterate. Nevertheless, these realities do not sufce to show exactly how it all worked. But let me digress for a moment. Is it correct to translate the Portuguese indgena as native in English (in particular American social sciences English)? One first problem is that indgena in Portuguese is at the same time a noun and an adjective, whereas indigenous is only an adjective in English: this implies translating um indgena as a native and, in general terms, this will probably run. But in old Portuguese African colonies, there were whites and mixed-race or black Luso- Africans, sometimes since generations earlier. Were they native? It was obvious to everybody that they were not indgena. They were Angolan or Mozambican, that is to say white, mixed-race or black Portuguese from Angola and Mozambique, but not indgena. Would it, in the case of completely black Luso-Africans, be the same in English: would those blacks really not be natives? Moreover, in the Portuguese African empire, indgena became a legal status within the juridical 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 I thank Maria da Conceio Neto (University Agostinho Neto, Luanda) for her remarks and criticism, which drove me to change or better qualify some aspects of the original version. That does not mean she will agree with all my nal proposals. Proceedings of the British Academy 179, 149171. The British Academy 2012. Racism-00-p.qxd 7/2/12 11:28 Page 149 duality imposed on the colonised (indgenas, or not-civilised, versus cidados, or civilised). In that sense, indgena might be translated by [colonial] subject, but it would thus embrace the whole of the local colonised population, when assimilados were (officially) full Portuguese citizens, as well as the Indians of Goa and the Chinese of Macao and when the Cape Verdeans were neither indgena nor assimilados (citizens) and enjoyed an intermediary status. Maria da Conceio Neto points out the absurdity [which] could be seen at So Tom where the natives (indgenas) were not those born locally but those brought there as contract workers (contratados) from Angola and Mozambique, since the very So Toman natives were not compelled to forced labour and therefore not called indgenas, but forros. 1 In this text, I will translate indgena (adjective) as native when it refers to the legal status or the condition of living within this legal status (native policy, Native Code, etc.), and as indigenous when it refers to the fact of being historically from that place (indigenous customs and habits, but a locally born European or Goan will not be an indigenous because his origin lay abroad), with some special cases (I will translate imposto indgena as hut tax). Often, I will simply use the Portuguese words, in italics. Furthermore, it is impossible to translate indigenato (the legal status and the social category) as indigenousness, which would be an indigenidade which does not exist in Portuguese. Even if the Portuguese noun indgena had been used before, 2 among many other words, to refer to African peoples (cafres, gentio, selvagens, pagos, or kafrs, horde, savages, pagans), its generalisation as a concept in order to refer to colonised native peoples in Portuguese continental Africa (and probably elsewhere) is more recent. Such a generalisation was linked to Lisbons effort to produce a systematic legislation for its new empire, from the beginning of the last quarter of the nineteenth century and above all after 1885. Before then, in the days of the slave trade in the rst age of colonisation, it is well known that the coloniser concluded alliances with some African states to secure the capture of slaves in other states. Arab or Swahili slave traders did the same. That meant that not all black people were to become slaves: it depended on the alliances. In contrast, under colonial capitalism, all black people became natives (indgenas), unless they succeeded in extracting themselves from their race. In Portuguese colonies, this was done with a remarkable degree of systematisation. The concepts indgena and indigenato as a legal category 3 are therefore more or less contemporary with the implementation of colonial capitalism. It could be 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 Michel Cahen 150 1 Mara da Conceio Neto, personal communication, 8 May 2011. 2 Francisco Bethencourt points out that, in the rst edition of Mores, indgena already exists with the modern meaning, and it may have existed before (Antnio de Moraes Silva and Rafael Bluteau, Diccionario da lingua portugueza composto pelo padre D. Rafael Bluteau; Reformado, e accrescentado por Antnio de Moraes Silva natural do Rio de Janeiro (Lisbon: Ofcina de Simo Thaddeo Ferreira, 1789). 3 Ana Cristina Nogueira da Silva, A cidadania nos Trpicos. O Ultramar no constitucionalismo monrquico portugus (18201880), unpublished PhD thesis, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2004, pp. 442. Racism-00-p.qxd 7/2/12 11:28 Page 150 said that this was a logical consequence of the victory of abolitionism, 4 indirectly linked with the expansion of capitalism, and it could also be said that indigenato and forced labour replaced slavery. But it is this very notion of replacement that needs to be discussed. Situations differ greatly according to whether we are looking at the French Caribbean before 1848, Brazil before 1888, the creole Portuguese archipelagos of Cape Verde or So Tom, or the continental colonies of the Portuguese empire before 1878. The key is whether, in all these places where slavery occurred, there was or there was not a slave plantation economy, a plantation complex. 5 The result of abolition was obviously different according to each case. It is well known that in the South of the United States, Brazil, the French Caribbean, and Runion, the plantation economic system declined quickly after the end of the multiple extensions of time granted to the former owners of slaves in order to oblige the freed slaves to stay. With obvious differences from one place to another, the majority of former slaves did not stay and preferred to become labourers in industrial cities, smallholders in the mountains, or even landless peasants, engendering a massive plebe that was poorly integrated into the capitalist production process. Nevertheless, that scenario does not seem to t the case of So Tom and Principe the Caribbean island of Portugal in equatorial Africa. So Tom and Principe So Tom and Principe seem to be an exception, a case of the lingering survival of a closed system of slavery in a plantation economy (the cocoa roas) up to the Second World War. This may be explained by the peculiar history of the genesis of creole society, 6 which prohibited the imposition of forced labour on the natives (lhos da terra, or forros) 7 and required the late and growing importation of slave INDIGENATO BEFORE RACE? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 151 4 Since the new uniqueness of human kind needed the codication of its categories. 5 Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). In this chapter, when I speak about plantation, it will always be large plantations and not the peasant self-subsistence agriculture which, nevertheless, may be very intensive in some areas. 6 I am calling creole not only the colony-born whites, but all the colonial (not colonised) social milieus produced by, or at the margins of, the imperial state apparatus. The longevity of the Portuguese rst age of colonisation made it peculiar; Isabel Castro Henriques, So Tom e Prncipe: A inveno de uma sociedade (Lisbon: Vga, 2000); Elisabetta Maino, Le kalidoscope identitaire. Anthropologie historique de So Tom e Prncipe, unpublished PhD thesis, cole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, 2004, pp. 712; Augusto Nascimento, S. Tom e Prncipe no sculo XIX: Um espao de interpretao das mudanas sociais, in Valentim Alexandre (ed.), O Imprio Africano (Sculos XIX e XX) (Lisbon: Edies Colibri, 2000), pp. 95116; Valentim Alexandre, Poderes e quotidiano nas roas de S. Tom e Prncipe, de nais de oitecentos a meados de novecentos (Lous: author, 2002). 7 The last attempt to impose forced labour on the forros provoked the war of Batep in 1953; Gerhard Seibert, Le massacre de fvrier 1953 So Tom, raison dtre du nationalisme santomen, Lusotopie 4 (1997), pp. 17392. Racism-00-p.qxd 7/2/12 11:28 Page 151 manpower (named serviais from the end of the nineteenth century) due to the insularity and small size of the archipelago, as well as the violence of the colonial state of a weak metropolitan capitalism. However, even in this case, the growing difculties of maintaining the system led to its criminalisation: in the 1950s, being sent from Mozambique to So Tom was not a question of forced labour for indigenous people, but very often of penitentiary labour for native convicts. In other words, So Tom represents one case of a slave plantation complex, and the fact that this complex needed a few decades more to die than was the case in the Americas does not change anything. Thus, it must not be understood as a transition where slavery was slowly substituted by forced labour; rather, forced labour was tried, but never successfully. 8 Historically speaking, in So Tom, there was no transition: there was an attempt to continue slave exploitation, and afterwards, the convulsions of its decline. Social improvements for serviais after the Second World War in order to stabilise them were concomitant with the crisis of this single-crop farming and of its protability. 9 Deep convulsions occurred too in the Americas: the difference is that in So Tom, capitalism hardly replaced slavery. It was the transition from slavery to nothing. The problem the social sciences face today is that the analysis of forced labour in Portuguese continental Africa has been and remains excessively inuenced by the case of So Tom, which fed famous scandals and abolitionist protests from the end of the nineteenth century up to 1925. 10 The issue was always that forced labour was no more than modern slavery, and forced labour in Angola and Mozambique was seen as forming part of other plantation complexes as early as the nineteenth century or beginning of the twentieth. 11 Obviously, slavery is literally a kind of forced labour. But this does not mean that twentieth-century forced (officially indentured) labour was modern slavery, at least if seen from the viewpoint of the mode of production and its historical path. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 Michel Cahen 152 8 See the rst chapter of Gerhard Seibert, Comrades, Clients and Cousins: Colonialism, Socialism and Democratization in So Tom and Prncipe (Leiden: University of Leiden, 1999), pp. 1849. 9 Alexander Keese, Early Limits of Local Decolonisation: Forced Labour, Decolonisation and the Servial Population in So Tom and Prncipe, from Colonial Abuses to Post-Colonial Disappointment, 19451976, International Journal of African Historical Studies, forthcoming. 10 In particular the famous Nevinson and Ross Reports: Henry W. Nevinson, A Modern Slavery (London: Harper and Brothers, 1906); Edward A. Ross, Report on Employment of Native Labour in Portuguese Africa (New York: Abbott Press, 1925). For a recent anlysis, see Miguel Bandeira Jernimo, Livros Brancos, Almas Negras: A misso civilizadora do colonialismo Portugus c. 18701930 (Lisbon: Imprensa de Cincias Sociais, 2009), esp. chs 2 and 5. 11 See the unambiguous title of the famous book by James Duffy, A Question of Slavery (London: Oxford University Press, 1967). Racism-00-p.qxd 7/2/12 11:28 Page 152 Late but extensive slave trade; weak slavery; modern forced labour What was the situation in the Portuguese colonies on the continent? With few exceptions, the former slave traders, being white, mulatto or black, did not become planters. Some managed to nd their place among the very small urban elites in Luanda, Benguela or Momedes in Angola, or Quelimane, Moambique or Ibo Island in Mozambique. But the new plantation companies were generally not theirs, and were a new phenomenon stemming from foreign or metropolitan capital, and in any case external capital. Even the descendants of the prazeiros of Great Zambezia in Mozambique, who could have been best placed to transform their prazos into latifundios, failed to do so, rst for military reasons: they sought to defend their freedom to be slave traders too long and too late, and they had to be defeated by metropolitan Portugal. 12 With the very tiny exception of the Mossuril peninsula facing Moambique Island the so-called terras firmes where slave plantations existed and a few places in the hinterland of Luanda in Angola, Portuguese (and also Swahili) slavery in these areas was domestic and above all for exportation. Obviously, domestic slavery did include some slaves working in quintas (small plantations), but I believe it is right to emphasise that the slave trade never produced a plantation economy in continental Portuguese Africa comparable to that in Latin America. The rst reason for this was a military one: in order to create those plantations, it would have been necessary to defeat a number of African states, some small and some larger, in order to dominate large areas of land directly. It was far more protable to export slaves, all the more since Brazilian production (even after independence) answered to the needs of legitimate trade in tropical commodities. 13 This effective conquest occurred very late, which is to say, at the very moment when abolition was actually implemented, between the Berlin Congress and the First World War. Even if they had wanted to do so, the former slave exporters had no more time to develop slave-worked plantations. In the Portuguese African empire, forced labour and indigenato were not implemented to maintain former slaves on the plantations (or in the mines), for INDIGENATO BEFORE RACE? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 153 12 Allen Isaacman, Mozambique: The Africanization of a European Institution: The Zambezi Prazos, 17501902 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1972); Allen Isaacman and Barbara Isaacman, Os prazeiros como trans-raianos: Um estudo sobre transformao social e cultural, Arquivo (Maputo: Arquivo Histrico de Moambique), 10 (1991), pp. 548. About the last period of the prazos, see Leroy Vail and Landeg White, Capitalism and Colonialism in Mozambique: A Study of Quelimane District (London: Heinemann, 1980); Ren Pelissier, Naissance du Mozambique: Rsistance et rvoltes anticoloniales (18541918), 2 vols (Orgeval: Ed. Plissier, 1984); and Srgio Chichava, Le Vieux Mozambique: Lidentit politique de la Zambzie, unpublished PhD thesis, Universit de Bordeaux, 2007. 13 Gervase Clarence-Smith, The Third Portuguese Empire, 18251975: A Study in Economic Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985). Racism-00-p.qxd 7/2/12 11:28 Page 153 such plantations or mines scarcely existed (with the exception, as we have seen, of So Tom, probably up until the Second World War). As is known, the rst Portuguese law against the institution of slavery was the decree of the Marqus S da Bandeira ordering the end of transatlantic trade in 1836, which became effective only in 1850 when Brazil issued a similar decree. Obviously, this supposed end of the transatlantic slave trade was not the end of slavery. The same Marqus S da Bandeira issued a series of anti-slave laws between 1854 and 1858, freeing some slaves and establishing 1878 as the nal date for abolition. In 1869, the slaves were made libertos and in 1875 the ex-libertos had to stay in the service of their former masters for two more years (18768). These twenty years were thought of in Lisbon as a period of gradual abolition and orderly transition from slavery to free labour: the Portuguese government visibly hoped that slaves who could no longer be exported would therefore stay with their owners, who would then be able to create plantations and transform their slaves into wage-earning workers. But in the great majority of cases, these plantations would be new ones, and not former latifundios full of former slaves. Unlike in Brazil or the French Caribbean colonies, the twenty-year intermediate period conceived in Lisbon was not to give time to slave-based plantation owners, but to allow a transition to a new, capitalist economy. The key point in the 1875, 1878 and 1899 legislation was that (with some hesitation and contradictory minor changes between these rst three Portuguese native labour codes) the prohibition of forced labour referring to the former slavery was enacted alongside the vagrancy clause under which the non-productive African could be judged a vagrant and made to contract for his services. It amounted to no less than the creation of modern forced labour. But this is not the same thing as slavery. 14 On the moral level and that of day- to-day life, similarities can easily be found between slavery and forced labour (above all before the 1950s); and it was on these grounds that Portugal was denounced by anti-slavery movements throughout the rst half of the twentieth century. But historically speaking, forced labour and indigenato were not the product of a long process of the decline of slavery: they were the direct consequence of the new age of colonialism, meaning the colonial capitalism now made possible 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 Michel Cahen 154 14 Portuguese has two separate words: escravatura for the slave trade, and escravido for slavery in plantations, mines, and so forth. When I refer here to slavery it is to escravido. Portuguese colonial literature in the 1930s sometimes distinguished escravido, used specically for domestic slavery of Africans by Africans (excluding any reference to forced labour) from escravismo (or esclavagismo) for the European system and doctrine. When the World Trade Organization was investigating forced labour, the Portuguese authorities understood this voluntarily as slavery indeed in the colonial ofcial vocabulary, trabalho forado refers to slavery and answered that there was no longer such escravismo but there was some escravido remaining, which they were ghting against; Maria Emilia Madeira Santos and Vtor Lus Gaspar Rodrigues, No rescaldo da escravatura. As cincias sociais chamadas ia nos anos 30 (sculo XX), Africana Studia (Porto) 8 (2005), pp. 25973. Racism-00-p.qxd 7/2/12 11:28 Page 154 by effective military conquest of the land and the defeat of the former social groups based on the economy of war and the slave trade. Between slavery and forced labour and indigenato, there was no continuity or even transition; there was a break. It was a matter of a change in production modes, which could now concern the whole African population, thanks to military conquest, while slaves had been only a minority of the African population. Military campaigns were not only a conquest of land, they very often involved the violent destruction of the former colonial economic system based on coexistence of an indigenous economy and long-distance trade by Luso-Brazilians, Portuguese, Luso-Africans (in Mozambique, in particular the prazeiros), Indians, Swahilis, or (obviously) African trade caravans, themselves linked with African states further into the hinterland. This point is very important. The peculiarity of the Portuguese break with slavery Nevertheless, it can be said that the continental Portuguese empire in Africa was not the only one where there was no European-owned slave plantation complex, but almost exclusively slave trade exports, and therefore de facto no transition from enslaved manpower to forced labour manpower on European plantations. 15 But this simply provides a further reason to revise the history of this transition. Moreover, in this short chapter it is impossible to discuss important cases of development of domestic slavery within African societies, and even production in market-oriented slavery in some African pre-colonial states, both stimulated by legitimate and illegitimate colonial trade on the coast. But even in the latter case, which indeed represented a first means of capitalist penetration within African states, its social formation prevented its possible use by new direct European imperialism to develop large forced labour plantations. 16 First, the African cases of market-oriented slavery very often did not produce a plantation complex, the slaves being spread among the local population as captives or forming special villages, but not working in plantations. Secondly, in the few (albeit important) INDIGENATO BEFORE RACE? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 155 15 See for example Emmanuel Terray, Une histoire du royaume abron du Gyaman: Des origines la conqute coloniale (Paris: Karthala, 1995); Robin Law, Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving Port, 17271892 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2004); Kristin Mann, Slavery and the Birth of an African City: Lagos, 17601900 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007). 16 That does not mean that nothing in African slavery could be used by new European plantations. For example, the plantations in Zambezia sometimes recovered the old ensacas of the prazos as forced workers. Ensaca here must not be confused with the same word in the Portuguese of Brazil or Portugal (packing into sacks or bags) but refers to the nsaka, the ten- to twelve-slave soldier squads which were the local structure of the Achikunda (the slave soldiers of the prazos). One can immediately see that such a use of ensacas for a rural gang forced labour system was based on the military defeat and humiliation of the Achikunda who, as proud slave soldiers, desperately resisted against their liberation by the Portuguese trying to indigenise them. Racism-00-p.qxd 7/2/12 11:28 Page 155 cases where a full plantation complex occurred, as in the Caliphate of Sokoto (in modern northern Nigeria, based on cotton) or in the kingdom of Dahomey (based on palm oil), the colonial conquest provoked their disintegration: slaves ed from the plantations due to the colonial conquest, or the social planters milieu was militarily defeated and broken up. The European plantations had therefore to be new ones, with another organisation, and other social relations of domination. The only exception could be the case of the formation of a plantation complex based on cloves in Zanzibar (fully developed by the 1840s) and part of the Swahili East African coast, which English and German colonisers had partially conquered. 17 But this must be considered as only a partial exception, since it represented conquest by new colonisers of former colonisers, the Arabs of Oman, and not of an indigenous planter class. In the space occupied today by Mozambique, market-oriented slave production by Africans seems scarcely (if at all) to have existed; 18 but going further into the hinterland, the case of the Lunda empire is well known and covered part of eastern twentieth-century Angola and the Belgian Congo. The Lunda empire made intensive use of slaves in production tasks, but not within a plantation complex. 19 Generally speaking, these African social formations based on slavery had to be defeated with the exception already noted. But even comparing the neighbouring Portuguese Angola and the Belgian Congo, or other European empires in Africa, there are huge differences. In the Portuguese empire, unlike in other European empires, but similar to what occurred in Latin America, there were old creole elite nuclei dating from the first age of colonisation. One might have expected them to have developed slave plantations and then passed to forced labour (and later wage-earned) manpower, thus leading the transition. But as in other European empires, and unlike in Latin America, there was no transition. The thesis of a transition from slavery to forced labour in Portuguese Africa is thus based rst on a wrong understanding and generalisation of the So Tom case, and second on misinterpretation of the reaction of pre-existent old elites when the age of modern imperialism dawned. The peculiarity of the continental Portuguese empire thus lies not only in the very absence of any transition which is, with the exception already noted, the 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 Michel Cahen 156 17 Frederick Cooper, Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa (1977; Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1997); Frederick Cooper, The Problem of Slavery in African Studies, Journal of African History 20:1 (1979), pp. 10325; Jan-Georg Deutsch, Emancipation without Abolition in German East Africa c. 18841914 (Oxford: James Currey, 2006). 18 Malyn D. D. Newitt, Portuguese Settlement on the Zambezi (London: Longman, 1973); Allen F. Isaacman and Barbara S. Isaacman, Slavery and Beyond: The Making of Men and Chikunda Ethnic Identities in the Unstable World of South-Central Africa, 17501920 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2004). 19 Isabel Castro Henriques, Percursos da modernidade em Angola: Dinmicas comerciais e transformaes sociais no sculo XIX (Lisbon: Instituto de Investigao Cientca Tropical/Instituto da Cooperao Portuguesa, 1997). Racism-00-p.qxd 7/2/12 11:28 Page 156 general case within the new European imperialism in Africa but in the fact that there was no transition in spite of the existence of old social colonial milieus for whom S da Bandeira had legislated from the 1850s because they were expected to produce such a transition. There is another way to approach the same Portuguese peculiarity. For other European countries, Africa was a case of New Colonies the Old Colonies being those in the Americas and Caribbean and there were no, or insignicant, creole populations. 20 In the Portuguese case, the New Colonies were conquered from the Old ones and with territorial continuity. The Old Colonies lay within the New ones the Le temps long dans le temps court of Fernand Braudel with the decline but survival of their old elites within the new social context. It is worth noting one further aspect, in particular with regard to the Congos or French West Africa: between the end of slave exports and the generalisation of forced labour, forty years or so 21 elapsed in the Portuguese empire, whereas France and Belgium developed harsh and massive forced labour immediately. 22 Although the legislation was all ready, and forced labour was expanding after the First World War, the 1929 crisis and the rigorous nancial policies of Salazar slowed down economic growth and so the need for indigenous forced manpower on plantations, which cannot much have exceeded 100,000 people in each of Angola and Mozambique in the middle of the 1930s. Thus, the generalisation of forced labour (in plantations, fisheries, and harbours, as well as in regions of forced peasant production) 23 actually did not occur before the end of the 1930s and during the Second World War. In the Portuguese empire, then, this chronological gap stresses even more forcefully the rupture between slavery and forced labour as distinct historical periods. Nevertheless, this assessment does not include the compulsory use of native people as porters (carregadores freely furnished by pro-Portuguese or subdued traditional chiefs) for Portuguese traders up to the 1920s, or for building roads or other public works, all of which was highly disruptive for the social life and production process of the Africans. In Angola, this was the case particularly under the rule of Norton de Matos as Governor (191214) and Alto-Comissrio (19213). 24 INDIGENATO BEFORE RACE? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 157 20 I do not tackle here the very specic cases of Sierra Leone and Liberia. 21 Only twenty years in the case of diamond exploitation in the Lunda region (Angola). 22 Adam Hochschild, King Leopolds Ghost: A Study of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston: Mariner Books, 1999); Crawford Young, The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). 23 For cotton and rice, there were generally not European-owned plantations (as there were for tea, copra, coffee, sugar cane, or coconuts), but concession areas where companies heavily organised and pressured the Africans to cultivate such crops at the expense of their food production. 24 Maria da Conceio Neto, Nas malhas da rede: O impacto econmico e social do transporte rodovirio na regio do Huambo c. 1920 c. 1960, in Beatrix Heintze and Achim von Open (eds), Angola on the Move: Transport, Routes, Communications and History/Angola em movimento: Vias de transporte, comunicaes e histria (Frankfurt: Otto Lambeck, 2008), pp. 11729. Racism-00-p.qxd 7/2/12 11:28 Page 157 Is it possible, then, to view these practices as lling the aforementioned gap of forty years between the end of the slave trade and the generalisation of forced labour, and therefore as constituting a transition? There could be good grounds for thinking so, since the use of carregadores for the traders and small coffee plantations of the hinterland, and of forced native workers for the development of Angola as dreamed by Norton de Matos, was systematic, harsh, and violent. 25 Such a use of compelled recruits may indeed surely be considered as a lingering legacy of slavery, for some natives; even if it was now part-time slavery, since they were no longer sold when arriving on the coast or in the cities (except for those sent to So Tom, but not specically recruited from the carregadores). Nevertheless, I do not share this historical interpretation, for three main reasons. First, even if some legacy of slavery may be found in the guise of the carregadores, this did not equate to preparation for modern forced labour. During the same period, the continuing export of serviais to So Tom plantations did not prepare for any change in the archipelago, but was the tendency of lingering slavery. Carregadores were slaves up to 1878 (and after), and then forced workers, and did indeed represent the main case of sector-based transition, since they carried out the same activity, probably for the same traders or their immediate descendants. But this is rather an exception. Were the latter transformed, two or three decades later, into forced labour-based plantation owners or shareholders of concession companies of forced cotton production? Had they been able to keep their former slaves to work on the new plantations? Generally speaking, I do not think so. Even if some managed to become modern traders, or even medium-sized planters (fazendeiros), in no way did their social milieu become the dominant one in twentieth-century Mozambique and Angola. The major plantations represented a new period, with new people and a new process. It comes as little surprise that during several decades, slavery continued in declining forms, while forced labour appeared and developed alongside it; but the simultaneity of both does not at all mean that the rst was producing the second, economically and socially. Rather, this was the competition of two historical ages. Secondly, the quantitative aspect is also a qualitative one. Except in the case of So Tom, the half-slave/half-forced-labour regimes of the 1890s, 1910s, and 1920s cannot be compared with the systematic recruitment of any native male for forced labour in plantations, sheries and mines, and the forced production of cotton and rice, in the 1940s and 1950s. Now, rather than thousands of people a year, hundreds of thousands were implicated (see below). Third, and linked to the rst point, the development of huge estates (Portuguese- owned or not, chartered or not), very often created from the end of the nineteenth century but fully developed by the end of the 1930s, or even the spreading of many 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 Michel Cahen 158 25 Maria da Conceio Neto, personal communication, 8 May 2011. Racism-00-p.qxd 7/2/12 11:28 Page 158 medium-sized settler-owned plantations in the 1950s (with the settlers often recent arrivals), is a completely distinct social phenomenon from the families, the capital and even the culture of the former slave traders of the nineteenth century. We now come to a new contradiction: it was indeed forced labour that allowed capitalist domination of Mozambique, Angola and areas of Guinea (and of other empires), but forced labour is not really a mode of capitalist exploitation. We will have to return to this contradiction. But rst it is necessary to go into the detail of the workings of the Statute governing indigenato. The social signicance of indigenato In this chapter, my analysis will not begin with the colonial labour legislation of 1875, 1878, 1899 or even 1914, but will start directly with the legislation of 19268, since it was between 1926 and 1942 that all the main legislation concerning the national-colonialism of the Estado Novo was issued, shaping the whole system until 1962 and partially up to 1974. But once again, one must emphasise that the new legislation was not brought in to discipline and govern huge crowds of post- slavery forced workers. The forced labour legislation of 19269 must therefore be analysed as developmentalist, with a forward-looking view of what Angola and Mozambique should become: a general work camp for Africans. Who was who? It may seem strange to remark that before 1926, there was no rule to dene clearly who was native or not civilised and who was civilised. One was notoriously recognised as being gentio or assimilado. As Jill Dias has shown, self-denition as Angolan or even African within the African elite of Luanda and its hinterland, Benguela, or Momedes, was not at all similar to being gentio or indigenous up to the late nineteenth century. 26 The liberal monarchy during its last years main- tained this absence of a denition. In 1917 (at least in Mozambique), a rst text required former assimilados to obtain an alvar (certificate) from the court certifying their assimilation. After 19267, terms for obtaining the assimilation certicate became more and more restrictive: henceforth, the aim of legislation was clearly to define who would not be exempted from forced labour. Since James Duffy, Douglas Wheeler, Ren Plissier, Gerald Bender, Malyn Newitt and other more recent researchers have already studied the content of such legislation, I would like to only stress some specic aspects. INDIGENATO BEFORE RACE? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 159 26 Jill Dias, Uma questo de identidade: Respostas intelectuais s transformaes econmicas no seio da elite crioula da Angola portuguesa entre 1870 e 1930, Revista Internacional de Estudos Africanos (Lisbon) 1 (1984), pp. 6194. Racism-00-p.qxd 7/2/12 11:28 Page 159 Who did work? The Estatuto Poltico, Civil e Criminal dos Indgenas de Angola e Moambique, issued on 23 October 1926, and extended to Guinea in 1929, denitely established the principle that metropolitan and colonial law must be different, in spite of the unity of the Nation. 27 It precisely dened natives as individuals of black race or being descended from them, who, by the way of their instruction and customs, do not distinguish themselves from the common people of this race (article 3). According to this Estatuto, colonial governments had to dene who would be native by a special diploma in each colony. In Mozambique, for example, the Diploma legislativo denindo as condies especiais que devem caracterizar os indgenas ou no indgenas performed this role. 28 There were slight differences between the different colonial diplomas or their successive versions in 1927, 1931, and so on, regarding conditions for becoming assimilated, but three conditions were always included: rst, to have completely abandoned indigenous habits and customs; second, the ability to speak Portuguese; and third, to practise a profession, trade or industry or to own goods being enough for their subsistence (article 1). In the 1931 Angolan diploma, this third condition was more precise: practise a profession [. . .] compatible with European civilisation. 29 The issue here is: what was more segregationist in this law serving as a tool of discrimination and what was more socially structuring? Even if the questions of knowledge of Portuguese and having abandoned indigenous customs and habits would obviously lead to a huge range of arbitrary judgements by local admini- strators, my hypothesis is that the third point, regarding profession, was by far the worst. Actually, knowledge of the Portuguese language extended to very few people at the time, but living in a city, or within a mission, or working for a company could give rise to such an ability. But what is understood by profession is only an activity fully integrated within the monetarised economy and on a permanent basis: a native person working in his eld for his own subsistence, or a native person working in a European company on a two-year contract, did not have a profession. In Mozambique, owning goods being enough for their subsistence was dened, for example, as having 100 head of cattle or five hectares of land on a private basis. The meaning is very clear: the denition of indgena is any (black) person not directly integrated into the capitalist economy. This is a mixture of what I will call literal racism, or even racial racism (because it dealt only with blacks), and 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 Michel Cahen 160 27 Decree no. 12,533, 23 Oct. 1926, Boletim Ocial de Moambique (Loureno Marques), 1st series, 28, 27 Nov. 1926. 28 Diploma legislativo . . ., no. 36, 12 Nov. 1927, Boletim Ocial de Moambique (Loureno Marques), 1st series, 46, 22 Nov. 1927. 29 Diploma legislativo . . ., no. 237, 26 May 1931, art. 1, quoted by Elisabeth Ceita Vera Cruz, O estatudo do indigenato e a legislao da discriminao na colonizao portuguesa: O caso de Angola (Coimbra: Novo Imbondeiro, 2005), p. 106. Racism-00-p.qxd 7/2/12 11:28 Page 160 social racism (not only social discrimination), since it deals with the whole cate- gory of people not living within capitalism. The two types of racism form a whole, but the second is far more effective: actually, since the 1899 Labour Code had introduced a vagrancy clause, any person not working was a vagrant and could therefore be obliged to choose freely his employer. The whole people was made vagrant, in an early kind of clash of civilisations. Within the context of the scandal provoked by the Ross Report on So Tom, Angola and Mozambique in 1925, it might be noted that the vagrancy clause disappeared in the 19269 legislation on native labour (Estatuto and Cdigo). In the same way, the obligation, moral and legal of working returned to the pre-1899 formulation of moral obligation. Was this new legislation less harsh than the former one? It has been suggested that it was, but I very much doubt it: at the same time, the coup dtat of May 1926 ended the Republic with the mute approval of the British government, and supporters of open forced labour came to power. 30 If they did so, it was because any change in the labour regime could be merely cosmetic. The reason is that the colonial administration no longer needed such precise clauses; the simple fact of not considering as work the traditional activity of the indgenas had been sufficient to put them under the moral obligation to work (dever moral do trabalho), which could allow (and actually allowed) for administrative intervention. African people perhaps were no longer vagrant, but since their day-to-day self-support activity was not recognised as labour, this was irrelevant. From vagrant people to not relevant people, no progress was made at all. Late but massive forced labour Many years ago, during my doctoral research on Mozambique, I calculated that in the 1940s and 1950s, all males who could be recruited for forced labour that is to say, any male between the ages of 15 and 60, not serving in the army or rural (native) police, a traditional chief, a domestic in a European family, or a permanent worker in a harbour or on a railway, and who had not emigrated had in fact been recruited, for six months a year or one year in two in companies, or permanently in forced food production. Indeed, in 1940, when Mozambique had a population of 5 million, of 1,197,028 native males aged between 15 and 60, some 533,780 were chibalo (forced) workers in plantations (latifndios of tea, copra, coffee, sugar cane, or coconuts), railways and ports, mines, and so on, 331,000 were forced cotton producers, and 60,000 forced rice producers, for a grand total of 924,780 people; that is to say, 117 per cent of the legal number of males liable for legal recruitment INDIGENATO BEFORE RACE? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 161 30 The legislation on forced cotton growing was published at this very moment. Racism-00-p.qxd 7/2/12 11:28 Page 161 (who should have numbered 793,370). 31 It is worth stressing that these gures were calculated a minima, do not include women, who were legally not to be recruited but who were very often as forced as their husbands to produce cotton, rice and castor oil, and do not include day-to-day forced work on roads or for other public tasks (in Mozambique this invisible forced labour was legalised as the contribuio braal, the arm drudgery). The situation became still worse after 1947, and the number of forced labourers by the end of the 1950s became very large, even though it was at this very moment that the internal economic crisis of colonisation began. What was more, vagrant/ not relevant people were prohibited from entering the civilised occupations; particularly from the 1940s, these occupations were open only to those holding a professional card issued by white trade unions. The tiny number of assimilados in Mozambique 4,353 out of 5,733,000 black inhabitants in 1950, or 0.008 per cent was thus the product not of direct racist measures against black individuals, but of large-scale forced labour among a whole people that had been made vagrant or not relevant. When someone was subjected to forced labour, it became almost impossible to change their situation, except by illegal emigration. Forced labour, not direct racist behaviour, was the reason for the weakness of the African elite in Mozambique but obviously, forced labour is per se a racist process, against a whole way of life. In Angola, the number of assimilados was tiny too, but far greater than in Mozambique 30,089 assimilados out of a black population of 4,036,687 people, or 0.75 per cent because of the persistence of old social milieus stemming from the nineteenth century or even before, and not at all a product of the twentieth century. This is the general framework, but regional differences were important. Indeed, forced labour created strong contradictions within colonial society: for example, it prevented Africans from producing on their own and selling their products to Portuguese merchants. According to Manuel Loff, in 1943 white traders blocked a train transporting contratados, on the grounds that these emigrations were excessive and injurious to their trade. 32 Maria da Conceio Neto stresses that, in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 Michel Cahen 162 31 That is to say, the total number of indigenous males aged from 15 to 60, minus the categories of other labour status listed supra. Personal calculations from data in: Misso de Inqurito Agrcola, Recenseamento agrcola de 19301940: Contribuio para o recenseamento agrcola mundial (Loureno Marques: Imprensa Nacional de Moambique/Repartio Tcnica de Estatstica, 1944); Nelson Saraiva Bravo, A cultura algodoeira na economia do Norte de Moambique (Lisbon: Junta de Investigaes do Ultramar, 1963); Armando Loureno Rodrigues, A produo no sector indgena de Moambique, BA dissertation, Instituto Superior de Estudos Ultramarinos, Lisbon, 1960; and Armando Castro, O sistema colonial portugus em frica (meados do sculo XX) (Lisbon: Editorial Caminho, 1978), which was written but not published in 1959. 32 The Labour Shortage in Angola, 15 Nov. 1950, by Scott (Assistant Information Ofcer of the British Embassy in Lisbon), National Archives, London, Foreign Office 371/80861, JP2183/2, quoted by Manuel Loff, As colnias portuguesas de frica entre a II a Guerra Mundial e a Guerra colonial: A viso anglo-americana, in Adriana Pereira Campos (ed.), Trabalho forado africano: Experincias coloniais comparadas (Porto: Campo das Letras, 2006), pp. 395442, see p. 432. Racism-00-p.qxd 7/2/12 11:28 Page 162 spite of forced labour laws, in some regions of central and south-central Angola, forced labour (in the form of work on plantations or in fisheries) was never completely imposed on peasants, in order to allow them to grow and sell a signicant surplus of cereals to the Portuguese, even if invisible forced labour was imposed on all. 33 Malyn Newitt has recently published part of the diary of Charles Spence, the British director of a trading company in Loureno Marques, who made a tour of Mozambique in 1943. In the north, local Indian traders were all complaining that trade in native products had more or less come to a standstill on account of the emphasis imposed by the government on cotton growing. Since the Nyassa Companys charter had come to an end, direct administration of the region had changed priorities from a focus on commercial activity (principally in African grown crops) in the imposition of a systematic administration and the commercial control of the cotton and rice monopoly concessionaires. 34 In Mozambique, during the Second World War, when forced labour recruitment was widespread, Portuguese law also made it possible, in exceptional instances, to escape forced labour laws. The Estatuto do Agricultor Indgena (Statute on African Agriculturalists) exempted some peasants from the contrato to allow them to develop their own farms, in full contradiction of the Estatuto dos Indgenas. Thus, if any peasant had not distinguished himself from the common people of his race by owning private land or 100 head of cattle, he must be native and subject to the moral obligation of labour. 35 If he had so distinguished himself, he must become an assimilado. But this special statute, introduced to authorise a very few Africans to plant large amounts of cash crops, simply allowed small Portuguese traders to buy products at native prices, that is to say below the ofcially xed prices of the direct white settlers. The allocation of this status remained at the discretion of the administrador da circunscrio (district colonial officer) and was obviously a question of poltica indgena discussed at the highest level in the province. Moreover, since it allowed several thousand Mozambican peasants to avoid seasonal forced labour, it alleviated one important contradiction of the system. But it must be noted that this very special statute undermining the Cdigo dos Indgenas categories was itself undermined, since peasants on concessions for forced production of cotton and rice were often considered agricultores africanos and therefore exempted from forced labour (seasonal work), to be compelled to work on forced crop growing. This was particularly the case in the Nampula INDIGENATO BEFORE RACE? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 163 33 Maria da Conceio Neto, personal communication, 27 April 2011. 34 Malyn Newitt, Uma viagem pelo Norte de Moambique durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial, in P. Havik, C. Saraiva and J. A. Tavim (eds), Caminhos cruzados em Histria e Antropologia: Ensaios de homenagem a Jill Dias (Lisbon: Instituto de Cinas Sociais, 2010), pp. 14358. Quotations are from the original manuscript in English; I thank Malyn Newitt for sending me this document. 35 Estatuto do agricultor indgena, aprovado pelo diploma legislativo no. 919, de. 5 de Agosto de 1944 (Loureno Marques: Imprensa Nacional, 1944). Racism-00-p.qxd 7/2/12 11:28 Page 163 province of Mozambique in the 1950s, as a way to disguise the statistics of forced cotton growing. Marvin Harris had already remarked that for the south of the colony: According to the 1950 census, the active male population between the ages of 15 and 55 years in the regions south of Zambezi roughly the distritos of Tete, Beira, Inhambane, Gaza and Loureno Marques numbered 593,834 men. Of this group, 33,766 were listed as exercising the profession of agriculturalist. Of the latter, it is not clear what percentage held the certicate of agricultor africano. There is no doubt, however, that most of these ofcially recognised agriculturalists were merely engaged in the production of cotton under the governments forced planting program. 36 How not to proletarianise: gendering and subalternising What has to be stressed immediately, following these quantitative thoughts, is that forced labour did not in any way produce a process of local integration within the capitalist production process. On the contrary, the Portuguese administration resolutely fought any tendency towards the formation of a proletarian class. S da Bandeiras old dream of seeing former slave traders become employers of permanent employees was soon abandoned. This was not only for political reasons fear of a proletarian mass but above all because it was far more protable not to have a proletarian class. A proletarian person must be paid at the cost of his social reproduction, and this was still too expensive. The Cdigo do Trabalho dos Indgenas nas colonias portuguesas de frica, the Labour Code of 1929, was very clear on this. 37 Contracts were never permanent ones, because Africans had to rest and return home. Salary was not calculated in relation to the value of work, but in relation to the amount of the hut tax; 38 actually, salary was no such thing, but rather a payment calculated under the cost of social reproduction of the worker. It did not generate any native market. This is why the worker had to return home to his family and lineage, not to rest, but to help reconstitute the domestic economy that was weakened in his absence, in spite of the relentless work of the women. We have here one of the two most basic features of the forced labour system: its highly gendered structure. It was this domestic economy that would make up the shortfall between the payment by the forced employer and the social cost of 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 Michel Cahen 164 36 Marvin Harris, Portugals African Wards: A First-Hand Report on Labor and Education in Mocambique, Africa Today 5:6 (1958), pp. 336, p. 18. www.cultural-materialism.org/portugalsafrican wards.pdf 37 Repblica Portuguesa, Cdigo do Trabalho dos Indgenas nas colnias portuguesas de frica, aprovado pelo decreto no. 16:199 de 6 de Dezembro de 1929 (Loureno Marques: Imprensa Nacional, 1929). 38 Article 197 species that the monthly wage must be 25 to 40 per cent of the imposto indgena, which means that the indigenous must work at least 2.5 to 4 months a year only to pay the tax; possibly more, since it is not clearly indicated if the wage is only the monetary part of income, or includes the value of food, blankets, and so forth. Racism-00-p.qxd 7/2/12 11:28 Page 164 reproduction. Therefore, there was no local economic basis for such a system that was cheaper than proletarianisation, except colonial violence to ensure it. Nevertheless, no system can endure and rely solely on violence, above all a colonial system like the Portuguese one, where the forces of coercion were very weak: a chefe de posto had just six cipaios (native police) under his command, with guns from before the First World War. In order to understand how such a forced labour system could work, one has to remember three factors. First of all, the collaboration of some of the traditional chiefs but this collaboration was efcient only when these chiefs were the legitimate ones. Linked to this first point, it is necessary to remember that, in the 1930s and even the 1940s and 1950s, only one or two generations had passed since the military conquest of the land. As Ren Plissier has clearly demonstrated, this conquest was very violent and deadly; memories of it were still very present in communities, and any chief, any indigenous person, knew that although there might be only six cipaios, other stronger forces could be quickly sent. 39 But recruitment was not the only problem: it was necessary also to prohibit the indigenous from staying in the harbours or cities or on the plantations, where they would begin to become proletarianised. For that purpose, the Portuguese administration used a very efcient tool, the pagamento diferido or deferred payment: at least half of the salary had to be paid not in the workplace, but after returning home. 40 This system had several colonial functions: rst, the native had to come back home to the domestic production sphere where he had been registered in the census; second, the hut tax was deducted without any problem from the deferred pay- ment, since the company sent the money through the administration; third, local Portuguese traders demanded that this petty money should not be spent only in the big companies shops; and last but not at all least, this tiny amount of money became essential in particular in the 1950s when the amount slowly rose precisely because of the weakening of the domestic economy. Forced labour had partly succeeded in creating its own necessity, when it moved slowly at the end of the 1950s and 1960s towards seasonal migrant work: the weakened domestic economy was no longer able to sustain many families. The main issue is to understand that deferred payment was the mark or the brand of an economic process that needed a combination of colonial constraint and the maintenance of the domestic economy in order to be globally protable for the colonial institution. This process did not integrate natives into a fully capitalist production process and capitalist social relationships system, but it did operate to submit them to capitalist domination. That is to say, we have here a legal expression of what Marxist anthropologists and historians conceptualised INDIGENATO BEFORE RACE? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 165 39 Ren Pelissier, Les campagnes coloniales du Portugal, 18441941 (Paris: Pygmalion, 2004). 40 Article 203, Repblica Portuguesa, Cdigo do Trabalho . . ., p. 54. Racism-00-p.qxd 7/2/12 11:28 Page 165 from the 1960s and 1980s as the unequal articulation of modes of production: 41 deferred payment was the very practical demonstration that workers were paid under the cost of social reproduction, which implied their regular return to the sphere of a maintained and subalternised domestic economy. We have here the second basic feature of the forced labour system: its very existence not as a whole but as one branch of a very authoritarian articulation of modes of production. On the ideological level, it is what I have before called the social racism of Portuguese colonialism. The last but not the least On 20 May 1954, decree-law 39,666 was published, that is, a new Estatuto dos Indgenas portugueses das provncias da Guin, de Angola e Moambique; a new Native Statute. 42 The constitutional reform of 1951 had replaced the former colonies by overseas provinces, reviving the old concept of liberal monarchy. 43 Thus, the unity of the Nation was politically reinforced: there was no longer one metropole and colonies belonging to the same empire, but only one Portugal. Everybody was therefore directly Portuguese, which implied the existence of different personal statuses within the same Nation and political constitution. Therefore, the new 1954 Statute aimed to respond to a situation in which the number of detribalised natives was growing: it created, for example, the possibility of special native private ownership (urban and rural) which could prevent a few of them from being recruited for forced labour. But it answered above all to the need to prohibit a growing number of natives from becoming assimilated, when, in fact, a great number of urban Africans could have been considered as having abandoned native habits and costumes, as speaking Portuguese fluently, and so forth. On the other hand, some Portuguese employers preferred to engage skilled black workers, paying them as natives. But this would have represented unacceptable competition with petty white workers in the cities. 44 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 Michel Cahen 166 41 Pierre-Philippe Rey, Colonialisme, no-colonialisme et transition au capitalisme (Paris: Maspro, 1971); Claude Meillassoux, Femmes, greniers et capitaux (Paris: Maspro, 1982); Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley: Conict in Kenya and Africa. 1. State and Class (London, Nairobi and Athens, OH: James Currey/Heinemann/Ohio University Press, 1992); see too the retrospective, by Emmanuel Terray, of his research, Dernire sance, Cahiers dtudes africaines (Paris) 50:198/199/200 (2010), pp. 52944. 42 Dirio do Governo (Lisbon), 1st series, no. 110, 20 May 1954, pp. 5605. 43 Constituio poltica da Repblica portuguesa, actualizada de harmonia com a Lei no. 2.048 de 11 de Junho de 1951 (Lisbon: Assembleia Nacional, 1952). 44 On this aspect and the activity of (white) labour unions aimed at protecting white manpower, see my article, Corporatisme et colonialisme: Approche du cas mozambicain (19331979), Cahiers dtudes africaines (Paris) 92 (1983), pp. 383417, and 93 (1984), pp. 524. Racism-00-p.qxd 7/2/12 11:28 Page 166 Contrary to what has sometimes been written, the 1954 Statute did not soften the conditions of assimilation, but actually worsened them, and even endangered the very situation of being an assimilado: First, the status of indigenato or assimilation was now made strictly individual throughout the entire Nation: 45 the wife and children of an assimilado would no longer automatically become assimilados, as before; they could apply for this status if they were living with the husband and father, and if they fullled the second and third conditions (see below). 46 Since it was necessary to be over 18 years of age to apply for assimilation (paragraph A, article 56), that meant that sons of an assimilado could be obliged to go to native missionary schools instead of going to better state schools; because of the unity of the Nation, a native migrating to metropolitan Portugal would remain a native there. Second, it was not only necessary to speak Portuguese, but from now on also accurately. 47 Third, it was necessary to display good behaviour (for example, not to participate in an African Ethiopian, Zionist or Tocoist church) and to have acquired the instruction and habits required for the integral application of public and private law of Portuguese citizens (paragraph D, article 56). Community ownership, and polygamy, including being a chief, were therefore incompatible with assimilation. Fourth, the stipulations regarding the profession, trade or industry or ownership of goods being enough for their subsistence (paragraph C, article 56) remained exactly the same as in 19269. Very signicantly, this new Native Statute was not followed by a new Labour Code: the 1929 Cdigo do Trabalho dos Indgenas remained, without any change and without any step towards authorisation of the formation of a permanent working class. With few exceptions, the only existing permanent working class was that of assimilados and mulattos, a very tiny one since the great majority of black assimilados and mestios did not work as industrial workers, but in services. For all these reasons, I consider the 1954 Native Statute to be the last archaic type of effort by the Portuguese administration in the middle of the 1950s, as the INDIGENATO BEFORE RACE? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 167 45 A point unique to Article 1: The statute of the Portuguese native people is personal and must be honoured in any part of the Portuguese territory where the individual who enjoys it is found. 46 Article 57: The native woman who is married to an individual who obtains citizenship [. . .] and the legitimate children or illegitimate children who are legitimated, and who are less than 18 years old, and who live under the direction of the father as of the date of said acquisition, may also obtain it, as long as the requirements in Paragraphs (b) and (d) of Article 56 are met. Furthermore, the new code did not contemplate or allow for the case of a native single woman, or even a separated woman, who applied for citizenship, or for a married woman to apply independently of her husband. 47 Paragraph (b) of Article 56: Falar correctamente a lngua portuguesa. Racism-00-p.qxd 7/2/12 11:28 Page 167 economic and political crisis of colonisation approached. Actually, this new Statute never really worked. In Mozambique, Africans were no longer even trying to become assimilados: the most violent period of forced labour was now disappearing (except in forced labour cotton-growing areas), and it was slowly becoming a seasonal migrant activity. In urban areas, to be an assimilado would mean more of a problem in getting jobs, since Portuguese employers would be obliged to pay the same as for whites and would therefore prefer to employ whites. The number of applications for assimilado status was strongly decreasing in the second half of the 1950s. From native to rural: an answer to the Third-Worldisation of the colonies? Does all of this mean that Portugal no longer wanted to avoid the formation of a permanent proletariat which must be paid at the cost of its social reproduction? Not at all, because, as we have noted, the Labour Code of 1929 remained the same. But the economic crisis in forced cotton growing at the end of the 1950s, and the beginning of the armed anti-colonial liberation struggle in 1961, led Salazar to authorise his Overseas Minister, Adriano Moreira, to take some important reformist measures. On 6 September 1961, decree-law 43,893 revoked the Native Statute of 1954. 48 The concept of indgena ofcially disappeared, but the same day, decree 43,897 recognised local habits and customs and integrated them globally within Portuguese written private law. 49 Legal hybridism became, in a way, official. Assimilation applications were replaced by a mere declaration, since any individual may submit to [Portuguese] written private law, by the way of a mere formality at the registry ofce, and his descendants would automatically be included in this written law (article 3). Urban Africans were considered under written law (article 5). Traditional chiefs could, with the approval of their council, authorise private appropriation of land by individuals (article 8). As there were no longer natives (indgenas), therefore, could the two separate spheres be managed: those of qualied professions and undifferentiated masses? First, the 1929 Labour Code remained in force for one more year, being revoked in turn on 27 April 1962, when Adriano Moreira issued his Cdigo do trabalho rural (Rural Labour Code) by way of decree 44,309. 50 What is interesting is to understand the meaning of rural as dened in articles 1 and 2: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 Michel Cahen 168 48 Boletim Ocial de Moambique (Loureno Marques), Supplement, 1st series, 14 Sept. 1962. 49 Boletim Ocial de Moambique (Loureno Marques), Supplement, 1st series, 14 Sept. 1962. 50 Dirio do Governo (Lisbon), 1st series, no. 95, 27 April 1962 (Supplement); Jos de Albuquerque Sousa, Cdigo do trabalho rural do Ultramar. Edio revista, com indices alfabtico e sistemtico (Coimbra: Coimbra Editora, 1962). Racism-00-p.qxd 7/2/12 11:28 Page 168 1. Manual workers without a dened profession, occupied in activities related to agricultural exploitation of land or gathering of produce, are considered rural workers [. . .] 2. For the implementation of the present Code [. . .] those workers whose duty is reduced to mere provision of manpower, not classied because of the nature of the service in any categories of employees or workers specifically qualified, are equivalent to rural workers [. . .] That means that a European managing a modern farm in the bush was not a rural worker, but an urban African on a building site or road works or a street trades- woman would always be classed as a rural worker. The vagrancy clause (ofcial or implicit) had disappeared but the ideological watertightness between the two spheres of social life remained intact. Therefore, article 69 could stand, that for equal work will always be attributed an equal salary, since this was within the rural sphere. Last but not least, article 80 completely reproduced the deferred payment system: 50 per cent of the earnings would be given to the worker after his return home. That meant that until 1974, the key institution of work paid under the social cost of reproduction remained current. Adriano Moreira had not invented the concept of rural labour, but had taken it from post-slavery Brazil. Anyway, the system no longer worked with all these details conceived by the Portuguese legal mind. During the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, Mozambique and Angola were already very much Third World countries. But there is no doubt that the duration of forced labour and the existence of an alleviated form of it up to the end of the 1960s, with the corresponding existence of a large community of petty whites occupying almost all qualied jobs, were the main obstacle to the formation of an African working class and elite. 51 The new 1962 Labour Code was no longer a forced labour Code, but it was still a Native Code, now called rural, with two ofcially different spheres of social life. It must be understood as a desperate attempt to combine the economic developmentalism of the 1960s with the will to slow down the proletarianisation of African workers, as antagonistic to the protability of colonial enterprise. The 1962 Rural Code never worked well either: the two spheres of social life did not need a detailed and bureaucratic Code to exist, since Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea were entering the situation of normal Third World countries, in which the massive urban informal sector and plebeian social milieus were the ones Adriano Moreira once wanted to make rural. INDIGENATO BEFORE RACE? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 169 51 That does not mean that no working class existed, as studied by Jeanne-Marie Penvenne, African Workers and Colonial Racism: Mozambican Strategies and Struggles in Loureno Marques, 18771962 (Portsmouth, NH, Johannesburg and London: Heinemann/Witwatersrand University Press/James Currey, 1995). Racism-00-p.qxd 7/2/12 11:28 Page 169 The ideology of petty-white colonialism within a weakened old capitalism This was obviously the reverse of the ofcially proclaimed doctrine of assimilation, even when reinforced by the capture of neo-lusotropicalism of an increasingly dated Gilberto Freyre. But while Freyres original lusotropicalism praised the process of racial mixing as the achievement of a new civilisation, Salazarist lusotropicalism saw it as a path to the racial and cultural whitening of African society by the way remaining assimilationist. But the huge contrast between ideology and reality does not mean that the doctrine of assimilation was mere propaganda or mere cynicism. An ideology does not exist to serve a political design; it is only a posteriori that the historian may analyse it in those terms. Ideology expresses the habitus of a social milieu, of the hegemonical group within a nation: it serves this group or nation to speak to itself, to represent itself in its own eyes, to imagine its own future. The question is therefore not to analyse assimilation as an inefcient process or cynical propaganda, but as the sole ideology possible and operating for a colonial capitalism short on capital and facing, thanks to masses of petty whites, political danger from abroad and foreign investment. Codication of the two spheres of social life in Portuguese colonial labour law (capitalist or civilised versus traditional or vagrant; integral application of public and private law of Portuguese citizenship versus rural) is no more than one expression of the existence of non-capitalist forms of capitalist domination, at the periphery of capitalism. As Immanuel Wallerstein showed, capitalism has always preferred non-capitalist forms of domination or exploitation, since it avoids paying for social reproduction at its cost; 52 and this was made possible in all the frontier areas of capitalist expansion where indigenous societies still survived. As we have seen, the deferred payment system is one trademark of this specific economic process. Portuguese colonisation was obviously a racist system and produced a highly racialised society. We have seen that the founding texts of the colonial system are based on the notion of race more exactly, race was used almost exclusively to designate black people, while the Portuguese were a nation. 53 But black colour was never ofcially mentioned for direct discriminatory purposes against individuals: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 Michel Cahen 170 52 Immanuel Wallerstein, Le capitalisme historique (Paris: La Dcouverte, 2002). 53 This does not mean that the concept of race was never used to designate Portuguese people: for example, the Dia da Raa (the Day of the Race) was a national day in Portugal up to 1974. But within the colonial legislation, race is used exclusively to name the Africans. This is understandable: the normal law was the one in Portugal, and in Portugal, law need not specify the race of the inhabitants. Therefore, the normal law in the colonies was for a tiny minority of the population (the civilised people), while the exceptional law devoted to a specific race was for the huge majority. The race of the (white) nation need not be named, since it was the whole of the nation with the not relevant massive exception of the Africans. Racism-00-p.qxd 7/2/12 11:28 Page 170 it was mentioned to designate the whole of a people the vagrant people which in turn would have the greatest consequences for individuals. It is what I have called social racism, a racism that defined Otherness not only by the skin colour of individuals, but as much by the denition of the non-capitalist sphere of social life of a whole people, even if petty whites and natives could live side by side in some neighbourhoods. 54 In certain ways, social racism transformed native people into something closer to a caste than a race; a kind of professional stratum. In that way, in its social consequences, indigenato was far more important than blackness. It was indigenato more than blackness that prohibited the social formation of a black elite, expressing the proximity racism of petty whites in Portuguese colonialism, different from the distant racism of other more capitalised forms of colonialism. INDIGENATO BEFORE RACE? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 171 54 In order to avoid possible misunderstanding, I will stress that, obviously, all of this is capitalist (forced labour is perfectly integrated in the capitalist world-system). But all of it does not work under the capitalist mode of production. It is a founding feature of capitalism to need such an articulation of modes of production, in order to nullify the contradiction of having to sell its products to the same persons it directly exploits. 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Domar Ocean Transportation, LTD., A Division of Lee-Vac, Ltd. v. Independent Refining Company v. Milford Navigation Company, Third-Party, 783 F.2d 1185, 3rd Cir. (1986)