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- Convenors:
-
Samuël Coghe
(Ghent University)
Jelmer Vos (University of Glasgow)
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- Location:
- B1 1.12
- Sessions:
- Friday 19 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
This panel examines the formation, implementation and interaction of global and local bodies of ecological knowledge at different commodity frontiers in modern Africa, paying special attention to agriculture and animal husbandry.
Long Abstract:
This panel explores the role knowledge of ecological landscapes played in the creation of commodity frontiers in modern Africa, with special attention to agriculture and animal husbandry. In recent decades, several historians and social scientists have used the concept of 'commodity frontiers' to study the expansion of global capitalism during the last 500 years. These scholars especially examine how, at the margins of an expanding world economy, land, labour and capital were reallocated to transform available resources into commodities for global markets. But commodity production also depended on intimate knowledge of the natural landscape, as local environments not only offered commercial opportunities but also posed constraints related to climate, diseases, and soil quality. Moreover, human intervention in the landscape often created new constraints. Because of these environmental challenges, commodity frontiers were sites of experimentation, adaptation and constant innovation. Focussing on the period after 1800, when Africa's integration in the global economy accelerated, this panel examines how knowledge of local ecologies was generated in and outside the continent and implemented to produce goods for global markets, especially cash crops and livestock. The panel thus aims to highlight the agency of African farmers and cattle-herders as much as the expertise of colonial botanists, agronomists, and veterinary scientists. We welcome contributions from all disciplines shedding light on the different local and global bodies of knowledge underpinning the expansion of African commodity frontiers in the modern era.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 19 July, 2019, -Paper short abstract:
This paper surveys botanic and agronomic studies produced by the Angolan Agricultural Division between 1898 and 1939 to analyse the ways in which both African farmers and colonial settlers used and adapted indigenous coffee reserves for commercial exploitation.
Paper long abstract:
This paper surveys botanic and agronomic studies produced by the Angolan Agricultural Division between 1898 and 1939 to analyse the ways in which both African farmers and colonial settlers used and adapted indigenous (robusta) coffee reserves for commercial exploitation. The paper is specifically interested in the different cultivation methods adopted by African smallholders and colonial planters and the bodies of knowledge which both groups applied to robusta's natural environment in Angola, the country's famed montane 'cloud' forests. Besides the issue of scale which obviously separated African from European planters, we examine different methods of planting, inter-cropping, shading, soil preservation, and processing. While there was little technological innovation in coffee cultivation on either side throughout this period, this paper aims to assess the specific contributions of African and European farmers to the transformation and management of the Angolan coffee landscape.
Paper short abstract:
Based on a variety of sources, this paper explains how maize became a staple food in central Angola well before the Portuguese conquest. It highlights its links with slave trade wars and the role of African women to the successful acclimatization and cultural appropriation of maize in that region.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will discuss some issues of a success story in times of distress. As a well-known consequence of the transatlantic slave trade several American plants became part of people's diet inside Africa. The most striking examples are manioc and maize, considered today "traditional" African staple foods. Both written sources and oral traditions confirm that in central Angola maize was replacing local sorghum and millets (massango, luco and massambala) well before the Portuguese conquest of the region. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when slavery wars caused waves of refugees, maize proved to be of great help since it can be cultivated as a vegetable crop or as a grain to make flour. In the nineteenth century the development of the Ovimbundu long-distance trade, during and after the slave trade, stimulated agriculture surpluses both to feed traders and porters and to exchange it for wanted goods. As in many African societies, agriculture was then essentially the domain of women, except for the clearing of new fields in the woodlands. So, the successful acclimatization and cultural appropriation of maize by local farmers and its relatively rapid expansion to distant frontiers, like today's Zambia, was mainly the work of women who empirically managed to find the best technical solutions for its cultivation in different environments. After the Portuguese colonization of the Angolan central plateau, in the early twentieth century, African peasants responded to new market opportunities with a renewed expansion of maize crops that became for a short time Angola's main export.
Paper short abstract:
How can travel writing cast new light on the production of colonial regimes based on the premises of landscape as a source of energy, against the backdrop of transnational commodity frontiers? I propose to read M. Burr's travelogue in Angola in order to highlight dynamics related to these vectors.
Paper long abstract:
August 21, 1907. In the New York Tribune, an article announced the recent findings of copper and gold deposits in the Katanga region of the Congo State, stressing the existence of a railroad from Lobito Bay to the Bié Plateau in Angola (Caminho-de-Ferro de Benguela), and urging the completion of the trajectory up to the Congo border. The last section of the Benguela-Katanga railroad would open in 1929, connecting the Belgian Congo to the port of Lobito, from which, after WWII, most of the shipments destined to the ore-handling facilities in Baltimore would be dispatched. According to Paul Virilio, the compulsion to accelerate that defined the history of railroad gave rise to a politics of time, regulating, in turn, a logistics of speed, or dromology, that instituted dynamic forms of occupation and delocalization. The travelogue A Fossicker in Angola (London, 1933) by Malcolm Burr, covers the search for fossil fuel to supply the Benguela Railway. In this paper, I focus on Burr's narrative to unravel the motifs of speed and violence in the industry of movement created by transnational configurations of power in Angola during the early decades of the 20th century, and how the logistics of speed is challenged and disrupted by the indigenous worker's bonds of kinship.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the emergence of knowledge on three aspects of the ecology of southern Mozambique - cattle breeds, veterinarian disease and pastures - in the context of a cattle expansion strategy devised by colonial authorities since the 1910s.
Paper long abstract:
Historical research has drawn attention to the key social and economic role that cattle has played in societies in Southern Mozambique in the past centuries. Classic scholarship focusing on Mozambique under colonial rule, alongside studies centred on environmental aspects in African history, have started extending our understanding of how war, migration and different colonial policies, but also low rainfall, droughts, changing land-use patterns and epizooties, have all contributed to changes in cattle population but also production in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In the early twentieth century, a thesis regarding the future of Southern Mozambique became dominant among colonial officials and experts: while most local animal husbandry practices were viewed as backward and uneconomic and local breeds as low-quality, the region had a major ecological potential for cattle expansion of imported breeds and crossbreeds, mostly to supply settler communities and Africans with varying amounts of meat, dairy, manure and draught animal power. Some officials even envisaged Mozambique would be able to export cattle to different markets. This ambitious strategy, resting mostly on western scientific knowledge adapted to the African environment, reflected race and class-based divisions present in Mozambique's colonial society.
Drawing on archival research, this paper traces the emergence between the 1910s and 1940s, in the context of this strategy, of knowledge on three aspects of the ecology of Southern Mozambique - cattle breeds, veterinarian disease and pastures. It furthermore discusses the scientific and technical debates and the tensions that surrounded this strategy, while also assessing some of its results.
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses farmland investments in postcolonial African countries as 'contracts' of recognition. Its insights draw from a case study of a farm estate in Mozambique, where memories, ecological knowledges and social identities have played a critical role in legitimising land ownership.
Paper long abstract:
The so-called new 'rush' for arable land in Africa, particularly notable over the last decade, has been associated with the emergence of new commodity frontiers. Contemporary farmland investments have focused on responding to new trends in global agricultural markets, promising renewed flows of labour and capital and a 'Green Revolution' for the continent. Yet, memory, ecological knowledges and social identities play a critical role in creating a common sense of place within longstanding farm estates.
Borrowing concepts from the property and justice scholarships, this paper discusses farmland investments as 'contracts' of reciprocal recognition (Lund, 2016, Sikor and Lund, 2009). Its insights draw from a case study of a plantation in Mozambique, which inherited the colonial and postcolonial legacy of a Portuguese-owned farm estate, involving semi-structured interviews with former labourers, smallholder farmers, district officers and company managers - in addition to a comprehensive analysis of historical archives in Lisbon and Maputo.
In this case, the villagers have constructed a sense of entitlement over decades, based on personal experiences with former land 'owners', as well as on their own ecological knowledge and attachment to this landscape. Legitimising 'devices', such as technology and trees, are confronted in claiming for a space of recognition. However, changes to the organisation of labour, cultivated cash crops, or previous spatial boundaries, are ultimately perceived as a breach of a previous understanding, and thus deemed less legitimate.