Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the development of consumer cultures in the coffee producing zones of northern Angola between 1920 and 1960. It argues that coffee workers in northern Angola, while deeply immersed in the global economy, kept relatively conservative tastes in relation to imported luxury goods.

Paper long abstract:

In the twentieth century, northern Angola became an important region in the global coffee trade. Growing American demand for robusta beans, particularly after World War Two, drew increasing numbers of Portuguese coffee planters to the region and caused its local trade hub, the coffee town of Uige, to become one of the most affluent cities of colonial Angola. Since the end of the export slave trade, access to imported consumer goods had been an important motivation for smallholders in northern Angola to develop coffee cultivation and for others to hire out their labor on local coffee plantations. Records of twentieth-century import-export firms, such as the Zuid-Afrikaansch Handelshuis (Amsterdam) and Robert Hudson and Sons (Leeds), as well as the multinational consumer goods company Unilever provide clues about the kinds of commodities that coffee producers in Angola were interested in. Preliminary research in these records points to a number of hypotheses, which this paper will discuss. First, a cash (or coin) economy seemed to develop more slowly in Angola than elsewhere in Africa; barter defined commercial exchanges between farmers and coffee traders until after WWII. Second, in this barter trade, textiles remained a dominant currency for much longer than one would expect in a "cash crop" economy. Third, the lack of urban conglomerations (apart from Uige) and a low-wage economy meant that demand for "modern" consumer goods, like soap and cosmetic products, was around 1960 still underdeveloped from the viewpoint of producers like Unilever.