6a. Indigenato Before Race

8

Indigenato Before Race? Some Proposals on Portuguese Forced

Labour Law in Mozambique and the African Empire (1926–62)

MICHEL CAHEN

WHEN ASKING ‘INDIGENATO BEFORE RACE?’, my purpose is quite obviously notto conclude that Portuguese colonial law organised only social discrimination andtherefore was not racist. One need only read the successive Native Statutes andthe Colonial Act to be convinced to the contrary. Nor is the aim to answer thequestion of the function of Portuguese colonial racism: it is very easy to point outthat it was an ideological tool to define who was native (and was to be compelledinto forced labour up to 1962) and who was not. People were black and thereforenative or ‘not civilised’ (with the small exception of assimilados), or white andtherefore never native and always ‘civilised’, even when completely illiterate.Nevertheless, these realities do not suffice to show exactly how it all worked.

But let me digress for a moment. Is it correct to translate the Portuguese indígenaas native in English (in particular American social sciences English)? One firstproblem is that indígena in Portuguese is at the same time a noun and an adjective,whereas ‘indigenous’ is only an adjective in English: this implies translating umindígena as ‘a native’ and, in general terms, this will probably run. But in oldPortuguese African colonies, there were whites and mixed-race or black Luso-Africans, sometimes since generations earlier. Were they ‘native’? It was obviousto everybody that they were not indígena. They were ‘Angolan’ or ‘Mozambican’,that is to say white, mixed-race or black Portuguese from Angola and Mozambique,but not indígena. Would it, in the case of completely black Luso-Africans, be thesame in English: would those blacks really not be natives? Moreover, in thePortuguese African empire, indígena became a legal status within the juridical

123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839404142

I thank Maria da Conceição 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 meanshe will agree with all my final proposals.

Proceedings of the British Academy 179, 149–171. © The British Academy 2012.

Racism-00-p.qxd 7/2/12 11:28 Page 149

duality imposed on the colonised (indígenas, or ‘not-civilised’, versus cidadãos,or ‘civilised’). In that sense, indígena might be translated by ‘[colonial] subject’,but it would thus embrace the whole of the local colonised population, whenassimilados were (officially) full Portuguese citizens, as well as the Indians ofGoa and the Chinese of Macao – and when the Cape Verdeans were neither indígenanor assimilados (citizens) and enjoyed an intermediary status. Maria da ConceiçãoNeto points out ‘the absurdity [which] could be seen at São Tomé where “thenatives” (indígenas) were not those born locally but those brought there as “contractworkers” (contratados) from Angola and Mozambique’, since the very São Toméannatives were not compelled to forced labour and therefore not called indígenas,but forros.1 In this text, I will translate indígena (adjective) as ‘native’ when it refersto 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 beinghistorically from that place (‘indigenous customs and habits’, but a locally bornEuropean or Goan will not be an ‘indigenous’ because his origin lay abroad), withsome special cases (I will translate imposto indígena as ‘hut tax’). Often, I willsimply use the Portuguese words, in italics. Furthermore, it is impossible to translateindigenato (the legal status and the social category) as ‘indigenousness’, whichwould be an indigenidade which does not exist in Portuguese.

Even if the Portuguese noun indígena had been used before,2 among many otherwords, to refer to African peoples (cafres, gentio, selvagens, pagãos, or kaffirs,horde, savages, pagans), its generalisation as a concept in order to refer to colonisednative peoples in Portuguese continental Africa (and probably elsewhere) is morerecent. Such a generalisation was linked to Lisbon’s effort to produce a systematiclegislation for its new empire, from the beginning of the last quarter of the nineteenthcentury and above all after 1885. Before then, in the days of the slave trade in thefirst age of colonisation, it is well known that the coloniser concluded alliances withsome African states to secure the capture of slaves in other states. Arab or Swahilislave traders did the same. That meant that not all black people were to becomeslaves: it depended on the alliances. In contrast, under colonial capitalism, all blackpeople became natives (indígenas), unless they succeeded in extracting themselvesfrom their race. In Portuguese colonies, this was done with a remarkable degree ofsystematisation.

The concepts indígena and indigenato as a legal category3 are therefore moreor less contemporary with the implementation of colonial capitalism. It could be

123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839404142

Michel Cahen150

1 María da Conceição Neto, personal communication, 8 May 2011.2 Francisco Bethencourt points out that, in the first edition of Morães, indígena already exists with themodern meaning, and it may have existed before (António de Moraes Silva and Rafael Bluteau, Diccionarioda lingua portugueza composto pelo padre D. Rafael Bluteau; Reformado, e accrescentado por Antóniode Moraes Silva natural do Rio de Janeiro (Lisbon: Officina de Simão Thaddeo Ferreira, 1789).3 Ana Cristina Nogueira da Silva, ‘A cidadania nos Trópicos. O Ultramar no constitucionalismo monárquicoportuguês (1820–1880)’, unpublished PhD thesis, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2004, pp. 4–42.

Racism-00-p.qxd 7/2/12 11:28 Page 150

said that this was a logical consequence of the victory of abolitionism,4 indirectlylinked with the expansion of capitalism, and it could also be said that indigenatoand forced labour replaced slavery. But it is this very notion of ‘replacement’ thatneeds to be discussed. Situations differ greatly according to whether we are lookingat the French Caribbean before 1848, Brazil before 1888, the creole Portuguesearchipelagos of Cape Verde or São Tomé, or the continental colonies of thePortuguese empire before 1878. The key is whether, in all these places where slaveryoccurred, there was or there was not a slave plantation economy, a plantationcomplex.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 Réunion, the plantation economic system declined quickly after the end of themultiple extensions of time granted to the former owners of slaves in order to obligethe ‘freed’ slaves to stay. With obvious differences from one place to another, themajority of former slaves did not stay and preferred to become labourers in industrialcities, smallholders in the mountains, or even landless peasants, engendering amassive plebe that was poorly integrated into the capitalist production process.Nevertheless, that scenario does not seem to fit the case of São Tomé and Principe– the ‘Caribbean’ island of Portugal in equatorial Africa.

São Tomé and Principe

São Tomé and Principe seem to be an exception, a case of the lingering survivalof a closed system of slavery in a plantation economy (the cocoa roças) up to theSecond World War. This may be explained by the peculiar history of the genesisof creole society,6 which prohibited the imposition of forced labour on the natives(filhos da terra, or forros)7 and required the late and growing importation of slave

INDIGENATO BEFORE RACE?

123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839404142

151

4 Since the new uniqueness of human kind needed the codification 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 veryintensive in some areas.6 I am calling ‘creole’ not only the colony-born whites, but all the colonial (not colonised) socialmilieus produced by, or at the margins of, the imperial state apparatus. The longevity of the Portuguesefirst age of colonisation made it peculiar; Isabel Castro Henriques, São Tomé e Príncipe: A invençãode uma sociedade (Lisbon: Véga, 2000); Elisabetta Maino, ‘Le kaléidoscope identitaire. Anthropologiehistorique de São Tomé e Príncipe’, unpublished PhD thesis, École des Hautes Etudes en SciencesSociales, Paris, 2004, pp. 7–12; Augusto Nascimento, ‘S. Tomé e Príncipe no século XIX: Um espaçode interpretação das mudanças sociais’, in Valentim Alexandre (ed.), O Império Africano (Séculos XIXe XX) (Lisbon: Edições Colibri, 2000), pp. 95–116; Valentim Alexandre, Poderes e quotidiano nasroças de S. Tomé e Príncipe, de finais de oitecentos a meados de novecentos (Lousã: author, 2002).7 The last attempt to impose forced labour on the forros provoked the ‘war of Batepá’ in 1953; GerhardSeibert, ‘Le massacre de février 1953 à São Tomé, raison d’être du nationalisme santoméen’, Lusotopie4 (1997), pp. 173–92.

Racism-00-p.qxd 7/2/12 11:28 Page 151

manpower (named serviçais from the end of the nineteenth century) due to theinsularity and small size of the archipelago, as well as the violence of the colonialstate of a weak metropolitan capitalism. However, even in this case, the growingdifficulties of maintaining the system led to its ‘criminalisation’: in the 1950s, beingsent from Mozambique to São Tomé was not a question of forced labour forindigenous people, but very often of penitentiary labour for native convicts.

In other words, São Tomé represents one case of a slave plantation complex,and the fact that this complex needed a few decades more to die than was the casein the Americas does not change anything. Thus, it must not be understood as atransition where slavery was slowly substituted by forced labour; rather, forcedlabour was tried, but never successfully.8 Historically speaking, in São Tomé, therewas no transition: there was an attempt to continue slave exploitation, andafterwards, the convulsions of its decline. Social improvements for serviçais afterthe Second World War in order to stabilise them were concomitant with the crisisof this single-crop farming and of its profitability.9 Deep convulsions occurred tooin the Americas: the difference is that in São Tomé, capitalism hardly replacedslavery. It was the transition from slavery to nothing.

The problem the social sciences face today is that the analysis of forced labourin Portuguese continental Africa has been and remains excessively influenced bythe case of São Tomé, which fed famous scandals and abolitionist protests fromthe end of the nineteenth century up to 1925.10 The issue was always that forcedlabour was no more than modern slavery, and forced labour in Angola andMozambique was seen as forming part of other plantation complexes as early asthe nineteenth century or beginning of the twentieth.11 Obviously, slavery is literallya kind of forced labour. But this does not mean that twentieth-century forced(officially indentured) labour was ‘modern slavery’, at least if seen from theviewpoint of the mode of production and its historical path.

123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839404142

Michel Cahen152

8 See the first chapter of Gerhard Seibert, Comrades, Clients and Cousins: Colonialism, Socialism andDemocratization in São Tomé and Príncipe (Leiden: University of Leiden, 1999), pp. 18–49.9 Alexander Keese, ‘Early Limits of Local Decolonisation: Forced Labour, Decolonisation and the“Serviçal” Population in São Tomé and Príncipe, from Colonial Abuses to Post-ColonialDisappointment, 1945–1976’, 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 PortugueseAfrica (New York: Abbott Press, 1925). For a recent anlysis, see Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, LivrosBrancos, Almas Negras: A ‘missão civilizadora’ do colonialismo Português c. 1870–1930 (Lisbon:Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2009), esp. chs 2 and 5.11 See the unambiguous title of the famous book by James Duffy, A Question of Slavery (London: OxfordUniversity 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 fewexceptions, the former slave traders, being white, mulatto or black, did not becomeplanters. Some managed to find their place among the very small urban elites – inLuanda, Benguela or Moçâmedes in Angola, or Quelimane, Moçambique or IboIsland in Mozambique. But the new plantation companies were generally not theirs,and were a new phenomenon stemming from foreign or metropolitan capital, andin any case external capital. Even the descendants of the prazeiros of GreatZambezia in Mozambique, who could have been best placed to transform theirprazos into latifundios, failed to do so, first for military reasons: they sought todefend their freedom to be slave traders too long and too late, and they had to bedefeated by metropolitan Portugal.12 With the very tiny exception of the Mossurilpeninsula facing Moçambique Island – the so-called terras firmes where slaveplantations existed – and a few places in the hinterland of Luanda in Angola,Portuguese (and also Swahili) slavery in these areas was domestic and above allfor exportation. Obviously, domestic slavery did include some slaves working inquintas (small plantations), but I believe it is right to emphasise that the slavetrade never produced a plantation economy in continental Portuguese Africacomparable to that in Latin America. The first reason for this was a military one:in order to create those plantations, it would have been necessary to defeat a numberof African states, some small and some larger, in order to dominate large areas ofland directly. It was far more profitable to export slaves, all the more since Brazilianproduction (even after independence) answered to the needs of legitimate trade intropical commodities.13 This effective conquest occurred very late, which is tosay, at the very moment when abolition was actually implemented, between theBerlin Congress and the First World War. Even if they had wanted to do so, theformer slave exporters had no more time to develop slave-worked plantations.

In the Portuguese African empire, forced labour and indigenato were notimplemented to maintain former slaves on the plantations (or in the mines), for


123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839404142

153

12 Allen Isaacman, Mozambique: The Africanization of a European Institution: The Zambezi Prazos,1750–1902 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1972); Allen Isaacman and Barbara Isaacman,‘Os prazeiros como trans-raianos: Um estudo sobre transformação social e cultural’, Arquivo (Maputo:Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique), 10 (1991), pp. 5–48. About the last period of the prazos, seeLeroy Vail and Landeg White, Capitalism and Colonialism in Mozambique: A Study of QuelimaneDistrict (London: Heinemann, 1980); René Pelissier, Naissance du Mozambique: Résistance et révoltesanticoloniales (1854–1918), 2 vols (Orgeval: Ed. Pélissier, 1984); and Sérgio Chichava, ‘Le “VieuxMozambique”: L’identité politique de la Zambézie’, unpublished PhD thesis, Université de Bordeaux,2007.13 Gervase Clarence-Smith, The Third Portuguese Empire, 1825–1975: 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 São Tomé, probably up until the Second World War).

As is known, the first Portuguese law against the institution of slavery was thedecree of the Marquês Sá da Bandeira ordering the end of transatlantic trade in1836, 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 ofslavery. The same Marquês Sá da Bandeira issued a series of anti-slave lawsbetween 1854 and 1858, freeing some slaves and establishing 1878 as the final datefor abolition. In 1869, the slaves were made libertos and in 1875 the ex-libertoshad to stay in the service of their former masters for two more years (1876–8).These twenty years were thought of in Lisbon as a period of gradual abolition andorderly transition from slavery to free labour: the Portuguese government visiblyhoped that slaves who could no longer be exported would therefore stay with theirowners, who would then be able to create plantations and transform their slavesinto wage-earning workers. But in the great majority of cases, these plantationswould be new ones, and not former latifundios full of former slaves. Unlike inBrazil or the French Caribbean colonies, the twenty-year intermediate periodconceived in Lisbon was not to give time to slave-based plantation owners, but toallow a transition to a new, capitalist economy. The key point in the 1875, 1878and 1899 legislation was that (with some hesitation and contradictory minor changesbetween these first three Portuguese native labour codes) the prohibition of ‘forcedlabour’ – referring to the former slavery – was enacted alongside the vagrancyclause under which the ‘non-productive’ African could be judged a vagrant andmade to contract for his services. It amounted to no less than the creation of modernforced 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 wasdenounced by anti-slavery movements throughout the first half of the twentiethcentury. But historically speaking, forced labour and indigenato were not theproduct of a long process of the decline of slavery: they were the direct consequenceof the new age of colonialism, meaning the colonial capitalism now made possible

123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839404142

Michel Cahen154

14 Portuguese has two separate words: escravatura for the slave trade, and escravidão for slavery inplantations, mines, and so forth. When I refer here to slavery it is to escravidão. Portuguese colonialliterature in the 1930s sometimes distinguished escravidão, used specifically for domestic slavery ofAfricans 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 ‘forcedlabour’, the Portuguese authorities understood this voluntarily as ‘slavery’ – indeed in the colonialofficial vocabulary, trabalho forçado refers to slavery – and answered that there was no longer suchescravismo but there was some escravidão remaining, which they were fighting against; Maria EmiliaMadeira Santos and Vítor Luís Gaspar Rodrigues, ‘No rescaldo da escravatura. As ciências sociaischamadas à iça nos anos 30 (século XX)’, Africana Studia (Porto) 8 (2005), pp. 259–73.

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 groupsbased on the economy of war and the slave trade. Between slavery and forced labourand indigenato, there was no continuity or even transition; there was a break. It wasa matter of a change in production modes, which could now concern the wholeAfrican population, thanks to military conquest, while slaves had been only aminority of the African population. Military campaigns were not only a conquestof land, they very often involved the violent destruction of the former colonialeconomic system based on coexistence of an indigenous economy and long-distancetrade by Luso-Brazilians, Portuguese, Luso-Africans (in Mozambique, in particularthe prazeiros), Indians, Swahilis, or (obviously) African trade caravans, themselveslinked 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 wasnot the only one where there was no European-owned slave plantation complex,but almost exclusively slave trade exports, and therefore de facto no transition fromenslaved manpower to forced labour manpower on European plantations.15 But thissimply provides a further reason to revise the history of this ‘transition’.

Moreover, in this short chapter it is impossible to discuss important cases ofdevelopment of domestic slavery within African societies, and even production inmarket-oriented slavery in some African pre-colonial states, both stimulated bylegitimate and illegitimate colonial trade on the coast. But even in the latter case,which indeed represented a first means of capitalist penetration within Africanstates, its social formation prevented its possible use by new direct Europeanimperialism to develop large forced labour plantations.16 First, the African casesof market-oriented slavery very often did not produce a plantation complex, theslaves being spread among the local population as captives or forming specialvillages, but not working in plantations. Secondly, in the few (albeit important)


123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839404142

155

15 See for example Emmanuel Terray, Une histoire du royaume abron du Gyaman: Des origines à laconquête coloniale (Paris: Karthala, 1995); Robin Law, Ouidah: The Social History of a West AfricanSlaving ‘Port’, 1727–1892 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2004); Kristin Mann, Slavery and theBirth of an African City: Lagos, 1760–1900 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,2007).16 That does not mean that nothing in African slavery could be used by new European plantations. Forexample, the plantations in Zambezia sometimes recovered the old ensacas of the prazos as forcedworkers. 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 werethe local structure of the Achikunda (the slave soldiers of the prazos). One can immediately see thatsuch a use of ensacas for a rural gang forced labour system was based on the military defeat andhumiliation 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 (inmodern northern Nigeria, based on cotton) or in the kingdom of Dahomey (basedon palm oil), the colonial conquest provoked their disintegration: slaves fled fromthe plantations due to the colonial conquest, or the social planters’ milieu wasmilitarily defeated and broken up. The European plantations had therefore to benew ones, with another organisation, and other social relations of domination. Theonly exception could be the case of the formation of a plantation complex basedon cloves in Zanzibar (fully developed by the 1840s) and part of the Swahili EastAfrican coast, which English and German colonisers had partially conquered.17 Butthis must be considered as only a partial exception, since it represented conquestby new colonisers of former colonisers, the Arabs of Oman, and not of an indigenousplanter class.

In the space occupied today by Mozambique, market-oriented slave productionby Africans seems scarcely (if at all) to have existed;18 but going further into thehinterland, the case of the Lunda empire is well known and covered part of easterntwentieth-century Angola and the Belgian Congo. The Lunda empire madeintensive use of slaves in production tasks, but not within a plantation complex.19

Generally speaking, these African social formations based on slavery had to bedefeated – with the exception already noted.

But even comparing the neighbouring Portuguese Angola and the BelgianCongo, or other European empires in Africa, there are huge differences. In thePortuguese empire, unlike in other European empires, but similar to what occurredin Latin America, there were old creole elite nuclei dating from the first age ofcolonisation. One might have expected them to have developed slave plantationsand then passed to forced labour (and later wage-earned) manpower, thus leadingthe ‘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 inPortuguese Africa is thus based first on a wrong understanding and generalisationof the São Tomé case, and second on misinterpretation of the reaction of pre-existentold elites when the age of modern imperialism dawned.

The peculiarity of the continental Portuguese empire thus lies not only in thevery absence of any ‘transition’ – which is, with the exception already noted, the

123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839404142

Michel Cahen156

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 History20:1 (1979), pp. 103–25; Jan-Georg Deutsch, Emancipation without Abolition in German East Africac. 1884–1914 (Oxford: James Currey, 2006).18 Malyn D. D. Newitt, Portuguese Settlement on the Zambezi (London: Longman, 1973); Allen F. Isaacmanand Barbara S. Isaacman, Slavery and Beyond: The Making of Men and Chikunda Ethnic Identities in theUnstable World of South-Central Africa, 1750–1920 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2004).19 Isabel Castro Henriques, Percursos da modernidade em Angola: Dinâmicas comerciais etransformações sociais no século XIX (Lisbon: Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical/Institutoda Cooperação 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 thatthere was no transition in spite of the existence of old social colonial milieus forwhom Sá da Bandeira had legislated from the 1850s because they were expectedto produce such a transition.

There is another way to approach the same Portuguese peculiarity. For otherEuropean countries, Africa was a case of ‘New Colonies’ – the ‘Old Colonies’being those in the Americas and Caribbean – and there were no, or insignificant,creole populations.20 In the Portuguese case, the New Colonies were conqueredfrom the Old ones and with territorial continuity. The Old Colonies lay within theNew ones – the ‘Le temps long dans le temps court’ of Fernand Braudel – with thedecline 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 orFrench West Africa: between the end of slave exports and the generalisation offorced labour, forty years or so21 elapsed in the Portuguese empire, whereas Franceand Belgium developed harsh and massive forced labour immediately.22 Althoughthe legislation was all ready, and forced labour was expanding after the First WorldWar, the 1929 crisis and the rigorous financial policies of Salazar slowed downeconomic growth and so the need for indigenous forced manpower on plantations,which cannot much have exceeded 100,000 people in each of Angola andMozambique in the middle of the 1930s. Thus, the generalisation of forced labour(in plantations, fisheries, and harbours, as well as in regions of forced peasantproduction)23 actually did not occur before the end of the 1930s and during theSecond World War. In the Portuguese empire, then, this chronological gap stresseseven more forcefully the rupture between slavery and forced labour as distincthistorical periods.

Nevertheless, this assessment does not include the compulsory use of nativepeople as porters (carregadores freely furnished by pro-Portuguese or subduedtraditional chiefs) for Portuguese traders up to the 1920s, or for building roads orother public works, all of which was highly disruptive for the social life andproduction process of the Africans. In Angola, this was the case particularly underthe rule of Norton de Matos as Governor (1912–14) and Alto-Comissário (1921–3).24


123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839404142

157

20 I do not tackle here the very specific 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 Leopold’s Ghost: A Study of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa(Boston: Mariner Books, 1999); Crawford Young, The African Colonial State in ComparativePerspective (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 pressuredthe Africans to cultivate such crops at the expense of their food production.24 Maria da Conceição Neto, ‘Nas malhas da rede: O impacto económico e social do transporte rodoviáriona região do Huambo c. 1920 – c. 1960’, in Beatrix Heintze and Achim von Open (eds), Angola on theMove: Transport, Routes, Communications and History/Angola em movimento: Vias de transporte,comunicações e história (Frankfurt: Otto Lambeck, 2008), pp. 117–29.

Racism-00-p.qxd 7/2/12 11:28 Page 157

Is it possible, then, to view these practices as filling the aforementioned gap of fortyyears 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 thinkingso, since the use of carregadores for the traders and small coffee plantations of thehinterland, and of forced native workers for the ‘development’ of Angola as dreamedby Norton de Matos, was systematic, harsh, and violent.25 Such a use of compelledrecruits may indeed surely be considered as a lingering legacy of slavery, for somenatives; even if it was now ‘part-time slavery’, since they were no longer sold whenarriving on the coast or in the cities (except for those sent to São Tomé, but notspecifically 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 serviçais to São Tomé plantations did not prepare for anychange in the archipelago, but was the tendency of lingering slavery. Carregadoreswere slaves up to 1878 (and after), and then forced workers, and did indeed representthe 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 anexception. Were the latter transformed, two or three decades later, into forcedlabour-based plantation owners or shareholders of concession companies of forcedcotton production? Had they been able to keep their former slaves to work on thenew plantations? Generally speaking, I do not think so. Even if some managed tobecome ‘modern traders’, or even medium-sized planters (fazendeiros), in no waydid their social milieu become the dominant one in twentieth-century Mozambiqueand Angola. The major plantations represented a new period, with new people anda new process. It comes as little surprise that during several decades, slaverycontinued in declining forms, while forced labour appeared and developed alongsideit; but the simultaneity of both does not at all mean that the first was producing thesecond, economically and socially. Rather, this was the competition of two historicalages.

Secondly, the quantitative aspect is also a qualitative one. Except in the case ofSão Tomé, the half-slave/half-forced-labour regimes of the 1890s, 1910s, and 1920scannot be compared with the systematic recruitment of any native male for forcedlabour in plantations, fisheries and mines, and the forced production of cotton andrice, in the 1940s and 1950s. Now, rather than thousands of people a year, hundredsof thousands were implicated (see below).

Third, and linked to the first point, the development of huge estates (Portuguese-owned or not, chartered or not), very often created from the end of the nineteenthcentury but fully developed by the end of the 1930s, or even the spreading of many

123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839404142

Michel Cahen158

25 Maria da Conceição 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 recentarrivals), is a completely distinct social phenomenon from the families, the capitaland 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 allowedcapitalist domination of Mozambique, Angola and areas of Guinea (and of otherempires), but forced labour is not really a mode of capitalist exploitation. We willhave to return to this contradiction. But first it is necessary to go into the detail ofthe workings of the Statute governing indigenato.

The social significance of indigenato

In this chapter, my analysis will not begin with the colonial labour legislation of1875, 1878, 1899 or even 1914, but will start directly with the legislation of 1926–8,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 systemuntil 1962 and partially up to 1974. But once again, one must emphasise that thenew legislation was not brought in to discipline and govern huge crowds of post-slavery forced workers. The forced labour legislation of 1926–9 must therefore beanalysed as ‘developmentalist’, with a forward-looking view of what Angola andMozambique 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 define clearlywho was native or ‘not civilised’ and who was ‘civilised’. One was ‘notoriouslyrecognised’ as being gentio or assimilado. As Jill Dias has shown, self-definitionas ‘Angolan’ or even ‘African’ within the African elite of Luanda and its hinterland,Benguela, or Moçâmedes, was not at all similar to being ‘gentio’ or indigenous upto the late nineteenth century.26 The liberal monarchy during its last years main-tained this absence of a definition. In 1917 (at least in Mozambique), a first textrequired former assimilados to obtain an alvará (certificate) from the courtcertifying their assimilation. After 1926–7, terms for obtaining the assimilationcertificate became more and more restrictive: henceforth, the aim of legislation wasclearly to define who would not be exempted from forced labour. Since JamesDuffy, Douglas Wheeler, René Pélissier, Gerald Bender, Malyn Newitt and othermore recent researchers have already studied the content of such legislation, I wouldlike to only stress some specific aspects.


123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839404142

159

26 Jill Dias, ‘Uma questão de identidade: Respostas intelectuais às transformações económicas no seioda elite crioula da Angola portuguesa entre 1870 e 1930’, Revista Internacional de Estudos Africanos(Lisbon) 1 (1984), pp. 61–94.

Racism-00-p.qxd 7/2/12 11:28 Page 159

Who did work?

The Estatuto Político, Civil e Criminal dos Indígenas de Angola e Moçambique,issued on 23 October 1926, and extended to Guinea in 1929, definitely establishedthe principle that metropolitan and colonial law must be different, in spite of theunity of the Nation.27 It precisely defined natives as ‘individuals of black race orbeing descended from them, who, by the way of their instruction and customs, donot distinguish themselves from the common people of this race’ (article 3).According to this Estatuto, colonial governments had to define who would be nativeby a special diploma in each colony. In Mozambique, for example, the Diplomalegislativo definindo as condições especiais que devem caracterizar os indígenasou não indígenas performed this role.28 There were slight differences between thedifferent colonial diplomas or their successive versions in 1927, 1931, and so on,regarding conditions for becoming ‘assimilated’, but three conditions were alwaysincluded: first, to have completely abandoned ‘indigenous habits and customs’;second, the ability to speak Portuguese; and third, to ‘practise a profession, tradeor industry’ or to ‘own goods being enough for their subsistence’ (article 1). In the1931 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 toolof discrimination – and what was more socially structuring? Even if the questionsof knowledge of Portuguese and having abandoned indigenous customs and habitswould obviously lead to a huge range of arbitrary judgements by local admini-strators, my hypothesis is that the third point, regarding ‘profession’, was by farthe worst. Actually, knowledge of the Portuguese language extended to very fewpeople at the time, but living in a city, or within a mission, or working for a companycould give rise to such an ability. But what is understood by ‘profession’ is onlyan activity fully integrated within the monetarised economy and on a permanentbasis: a native person working in his field for his own subsistence, or a native personworking in a European company on a two-year contract, did not have a ‘profession’.In Mozambique, ‘owning goods being enough for their subsistence’ was defined,for example, as having 100 head of cattle or five hectares of land on a privatebasis. The meaning is very clear: the definition of indígena is any (black) personnot directly integrated into the capitalist economy. This is a mixture of what I willcall ‘literal racism’, or even ‘racial racism’ (because it dealt only with blacks), and

123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839404142

Michel Cahen160

27 Decree no. 12,533, 23 Oct. 1926, Boletim Oficial de Moçambique (Lourenço Marques), 1st series,28, 27 Nov. 1926.28 Diploma legislativo . . ., no. 36, 12 Nov. 1927, Boletim Oficial de Moçambique (Lourenço Marques),1st series, 46, 22 Nov. 1927.29 Diploma legislativo . . ., no. 237, 26 May 1931, art. 1, quoted by Elisabeth Ceita Vera Cruz, O estatudodo indigenato e a legislação da discriminação na colonização 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 hadintroduced a vagrancy clause, any person ‘not working’ was a vagrant and couldtherefore be obliged to choose ‘freely’ his employer. The whole people was madevagrant, in an early kind of clash of civilisations.

Within the context of the scandal provoked by the Ross Report on São Tomé,Angola and Mozambique in 1925, it might be noted that the vagrancy clausedisappeared in the 1926–9 legislation on native labour (Estatuto and Código). Inthe same way, the ‘obligation, moral and legal’ of working returned to the pre-1899formulation of ‘moral obligation’. Was this new legislation less harsh than theformer one? It has been suggested that it was, but I very much doubt it: at the sametime, the coup d’état of May 1926 ended the Republic with the mute approval ofthe British government, and supporters of open forced labour came to power.30 Ifthey did so, it was because any change in the labour regime could be merelycosmetic. The reason is that the colonial administration no longer needed suchprecise clauses; the simple fact of not considering as ‘work’ the traditional activityof the indígenas had been sufficient to put them under the ‘moral obligation to work’ (dever moral do trabalho), which could allow (and actually allowed) foradministrative intervention. African people perhaps were no longer vagrant, butsince their day-to-day self-support activity was not recognised as labour, this wasirrelevant. From ‘vagrant people’ to ‘not relevant people’, no progress was madeat all.

Late but massive forced labour

Many years ago, during my doctoral research on Mozambique, I calculated that inthe 1940s and 1950s, all males who could be recruited for forced labour – that isto 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 permanentworker in a harbour or on a railway, and who had not emigrated – had in fact beenrecruited, for six months a year or one year in two in companies, or permanentlyin forced food production. Indeed, in 1940, when Mozambique had a populationof 5 million, of 1,197,028 native males aged between 15 and 60, some 533,780were chibalo (forced) workers in plantations (latifúndios of tea, copra, coffee, sugarcane, or coconuts), railways and ports, mines, and so on, 331,000 were forced cottonproducers, 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


123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839404142

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 figures werecalculated a minima, do not include women, who were legally not to be recruitedbut who were very often as forced as their husbands to produce cotton, rice andcastor oil, and do not include day-to-day forced work on roads or for other publictasks (in Mozambique this ‘invisible forced labour’ was legalised as thecontribuição braçal, the ‘arm drudgery’).

The situation became still worse after 1947, and the number of forced labourersby the end of the 1950s became very large, even though it was at this very momentthat 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 aprofessional card issued by white trade unions. The tiny number of assimilados inMozambique – 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, butof large-scale forced labour among a whole people that had been made vagrant ornot relevant. When someone was subjected to forced labour, it became almostimpossible to change their situation, except by illegal emigration. Forced labour,not direct racist behaviour, was the reason for the weakness of the African elite inMozambique – but obviously, forced labour is per se a racist process, against a wholeway of life. In Angola, the number of assimilados was tiny too, but far greater thanin 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 fromthe 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 toPortuguese merchants. According to Manuel Loff, in 1943 white traders blockeda train transporting contratados, ‘on the grounds that these emigrations wereexcessive and injurious to their trade’.32 Maria da Conceição Neto stresses that, in

123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839404142

Michel Cahen162

31 That is to say, the total number of indigenous males aged from 15 to 60, minus the categories ofother labour status listed supra. Personal calculations from data in: Missão de Inquérito Agrícola,Recenseamento agrícola de 1930–1940: Contribuição para o recenseamento agrícola mundial(Lourenço Marques: Imprensa Nacional de Moçambique/Repartição Técnica de Estatística, 1944);Nelson Saraiva Bravo, A cultura algodoeira na economia do Norte de Moçambique (Lisbon: Junta deInvestigações do Ultramar, 1963); Armando Lourenço Rodrigues, ‘A produção no sector indígena deMoçambique’, BA dissertation, Instituto Superior de Estudos Ultramarinos, Lisbon, 1960; and ArmandoCastro, O sistema colonial português em África (meados do século 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 Officer of the BritishEmbassy in Lisbon), National Archives, London, Foreign Office 371/80861, JP2183/2, quoted byManuel Loff, ‘As colónias portuguesas de África entre a IIa Guerra Mundial e a Guerra colonial: Avisão anglo-americana’, in Adriana Pereira Campos (ed.), Trabalho forçado africano: Experiênciascoloniais comparadas (Porto: Campo das Letras, 2006), pp. 395–442, 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 nevercompletely imposed on peasants, in order to allow them to grow and sell a significantsurplus of cereals to the Portuguese, even if ‘invisible forced labour’ was imposedon all.33 Malyn Newitt has recently published part of the diary of Charles Spence,the British director of a trading company in Lourenço Marques, who made a tourof 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 ofthe emphasis imposed by the government on cotton growing’. Since the NyassaCompany’s charter had come to an end, ‘direct administration of the region hadchanged priorities from a focus on commercial activity (principally in Africangrown crops) in the imposition of a systematic administration and the commercialcontrol of the cotton and rice monopoly concessionaires’.34

In Mozambique, during the Second World War, when forced labour recruitmentwas widespread, Portuguese law also made it possible, in exceptional instances, toescape forced labour laws. The Estatuto do Agricultor Indígena (Statute on AfricanAgriculturalists) exempted some peasants from the contrato to allow them todevelop their own farms, in full contradiction of the Estatuto dos Indígenas. 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 becomean assimilado. But this special statute, introduced to authorise a very few Africansto plant large amounts of cash crops, simply allowed small Portuguese traders tobuy products at native prices, that is to say below the officially fixed prices of thedirect white settlers. The allocation of this status remained at the discretion of theadministrador da circunscrição (district colonial officer) and was obviously aquestion of política indígena discussed at the highest level in the province.Moreover, since it allowed several thousand Mozambican peasants to avoidseasonal forced labour, it alleviated one important contradiction of the system.But it must be noted that this very special statute undermining the Código dosIndígenas categories was itself undermined, since peasants on concessions forforced production of cotton and rice were often considered agricultores africanosand therefore exempted from forced labour (seasonal work), to be compelled towork on forced crop growing. This was particularly the case in the Nampula


123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839404142

163

33 Maria da Conceição Neto, personal communication, 27 April 2011.34 Malyn Newitt, ‘Uma viagem pelo Norte de Moçambique durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial’, in P.Havik, C. Saraiva and J. A. Tavim (eds), Caminhos cruzados em História e Antropologia: Ensaios dehomenagem a Jill Dias (Lisbon: Instituto de Ciênças Sociais, 2010), pp. 143–58. Quotations are fromthe original manuscript in English; I thank Malyn Newitt for sending me this document.35 Estatuto do agricultor indígena, aprovado pelo diploma legislativo no. 919, de. 5 de Agosto de 1944(Lourenço 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 forcedcotton 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 15and 55 years in the regions south of Zambezi – roughly the distritos of Tete, Beira,Inhambane, Gaza and Lourenço Marques – numbered 593,834 men. Of this group,33,766 were listed as exercising the ‘profession’ of agriculturalist. Of the latter, it isnot clear what percentage held the certificate of agricultor africano. There is no doubt,however, that most of these officially recognised agriculturalists were merely engagedin the production of cotton under the government’s forced planting program.36

How not to proletarianise: gendering and subalternising

What has to be stressed immediately, following these quantitative thoughts, is thatforced labour did not in any way produce a process of local integration within thecapitalist production process. On the contrary, the Portuguese administrationresolutely fought any tendency towards the formation of a proletarian class. Sá daBandeira’s old dream of seeing former slave traders become employers ofpermanent employees was soon abandoned. This was not only for political reasons– fear of a proletarian mass – but above all because it was far more profitable notto have a proletarian class. A proletarian person must be paid at the cost of his socialreproduction, and this was still too expensive. The Código do Trabalho dosIndígenas nas colonias portuguesas de África, the Labour Code of 1929, was veryclear 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, butin relation to the amount of the hut tax;38 actually, ‘salary’ was no such thing, butrather a payment calculated under the cost of social reproduction of the worker. Itdid not generate any native market. This is why the worker had to return home tohis family and lineage, not to ‘rest’, but to help reconstitute the domestic economythat 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: itshighly gendered structure. It was this domestic economy that would make up theshortfall between the ‘payment’ by the forced employer and the social cost of

123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839404142

Michel Cahen164

36 Marvin Harris, ‘Portugal’s African “Wards”: A First-Hand Report on Labor and Education inMocambique’, Africa Today 5:6 (1958), pp. 3–36, p. 18. www.cultural-materialism.org/portugalsafricanwards.pdf37 República Portuguesa, Código do Trabalho dos Indígenas nas colónias portuguesas de África,aprovado pelo decreto no. 16:199 de 6 de Dezembro de 1929 (Lourenço Marques: Imprensa Nacional,1929).38 Article 197 specifies that the monthly wage must be 25 to 40 per cent of the imposto indígena, whichmeans 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 valueof 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 thatwas cheaper than proletarianisation, except colonial violence to ensure it.

Nevertheless, no system can endure and rely solely on violence, above all acolonial system like the Portuguese one, where the forces of coercion were veryweak: a chefe de posto had just six cipaios (native police) under his command, withguns from before the First World War. In order to understand how such a forcedlabour system could work, one has to remember three factors. First of all, thecollaboration of some of the traditional chiefs – but this collaboration was efficientonly when these chiefs were the legitimate ones. Linked to this first point, it isnecessary to remember that, in the 1930s and even the 1940s and 1950s, only oneor two generations had passed since the military conquest of the land. As RenéPélissier has clearly demonstrated, this conquest was very violent and deadly;memories of it were still very present in communities, and any chief, any indigenousperson, knew that although there might be only six cipaios, other stronger forcescould be quickly sent.39 But recruitment was not the only problem: it was necessaryalso to prohibit the indigenous from staying in the harbours or cities or on theplantations, where they would begin to become proletarianised. For that purpose,the Portuguese administration used a very efficient tool, the pagamento diferidoor 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: first, the native had to come backhome 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, localPortuguese traders demanded that this petty money should not be spent only in thebig companies’ shops; and last but not at all least, this tiny amount of money becameessential – in particular in the 1950s when the amount slowly rose – preciselybecause of the weakening of the domestic economy. Forced labour had partlysucceeded in creating its own necessity, when it moved slowly at the end of the1950s and 1960s towards seasonal migrant work: the weakened domestic economywas 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 constraintand the maintenance of the domestic economy in order to be globally profitablefor the colonial institution. This process did not integrate natives into a fullycapitalist production process and capitalist social relationships system, but it didoperate to submit them to capitalist domination. That is to say, we have here alegal expression of what Marxist anthropologists and historians conceptualised


123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839404142

165

39 René Pelissier, Les campagnes coloniales du Portugal, 1844–1941 (Paris: Pygmalion, 2004).40 Article 203, República Portuguesa, Código 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 paidunder the cost of social reproduction, which implied their regular return to the sphereof a maintained and subalternised domestic economy. We have here the secondbasic feature of the forced labour system: its very existence not as a whole but asone branch of a very authoritarian articulation of modes of production. On theideological level, it is what I have before called the ‘social racism’ of Portuguesecolonialism.

The last but not the least

On 20 May 1954, decree-law 39,666 was published, that is, a new Estatuto dosIndígenas portugueses das províncias da Guiné, de Angola e Moçambique; a newNative 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 onemetropole and colonies belonging to the same empire, but only one Portugal.Everybody was therefore directly Portuguese, which implied the existence ofdifferent personal statuses within the same Nation and political constitution.Therefore, the new 1954 Statute aimed to respond to a situation in which the numberof ‘detribalised natives’ was growing: it created, for example, the possibility ofspecial native private ownership (urban and rural) which could prevent a few ofthem from being recruited for forced labour. But it answered above all to the needto prohibit a growing number of natives from becoming ‘assimilated’, when, infact, a great number of urban Africans could have been considered as havingabandoned native habits and costumes, as speaking Portuguese fluently, and soforth. On the other hand, some Portuguese employers preferred to engage skilledblack workers, paying them as natives. But this would have representedunacceptable competition with petty white workers in the cities.44

123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839404142

Michel Cahen166

41 Pierre-Philippe Rey, Colonialisme, néo-colonialisme et transition au capitalisme (Paris: Maspéro,1971); Claude Meillassoux, Femmes, greniers et capitaux (Paris: Maspéro, 1982); Bruce Berman andJohn Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa. 1. State and Class (London, Nairobiand Athens, OH: James Currey/Heinemann/Ohio University Press, 1992); see too the retrospective, byEmmanuel Terray, of his research, ‘Dernière séance’, Cahiers d’études africaines (Paris) 50:198/199/200(2010), pp. 529–44.42 Diário do Governo (Lisbon), 1st series, no. 110, 20 May 1954, pp. 560–5.43 Constituição política da República portuguesa, actualizada de harmonia com a Lei no. 2.048 de 11de Junho de 1951 (Lisbon: Assembleia Nacional, 1952).44 On this aspect and the activity of (white) labour unions aimed at protecting white manpower, see myarticle, ‘Corporatisme et colonialisme: Approche du cas mozambicain (1933–1979)’, Cahiers d’étudesafricaines (Paris) 92 (1983), pp. 383–417, and 93 (1984), pp. 5–24.

Racism-00-p.qxd 7/2/12 11:28 Page 166

Contrary to what has sometimes been written, the 1954 Statute did not softenthe conditions of assimilation, but actually worsened them, and even endangeredthe very situation of being an assimilado:

• First, the status of indigenato or assimilation was now made strictly individualthroughout the entire Nation:45 the wife and children of an assimilado wouldno longer automatically become assimilados, as before; they could apply forthis status if they were living with the husband and father, and if they fulfilledthe second and third conditions (see below).46 Since it was necessary to be over18 years of age to apply for assimilation (paragraph A, article 56), that meantthat sons of an assimilado could be obliged to go to native missionary schoolsinstead of going to better state schools; because of the unity of the Nation, anative 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 toparticipate in an African Ethiopian, Zionist or Tocoist church) and to haveacquired ‘the instruction and habits required for the integral application of publicand private law of Portuguese citizens’ (paragraph D, article 56). Communityownership, and polygamy, including being a chief, were therefore incompatiblewith assimilation.

• Fourth, the stipulations regarding the ‘profession, trade or industry’ or ownershipof ‘goods being enough for their subsistence’ (paragraph C, article 56) remainedexactly the same as in 1926–9. Very significantly, this new Native Statute wasnot followed by a new Labour Code: the 1929 Código do Trabalho dos Indígenasremained, without any change and without any step towards authorisation of theformation of a permanent working class. With few exceptions, the only existingpermanent working class was that of assimilados and mulattos, a very tiny onesince the great majority of black assimilados and mestiços did not work asindustrial workers, but in services.

For all these reasons, I consider the 1954 Native Statute to be the last archaictype of effort by the Portuguese administration in the middle of the 1950s, as the


123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839404142

167

45 A point unique to Article 1: ‘The statute of the Portuguese native people is personal and must behonoured 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 thelegitimate 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, aslong as the requirements in Paragraphs (b) and (d) of Article 56 are met.’ Furthermore, the new codedid not contemplate or allow for the case of a native single woman, or even a separated woman, whoapplied for citizenship, or for a married woman to apply independently of her husband.47 Paragraph (b) of Article 56: ‘Falar correctamente a língua portuguesa’.

Racism-00-p.qxd 7/2/12 11:28 Page 167

economic and political crisis of colonisation approached. Actually, this new Statutenever really worked. In Mozambique, Africans were no longer even trying tobecome assimilados: the most violent period of forced labour was now disappearing(except in forced labour cotton-growing areas), and it was slowly becoming aseasonal migrant activity. In urban areas, to be an assimilado would mean more ofa problem in getting jobs, since Portuguese employers would be obliged to pay thesame as for whites and would therefore prefer to employ whites. The number ofapplications for assimilado status was strongly decreasing in the second half ofthe 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 apermanent 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 thebeginning of the armed anti-colonial liberation struggle in 1961, led Salazar toauthorise his Overseas Minister, Adriano Moreira, to take some important reformistmeasures. On 6 September 1961, decree-law 43,893 revoked the Native Statute of1954.48 The concept of indígena officially disappeared, but the same day, decree43,897 recognised ‘local habits and customs’ and integrated them globally withinPortuguese written private law.49 Legal hybridism became, in a way, official.Assimilation applications were replaced by a mere declaration, since ‘any individualmay submit to [Portuguese] written private law, by the way of a mere formality atthe registry office’, and his descendants would automatically be included in thiswritten law (article 3). Urban Africans were considered under written law (article5). Traditional chiefs could, with the approval of their council, authorise privateappropriation of land by individuals (article 8).

As there were no longer natives (indígenas), therefore, could the two separatespheres be managed: those of ‘qualified professions’ and ‘undifferentiated masses’?First, the 1929 Labour Code remained in force for one more year, being revokedin turn on 27 April 1962, when Adriano Moreira issued his Código do trabalhorural (Rural Labour Code) by way of decree 44,309.50 What is interesting is tounderstand the meaning of ‘rural’ as defined in articles 1 and 2:

123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839404142

Michel Cahen168

48 Boletim Oficial de Moçambique (Lourenço Marques), Supplement, 1st series, 14 Sept. 1962.49 Boletim Oficial de Moçambique (Lourenço Marques), Supplement, 1st series, 14 Sept. 1962.50 Diário do Governo (Lisbon), 1st series, no. 95, 27 April 1962 (Supplement); José de AlbuquerqueSousa, Código do trabalho rural do Ultramar. Edição revista, com indices alfabético e sistemático(Coimbra: Coimbra Editora, 1962).

Racism-00-p.qxd 7/2/12 11:28 Page 168

1. Manual workers without a defined profession, occupied in activities related toagricultural exploitation of land or gathering of produce, are considered ruralworkers [. . .]

2. For the implementation of the present Code [. . .] those workers whose duty isreduced to mere provision of manpower, not classified because of the nature ofthe 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 ruralworker, 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 (officialor implicit) had disappeared but the ideological ‘watertightness’ between the twospheres of social life remained intact. Therefore, article 69 could stand, that ‘forequal work will always be attributed an equal salary’, since this was within the ruralsphere. Last but not least, article 80 completely reproduced the deferred paymentsystem: 50 per cent of the earnings would be given to the worker after his returnhome. That meant that until 1974, the key institution of work paid under the socialcost of reproduction remained current. Adriano Moreira had not invented theconcept of ‘rural labour’, but had taken it from post-slavery Brazil. Anyway, thesystem no longer worked with all these details conceived by the Portuguese legalmind. During the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, Mozambique and Angolawere already very much Third World countries. But there is no doubt that theduration of forced labour and the existence of an alleviated form of it up to the endof the 1960s, with the corresponding existence of a large community of petty whitesoccupying almost all qualified jobs, were the main obstacle to the formation of anAfrican working class and elite.51

The new 1962 Labour Code was no longer a forced labour Code, but it was stilla Native Code, now called ‘rural’, with two officially different spheres of sociallife. It must be understood as a desperate attempt to combine the economicdevelopmentalism of the 1960s with the will to slow down the proletarianisationof African workers, as antagonistic to the profitability of colonial enterprise. The1962 Rural Code never worked well either: the two spheres of social life did notneed a detailed and bureaucratic Code to exist, since Angola, Mozambique, andGuinea were entering the situation of ‘normal’ Third World countries, in whichthe massive urban informal sector and plebeian social milieus were the ones AdrianoMoreira once wanted to make ‘rural’.


123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839404142

169

51 That does not mean that no working class existed, as studied by Jeanne-Marie Penvenne, AfricanWorkers and Colonial Racism: Mozambican Strategies and Struggles in Lourenço Marques, 1877–1962(Portsmouth, NH, Johannesburg and London: Heinemann/Witwatersrand University Press/JamesCurrey, 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 officially proclaimed doctrine of assimilation,even when reinforced by the capture of neo-lusotropicalism of an increasingly datedGilberto Freyre. But while Freyre’s original lusotropicalism praised the processof racial mixing as the achievement of a new civilisation, Salazarist lusotropicalismsaw it as a path to the racial and cultural whitening of African society – by the wayremaining assimilationist. But the huge contrast between ideology and reality doesnot 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 thatthe historian may analyse it in those terms. Ideology expresses the habitus of asocial milieu, of the hegemonical group within a nation: it serves this group ornation 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 inefficient process orcynical propaganda, but as the sole ideology possible and operating for a colonialcapitalism short on capital and facing, thanks to masses of petty whites, politicaldanger from abroad and foreign investment.

Codification of the two spheres of social life in Portuguese colonial labour law(capitalist or ‘civilised’ versus traditional or ‘vagrant’; ‘integral application of publicand private law of Portuguese citizenship’ versus ‘rural’) is no more than oneexpression of the existence of non-capitalist forms of capitalist domination, at theperiphery of capitalism. As Immanuel Wallerstein showed, capitalism has alwayspreferred non-capitalist forms of domination or exploitation, since it avoids payingfor social reproduction at its cost;52 and this was made possible in all the frontierareas of capitalist expansion where indigenous societies still survived. As we haveseen, the deferred payment system is one trademark of this specific economicprocess.

Portuguese colonisation was obviously a racist system and produced a highlyracialised society. We have seen that the founding texts of the colonial system arebased on the notion of race – more exactly, ‘race’ was used almost exclusively todesignate black people, while the Portuguese were a nation.53 But black colour wasnever officially mentioned for direct discriminatory purposes against individuals:

123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839404142

Michel Cahen170

52 Immanuel Wallerstein, Le capitalisme historique (Paris: La Découverte, 2002).53 This does not mean that the concept of race was never used to designate Portuguese people: forexample, the Dia da Raça (the ‘Day of the Race’) was a national day in Portugal up to 1974. But withinthe colonial legislation, race is used exclusively to name the Africans. This is understandable: the ‘normallaw’ 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), whilethe ‘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 exceptionof 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’ – whichin 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 ofindividuals, but as much by the definition of the non-capitalist sphere of social lifeof a whole people, even if petty whites and natives could live side by side in someneighbourhoods.54 In certain ways, social racism transformed native people intosomething closer to a caste than a race; a kind of ‘professional stratum’. In thatway, 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 Portuguesecolonialism, different from the ‘distant racism’ of other more capitalised forms ofcolonialism.


123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839404142

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 underthe capitalist mode of production. It is a founding feature of capitalism to need such an articulation ofmodes of production, in order to nullify the contradiction of having to sell its products to the samepersons it directly exploits.

Racism-00-p.qxd 7/2/12 11:28 Page 171

123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839404142

Racism-00-p.qxd 7/2/12 11:28 Page 172

Documents

6a. Indigenato Before Race