Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa by Catherine Higgs

Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa by Catherine Higgs

Author:Catherine Higgs [Higgs, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2012-07-25T08:27:00+00:00


Lourenco Marques, Mozambique. From Collection A2717-32, by permission of Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.

By 1898, when the city became the capital, 4,902 people called it home. For its poorer residents, it continued to be "dirty, muddled [and] chaotic." Yet by 19o4, the population had doubled again to 9,849. Another side of the city had emerged, clean and efficient, with a busy port whose wooden wharf had been replaced by one of concrete and with paved roads served by taxis and trams. As elsewhere in Portuguese Africa, foreign investors had initially funded the public projects, but by 1905, Portugal had paid off the loans and claimed full ownership of the port and the railroad. Visitors could stay at good hotels with rooms screened to keep out mosquitoes, and they could enjoy an evening stroll along the beachfront. It was this modern city that Joseph Burtt encountered when he arrived in Lourenco Marques in February 1907.3

The transformation of the city and the development of its infrastructure were intimately linked to the gold rush in South Africa, which had begun with the discovery of rich deposits on the Witwatersrand (orRand) in 1886. The surrounding city of Johannesburg emerged almost overnight to service the mines and their laborers. In i8go, fourteen thousand miners were working on the Rand in what was then the South African Republic (or Transvaal), an independent state governed by Afrikaners. Foreign interests, mainly British, controlled the gold mines. By the time Britain defeated the South African Republic in the 18991902 war and claimed the territory as the Transvaal Colony, as many as sixty thousand Africans had migrated to Johannesburg's mines from Mozambique.4

Workers had long been among Mozambique's major exports. In the midnineteenth century, they had begun traveling to the farms of Madagascar, the large island off Mozambique's east coast claimed as a colony by the French, and to the sugar plantations of British Natal in the south. By the end of the century, they were also laboring on the farms and in the gold mines of British Southern Rhodesia on Mozambique's long eastern frontier.5

Competing with foreign farms and mines for labor were Mozambique's prazos, roughly equivalent to the rotas of Sao Tome and Principe and the fazendas of Angola. The prazeros (estate managers), many of whom were AfroPortuguese, traded in gold and ivory beginning in the sixteenth century. A good part of their revenue came from taxes on resident peasant farmers, who usually paid in maize, wheat, millet, rice, and peanut oil. Repeated attempts by the Portuguese Crown to assert its authority over a massive territory that would eventually extend more than 2,800 miles along the coast from Lourenco Marques in the south to Rovuma Bay in the north-and, at points, 500 miles west into the interior-met with limited success.6

Following Britain's 18go Ultimatum, which had dispelled Portugal's vision of a transcontinental empire linking Angola in the west to Mozambique in the east, Portuguese officials set out to establish effective control of the colony.



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