CHAPTER XIII

The African Laborer

The buying and selling of labor for the purpose of property in its ultimate products began its modern phase with the African slave trade. Labor purchase has since dominated the modern economic world, and as that world now turns renewed attention towards Africa, the central theme must naturally again be the investment which white Europe and America are making in the black labor force of Africa.

The European demand for land in Africa was in effect a demand for labor; first a demand for slave labor; then for forced labor with a nominal wage; later it became a demand for wage labor with indirect compulsion by sequestration of land to such an extent that the laborer could not support himself on his own acres; with this went poll, hut and other taxation which could be met only by a cash wage system.

There followed indirect inducements to work: flattering deception on the part of recruiting agents, pressure brought to bear by chiefs, and finally the lure of new imported goods: first for ornament, then for convenience, and then for new necessities. One can trace here in miniature the exact steps by which the European laborer has been reduced to regular work through total separation from his ancient source of livelihood on the land.

The demand for labor in Africa brought out certain fundamental differences between the native and European attitudes toward work. Before the arrival of European enterprise, paid labor was practically unknown in Africa. The chief could demand certain labor as a service to the community; like contributing to his support or keeping pathways open. It was a sort of labor tax and not a burden; it lasted but a short time and the community was interested in it. It did not resemble in the least the kind of forced labor which the Europeans imported.

European legislation concerning labor is based upon the fact that the worker is practically divorced from land and capital; he must work for a living; and he wants desperately to retain his job, since the labor supply exceeds the demand. In Africa this is not yet true. The demand for labor still exceeds the supply, except in certain overdeveloped areas during the late depression. The mass of workers are still connected with tribal lands and villages, and use money wages for taxes and for luxuries rather than necessities. African laborers are directly dependent upon wages only in the Union of South Africa and in the vicinity of the mines of Northern Rhodesia and Katanga. It is not possible yet, therefore, to exploit the African laborer as thoroughly as the European laborer; yet the standard of tribal living is so low that the African is on the whole much worse off than the European and it is possible not only fatally to curtail the possibilities of tribal life, but also to monopolize natural resources so as to mortgage the economic future of millions of blacks.

Work for the primitive African was largely a source of pleasure. When it demanded effort and unpleasant effort, this was turned into a sport rather than a task. Among those advanced tribes where the organization of work demanded regularity and concentration, and the use of tools, as among the weavers of cloth and makers of hats and weapons, even then there was a much larger degree of voluntary varied and pleasurable effort for artistic satisfaction and much less of compulsion and irksomeness than among modern factory workers. The artisan could be to considerable extent an artist.

Then again the object of work in the African tribe was not individual income. The native stressed the importance of work for the welfare of the family and clan. Each person considered himself as a member of a group rather than as an individual, and in turn he relied upon the aid and guidance of that group in all his daily life. Imagine then the results of the impact of the European type of forced labor upon the African tribesman, even when it was mainly agricultural; but especially when it became labor in mines and industry.

Africa is a vast reservoir of cheap labor, which can compete with and replace to a considerable degree white labor the world over, and yield at the same time a much larger profit to capital. Common labor in Africa costs on an average twenty-five cents a day. Moreover, this labor is capable of more than ordinary toil. There has been a remarkable acquiring of skill for producing goods for export among African laborers. In British West Africa and elsewhere, cocoa-growing has developed in native hands from insignificant beginnings to one of the important industries of the world. The palm tree belt covers central Africa from Lake Tanganyika to the Atlantic Ocean and is worked by blacks; the oil is shipped to Europe and America, where it is used for soap, tin plating and in other ways. The United States imports annually over 30,000 tons of oil from Nigeria alone, and some 275,000 tons of palm kernels. Cotton is being raised in Africa in the Nile Valley, Uganda and Nigeria. Sixty-nine per cent of the coffee raised in Tanganyika is grown by the natives. All over Africa, natives are being used for skilled work in mining, on the railways and in other industries. The total number of skilled workers is still small but it is rapidly increasing.

Today this labor is not leaving Africa either by means of a slave trade or by migration; on the other hand, capital is entering Africa from Europe and America in commodities representing larger and larger sums, and this capital is being used to monopolize land and natural resources. This process can be traced in a general way, although exact figures and careful studies are not always available.

The present extraordinary situation in the Union of South Africa is woven of a dozen twisted threads, including colonization of South African land by actual white farmers, long-continued war with the native tribes, sudden and colossal industrialization through the mines, and widespread investment in mining and commerce on the part of the middle class and well-to-do English public. English wealth and comfort, therefore, has a stake in South Africa which cannot be easily disturbed. On the other hand, not only do African farmers want cheap labor, but African industry is based upon it. Along with this goes the rivalry of the poor whites and the bitter fear of the skilled white workers. The problem of building a just native policy under such circumstances is indeed baffling.

In 1824 there were 60,000 slaves and serfs in South Africa and when slavery was abolished by Great Britain in 1838 it affected nearly 40,000 Negroes and Malays. Forced labor for farming and for porterage followed, and later for building of railways.

As the South African native lost his legal right to the land, he stayed on the land of the whites as squatter or contract laborer, or retired to native reserves. Settlement on the native reserves not only compelled him usually to leave his ancestral tribal home, but also afforded him too little land for support.

The squatter, on the other hand, stuck doggedly with a certain moral justification. He was usually an African whose tribal lands had been seized and were in the legal possession of whites, but who clung to his native soil. Such natives were not in reality trespassers as recent laws have described them, but historically, or in their own belief, precisely the reverse. The white man was the trespasser, but he had the law back of him and could compel the native to work on his land or pay rent. Today in the Transvaal alone there are 300,000 squatters. They are increasingly under the power of the owner. Their share of the produce is small, often a third.

The native farm laborers may enter into contract and become regular tenants, but the labor laws reduce them practically to the position of serfs. The older contracts were traps for the workers. The newer contracts give the laborer better protection but nothing like modern freedom of contract. The cash wages paid for contract labor are small, amounting to two dollars, or two dollars and fifty cents a month, with a small food ration; less than this is paid in the Transvaal and the Free State. The working hours are from sunrise to sunset, six days in the week. The laborer usually builds his own house and has only Sunday and one or two days at Christmas as holidays. The average income of a family of three adults and five children is reported at something over fifty dollars a year. As a result of these conditions five or six thousand native contract workers desert each year.

The Native Service Contract Act of 1932 makes laborers liable to criminal prosecution if they leave. Up to eighteen years of age they can be punished by flogging. The Cape Argus called the Act a ”barbaric” piece of legislation. It allows no farmer to hire a native unless he produces a document signed by a previous employer, permitting him to leave for finding work. The native rural population of the Union of South Africa is estimated at about five and one-half million. The pass laws to control the movement of labor are especially harsh. The majority of natives must have at least four passes, consisting of a labor contract, a special pass for moving from one district to another, a night pass, and a receipt for payment of poll tax. In the Transvaal, a native may have to produce twelve different passes. Pass laws are sometimes used by the police to harass the natives and to breed criminals. Of the court convictions of Union natives, eleven per cent are under the pass laws, while forging of passes is a profitable business. Over 40,000 natives were imprisoned for violating the pass laws in 1934.

In 1867, on land owned by a Hottentot mulatto, the first diamond was discovered in South Africa near the Orange River, and later the main mines were found near Kimberley. Through this discovery, the annual world output of diamonds rose from four million dollars a year to twenty million dollars in the nineties, and ninety million dollars in the 1930s.

The whole history of capital investment in South Africa has yet to be written. Cecil Rhodes began digging diamonds in 1870 and was rich within a year. Within a decade he had consolidated the mines at Kimberley and become a member of the Cape Colony assembly. In 1884 he encouraged Warren to seize Bechuanaland and make it a British protectorate. He sensed there must be gold and other minerals further north. His agents, helped by the missionary Moffat, brother-in-law of Livingstone, secured the Rudd concession in 1888, through which Lobengula gave the right to search for minerals in Matabele-Mashonaland, in return for a thousand rifles with ammunition and 1,200 pounds sterling.

In 1889 Rhodes organized the British South Africa Company with a capital of a million shares of one pound each, three-fourths of which were privately issued to directors and supporters and the remainder held for contingencies. It was not until 1886, two years after the London convention which acknowledged the independence of the South African Dutch states, that the greatest gold field of the world was discovered in the Transvaal. The magic city of Johannesburg arose on this field, which has furnished nearly a quarter of the gold produced in the world since the fifteenth century, and still yields over half of the annual output.

There was an enormous influx of Englishmen and others into Johannesburg until the strangers outnumbered the Boers five to one. Rhodes became Prime Minister of Cape Colony in 1890. On the one hand he was seeking British monopoly of the new mines, and on the other pushing toward Central Africa, where he knew there were further mineral deposits and where he wished to consolidate British industrial dominion in South Africa with her grip on the Nile Valley.

Rhodes was now the executive director of stock companies which controlled both the diamond and the gold fields. The Matabele war was a turning point and Southern Rhodesia became the keystone of Rhodes’ Empire. In September, 1895, the price of one pound shares of the chartered company was nine pounds. In order to control the investment which England and America were making in South Africa, Rhodes took a fatal step, and through his agent, Jameson, having overthrown the Matabele in 1893, tried to seize political power in the Transvaal. In December, 1895, came the Jameson raid on Johannesburg. Momentarily the raid was a failure, but gold production in the South African mines rose from thirty-four million dollars in 1894 to eighty million in 1899. There ensued from 1899 to 1902 a bitter war between Britons and Boers for the mastery of the mineral wealth of South Africa; a war that cost 10,000 lives in the field and at least forty thousand wounded.

The world has not realized how fateful a step this was. The Rhodes imperial plan changed the face of Africa, modified the trend of civilization, and began a movement that ended in the World War. The gold and diamonds of South Africa fired the imagination of the investing world. The discovery was sudden and dynamic. Men talked of Ophir and King Solomon’s mines; of the Manifest Destiny of the white race and especially of Britain. In America the industrial and technical triumph following the Civil War and Reconstruction was at its height, breeding millionaires. In England, the middle class had a new dream of power and dominion. Leopold of Belgium was fired to begin the seizure of Central Africa. Germany suddenly realized the meaning of Africa. England and France renewed their rush for North and West Africa.

The development of South Africa and the fate of the natives there changed. Hitherto a farming community desired land and labor to help them farm; but, after all, there was land enough for white and black. Now farmers began to change into speculators and investors. They wanted land monopoly and slaves. They ruthlessly pushed the natives back and out, while the industrialists began to tap the reservoir of primitive native labor in the interior. White labor from Europe was attracted by high wages and preferred status, and the sons of white South African farmers began to join the ranks of prospectors for mineral wealth and skilled workers. To the riches of African vegetable oils and ivory were added diamonds and gold and then copper and tin, but above all power and empire. Europe prepared to divide up Asia after the Boxer troubles. Japan impatiently shook off the threat of China and toppled Russia over, as Russia was already collapsing from interior dry rot. The Madhi and Menelik started to drive Europe out of Northeast Africa, while France and England in jealous rivalry at Fashoda nearly precipitated a world war.

But a balance of power was effected because of the prospective profits of capital, under peace and compromise. The world expanded enormously in imperial industry, until in 1914 came the collapse. It was almost exactly one hundred years after England by the Treaty of Utrecht received the monopoly of the African slave trade and pushed it into enormous expansion. A century later came the decline of the West; the end of that Purple Era which so long seemed to spell the apogee of human civilization, but can only be regarded today as an uneasy incident in the ups and downs of civilization.

In South Africa, as mining and industry expanded, an increased demand for workers arose and the natives began pouring in to work the mines. The land legislation of 1913 increased the migration. The wages paid were low; the conditions were irksome, but both wages and conditions in mine work were much better than on the Boer farms.

A native urban population also arose, of servants and laborers, helpers of all sorts, auxiliary to the main mining industry. Thus began the so-called native locations. These locations were long allowed to develop haphazard. Wherever a European settlement appeared, at its door sprung up a motley native slum filled with black men and women who worked for the white men. They were bleak, treeless wastes, with discontent, sickness and crime. Usually they were separated by at least three miles from the main European town and this allowed curfew regulations and taxation upon the workers for transportation. Sixteen per cent of the total native population of South Africa, or over a million persons live in the city. Johannesburg, for instance, has 500,000 natives and 227,000 Europeans.

The bulk of native mine labor is recruited from the reserves and protectorates. The South African government has an agreement with Portuguese Mozambique for an annual supply of labor which amounted to 90,000 natives in 1932 and 80,000 in 1933. Native miners live in huge concentration camps called compounds, guarded night and day, and are seldom allowed to leave until the year’s contract is up. There are no beds and the food is poor. Flogging is not unusual. They work from 2:30 o’clock in the morning until 4:30 o’clock in the afternoon, with a cold breakfast and a warm dinner. The mines are hot and often flooded. Miners sometimes work lying on their backs or standing up to their waist in water. As the Minister of Mines said in 1926, “We cannot deny that the natives of the Witwatersrand, nearly 190,000, are really in a semi-servile condition.”

The South African Labor Party in 1911 had carried a Mines and Work Act which shut out non-Europeans from many employments on the excuse of safety and health. Bantus were thus excluded from certain skilled occupations, although the Transvaal courts later held such discrimination to be unconstitutional. In general, labor unions in South Africa excluded colored workers, although a few have been admitted in the Cape Province. Refusal was regularly made by the authorities to grant natives the right to act as traders and merchants in certain town locations, and the bargaining power of black labor was hampered by laws under which a breach of contract was a criminal offense and strikes were illegal except in the case of day laborers and weekly employees.

White workers were still dissatisfied with the conditions of work and continued to blame native competition. There was in 1913 a strike in the gold mines and a threat of a native uprising, and in 1914 a more serious general strike of whites which had to be put down by armed force. The upheaval and readjustment of the World War and the depression had profound effect in South Africa and tended to fester around the color problems, as is usual in such cases. The whole fabric of capitalism was shaken. During the War, not only were 93,000 natives used in various war capacities, including 8,000 as soldiers, but many mines, in order to reduce the cost of production, expanded the field of work for cheap black labor and gave it such skilled work as the natives were able to do. A report of 1925 attests to “the native’s almost phenomenal advance in efficiency during recent years,” and says that if the development was unhampered, the European worker would be eliminated “from the entire range of mine operation.”

The result was labor unrest: among the whites, fear of losing their jobs to cheap black labor; among the blacks, fear of always being held down to starvation wage. In 1918 the white employees at the Johannesburg Power Station struck and the city council capitulated. The native sanitary workers tried to do the same, but were punished under the criminal law. There was passive resistance in 1920 by natives in the Rand; a student strike at Lovedale College and a serious native strike at Port Elisabeth. The nearly one hundred-sixty native religious sects became centers of agitation. In 1921 the police shot down scores of one sect called Israelites.

Attempts to reduce wages in 1922 led to a strike of the white skilled workers which threw 20,000 whites and 180,000 natives out of work on the Rand. Finally, in March, the Federation of Labor was induced to call the strike off and disown “Communism.” Smuts, then Prime Minister, in return appointed a commission to investigate, and Hertzog announced that in the next election the Nationalists would work with Labor. A new frank and determined policy actively to suppress the economic and political development of the native thus appeared.

By an act of 1922 further trades were barred to natives by the Apprenticeship Act. This required that a native should have an education up to standard six, which very few natives could reach, because of their limited public schools. Since 1922, the Chamber of Mines and the white trades unions have had an agreement by which the ratio of employment is put at one white man to 10.5 natives.

This whole movement culminated in the Color Bar Act of 1926, an amendment of the Mines and Work Act. It empowered the ministry to make regulations which would exclude natives from occupations requiring special skill and thus make legal the established practice of reserving the best work for Europeans. This was one of the most extraordinary acts of a white civilized government and was in effect a public admission of the inability of white labor to compete with Negroes on equal terms. It was a surrender of the dogma of inborn Negro inferiority in learning industrial technique.

In another aspect of the question, this legislation cuts curiously athwart the Marxian dogma, for instead of class conscious labor solidarity, land monopolists and skilled industrial workers here joined with capital to exploit black labor. Thus white skilled labor in South Africa gets a larger share of the product of industry, but to compensate the owners, native labor is wretchedly under-paid; so that in a sense the higher wage of the white worker is taken from the wage of the black worker and not from the profits of capital. The democracy of the Union of South Africa became an oligarchy in which highly paid white skilled labor had no real control of wealth and income but was induced to sacrifice even unskilled white labor to the competition of the artificially depressed wage of the native—a fact which explains the poor white problem of South Africa.

In 1931, there were thirty thousand European workers and miners on the Rand; and 350,000 native miners who constituted ninety per cent of the total labor force. This number fell to 240,000 in 1933 and 270,000 in 1934. Perhaps 200,000 black miners and 15,000 white skilled laborers is the norm. Also, in addition to the miners, there were 120,000 natives in manufacturing and production, or sixty per cent of the labor force, and 40,000 natives in transport, or thirty-five per cent of the total. Thousands were in secondary industries such as clothing, food, laundry, furniture and handicraft. Practically all servants were native men.

Despite the fact that fluctuations in the general price levels in South Africa have amounted to nearly fifty per cent, native pay has stayed at practically the same rate since the war. While the white worker averages nearly $4.50 a day the colored mine worker gets a little over fifty cents, in addition to simple rations and a place in the compound. The white miner on the Rand is less skilled and does poorer work than the California miner but receives nearly twice the pay. Since the war his wages have risen about twenty per cent, not including funds for pensions and an increased number of holidays.

It has been variously estimated that since 1927 white wages have amounted to something between seven and ten times the native wage. Padmore reports that the income of the South African mining industry was 46,206,000 pounds in 1931, out of which 16,600,000 pounds were paid in wages. This was about equally divided between 23,000 white miners and 240,000 blacks. In 1934, 30,000 white miners received 11,000,000 pounds while 270,000 Africans got less than 9,000,000 pounds. In secondary industries white workers get at least twenty-five dollars a week while natives receive from five to seven dollars and fifty cents. The 20,000 natives employed on the railways get an average monthly wage of fifteen dollars and seventy-five cents.¹

Black labor has not submitted to this wage slavery without a struggle. The Industrial and Commercial Workers Union, known as the ICU, was the first organized effort on the part of native workers and it had for a while phenomenal success. It was organized in 1919 by a young native of Nyasaland, Clemens Kadalie, one of the results of missionary educational effort and an illustration of the reason that industry opposes native education. Kadalie’s organization began its efforts with a docker’s strike at Cape Town. Within a few years it had enrolled 100,000 members in the chief industrial and agricultural centers of the Cape Province. From 1924–1926 it spread into the Transvaal and the Orange Free State.

From the nature of the situation it had to become a political as well as an industrial organization, and Hertzog himself appealed to the ICU to rally the voters of the Cape behind him in his fight against Smuts in 1924. On the other hand, the farmers were alarmed at the organization, and the laws against native organization which could be evoked meant its eventual doom. Strikes on the part of natives were for the most part illegal; and agitation of almost any kind could be interpreted as sedition. The only thing that could save the ICU was white labor alliance.

This Kadalie attempted when he secured recognition by the Trades Union International at Amsterdam. He appealed then to the white Cape Federation of Laborers and the Trade Union Congress. They refused to recognize colored trades unionists, but did propose that there should be periodic consultation between the ICU and the federation. This meager concession Kadalie ought to have accepted, or better the whites should have insisted on; but Kadalie stood firmly on the principle of full recognition and the negotiations fell through.

The ICU thereupon was attacked in the courts. During one year, 1927, it is said to have paid out twenty thousand dollars for litigation. Inner troubles ensued, natural among untrained workers, not used to this kind of co-operation. The result was that the ICU was disrupted; there now exist three native industrial organizations: the ICU (now led by an English trade unionist), a separate but similar organization in Natal, and a communist organization.

There is some social uplift work among native workers. The mortality of native miners has been greatly reduced and accident compensation has been increased. Up until 1919 the native victim of an accident received only about one-tenth as much as the white worker. Today he receives about one-half. In 1931, out of 243,000 workers, 2,250 died of disease and six hundred from injuries received at work. Native workers, when they are no longer able to work, are sent back to the reserves. The law provides compensation for white miners and for the dependents of those killed. Up to 1929, eleven million pounds compensation had been paid Europeans. Blacks are not taken care of in the two tuberculosis sanitaria where white miners may go.

Sanitary conditions in the locations became so bad that effort is now being made to correct them. The church and white women have undertaken social work in the locations, including hospitals, clinics and social settlements. Up to the end of 1932 Johannesburg had expended 1,100,000 pounds sterling, Cape Town 300,000 pounds sterling and Durban 170,000 pounds sterling, to improve native housing. Bad conditions are still reported in many cities.

Black labor in the union may be divided into a higher group of forty thousand professional men, teachers and clerks; 360,000 miners, 475,000 farm laborers, and 165,000 common laborers and artisans. These blacks and colored people are to a large degree integrated into the economic system of the whites. About one-third of the total native labor belongs to this system. Of these, ninety per cent are unskilled laborers but they are fast acquiring skill. Despite opposition, natives have learned how to build houses, make implements, spin and weave cloth, work metals, form social and political institutions and teach school.

Thus labor, assisted by the bounty of nature and capital goods raised and made by other laborers, produced minerals as follows in South Africa up until 1935: gold to the value of 2,817 million pounds sterling; diamonds to the value of six hundred thirty-seven million pounds sterling and a total of mineral production including gold, diamonds, coal, copper and tin to a value of 3,733 million pounds sterling. The South African mines and allied industries employed in 1935, 360,000 natives and colored persons, forty-three thousand Europeans and eight thousand Asiatics.

In the four South African protectorates, it is not easy at first sight to sense the economic situation. Politically these protectorates are under direct British control, but economically they are bound hand and foot to the economy of the Union of South Africa. They control most of their own land, but the land is poor and eroded by bad methods of agriculture and cattle raising. This makes it impossible for the tribes to raise enough food to support themselves and pay their taxes. South Africa, through customs duties and other regulations, dominates their import and export trade; she exploits their labor in the mines and leaves them no method by which they can get adequate revenue or modern industrial guidance. They are being starved into union with South Africa on the one hand, while the imperial government is being threatened to make it hasten their surrender. It has been openly stated by South Africans that one reason for annexing the protectorates is that this will assist in the solution of the poor white problem.

Bechuanaland is engaged in cattle raising and dairying on the part of the natives and some gold and silver mining by the whites. It has an area of 275,000 square miles and a native population of 260,000 in four chief tribes. There are about a thousand European inhabitants. Wheat, corn, beans and live stock are exported to the amount of 150,000 pounds sterling a year. At least seven thousand natives seek work outside the protectorate annually.

Swaziland, with 7,000 square miles and 150,000 natives, raises tobacco, corn, cotton, vegetables and live stock. Over 10,000 young men each year work in the Rand mines and on the Natal farms. Basutoland has 10,000 square miles and over 550,000 natives. It produces barley, oats, vegetables, corn, sorghum and wheat. There is sheep breeding and seven million pounds of wool were exported in 1935. Basutoland has not nearly enough land for the workers, and in 1932 about 58,000 Basutos, or fifty-five per cent of the adult males, worked away from home; 26,000 in the mines; 12,000 on farms; 19,000 in domestic service. Barotseland, the native reserve in Northern Rhodesia, has 350,000 people on 60,000 square miles and sends annually from 40,000 to 80,000 laborers out of the reserve to find work.

South Africa has also two other race and cultural problems in addition to the native problem; one has to do with 800,000 so-called “colored” people. They are descendants of the Boers and the Hottentots in the earlier days, and of inter-mixtures between these and the Malays. They form a class of people with considerable education and culture. They sent two corps to East Africa to help the Allies during the World War, and have made good citizens and skilled workers. They are however subject to caste restrictions almost as severe as those visited upon the natives. They vote under property and literary restrictions in Cape Colony but can at present elect only a restricted number of white members to the provincial and Union legislatures, no matter what the number of their voters may be.

There are also in South Africa, East Indians who began to be imported from India to South Africa about 1860 as indentured laborers to work on the sugar and tea plantations of Natal. Some 150,000 were originally imported. They were actively recruited and assured that no disability or limitation of legal rights would ever be imposed on them by reason of race, color, or religion. Importation was stopped in 1866, started again in 1874 and was abolished in 1911. There are now 170,000 resident Indians, and thousands have been repatriated. There are capitalists among them, especially in Natal, but the majority of them are poor artisans and laborers with a middle class of retail traders and professional men.

Eventually the Indians were subjected to all sorts of discrimination. There was open conflict in 1910 on the legality of Indian marriages and then economic strife over the question of buying land and trading. They had proved more successful than the whites in exploiting the natives. An act prohibiting them from owning land in Natal, the Transvaal and other places and restricting their right to trade was enacted.

Gandhi organized the Indians for agitation, initiating in South Africa his technique of “satyagraha.” He brought forward a five point program, demanding a repeal of the racial stigma on Asiatics; the right of Indians born in the Cape to return there; the abolition of special taxes, etc. He was really claiming the rights of British citizens for Indians. He carried out his passive resistance and marched his protesting Indians into the Transvaal. His arrest was followed by strikes. He gained some of his demands in 1914, and in 1926 a settlement was arranged between South Africa and India. The Indians were to be encouraged to return home, the South African government paying their passage and giving each of them a bonus of one hundred dollars. Indians born in South Africa do not usually leave and are victimized under the Color Bar Act and other laws.

The white labor group in South Africa fears the competition of the Negro worker and tries to ward it off by trade union organization and government action. This has not only forced down the wage and social condition of the native, but also of an increasing proportion of whites. The gulf between the rich and the poor in the white group is becoming deeper. The older theory was that the white people were to represent an upper caste, rich, experienced, trained and powerful. They were to dominate black labor by their ability as well as by their capital and political power. But, in fact, where they appeared in any numbers, some of them fell from their high estate or never reached it.

The problem came insistently to the attention of the Union of South Africa as early as 1888, and in 1927 the Carnegie Report estimated that 300,000 of the white population were “very poor.” Thus when a population of two million white people tried to a large extent to live on the land and exploit the labor of seven million Negroes, one of the results was that at least fifteen per cent of the exploiting group fell into the exploited class.

There is a tendency in South Africa to look upon the poor whites as a burden to society, since they cannot be so effectively exploited as a source of income as can the natives. As one white South African said, “The poor whites are like children in a large family who are looked upon as a burden, while the natives are like the cattle who are regarded as assets.” The poor whites form a dangerous slum population, with indolence, dishonesty and prostitution; yet practically all of them have the vote and in many constituencies hold the balance of power. These poor whites look to the state for help and say that they must not be allowed to sink to the level of “the Hottentot.” Economic competition between them and the native increases. In the northwest Transvaal there are sections where Dutch whites are wage laborers for native employers; while, on the other hand, the white farm laborer is no longer a social equal with the white landholder.

For several reasons the British government has been less disposed to yield to the exploitation of black labor in Kenya than in South Africa. First of all, there were until lately no such large investments in Kenya on the part of the English public as in the South African mines, and consequently less propaganda to make Great Britain think that exploitation in Kenya was absolutely necessary to English well-being. Then too, experience in the development of the West African native as a peasant proprietor, and the ensuing profitableness of his commercial exploitation made South African methods seem less necessary. Finally the first English labor government came to power just as the Kenya dispute was hottest.

There has gone on between England and Kenya an acrimonious debate over the native laborer, which at one time threatened armed rebellion. From the beginning the white settlers were determined to have forced labor and when the Colonial Office tried to lay down restrictive rules, the settlers forced their withdrawal. They sought the resignation of one governor and declared that it was unfair to invite settlers to the country, give them land and then not supply them with cheap labor.

By alienation of land, restriction of their crops, inaccessability to the markets, increased taxation and the direct pressure of the government, the natives have been forced into European employ rather than attracted to it. In 1912, 12,000 were employed and natives testified that through pressure on the chiefs they were compelled to hire out to the white farmers and were further forced by native taxation.

As Norman Leys reminds us, one of the great boons promised the natives was Pax Britannica—cessation from the losses of inter-tribal war. Yet during the World War, from Kenya alone, fourteen thousand natives were enrolled as fighters and one hundred and fifty thousand as porters and stevedores. Of these black men, 1,743 were killed and 44,875 died of disease—a total loss of 46,618, which is greater than any loss through tribal wars for generations. The relatives of most of these dead men have never been traced and there was in 1924 a balance of pay and wages due them unclaimed, amounting to $775,000.

In 1919 the work of recovery from the war began in Kenya and there was naturally a shortage of labor. The governor declared that the natives must be compelled to work and by exercising compulsion through chiefs ninety thousand were in white employment by 1920. The resident white bishops, representing the missionaries, were alarmed at this attitude and issued in 1919 an astonishing but characteristic memorandum. They said, “We do not believe that there is the least intention on either side [government and the settlers] of exploiting natives for private ends ... we believe that ideally all labor should be voluntary. We recognize that at present this is impossible and that some form of pressure must be exerted [our italics] if adequate supply of labor necessary for the development of the country is to be secured.”

Low wages and high taxes increased the black labor force to one hundred eighty-five thousand in 1927, but under the depression it fell to one hundred thirty-two thousand in 1929 and rose to one hundred fifty thousand in 1935. In 1934 native laborers in Kenya were paid from two to two and a half dollars a month. In 1929 the average peasant family living in a native reserve had an income between seventeen dollars and fifty cents and twenty-two dollars and fifty cents a year; while the wage earner received about twenty-two dollars and fifty cents, except in the case of skilled laborers and miners. Labor tenancy under contract is the chief form of labor. Contracts may be made for a period up to three years and must involve not less than one hundred and eighty days’ work for wages each year. In 1933 over three thousand natives were punished for breach of contract under the Masters and Servants Ordinance. The Kavirondo Native Association pointed out that ten thousand natives had been turned off their land and forced to make labor contracts for periods of six months at two dollars and fifty cents a month.

The produce on native farms is restricted. Natives formerly were not allowed to grow either tea or coffee and until recently there was no effort to help them in marketing their produce, as in Uganda and Tanganyika. “A new marketing scheme was recently introduced which gave the native producer protection, ensures fairer prices, and by a system of inspection bettered the quality of native produce.”² The produce raised by the native goes through many hands before he gets his share, so that of the five hundred thousand pounds sterling which his produce is worth annually, only about two hundred thousand pounds actually reach him, because of four to six European and Indian middlemen. The produce of native farms was valued at $2,730,000 in 1924, but that same year $4,380,000 was collected in native taxes. Of this $1,250,000 came from customs and the rest from the hut and poll taxes.

The squatters law is more drastic than in South Africa. In Kenya squatters must do six months’ contract labor and this is often increased. A labor registration ordinance has been enacted which makes the laborer carry a wallet with his fingerprints and labor record. Failure to have the certificate is a criminal offense. Trade union organization and collective bargaining are strictly prohibited by law. There is no social legislation such as unemployment benefits or old age pensions; no workmeri s compensation act nor minimum standards in housing.

Lately big business is invading Kenya. The largest mining claims are held by the Tanganyika Concessions, Ltd., the Kenya Developments, Ltd., and French and American capitalists. The Imperial Chemical Industry, Ltd., a British trust with a capital of over four million pounds sterling, has a concession to exploit soda at Lake Magadi, where there is a deposit of two hundred million tons.

There are also in Kenya thirty thousand Indians. They came to build the Uganda railway and as soldiers during the war. They work as clerks, artisans and traders; and in the native reserves the trade is nearly all in their hands. Effort has been made to exclude them entirely from the Colony and has been successful in excluding them by administrative policy from the land reserved for the whites, in restricting their commercial rights, in segregating them in residence and partially disfranchising them by putting them on a separate election roll. They have fought continuously for full rights as English subjects.

Southern Rhodesia forms a variation of the South Africa-Kenya labor pattern. The aim of Southern Rhodesia, as expressed by Prime Minister Huggins, is to make Southern Rhodesia a “white mari s country,” despite the fact that today fifty-five thousand whites face 1,300,000 blacks. The whites are engaged in agriculture, stock culture and mining and are depending on African labor. Labor is supplied from Nyasaland, Northern Rhodesia and Mozambique, as well as from Southern Rhodesia. Today there is enough land for whites and blacks and the available labor force from Southern Rhodesia itself and neighboring territory gives an ample supply of low-priced labor. High taxation and limited land have not yet been necessary in Southern Rhodesia to secure labor. When the natives grow in education and compete in farm produce, as mining and industry increase and more white workers appear, the South African pattern will be reproduced.

In 1932, sixty-five per cent of the native population lived on the reserves and from one hundred and fifty to two hundred natives annually were purchasing land in the undetermined areas. Village settlements are planned near the urban centers for natives in employment and three have been provided for. A large number of natives have remained upon the land of white landlords as squatters. The number of such tenants was limited in 1908 to forty on a single farm. The customary rent charge is five dollars a year. The Native Affairs Commission of 1910 advocated the substitution of labor for cash rent and prohibition of natives living outside the reserves, unless they were employed by Europeans for a definite period.

Native agricultural laborers receive three dollars and seventy-five cents per month of thirty working days, but during the depression this fell to two dollars and fifty cents. In 1935, 127,000 natives were in the employ of white farmers and 77,000 in the mines. Over 120,000 of these workers were from outside Southern Rhodesia. The average monthly wage in the mines is about three dollars to seven dollars and fifty cents a month for unskilled and semi-skilled labor. Skilled workers such as machinists in the mines get from eleven to fifteen dollars per month.

The investment of capital on which the Rhodesias rest is illustrated by the fact that in 1923, when the British South Africa Company withdrew from the administration of Rhodesia, it received 3,750,000 pounds sterling from the Imperial Government and at the same time retained ownership in lands amounting to 10,195,000 acres, and mining rights yielding an annual income of over 100,000 pounds sterling. The assets of the Company were 7,065,000 pounds at that time. In 1933 the Company sold its mining rights to Southern Rhodesia for 2,000,000 pounds. Its total profits in 1934 were 328,797 pounds.³

Some natives employed in government service are messengers, interpreters, railway guards, jailers, police, agricultural and industrial demonstrators. They average twenty-five dollars per month. All supervisory positions and skilled jobs are reserved for whites. After a strike, the government and the Chamber of Mines have promised white miners a minimum of five dollars a day for an eight-hour day. White organized labor is hostile to black labor and allows no African to receive the pay of a skilled worker even if he does the work.

Unionization among colored workers is forbidden. Labor legislation such as workmen’s compensation and hours does not apply to Africans. The Masters and Servants Act and the pass system regulate native labor. All natives must obtain a pass before they can enter Southern Rhodesia and are allowed thirty days to find work. After that they are liable to arrest as vagrants. If a native quits a job without consent he is liable to a fine of fifty dollars or two years’ imprisonment or both.

It will be seen that Southern Rhodesia proposes to arrange for a class of governing capitalists and planters and a Negro proletariat. It is trying to avoid the rise of a poor white problem and does not expect the black worker to gain any considerable voice in government.

The copper region of Africa lies in the southern part of the Belgian Congo and in Northern Rhodesia. The fields are said to contain over a third of the world’s known resources. For a thousand years natives have mined small quantities of copper in what is now Northern Rhodesia and the present mines were first pointed out to Europeans by native chiefs. Gold mines were worked with black labor in 1906 but use of Negro miners on a large scale began in the Belgian Congo in 1911.

Northern Rhodesia is one of the lowest cost copper-producing areas in the world and is able to deliver in Europe copper at a cost forty or fifty per cent lower than is possible for mines in the United States. It is said that the mines of Northern Rhodesia could produce a quarter million tons a year for a hundred years.

The effect of South African diamonds and gold upon the world is fairly well-known. But in the case of copper we have an astonishing illustration of the economic interdependence of the world, including Africa, and of the curious linking of social and racial problems. From a world production of a quarter of a million tons in 1880, the age of electricity brought, in 1929, nearly two million tons of copper. This increase has been accompanied by manipulation of price in the world market, by war and depression, by tariff restrictions and cartels. For the first part of the nineteenth century, the British Empire produced a large percentage of the world’s copper. Just before the World War, the United States was producing fifty-six per cent. The production fell during the war, but afterward consumption increased rapidly and speculation sent the price to five hundred dollars a ton in 1929. Then came the depression and mines began to close.

Next to the abundance of the metal itself, the great commercial advantage of the African copper region lies in the presence of an inexhaustible cheap labor force. When the Rhodesian mines first became active, the process of recruiting labor reached to centers three hundred to six hundred miles distant. There was the usual bribery of chiefs and misrepresentation; and mission work, agriculture and education were interfered with over wide stretches of African village life. In some districts sixty per cent of the able-bodied men were away from home during the construction boom in the copper belt. The wages offered, though low, were so much higher than the workers had ever been given, that very soon recruiting was unnecessary and a stream of volunteers presented themselves at the mines. When the demand fell, they were sent back to their villages; so that the mining companies had all the advantages of a vast labor reserve which they could discharge at will without responsibility.

There were in Northern Rhodesia in 1930–31, one and one-fourth million natives and about fourteen thousand whites. The wage-earning natives formed then something over 100,000, and of these thirty-eight thousand found work outside of the territory on farms and in mines. Perhaps in no other area of the world has there been so sudden an economic transformation or such an intensive application of scientific knowledge to a region so large and so primitive as in the territories on the watershed between the Congo and Zambesi Rivers. The richest products of European knowledge and American enterprise are harnessed together for exploiting the vast resources of Africa so as to enhance the wealth of the world for the benefit of the white investor, with scant reference to native welfare.

Thus in Northern Rhodesia during the last twenty-five years an essentially urban economic organization has been imposed upon a native rural economy and has brought with it all the vicissitudes of modern industrial systems. For instance, during the boom, Northern Rhodesia was producing copper, zinc, lead and vanadium. In January, 1927, there were about 8,500 natives employed, not counting servants and town employees. By December, 1927, the number rose to nearly 11,000; it reached 16,000 by 1929 and by September, 1931, it reached a peak of nearly 32,000. Labor was in constant demand. Then came the catastrophic fall in the price of copper. Six of the mines were closed and the demand for labor dropped. Throughout 1931 there came a gradual decrease to 21,000 in May; 16,000 in October; and 13,000 in December. The decrease went on until 1933, when in July, only 7,500 Negro miners were at work.⁴

There was among the natives great astonishment, disappointment and suffering. Northern Rhodesia was following the fate of countries which depend on a single product and suffer with all the fluctuations of a world market. Under favorable trade conditions, perhaps 12,000 natives will eventually be required to operate the mines, with some eight thousand additional servants, shop men and laborers near the mines, making twenty thousand in all.

The work of the native Rhodesian miners follows the tendency of so much modern labor. Only a few highly skilled workers are needed. The actual production of copper is very largely an automatic machine process. The ore is dug by manual labor, but for raising of the ore and taking it to the smelter, the only labor needed is to oil the machinery and stop blockage. In smelting, converting and casting only a few workers are needed.

Unskilled native labor in the Rhodesian mines formerly received from three dollars and sixty cents to seven dollars a month. The average cash wage for adult employees in the mines is about twenty-five cents a day, rising to forty-two cents for a skilled carpenter. Bonuses up to eight cents a day are sometimes paid for satisfactory work. In addition to this the laborers get food, rent and medical care which can be estimated at perhaps twenty-two cents a day, a total wage of forty-seven to fifty cents. Since the depression the average level of wages has been lowered. On the other hand, in the last seven years price levels have risen in Northern Rhodesia as much as two hundred per cent; living standards among the natives also have risen. Missions have to pay more for salaries and food and to charge the pupils more.

It was estimated, in 1931, that the 110,000 natives at work inside and outside the colony earned $4,500,000; of this the native was paid $900,000 in cash; $1,250,000 in goods which they bought; and $250,000 in taxes which they paid. Of $500,000 earned by natives at one mine, $280,000 was spent on trade goods; $60,000 spent at the beer halls run by the proprietors of the mine; $14,000 for taxes and licenses; $95,000 was sent or taken home, and the rest spent for food and miscellaneous items. At one time, between ten and fifteen per cent of the natives had savings accounts of about thirty dollars when they left employment. A few had accounts of over two hundred and fifty dollars.

The capital used in the mining sections is almost wholly imported: of the thirty-six and one-half million dollars which Northern Rhodesia annually pays out, eighty-two per cent are payments for borrowings. Of the goods imported, thirteen million is in consumption goods for Europeans; two million dollars consumption goods for natives, and one hundred and fifty million dollars, goods for industry and construction.

A most significant fact is, that this work which the natives do has objectives which have no direct relation to their life. They use little copper. There is no local brass industry; and there is no connection of the mines with other work carried on by local craftsmen. There is almost no internal cycle for the satisfaction of wants. Manufactured articles which are brought in for native consumption amount to nearly a million dollars’ worth annually. Native spinning has disappeared. Picks, hoes, pots, and pans might be manufactured but native blacksmiths have been hampered and discouraged by the government.

The system is having a disintegrating effect upon the native village economy. The new industrial individualism comes into contrast with the communalism of the tribe. The village, the huts, the native agriculture change little. There are some new goods: cotton is worn, candles are used, blankets, knives, axes, mirrors are desired, and in addition gramophones, sewing machines and bicycles. Sugar, tea, rice, cigarettes and canned goods are in demand; but the money to buy these things must come almost entirely from work in industry and not from anything that the village can furnish. Even the possibility of subsistence agriculture is reduced, because of the absence of men from their homes and farms.

In 1931, for instance, it is estimated that one-tenth of the total population, or one hundred and fifty thousand men, were absent from the native villages over long periods, leaving the old men, the children and the women in the isolated village. Such a long absence is a strain upon the fidelity of husband and wife, leading especially in the mines to temporary unions, prostitution and disease.

Since there is no competition from Indian traders, the natives have ventured into trade to some extent. In 1931 there were seventy-two native stores and six hundred and seventeen peddlers; but these traders are discriminated against at many of the mine centers. Their credit is limited and the banks furnish only a six-cent piece as the smallest unit of currency.

A black labor movement is evident in Northern Rhodesia. All the native miners in the copper industry of Northern Rhodesia went out on general strike in May, 1935, because of a proposed increase in taxes without wage increase. Armed clashes occurred between the blacks and troops at the Roan Antelope mines, where the soldiers opened fire and killed over ten and wounded several others. For days the entire mining district of Ndola, Luanshya and Nkana were disturbed and there was a sympathetic strike by native domestic servants.

All the white towns have segregated areas for Negroes, usually across a railway or a stream. The natives usually outnumber the whites and all live in the native location, except some of the servants. About thirty per cent of the residents in the locations are married and live in quarters separate from the single men.

The problem of competition between white and colored labor has already risen, since Northern Rhodesia had to import skilled labor for work in the mines and especially for work on the railways. On the railways the English trade union rules prevail and these prevent natives from being employed. Also government policy requires that on all government building, fifty per cent of all skilled labor shall be white. Already many of the whites in Northern Rhodesia are demanding complete political control of the black population.

Nyasaland was one of the main areas of David Livingstone’s activities between 1866 and his death in 1873. It early became, therefore, a mecca for missionaries and had a larger proportion of mission schools and missionary effort than most African colonies. The result is that today more Negroes with sufficient training to act as teachers and clerks are found in Nyasaland than in neighboring territories. The natives of Nyasaland are not in large reserves but have areas scattered throughout the territory. On these there were fifty-three thousand native tobacco growers and thirteen thousand, two hundred and sixty cotton growers in 1932. They raised sixty per cent of the cotton crop; but in disposing of their produce they were largely at the mercy of European and Asiatic traders. On the other hand, there are thousands of landless natives who are on the plantations of the whites. They are liable for a cash rent of one to two dollars, but usually this is demanded in labor; otherwise the tenants are evicted. The coffee plantations use this sort of forced labor largely.

The Nyasaland Planters Association is opposed to black peasant proprietors In 1931 an English commission advocated the setting aside of six million acre for native occupation but this recommendation was not followed. In 1933 a new, lands’ bill was introduced investing native territory in the governor as trustee This proposal so far has not been followed. An ordinance of 1928 put some safe-guards around the tenants, requiring cash wages and short labor contracts Maximum rents were fixed and evictions limited. Notwithstanding this, the sixty thousand wage earners working as farm hands, servants and mechanics have insufficient security.

Lately the English government has called attention to the fact that the hut and poll tax is forcing the native out of the colony to find work, and keeping him from agriculture. The continued migration of able-bodied natives, since the depression, has become a considerable problem. The Nyasaland Committee on Emigrant Labor (1935) put the total of Nyasaland natives employed out of the territory as one hundred twenty thousand. Forced labor is used for transport, road and railway building, public buildings, sanitary work, telephone lines. The crisis was severe in 1932.

The wages paid are low. Common labor receives from one dollar and a half to a dollar seventy-five a month; skilled laborers between five and ten dollars a month. Clerical and government employees, of whom there are a considerable number, receive from twelve-fifty to twenty-five dollars a month.

Possibly Leopold of Belgium in his earlier years had some philanthropic plans for the Belgian Congo. Certainly he encouraged scientific study of the tribes, which resulted in the beginning of an encyclopedia of Belgian Negro culture; he collected a marvelous museum at Tervueren, although even here the private profit motive was emphasized. Certainly, after 1891, Leopold let loose in the Congo “the most ruthless system of exploitation which even Africa has known—

“One, Leopold claimed to exercise his absolute powers of Sovereign to tax his subjects. Since he could not collect taxes in money, he argued that he would tax them either in kind or labor.

“Two, he also claimed the right to demand from his native subjects the obligation of military service.

“Three, he claimed that the land was the property of the State and therefore of himself, the Sovereign of the State.

“Four, it was by exercising these ‘rights’ and claims through decrees, that he established his water-tight system of monopoly and exploitation.”⁵

By decrees in 1891 and 1892 a state monopoly of all ivory and rubber was created. The natives were forbidden to either collect or sell these products. They were on the other hand taxed in kind and in labor, so that the produce could be collected and brought to the coast for transport and sale in Europe. Under the decree of December 5,1892, the officers of administration were ordered to take any steps necessary for assuring the exploitation of the Crown land thus sequestered. This meant that the natives were forced to collect ivory and rubber and the collecting officers were paid a percentage upon the amount gathered. Forced labor and slavery were thus established. This forced labor was used not only in the interests of the king himself, but was delegated to private corporations. In addition to this, every year the governor-general was ordered to raise a stated number of troops and this military tax was distributed by the governor among his subordinates. Such native troops were subjected to military service for twelve years.

Thus humanity and commerce did not replace the Arab slave traders. Rather, European greed and serfdom were substituted. The land was confiscated by the state and farmed out to private corporations. The wilder cannibal tribes were formed into a militia to prey on the industrious, who were taxed with specific amounts of ivory and rubber, and scourged and mutilated if they failed to pay. Harris declares that King Leopold’s regime meant the death of twelve million natives.

“Europe was staggered at the Leopoldian atrocities, and they were terrible indeed; but what we, who were behind the scenes, felt most keenly was the fact that the real catastrophe in the Congo was desolation and murder in the larger sense. The invasion of family life, the ruthless destruction of every social barrier, the shattering of every tribal law, the introduction of criminal practices which struck the chiefs of the people dumb with horror—in a word, a veritable avalanche of filth and immorality overwhelmed the Congo tribes.”⁶

So notorious did the exploitation and misrule become that Leopold was forced to take measures toward reform, and finally in 1908 the Free State became a Belgian colony. The state took over the colony in 1909, reluctantly and in the face of widespread world criticism. To some extent Belgium has faced the realities of the situation. She has realized that the demands of European enterprise are apt to clash not only with the well-being but even the survival of the natives and that at least to that extent it must be curtailed. This is the clear explanation of the status of the Congo. Belgium has bettered the condition of the native and made the situation more hopeful than in the Union of South Africa, the Rhodesias or Kenya. Some attempt has been made to develop native life. The average wage at the mines is low, but higher than in Rhodesia or South Africa. It amounts to about seventy-five cents a day—thirty-three cents in cash and forty-five cents in health, housing, and rations.

The mines have faced the problem which we have seen in Northern Rhodesia and South Africa, of demoralized village life by large withdrawals of adult workers. Belgium has therefore set about a systematic curbing of labor recruiting with gradual and partial detribalization. Natives are transplanted in limited numbers to new government and corporation villages, where the plan is to make them spend their lives under different conditions, but with guidance and welfare work. The mines have undertaken to some extent to educate their children, safeguard the families and care for them in old age.

The depression was severe. There was the same great drop in working forces at Katanga as in Rhodesia: the 17,000 workers of 1929 shrinking to less than four thousand in 1932; but there was greater effort in Katanga to maintain a dependable resident labor force. There were in the Congo in 1935, 377,531 laborers, divided as follows: natives employed at a long distance from home 119,442; at a short distance 126,177; and near home 131,932. In the mandate of Ruanda-Urundi there were 7,470 permanent and 26,344 non-permanent employees.

Moreover, the Congo has no problem of competition between white and colored laborers, because the white persons who come in are mainly officials, merchants and agents. There are less than twenty-thousand whites in the country. Some of these are technicians and skilled laborers, but the proportion of these is small. Orde Browne says, “The train from the south reaches the Belgian border, with a staff that is European in all the important posts; there the traveler changes to a train which is managed almost entirely by Africans.” The natives are locomotive-engineers in charge of machines and tools; they repair the railway coaches and they do all the skilled work in the mines. This has a double result. Not only does the Belgian investor get skilled work cheap and thus make up in profit for what he may lose by social uplift work, but he also is avoiding the menace and demands of white labor with European affiliations. On the other hand, he inspires the natives of other parts of Africa with ambition to be allowed the same work and with the knowledge that it is only their color which keeps them from the opportunity; and this threatens the preferred status of resident white artisans.

Uganda, while near Kenya, departs from the South Africa-Kenya labor pattern and approaches the West African labor situation. There were in Uganda, in 1931, three and one-half million Africans, fourteen thousand Asiatics and two thousand Europeans. Whites are chiefly government officials, with merchants and bankers in the towns, and about three hundred planters. The East Indians are artisans, government clerks and small traders. There are thirty large Indian landlords holding fourteen thousand acres and an Indian has the largest sugar factory.

The Africans are engaged in farming and stock raising. Only forty-seven thousand are in the service of whites as farm laborers, porters, and dockers; at cotton-picking time there are large numbers of temporary workers; and there are a few in the civil service, in British and native administration. In general the labor laws in Uganda are as follows: 1. the pass law; 2. reduced taxes for those who work for the whites; 3. heavy taxes to drive native traders out of business; 4. forced labor for single men, two months every year.

The Chambers of Commerce, Planters Association, Cotton Spinners Association and Indian Commercial Association have united to bring pressure upon the government for recruiting native wage labor. The result is a Masters and Servants Ordinance which makes leaving an employer a criminal offense with arrest without warrant. In 1934 the average wage in Uganda for unskilled labor was two dollars and fifty cents to three dollars and seventy-five cents a month, without food. The average native peasant farmer has an income between one hundred and one hundred twenty-five dollars a year. Mining has begun and the Tanganyika Concessions, Ltd., one of the largest mining syndicates in East Africa, has penetrated Uganda. During 1934 there were a hundred mining claims granted to whites. Natives exported 316,000 bales of cotton.

In studying the condition of the laborers in French Africa one must differentiate between French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa. In French West Africa there is an organized territory with some cities like Dakar and Saint Louis, where modern conditions of work and some self-government are manifest; throughout the colony there is recognition of land ownership by natives and individual farming. Labor legislation was introduced in 1926 and contracts provided for, with limited hours of work, minimum wage, compensation for accident and death. There is medical attendance, and saving is encouraged. Arbitration councils are provided to settle labor disputes. There are no regular labor inspectors but on the whole the labor conditions are not bad. On the other hand, military service is required and sometimes the soldiers are used for public work. There is general conscription for public work to build roads and railways, and the government still furnishes labor for transport and on some large farms. The amount of forced labor, however, is not large and seems to be decreasing.

On the other hand, in French Equatorial Africa one has a vast territory thinly populated, not well organized, where exploitation has in cases run wild and been as bad as anything in the Belgian Congo or elsewhere. There is no military conscription in Equatorial Africa, but railway construction and the attempt to collect wild produce have caused the use of forced labor on a large scale. The construction of the Congo Ocean Railway involved a mass of laborers, among whom there was one contingent which had a mortality of six hundred per thousand. A head tax to be paid in products of the soil was used as a means of forcing labor in 1900. It was charged that the tax was five or ten times as high as it ought to have been, because of the prices arbitrarily put on products. In 1904, armed guards were forcing the natives to gather rubber; some were shot; one thousand and five hundred were massacred in one area, which resulted in a successful revolt. Other workers revolted in 1928 and Chinese coolies were introduced but were not retained. Between 1922 and 1932, ninety-three thousand men were used in forced labor with the result that some eighty thousand natives migrated to the English Gold Coast searching for better conditions. In 1930, compulsory labor for private enterprise was legally forbidden and in 1933 further restrictions on forced labor were issued.

In all French Africa the profit motive, while curbed by certain general restrictions and especially by the beginnings of popular education, is nevertheless present and dominant. French Africa is in the main organized for profit. Great corporations, great banks, great shipping agencies, great railroads, all unite in well-known and stereotyped ways to overthrow native industry, to make economic development in French West Africa mechanical and methodical, and, above all, profitable. The great excesses of the past in land-grabbing and serfdom are guarded against; but the retail profiteer and the wholesale price-manipulator are here in their glory. They are underbidding and displacing the native merchants by methods which the natives cannot meet. The native, to live, must raise what the world makes him raise and raise it at the world’s price; and white world business too determines the native’s share of the profit.

We now turn to British West Africa, where instead of the tenant farmer, we have predominantly the peasant proprietor; the industrial worker and trader, while a considerable and growing factor, is a small and not dominant one in the economic situation.

Nigeria is as large as the British Isles and has some nineteen million inhabitants. This colony perpetuates the old town culture of certain parts of Africa, with perhaps a hundred towns having from ten thousand to four hundred thousand inhabitants. The northern provinces carry on the village and rural life. In the whole of Nigeria, in 1935, there were only 200,000 of the natives in European employ, or about two per cent. The mass of the people are peasant proprietors. The total export trade of Nigeria has varied from seventeen million pounds sterling in 1928 to nine and one-half million pounds sterling in 1932; the imports from sixteen and one-half to seven and one-fourth million during the same time. The chief products are palm oil, palm kernels, cotton, cocoa, mahogany, tin, gold, groundnuts and skins.

British economic penetration and control consist in practical monopoly of transportation of all goods by ship to Europe; of various monopolies such as the British Cotton Growers’ Association, which does all the ginning; and returns on invested capital for mining and transport facilities. Great trading companies have divided the entire country into commercial zones. The agents of various companies have organized Chambers of Commerce and other methods of fixing profits and regulating trade. Local Chambers of Commerce are connected with the Liverpool Chamber, through a special West African section. The Liverpool Chamber is controlled by British bankers, merchants, and manufacturers. These chambers have long been represented directly in the governing councils of the various colonies.

The depression and manipulation of the market by British merchants have caused a good deal of dissatisfaction and misunderstanding. The spread between prices in Liverpool and in Nigeria is sometimes very large. It is charged that in 1932, for instance, palm oil fetched ten pounds a ton in Nigeria and eighteen to twenty pounds in London.

Although the plantation system has not been introduced into West Africa, exploitation by monopoly and invested capital is universal: first of all the state gives every facility to these companies. The state has built railways in Nigeria at a cost of about twenty-two million pounds. This has involved the use of forced labor. Harbors have been built at an expense of eight million pounds sterling and the money loaned to colonial governments must be spent in British-made machinery and material.

The gold fields are owned by the government. In 1934, seventy thousand mine workers were employed in Nigeria with some protective labor legislation. The average wage is twenty-five cents a day for underground work and eighteen cents a day for work on the surface. The workers furnish their own food. All skilled and supervisory work is done by whites.

In Southern Nigeria and Lagos there are sixty thousand wage earners employed on railways, public works and forests. There are a large number of clerks and civil servants. Skilled mechanics are trained in government shops as engineers, carpenters, masons, and painters. These employees receive from two hundred fifty dollars to one thousand dollars a year. In Benin and the Cameroons there are lumber workers under six months’ contract cutting mahogany, with low wages and hard work.

The Gold Coast is the most advanced of the West Coast colonies and the richest. There are three and one-half million natives in the colony and its associated territories, and only five per cent of the adult males are in European employ. In 1934 these employees included twenty-four thousand miners and ten thousand general employees.

The Gold Coast is the largest producer of cocoa in the world. With Nigeria it raises sixty per cent of the world’s total production. The story of this development is of interest. A native Gold Coast laborer, William Tetteh Quarshie, was working in Spanish Fernando Po, where cocoa had been introduced from Mexico. When he returned to the Gold Coast in 1876 he brought some beans and planted them. He sold seeds to other farmers and by and by the whole population around began planting cocoa. The first shipments abroad amounted to eighty pounds in 1891, five hundred and thirty-six tons in 1900 and in 1911 to forty thousand tons. The expansion of the cocoa industry was rapid from 1906 to 1915, but was curtailed during the war and then accelerated by high prices from 1919 to 1920. Then came low prices and fluctuation. Prices went as high as eighty-pounds per ton in 1920 but in 1934 it was fifteen pounds per ton.

The export rose from fifty-three thousand tons in 1914 to sixty-six thousand tons in 1918. In 1926, two hundred thirty thousand tons valued at eight million pounds sterling were exported to Europe and America. Prices since have fallen so that the 1931 crop of two hundred forty-four thousand tons was valued at only five and one-half million pounds; in 1935, two hundred eighty-five thousand tons were raised. There are a few white plantations, but the bulk of the cocoa is raised by over fifty thousand black peasants on 950,000 acres.

The cocoa crop is handled by European commercial houses who maintain local stores. Naturally the crop is subject to world markets and to combinations on the part of buyers. A local buying pool fixes the price and this pool is linked with the local banks and shipping companies and the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce. While the price paid is thus kept low in order to make the maximum profit for the exporters, on the other hand the natives pay high prices for manufactures in stores owned by trading companies. Cheap Japanese goods are kept out by high tariff and English goods must be bought. An export duty on cocoa which, of course, favors the English importers, furnishes about sixty per cent of the colonial income.

Back of all this has gone an interesting play of forces. It is charged, for instance, in Portugal that the boycott of Portuguese cocoa at Principe and São Thomé some years ago was deliberately designed by some interests to transfer the cocoa industry to British territory and start a large plantation system. Negro peasant enterprise frustrated this. These black West African growers have tried to get better banking facilities on the West Coast and lately with government aid are beginning to protect themselves through co-operative organization.

The government has done much excellent work in helping the natives improve the quality of the cocoa and maintain proper standards; there are experiment stations and a system of inspection. But there are seven hundred million cocoa trees on the West Coast and a tree may bear a hundred years. It is therefore very difficult to adjust the production of cocoa to fluctuations in demands. In 1925 the natives of the Gold Coast sold twenty-seven and one-half million dollars worth of cocoa and imported twenty-five million dollars worth of English goods. Before the depression, the Gold Coast Negroes were prosperous, with ten thousand bank accounts in 1922. Today the Colony is gradually recovering.

The Gold Coast is rich in minerals, including gold, diamonds and manganese. Gold has been produced since the fifteenth century, and in 1934 there were seven mines producing, twenty-four under development, and fifteen prospecting. The Ashanti Company, a British organization, was started in 1896, and holds a concession over one hundred square miles on a ninety-nine year lease. They declared a dividend of one hundred per cent in 1930 and one hundred thirty per cent in 1933, besides distributing free shares. Mining companies in some cases have to obtain their concessions from the native stools and the money paid belongs to the councils of the native states.

The chief employers of wage labor are the government departments, including railways and public works; and the mining, shipping and trading industries. The Negroes not only do the labor of the mines but occupy many skilled positions there as well as on the railways and in public works. Between twenty and thirty thousand are employed in the mines and about five hundred whites. Laborers get from eighteen to twenty-eight cents a day and skilled laborers from fifty to seventy-five cents. At present these wages are decreasing.

The Gold Coast has two thousand five hundred carpenters and builders, one thousand tailors, one thousand five hundred bricklayers and masons, eight hundred chauffeurs and mechanics, three hundred painters, one thousand goldsmiths and five thousand boatmen and fishermen. There are a number of cocoa brokers and also about six thousand traders and peddlers, mostly women, and eight thousand porters and carriers. There are twelve thousand Africans employed as clerks, teachers and clergymen; fifty practice law and eleven practice medicine.

In the northern territories there is forced labor for road building, in accordance with the new ordinance enacted in 1935. It requires six days’ labor per quarter. The Gold Coast is the only African colony where the natives pay neither poll nor hut tax, but taxation in other forms has reached such a height that two delegations about 1934 went to London to protest, but without success. The colonial government discriminates openly between its white and colored employees: it pays black government physicians, with education identical with that of the whites, salaries and pensions sixteen and two-thirds per cent less.

On the Gold Coast and elsewhere in British West Africa, Syrians are prominent in commerce and money-lending and present a new problem.

Sierra Leone has twenty-six thousand square miles and one and one-half million natives. The chief work is agriculture, rice being raised for food, and more palm kernels being exported than from any other British territory except Nigeria. In 1922 the imperial government enacted the palm oil ordinance which gives the governor the right to grant concessions to the extent of five thousand acres for developing palm oil plantations. Lever Brothers have obtained such concessions. In 1934 the export of kernels rose to 68,000 tons valued at 112,000 pounds. The government derives most of its revenue by an export tax on palm oil and kernels.

The mines employ ten thousand native workers; three thousand are employed on railways and public construction. There are about six thousand unskilled workers in Freetown. Unskilled labor gets eighteen to twenty-five cents a day and skilled labor from fifty to seventy-five cents. The Krus are employed as stevedores, sailors and firemen on West Coast ships and are noted for efficient labor. They are paid from eighteen to twenty-five cents a day.

Gambia is the most unfortunately situated of the West African colonies for industry. Groundnuts are raised, but little food. There is a very small labor market, except for a few artisans. It is said that a Gambia peasant may make thirty-seven dollars a year but this does not near pay his expenses. Recently a debt of thirty thousand pounds sterling owed by the farmers to the state was canceled after agitation by the natives.

The labor movement in West Africa began in Sierra Leone. Usually trade unions were not allowed, and there was forced labor in the protectorate and household slavery was legal as late as 1927. In the colony of Sierra Leone, the Railway Meri s Union was at one time the largest union on the African continent. It conducted a strike in 1917 and another in 1926. After six weeks’ struggle, the latter strike was stopped by the armed force of the state. Thirty-sever employees, some of whom had worked for twenty years, were thrown out of employment and many others taken back at reduced pay.

There was a general strike of workers in Gambia in 1929, started by sailors whose wages had been reduced. It lasted sixty-two days but was finally settled by government pressure. Labor in Nigeria has comparatively little chance for organization. Public meetings are not permitted, except with special permission of the commissioner of peace. In 1929, thirty thousand women in one palm oil district struck on account of prices offered. Eighty of them are said to have been killed by machine guns and a large number wounded. Natives were taxed to reimburse the company.

Liberia, the only independent Negro state in Africa, has between one million and one and one-half million inhabitants, of whom sixty thousand live in modern fashion and the rest under the tribal regime. Recently the labor problems of Liberia have attracted world attention. United States capital turned to Liberia to off-set British monopoly of rubber, of which the United States was using nearly two-thirds of all produced. The Firestone Rubber Company obtained a concession from Liberia for the production of rubber with the right to select a million acres of land at the nominal rental of six cents an acre; and the right to labor supplied by the Liberian government through the native chiefs. Competition, however, for Liberian labor, between the Firestone Company and the Spanish interests at Fernando Po, led to a considerable amount of forced labor in which various Liberian officials were implicated.

The exposing of this system finally led to an appeal of Liberia to the League of Nations for assistance in reorganizing her government and labor economy. This, on the insistence of the Firestone Company, was offered only on terms that meant the virtual surrender of Liberian autonomy, and the offer was refused by Liberia. The United States withdrew recognition and for a time matters were critical. Finally, Liberia made terms with Firestone and the United States and still retained her sovereignty. The difficulty still remains that the Firestone contract is unfair, but is backed by the American government. Without this financial interest of America in Liberia the pressure of Great Britain and France would doubtless overwhelm her.

Today Liberia has an area of forty-three thousand square miles, and about three hundred and fifty miles of coastline. The revenue amounted in 1913 to $530,000 and in 1936 to $780,000. The imports in 1912 were $1,667,857 and the exports $1,199,152 and in 1936 $1,670,000 and $1,300,000. The exports consisted chiefly of rubber, palm oil and kernels, coffee, piassava fiber, ivory and arnotto.

For a long time the Portuguese colonies were used for the private enterprise of commercial organizations. Angola has forty thousand Europeans and mulattoes and three million natives on about a half million square miles. Mozambique on 300,000 square miles has four million natives and 35,000 mulattoes and Europeans. In Mozambique two chartered companies have the right to tax natives and dispose of their labor. For a long time labor conditions in these colonies were among the worst on the continent, involving slavery and a slave trade. The reason was that the administration of the government in the colonies has been really in the hands of English and other foreign investors or of Portuguese investors who were working solely for profit. The Mozambique Company, for instance, has a charter granting it sovereign rights for fifty years from 1891. The government has granted great estates and been foremost in providing forced labor for them.

In the case of the Mandates a study of labor conditions leads back to German Africa. The Germans in their colonies introduced modern and efficient sanitation, being the first to combat sleeping-sickness. They trained the natives in industrial skills and provided food and shelter. On the other hand, they were harsh in discipline, ruthless in sweeping away tribal culture, and low in sex morals.

In 1884 two German warships seized Togoland and the Cameroons. It was agreed that the natives should retain their lands, but the Germans repudiated the treaty and gave all the highlands to white settlers and joint stock companies and instituted forced labor. They used flogging and torture. The Cameroons fell to the allied forces in 1916. In Togoland, on account of the absence of highlands, the Germans did not settle as in the Cameroons, and peasant production was carried on; but there was much flogging and torture and sexual outrages. The members of the Bremen senate charged that while the white population of Togoland was only 254, there were 240 mulatto children. Togoland fell to the allies in 1914 and was divided between France and England.

Dittman, social democratic leader in the Reichstag, declared that in German Southwest Africa flogging and judicial execution of natives were widespread. In the small colonies of the Cameroons and Togoland, there were in a single year, 1910, over ten thousand convictions of natives to death, flogging, imprisonment, and fines. In Tanganyika there were 2,783 floggings in one year, not counting those of an unofficial character. The instrument used—a rhinocerous hide whip—often caused severe illness, and in many cases, death. In 1914, nearly seven thousand natives were executed, flogged, and imprisoned in a year. Dittman quoted Professor Schillings, a German expert on African affairs, as asserting that “200,000 natives in all had been done to death in German colonies,”⁷

When Tanganyika became an English mandate, the English had an opportunity to show a contrasting administration. They brought Cameron, a governor trained in West Africa, to the task, and the interests of native labor received especial attention. The labor policy in Tanganyika under Cameron was to develop native labor on its own land so that natives could choose between village production and wage labor. The cultivation of coffee, rice, cotton, corn, and other grains, tobacco and groundnuts has been encouraged, as well as trade in live stock. With regard to wage labor the rule has been laid down that there must be no compulsion and that employers must attract labor by wages and condition of work.

The direct taxation was only half of the rate in Kenya and the money was spent with some regard to the wishes of the natives. Cameron refused to adopt a policy which would force the natives to work either by increasing the tax or by other methods of coercion. Beyond that he established a labor department in 1926 which not only supervised labor laws but tried to plan and direct a labor development. Labor camps were established for migratory workers and the moving of labor long distances was discouraged. Diet and sanitation were looked into. The whole matter of recruiting of labor and contracts was given exhaustive study. Desertion by contract laborers since 1928 has no longer been an offense which the police can deal with without a specific charge by the employer. There is no pass law, but a system of registration.

Unfortunately the new governor succeeding Cameron in 1930 abolished the labor department for reasons of economy. In 1935 over 218,000 natives were employed by the government and private employers, including 110,000 farm laborers, fifty thousand porters, carriers and common laborers, eighteen thousand servants, ten thousand on railways and public works and five thousand in mining. Over twenty thousand migrated to Southern Rhodesia and the Congo to work in the copper mines during 1932.

The average wage in 1932 for natives was four to five dollars a month for thirty working days. Skilled workers got twelve and one-half to nineteen dollars per month. Whites are employed in all administrative and supervisory positions. Skilled and semi-skilled labor is done by East Indians and natives. There is much child labor, especially on the coffee plantations. Natives living far away have to walk hundreds of miles in search of jobs. In 1932, more than ten thousand natives were used as porters in military and public works.

Mining has begun but is still in its infancy in Tanganyika. Gold, tin and salt are increasing in output and employ about five thousand natives. They received three dollars seventy-five cents a month in 1933–34. In Tanganyika and East African colonies there is much usury. It is carried on by East Indians who advance loans to natives to pay taxes. In 1932 the natives contributed 150,129 pounds sterling in taxes but expenditures amounted to 162,000 pounds sterling. Loans are made by usurers to meet current expenses and planting. The crop then is taken over in the settlement of debt and the native borrows again for planting. A Native Credit Ordinance has been passed to regulate these transactions.

In the Cameroons, divided as mandates between the British and French, the German government had granted some 300,000 acres to whites for plantations and furnished them with forced labor. This has been in part stopped and the British plantations employ sixteen thousand natives while the French have fifty-three thousand workers. German property has been bought back by Germans since the war and Germans are in control of it. The British in Tanganyika and the French in Togoland and the French Cameroons did not at first allow the Germans to buy back their property. The ten thousand agricultural laborers in the British Cameroons receive twelve cents a day. Women and children get four to six cents a day.

In German Southwest Africa, natives were formerly distributed in labor battalions among the farmers and were sold with the farms; women were frequently misused. Stock raising was the principal occupation of the natives, but the best grazing lands were seized by the whites. When the colony became a mandate of the Union of South Africa, the 328,000 natives were treated by the 21,000 whites in the main like the natives of the Union, home legislation being applied without any attempt at modification. Diamond mining has declined sharply since 1931, but coffee, tin, and vanadium are produced. Native miners decreased from 7,750 in 1930 to 2,000 in 1932.

Skilled occupations are reserved for whites. Labor is recruited in the reserves. Native miners get five to twelve and one-half dollars a month; farm hands two and one-half dollars a month; servants two and one-half to five dollars a month. White miners get five dollars a day.

Some general considerations may conclude this survey of African labor. The development of African labor from hunting to cattle raising and to agriculture can still be traced in vague outline. The Hottentots emerged recently from the hunting stage. Along the whole of East Africa from the Nile region through the Congo Basin to the lower Zambezi and South Africa there is still cattle breeding. The cattle are not held for their meat and milk value, but as an evidence of wealth. They are seldom slaughtered if healthy. In the Union of South Africa, the native population owns forty-nine per cent of the cattle; but because they have so little land, the pastures are overstocked, cattle badly nourished and the soil eroded. The protectorate of Bechuanaland, with a native population of 155,000, has 426,000 head of cattle; while Kenya, with a native population of three million, has five million goats and three million sheep.

The beginning of manufacturing in Africa is shown by such work as reducing ore to ingots, preparing cotton and sisal for the market, and crushing sugar cane; and also in the processing of certain native materials like coffee, the vegetable oils and cocoa. This will increase in amount and value as the demand becomes larger for export material of more carefully selected character and in better condition for use. Indeed there is no reason why a considerable amount of primary preparation of goods for ultimate manufacture should not soon be done in Africa.

In addition to this there is some factory labor in South Africa. In these establishments 10,000 whites, 6,000 colored and natives and 500 Asiatics are working.

The main economic activity of Africa is today agriculture, including the collection of natural produce and mining. Both these bring the natives into economic contact with Europeans and cause inevitable changes in African communities. Sometimes the contact leads to chaos by the breaking down of old institutions, either with nothing to replace them, or with European institutions, that cannot function well under the circumstances. Economic individualism under this impact increases in a land where the economic unit was formerly the communalism of the village and the tribes. The older co-operative economic unit decreases in size; the families tend to become independent groups instead of units of a clan; and the members of the family, individuals instead of parts of a communal unit. Social prestige begins to depend upon a man’ s wealth rather than upon his generosity.

In partial compensation for this there is rising in Africa some new attempt at co-operative enterprise. The co-operative principle has special significance to African life, in making the adjustment between the inroads of individualism and industry, and the communalism of the tribe. One writer says: “The Co-operative Movement is perhaps the most potentially fruitful single development for real cultural expansion that has been started among the Native people of South Africa up to the present time. The moral sanctions implicit in the co-operative principles are natural to the Native mind, which has hitherto known no essential cleavage between the spiritual and the material world. Every major action of the Native had its spiritual significance. Co-operation is a discipline but one like in kind, if developing in application and in degree, to that of the Native’s tribal past.”⁸

Co-operative societies have been established in French West Africa beginning in 1910. Arrangements have been made for them to be organized in each colony. They deal with sickness and insurance, and also provide loans. There are at present 8,500,000 members and the dues are collected as tax by the government. These societies have built wells and grain magazines and have loaned seed, plows, and trucks. The societies have been successful in Senegal where there were fifteen such societies in 1926 with over a million members and a net capital of ten million francs. There is a savings bank at Dakar with branches in the postal service throughout the colony. This bank has forty branches with four thousand depositors and total deposits of two million francs. There are numerous co-operative units in schools.

On the British Gold Coast, co-operative societies have also been successful. A co-operative ordinance was passed in 1921. There was at first suspicion, indifference, and opposition, but the expansion was rapid. In five years, four hundred societies were formed with nine thousand members and a capital of forty thousand dollars. Four thousand tons of cocoa are marketed by these societies annually. The producers of other crops are also trying co-operation and have five joint marketing associations. The movement of the coast has spread more rapidly in five years than it did in India in ten years. The Gold Coast societies encourage savings, loans and marketing. Both Europeans and African experts in co-operation are being trained and hired and the co-operative societies are marketing high purity cocoa which sells at a higher price. Nevertheless, they control at present only two percent of the total exports. There are thirty-seven Negro co-operative organizations in South Africa and more being organized. Tanganyika has the Native Co-operative Union with 24,000 members. Nigeria has one hundred co-operative cocoa marketing associations. In the British mandate of the Cameroons are ninety-three co-operative cocoa societies, and there are others in French Togoland and the Cameroons.

Contact with Europe has tended to increase the capacity of Africa to consume European goods. The African laborer is drawn into this new competition, but is hindered because of his small buying power based on low wages. On the other hand, even this buying demand is replacing home-made African utensils and clothing with European trade-made goods. Indigenous arts and crafts are disappearing. The native no longer works in iron or weaves clothing. Artistic talent is smothered by cheap and often ugly goods and even by cast-off clothes. New dances are driving out the dramatic native dances. New foods are replacing the old. There is much undernourishment, due in part to the two scourges of Africa: malaria and the tsetse fly. The fly makes milk, meat and animal fats scarce, so that the native food consists of vegetable products with some fish, insects and vermin. Fruit, eggs and chicken are little eaten.

The labor legislation was designed first of all to control labor and was drawn up almost solely in the interest of the employer. The mining development led to the annoying pass laws and the labor codes tended to push the native into the criminal court, especially through the contract laws. This legislation is being gradually improved. The duration of contracts is being decreased and the breaking of a contract is not so often regarded in law as a crime. The International Labor Organization has been working to secure some general agreement with regard to contracts and wages and has made some progress.

There is a good deal of migration of labor between colonies. Uganda gets cotton pickers from the Congo. The Belgian railways in the Congo have been built by Portuguese native labor. British West Africa gets laborers from French territory. Italian Somaliland draws from the Sudan and there is thus constant movement of large numbers over international borders. The African is traveling and observing and learning about conditions all over Africa, and commenting upon them. There is little legislation covering this inter-colonial supply of labor. The Union of South Africa has made arrangement with Portuguese Africa at various times and the Belgian Congo has had understandings with Angola. These understandings, however, nearly all relate to the number of laborers and not to their status.

Buell estimates in 1926 that ten per cent of the African workers outside the Union of South Africa and British West Africa were in white employ and a part of the international proletariat. The proportion varied from two per cent in Uganda to fifty per cent in East Africa. The proportion employed during the last decade decreased during the depression and then increased. There are today in black Africa about four million native laborers in white employ. The capital investment which Europe and America have made in African land and labor is not readily ascertainable. Two statements concerning mining may be made: the total mining investment south of the Sahara has been estimated at $1,300,000,000. In the diamond mines of South Africa $100,000,000 was invested between 1886 and 1934 and paid dividends amounting to $400,000,000.

The central economic fact however is that in Africa today hundreds of thousands of laborers are working for wages as low as five dollars a month or twenty-five cents a day up to an average of ten dollars a month and seventyfive cents a day and at tasks for which civilized countries are paying five or ten times as much. Yet white labor does not recognize black labor as part of the labor problem.