In the Belgian Congo, Forminière was able to attract African laborers to its diamond mines using alluring incentives, consistent with those outlined above, but it also relied on coercion, or at least significant pressure, to complement this voluntary workforce. Forminière commenced operations in 1912, five years after the discovery of the first diamond in the south central Kasai region. Granted ample land and exclusive access to the diamond-bearing soils by the colonial state, Forminière was well poised to exploit this bountiful area. Initially unwilling or unable to pay competitive wages, the company instead sold goods, including clothes and shoes, to its employees at subsidized prices, and offered attractive housing. Forminière was consequently able to grow its workforce from several hundred African employees to roughly seven thousand in 1919. The company was also involved, though, if only indirectly, in coercive methods to secure a portion of its African staff. Forminière owned roughly 40 percent of the notorious Bourse du Travail du Kasai, an entity that, following its establishment in 1921, combed the countryside aggressively seeking recruits. In three short years, this agency helped Forminière double its workforce, from ten to twenty thousand, making it the Congo’s largest employer. Moreover, in 1928, the colonial state granted Forminière its request for exclusive access to African labor in the Tshikapa area of the Kasai, thereby denying local residents a choice of employers. As this freedom to choose disappeared, corporate incentive and generosity were among the first casualties.
African Traditional Authorities as Industry Brokers
Much as African headmen in South Africa did following the Kimberley discoveries, traditional authorities played important roles elsewhere on the continent in helping mining companies staff their operations. Stripped of much of their authority by the colonial overlords, indigenous chiefs cooperated with the new European masters primarily to attempt to retain a portion of their former social and political privileges. To this end, they often offered up or encouraged young male subjects to fulfill labor contracts on the mines. Only in the Gold Coast and, to a lesser extent, in Sierra Leone did these traditional leaders assume a more authoritative role. In these two settings, British colonial officials permitted indigenous rulers to retain varying degrees of control of the mineral rights associated with the lands that fell within their political domains.
In most other colonial contexts, African traditional rulers simply served as cogs in the various colonial recruiting schemes, attempting to retain what little power they still possessed. In South West Africa, for example, African headmen were essentially on the state’s payroll. In exchange for maintaining order and ensuring that male subjects were made available to the various state recruitment agencies, they drew a modest salary. In practice, the South African regime, which oversaw affairs in the neighboring territory, after it had become a League of Nations “mandate” following World War I, strove to “increase the wants” of these headmen. According to this design, these traditional authorities would then pressure their subjects into becoming migrant workers, with the headmen demanding a portion of workers’ wages in the form of “presents.” Consequently, ethnic Ovambo chiefs, who presided over a large area in northern Namibia from which the mandate’s diamond companies derived significant portions of their workforces, were deeply invested in the migrant labor system. In 1929, for example, in order to promote labor migration, the government of South West Africa instituted a five shilling tax on all adult men in Ovamboland, a portion of which went to indigenous leaders to ensure their ongoing collaboration. It’s small wonder then, that by 1955, these local headmen had taken it upon themselves to double this tax! The government also introduced the Tribal Trust Funds in Ovamboland in the 1920s to help regional chiefs improve their communities. This pool of money played a major part in these indigenous leaders’ enthusiastic involvement in labor recruitment, since it was largely generated by fees levied on migrant mine workers’ incomes.
Some chiefs were even more self-serving. For example, during the 1920s, an Ovambo headman named King Ipumbu demanded that each laborer returning from the diamond fields provide him with clothes, knives, or £1 in currency. At one point, he even required that recruits surrender half of their wages to fund his purchase of an automobile. In another case, from 1938, Chief Martin Elifas Kathikua sent a letter to his subjects employed on the diamond mines who were concerned about a newly implemented policy of X-raying workers due to be repatriated to Ovamboland. The missive (below) underscores just how invested in the system of migrant labor African headmen often were, and also their willingness to adopt the pejorative language used by white settlers in Africa: the chief’s subjects were “boys” who should not be “cheeky.”
I . . . want to say to you that I hear that you have been very cheeky to the masters who are in charge of the work and that you have also been in gaol. . . . I am tired of all this nonsense of all you people. I am tired of all the bad things I hear about you. You and other boys like you spoil my name. . . . This nonsense that you people speak about the machine is all lies. You know that it is lies. You pretend to be frightened and in this way you frighten one another. . . . You will carry on with this nonsense until there is no more place for you people to earn money. If there is anything to be afraid of I will tell you about it or the Government will tell you about it. . . . Where are you going to find money to buy things for your families when you come back from work. Are you a chief now . . . or how is it that you have become so clever that you know all about the machine. You know nothing about it. You have got to do your work and listen to what you are told. That is all I say to you.[71]
It should come as no surprise that the Ovambo headmen, who benefited so handsomely from the recruitment and migration system, never seriously opposed it. They did, however, attempt to minimize the local disruption it caused by limiting the absence of their subjects to periods when the cycle of subsistence activities required the least amount of manpower and, when possible, to restrict laborers’ time on the mines to six months. They also encouraged recruits to depart in groups and to remain together throughout their employment so as to maintain a sense of discipline and ethnic cohesion. So, although these traditional authorities undoubtedly benefited from the migrant labor system, some also took a genuine interest in their subjects’ well-being.
In Angola, traditional leaders, or sobas, played a similar role in the coercive recruitment scheme in place in that colony. When African police, or cipaios, arrived in villages, the headmen were responsible for furnishing the requested number of recruits. In response, many sobas implemented a type of rotational system to maximize rest periods for workers who had most recently served, offering up instead subjects who had never served or those who were sufficiently rested from previous stints. However, sobas ultimately deferred to the cipaios’ authority, aware that they risked corporal punishment, arrest, or even servitude on the mines if they didn’t follow orders. In order to maintain sobas’ compliance, Diamang periodically rewarded these headmen with small gifts, including cash, alcohol, seeds, cloth, and surplus Portuguese military uniforms. In 1922, for example, the diamond enterprise was offering small sums of money to sobas for each wife who accompanied and remained with her contracted husband on the mines. Diamang also honored cooperative sobas with portraits hung in its company museum, though corporate officials could also remove these images as a means of shaming headmen who failed to provide adequate numbers of laborers. In this sense, the museum served as a type of “Headman Hall of Fame,” except this shrine featured both inductions and removals. Nothing was permanent.
Following the creation of the Bourse du Travail du Kasai in the neighboring Belgian Congo, village chiefs played similar roles to Angola’s sobas in helping populate Forminière’s mines. Headmen who initially refused the demands of the Bourse recruiters were offered a commission in exchange for supplying recruits, or were simply sanctioned. These financial enticements, coupled with the threat of punishment, convinced most regional chiefs to comply. Moreover, because Africans could engage
in casual labor, coming and going according to local agricultural cycles, and could also bring family members to Forminière’s mines, traditional authorities were reluctant to try to hinder their subjects’ pursuit of these attractive employment opportunities.
The Gold Coast constituted the exception to these scenarios. In this setting, mining companies were as beholden to indigenous rulers as they were to the state, because the British colonial authorities permitted African chiefs to retain the mineral rights associated with their traditional lands. In Akwatia, the colony’s richest diamondiferous area, this policy enabled headmen to rent access to the highest bidders. In compliance with this practice, African Selection Trust Ltd. (AST), one of the first mining companies to be incorporated in the colony following the discovery of diamonds in 1919, took out its first lease in 1922. The enterprise agreed to pay the local chief, or “stool,” £1,300 in “consideration money,” a mining rent of £500 per annum and 5 percent of net profits. AST even granted the local chief, Ofori Atta, a seat on its board of directors.
Because the Gold Coast chiefs were well aware of the valuable endowments they controlled, they initially took a measured, patient approach to negotiations with mining companies, knowing that a payoff would eventually come. In many ways, their desire to attract foreign mining capital paralleled the motivations and efforts of the colonial states. Moreover, just as colonial governments displayed little regard for indigenous subjects’ welfare, very little of the money that these chiefs, or “stools,” received flowed down to local residents, including the mine workers themselves. For example, after a visit to Akwatia in 1929, Governor Alexander Slater commented that it “is one of the most squalid towns in the Gold Coast, there being no sign that one penny of the (mining) rents and royalties has been spent on its improvement.”[72]In 1933, the new governor, Shenton Thomas, echoed Slater’s statements, declaring that “Akwatia and Asamankese [an adjacent area] are squalid and lacking in improvements and amenities which are to be found in many places of their size enjoying but a fraction of their revenues. Most of the land which is not actually required by the inhabitants themselves has been disposed of, and today the people are left, not only with nothing to show for this huge expenditure [on litigation] of stool funds, but with a debt of several thousand pounds. . . . The division has been brought to the verge of ruin.”[73]It is difficult to imagine how these assessments can be reconciled with the claim that appeared at the outset of this chapter that cast Akwatia as “the Bournville of the Gold Coast.” Indeed, for the most part, only the lawyers, whom the stools were continuously forced to hire, truly profited from this otherwise ruinous cycle of litigation, debt, and further land alienation.
In nearby Sierra Leone, traditional authorities played a less significant role than they did in the Gold Coast, though they were still more formally involved in the development of the industry in that colony than were headmen elsewhere on the continent. Unlike in the Gold Coast, the British Crown had opted to retain control of mineral rights in Sierra Leone, thereby precluding local ethnic Kono headmen from renting access to foreign mining companies. British officials stereotyped Kono as an “economically backward, remote region infected by sleeping sickness and malaria” and stated that “the Konos had no conception of mining rights.” Beyond this unflattering assessment, timing also played an important role in the development of local policy: in the midst of the global Depression, British colonial officials were eager to secure any investment that promised to raise revenue and provide employment.
Traditional authorities in Sierra Leone did, however, manage to receive compensatory funds for the use of lands over which they claimed control—though not from the state. In a gesture of unanticipated goodwill, Sierra Leone Selection Trust (SLST), the company that enjoyed exclusive mining rights in Sierra Leone following its formation in 1934, agreed to pay surface rents to the chiefs. In 1937, for example, these payments amounted to a total of £242 (roughly $20,800 today), a figure that, though somewhat small, was substantially greater than any alternative use value of the land. Corporate compensation was also to be awarded to chiefs for any damage to buildings, trees, crops, or sacred sites that occurred during mining operations. Meanwhile, in 1932, the state had begun to contribute, as well, creating the Protectorate Mining Benefit Trust Fund, into which all mining rents were paid “for the exclusive benefit of the natives.” However, these funds were redistributed and applied throughout Sierra Leone, rather than solely within the diamond-bearing regions. Only in the 1950s, in response to ethnic Konos’ complaints regarding this practice, did additional funds from the trust start flowing directly to the mining zones “for the benefit of Kono people, with special reference to the local population . . . of the mines.”
The Labor Process within the Broader Labor Environment
Over time, the dozens of active diamond-mining companies in operation during the colonial period recruited—forcibly or otherwise—millions of African employees. The labor process and structures that workers on these mines encountered differed depending on whether the diamond deposits were alluvial, underground, embedded in coastal sands, or even offshore. Individual employers also shaped these environments according to the particular working conditions they offered, including the degree of mechanization. Most of the deposits beyond South Africa’s great kimberlite pipes were not located deep underground, and, therefore, diamond mining was neither as expensive nor as dangerous as other types of mineral excavation, including gold mining. But these settings still featured long, often punishing, workdays. Moreover, for most male laborers, family members quickly became only distant memories, as very few employers permitted women or children onto their mines. Such were the challenges that diamond-mining companies created for their African labor forces during the colonial period.
The Labor Process
Labor conditions were dictated primarily by the depth of the diamond deposits but also by a mining company’s commitment—or lack thereof—to mechanization. For the most part, underground mining was limited to South Africa, with most operations elsewhere excavating alluvial deposits. In South West Africa (Namibia), however, most diamonds were located in coastal desert zones. In order to access the submerged stones, the labor process entailed both removing massive quantities of sand and digging down into the continental shelf, outward from the beaches into the Atlantic Ocean. As you can imagine, the technology and expertise required to render this undertaking profitable were both considerable. Over time, mining operations of all types mechanized to varying degrees, yet they never dispensed with manual laborers. In fact, the employment of Africans on the continent’s diamond mines typically grew over the course of the colonial period. Workers generally benefited from the introduction of machinery, which relieved them of some of the most difficult tasks in the mining process. A handful of employees were also trained as machine or heavy equipment operators or technicians. However, these types of professional advancement opportunities were highly limited during the colonial period. Moreover, the wages of blacks, in general, continued to lag far behind the salaries of their white counterparts, who maintained a virtual monopoly on the managerial and engineering ranks.
Mechanization and Alluvial Deposits
Owing to the superficial nature of alluvial deposits, they are the easiest to excavate. These concentrations are typically located in the bottom of stream, creek or river beds, or in adjacent banks and hills. Before accessing these stones, however, three fundamental tasks need to be completed: the diversion of the water flow; the drainage of any remaining water; and, finally, the removal of the newly exposed, non-diamond-bearing layer of earth, unkindly known in the industry as “overburden.” During the colonial era, payable deposits typically featured overburden depths of less than 150 feet, but were, at times, as shallow as a single foot. Next, the underlying diamondiferous soil, or “ore,” is removed. The excavation of these two layers constituted the most demanding tasks in the alluvial mining process: prior to mechanization, colonial-era companies reli
ed exclusively on shovelers to remove both. Consequently, during the early years of alluvial mining, operators primarily targeted creek valleys, as they typically featured thin layers of overburden. Going forward, companies gradually introduced heavy machinery, which increased the number of diamonds that could be harvested. In every instance, though, the process of mechanization tended to be both fitful and incomplete, with manual laborers continuing to make significant contributions. Although the depth of the diamonds at Kimberley had forced operators to mechanize early on in order to profitably mine those deposits, this form of commercial pressure was absent in alluvial settings.
In Angola, for example, Diamang entered the mechanical excavation age only in 1937 with the introduction of steam shovels. The impact was so negligible, though, that by 1942 this machinery accounted for only 1.8 percent of the overburden removed. Manual laborers continued to remove virtually the entire layer. Moreover, because the (minimal) equipment that the company had introduced was both unreliable and unevenly deployed, many mines continued to be machine-free. Following this initial introduction of machinery, it wasn’t until after the Second World War ended and the international demand for diamonds rebounded that Diamang sought to increase the volume of overburden and ore removed mechanically. In the 1950s, the company added scrapers, bulldozers, and draglines to its fleet of excavation machinery. Consequently, the percentage of overburden removed mechanically expanded from 6.5 percent in 1950 to 44.3 percent in 1960. Yet even this increased figure still amounted to less than half the total. In order to excavate the remainder, the company continued to retain thousands of manual laborers. Even into the early 1970s, on the eve of Angolan independence (1975), Diamang continued to utilize droves of inexpensive shovelers. Instead of mechanization lightening workers’ loads, Diamang simply redeployed most shovelers to mines on which it had not yet introduced machinery or otherwise ordered them to continue removing what they could, no matter how minuscule the amount.
Stones of Contention Page 14
