Officials within the MESC hoped that regional co-operation would continue after the war and the efforts of the Centre would provide a basis for the continued improvement of agriculture within the region. However, although the mechanization of farming continued in Iraq and Syria, and Egypt continued to show an interest in the improvement of its wheat and rice varieties, much of the work of the MESC in terms of improving fertilizers, seeds and livestock was abandoned for lack of resources. Without the pressure of war, western and local governments lost the political will to invest and co-operate.51
PROFITEERING IN EAST AFRICA
Although from the summer of 1941 the fighting was confined to the northernmost coastal strip of Africa, the hinterland of the British base in Egypt stretched all the way down the eastern side of Africa as far as South Africa. Throughout the war South Africa acted as a staging-post on the vital sea route around the Cape. It supplied the empire with men and gold, and the expansion of the country’s industrial and manufacturing base meant that it was able to produce weapons as well as manufactured goods. South African foodstuffs were transported to Egypt through East Africa, which acted as a secondary military base. Southern Rhodesia developed an iron and steel industry and the country’s industrial output tripled.52 Rhodesian and Kenyan farmers grew maize, sisal and pyrethrum daisies. But there was no Middle East Supply Centre set up here. Instead, the war exposed the rapacious nature of colonialism. White settler farmers used the conflict to demand guaranteed prices for their food crops, and in Northern and Southern Rhodesia the settlers used unwillingly conscripted African labour to work on their farms. By 1945 the white settlers had managed to entrench themselves both on the land and in the colonial administration. But some African producers also found ways of capitalizing upon the rising demand for foodstuffs, and their post-war desire to continue to build upon their prosperity set them on a collision course with the settlers.53 Meanwhile, measures to protect the entitlement to food of the poor and vulnerable were inadequate and in 1942 drought and crop failure resulted in localized famines in the region.
In 1939 the outlook of white settler farmers in East Africa was bleak. Every white farmer in Kenya was carrying an average debt of £2,000 and it was proving economically unviable for European settlers to establish themselves as farmers.54 When the leader of the Kenyan settler community, Major Cavendish-Bentinck, travelled to London at the beginning of the war he was told that the Ministry of Supply might be interested in their tea and sisal but their maize and coffee crop were of no interest to Britain.55 Nor did the government have any desire to prop up their failing enterprises. The situation was similar for white settler farmers in the Rhodesias. But when the war moved to Ethiopia in the summer of 1940 the settlers began to insist that their contribution to the war effort would be to increase agricultural production, and they began to pressurize their colonial governments to increase prices and provide them with loans. In Kenya their demands were resisted until November 1941, when the presence of British troops, Italian prisoners of war, Polish refugees, convalescent soldiers from North Africa and troops in training for Burma created a new and urgent demand for food. By 1943 the military were purchasing £1.5 million worth of meat, maize, vegetables, bacon and dairy products, virtually double what they had spent in 1941. Japan’s capture of south-east Asia created demand for Kenyan sisal for rope-making and pyrethrum daisies, which were the basis for insecticides. These two crops earned plantation owners more than double the amount of money earned by sales of food to the military.56 Sisal and pyrethrum were mainly sold to the United States, and so Kenyan farmers gained disproportionately good access to lend-lease farm machinery. Meanwhile, white settlers took advantage of the recruitment of colonial officers into the army to take over the colonial establishment, and created and ran production and supply committees, which enabled them to set the agricultural agenda within the colonies.57 They put government loans and lend-lease equipment to good use, breaking in new land with the assistance of Italian prisoners of war and conscripted African labour, and used their new-found wealth to pay off their debts.58
In Northern and Southern Rhodesia European farmers struggled to find Africans to work on their farms. The Africans preferred to look for work in the towns or the South African mines, and higher wartime food prices provided those on the reserves with the incentive to farm for themselves rather than for a miserly wage. When the settlers pressed their governments to introduce African conscription for farm labourers they were told that conditions on the reserves were too precarious to justify further recruitment of men, and insisted that farmers must improve pay and conditions in order to compete for workers. The white farmers had no intention of improving working conditions on their farms and protested that the Africans were far more productive if they were working under European supervision and that African men should not be allowed to lie about on the reserves when the empire was under siege. The colonial administrators recognized these arguments as a call for exploitation dressed up as patriotism and resisted the settlers’ demands until 1942, when a drought threatened food production.59 The European farmers immediately capitalized on the administration’s fear of food shortages, to insist on the implementation of wartime conscription for farm labour. The Secretary of State was told that unless Africans were recruited to bring in the harvest almost half the colony would be threatened by famine. Moreover, there were the difficulties that would arise in trying to feed the white civilians, 10,000 RAF personnel taking part in the Empire Air Training Scheme, and 6,000 internees.60 Even before the Compulsory Native Labour Act was passed in August, the conscription process had begun. The Africans went unwillingly and it was widely reported that the approach of African messengers from the Native Department (who were used as recruiters) was ‘a signal for all able-bodied men to scatter to the four winds’.61 The farmers paid them only one shilling a day. The government paid the rest of their wages and supplied them with food. Altogether this provided white Rhodesian farmers with a subsidy worth £63,700.62
An indignant War Office investigator pointed out that the settlers were forcing the army to pay inflated prices for their goods. African farmers were paid substantially less for their maize. In Kenya the rate was 6 s. 20 cents per bag compared to 13 s. a bag for that of the settlers. White farmers argued that if the Africans were paid too much their lazy natures meant that they would reduce production. The colonial administration had been bullied out of taking the more reasonable and much cheaper course of action, which would have been to encourage peasant production rather than subsidize white-owned farms. The Native Commissioner for Mt Darwin in Southern Rhodesia ‘found there was no convincing reason for compelling Africans to work on increased acreages for Europeans while their own acreage was reduced and settlers sold their maize at twice the price of African maize’.63 In the maize- and peanut-producing region of Mrewa the commissioner wondered to ‘what extent food production is being increased in European areas by removing 440 growers from the Reserves which between them sold 40,300 bags of maize and 12,700 bags of shelled nuts during the current year.’64
By agreeing to pay white farmers more for their crops and accepting their demands for African conscripted labour, the colonial governments reinforced labour migration and rural neglect. In the African reserves a number of factors came together to promote poverty, malnutrition and a rise in infant mortality. Concentration on the war effort meant that welfare and development schemes were neglected, the conscription of able-bodied men into the army and as farm labourers diverted too many men away from subsistence farming, while poor rains in 1942 led to crop failure on the reserves in 1943.65 However, the Northern Rhodesian colonial administration did have some success in protecting the reserve population of women and children from hunger. In an attempt to avert hunger if millet crops should fail it was made compulsory for everyone to grow at least some extremely drought-resistant cassava. For the women on the reserves it made sense to adopt this new plant. It could be cultivated in the same fields in which t
hey had previously grown their staple millet, and so it did not depend on scarce male labour to cut down trees and clear new land. Its drought resistance was prized and it had the added advantage that it could be grown as a cash crop. The government bought large quantities to feed the labourers it employed on road-building.66 Those who grew cassava survived the droughts of 1942 and 1949 better than those who stuck to growing the traditional millet. But cassava’s spread carried a price. The preparation of manioc flour is laborious, and as it is seen as women’s work it substantially increased the workload of peasant women. Porridge made from manioc is also less nutritious than that made with millet, and in the long term the nutritional quality of the cultivators’ diet declined.67
Elsewhere in East Africa the forced conscription of African labour to work on sisal plantations had a particularly baleful impact on the reserve populations. It is a sign of the British government’s desperation but also of its cavalier attitude towards the lives of its colonial subjects that Tanganyikans were impressed into working, virtually as temporary slaves, on the sisal plantations. On at least one estate the men lived in appalling conditions with no housing, firewood or proper medical attention for the painful sores associated with sisal cutting.68 Meanwhile, their families left behind on the reserves were reduced to hunger. Unfortunately, a government drive for more maize had persuaded the African farmers to plant corn, which is even more drought-sensitive than millet. Lack of labour and of rain in 1942 resulted in a devastating fall in the harvest. The dearth of food could not be compensated for with the usual imports of Burmese rice, and Churchill’s diversion of shipping from the Indian Ocean meant there was no hope of emergency imports of food. Famine deaths were confined to the area of Ugogo but hunger was widespread. Even the workers on the sisal plantations had their ration of one kilogram of meal a day reduced to 316 grams. Children were sold in return for grain. This is remembered in Tanganyika as ‘Europe’s famine’.69
By caving in to settler demands the colonial East African governments failed to implement policies which secured the benefits of higher wartime prices for food for African farmers. Nevertheless, the official price, even for African maize, doubled, and many Africans made their own efforts to ensure that they were able to participate in the wartime bonanza. Some simply side-stepped the government and evaded controls by transporting their maize along pre-colonial trade routes at night. Black market maize fetched an even higher price than that paid to the settlers by the government purchasing boards.70 Whether East Africans went hungry depended on the ways in which the war disrupted their local economy. In areas where there was road-building, a disproportionate number of wage labourers compared to farmers led to a tendency towards over-selling and later hunger. In other areas the peasants held back food, planning for food shortages, or found that even if they produced a surplus of food they had nowhere to sell it.71 The herders of livestock were probably the worst hit as the army’s insatiable demand for meat meant that they were forced to sell their cattle at prices well below the market value. The army sometimes paid even less than in the worst period of the Depression, and the stock routes were too well policed to allow for the growth of a substantial black market.72
The most fortunate were those with ready access to markets. Around East Africa’s towns peasant production diversified into mixed farming.73 In Kenya, the African districts of Nairobi were filled every day with women from Kiambu selling vegetables and charcoal for a good profit. The Kikuyu sold their vegetables to army-run vegetable-drying factories where their potatoes and beans fetched double the pre-war prices. In the districts of Nyeri and Embu 11,000 families were issued with seeds and their planting schemes were organized by the Department of Agriculture.74 Even the famine in Kenya’s Central Province in 1943 was a source of profit to the Kikuyu tribe. The starving people of Machakos had plenty of money. Each month the soldiers fighting in the war sent home large remittances and their hungry families could be seen on the roads each day, fetching food from the Kikuyu farmers. ‘The District Commissioner estimated that during the three worst months the Kamba tribe of Machakos must have spent at least £100,000 each month on food in Kikuyuland and Kitui.’75 The Kikuyu were able to make seven times the price offered by the Maize Control Board for their crops, and four and a half times more money than the white settlers. The entrepreneurial saved up their money and invested in lorries and shops, and the newly prosperous disrupted social hierarchies within the reserves as they challenged the traditional authority of chiefs and elders and sought political representation and a voice in the colonial regime.76
By 1945 white settlers had infiltrated the colonial bureaucracies and were the owners of fully capitalized farms. Their numbers were swelled in the immediate post-war years by the arrival of young men intent on escaping Britain under a Labour government.77 Determined to take advantage of their new, much stronger position, the white settlers resented the economic challenge represented by the African proto-capitalists thrown up by the war. As soon as hostilities had ceased Kenyan settlers reverted to the old arguments of the 1930s, claiming the African farmers were denuding the land and they began pushing for the removal of the now relatively prosperous vegetable-growing African squatters* from their farms. This set post-war Kenya on a course towards internal conflict which came to a head seven years later with the Mau Mau conflict, when Kikuyu farmers rose in protest against repressive measures which deprived them of their land.78 A side-effect of this conflict was the consolidation of Kikuyu land-holdings which provided the basis for the 1950s ‘agricultural revolution’. Vegetable-planting schemes like the one associated with the long-closed military vegetable-drying plant were revived. African farmers were reorganized into high-productivity cash-crop farming and began growing European vegetables on a large scale. This is why Britain still imports fresh beans by air from Kenya.79
In the Rhodesias the political power of the settler communities had expanded to such a point that they were able to push through the creation of a Native Labour Supply Commission which recruited African labour to work on white farms right up until the 1970s, reinforcing the neglect of African farming.80 The bitter consequences of the resentments this caused are still being felt today in Zimbabwe (as Southern Rhodesia was renamed), where Robert Mugabe’s ‘land reform programme’ has dispossessed white farmers, and raging inflation has left the African population destitute, ravaged by hunger and a cholera epidemic in 2008.
WEST AFRICA AND THE DOLLAR DEFICIT
In 1939 West African farmers were faced with the same depressing prospect as East Africa’s settler farmers: their crops (cocoa beans, palm produce and peanuts) were surplus to requirements. In 1939 America and Britain already had one year’s worth of cocoa beans in storage and the farmers’ third best customer, Germany, had disappeared from the market.81 Cocoa beans came very low on the shipping officials’ list of priorities and the farmers were faced with the prospect of harvesting a virtually worthless crop. In order to prevent the farmers from facing bankruptcy the British government bought up that year’s supply, much of which it destroyed. In 1941 the West African Cocoa Control Board was set up to organize the bulk buying of cocoa, and from 1942 it dealt with other products and became the West African Produce Control Board.
However, the immense wartime demand for food and the Japanese capture of south-east Asia revived the demand for West African foodstuffs, which in 1942 were suddenly seen as an untapped and valuable resource, as were the region’s supplies of tin, bauxite (for aluminium), iron ore, rubber, cotton and sisal.82 A Resident Minister for West Africa was appointed and for the first time a co-ordinated economic policy was applied to Britain’s four West African territories – the Gold Coast, Sierra Leone, the Gambia and Nigeria. The rising demand for foodstuffs meant that the Boards were able to sell West African produce for a good profit. But West African farmers benefited little from the revival of the food trade. The Boards continued to pay the producers low prices while the rising profits were channelled into the coffers of the
British government, which used them to pay off some of Britain’s debt to the United States.
Before he set off to take up his post as Resident Minister for West Africa in June 1942 Lord Swinton met with the Minister of Food. Lord Woolton told him that the nutritionists had warned him that the British could not cope with a cut in their fat ration. He added, ‘It all depends on what you can do in West Africa whether we can maintain it or not.’83 Before the war Nigeria had been governed according to the 1930s’ philosophy that expensive modernization projects were not to be encouraged. Governor Sir Bernard Bourdillon had been implacably opposed to the rationalization of agricultural production and had vetoed the introduction of European-run plantations and even the import of hand-presses to ease the task of processing palm kernels. Although after 1940 he had adopted the new wartime approach and had approved the construction of a Pioneer Mill and the distribution of hand-presses for palm kernels, the backward state of the industry meant that an increase in palm oil supplies in 1942 depended entirely upon villagers stepping up production.84
The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food Page 17
