by Sven Beckert
For the next eight years, these Tuskegee experts advised German colonialists on how to extract more cotton for export from African rural cultivators. They built experimental cotton farms, introduced new strains of cotton, opened a “cotton school,” expanded the local infrastructure, and used increasingly coercive measures to force local cultivators to grow cotton for world markets. And indeed, between 1900 and 1913, cotton exports from Togo increased by a factor of thirty-five.51
Bereft of experience in cotton growing, German colonial bureaucrats and textile industrialists had looked to the United States for expertise in such matters and immediately had settled on the possibilities of recruiting African Americans to their colonial cotton venue, assuming, like most of their imperial counterparts, that “cotton culture since time immemorial [is] the Negro’s favorite culture.” To do so, in the summer of 1900 a German aristocrat and agricultural attaché at the German embassy in Washington, D.C., Beno von Herman auf Wain, traveled to Roslindale, Massachusetts, to meet African-American activist and Tuskegee leader Booker T. Washington, asking him for help in recruiting cotton planters and a mechanic “to teach the Negroes there [in Togo] how to plant and harvest cotton in a rational and scientific way.” By late September, Washington was able to confirm that he had selected four men who were ready to go. James Calloway, forty, director of the cotton section of Tuskegee, was to direct the mission and supervise its younger members. He had been in charge of Tuskegee’s eight-hundred-acre farm and spoke some German. He was to be joined by John Winfrey Robinson, an 1897 Tuskegee graduate; Allen Burks, a 1900 Tuskegee graduate; and Shepard Harris, who had entered Tuskegee in 1886 and had learned the carpentry trade there. They were all the sons of slaves, and according to Washington, the ancestors of two of these experts “came from this part of Africa.” Washington insisted to von Herman that “I should very much hope that your Company will not make the same mistake that has been made in the South among our people, that is, teach them to raise nothing but cotton. I find that they make much better progress financially and otherwise where they are taught to raise something to eat at the same time they are raising cotton.”52
Once Calloway, Robinson, Burks, and Harris arrived in Togo, their operations unfolded in grand style. On land once controlled by the king of Tove, they ventured to build a cotton farm much like the ones they had left behind in the United States. With the help of two hundred local men they cleared the high grass and trees, while local women and children collected the remaining roots to burn them. As a result of such and other exertions, by May they had planted about twenty-five of these acres in cotton and by July about one hundred acres. Starting systematically and virtually ignoring the accumulated experience of the people of Tove, Calloway and his colleagues planted fields with different kinds of cotton at various times to investigate what cotton would grow best and when it should be sown. By April, Calloway reported proudly to Booker T. Washington that “our work looks quite promising…and we believe that we will make cotton.”53
Despite these energetic beginnings the Tuskegee experts soon encountered numerous difficulties. For the African-American planters, for example, it was unimaginable to run a successful cotton farm without draft animals, but the rural cultivators around Tove, reported John Robinson in astonishment, “were as afraid of a horse or cow as a common American youth is of a ‘mad dog.’ ” Not only were they unfamiliar with using draft animals, but the animals themselves did not survive long in the local disease environment. Unanticipated patterns of rainfall also created problems. When the rains started in July, the cotton that the Tuskegee experts had planted right after their arrival rotted. They could have learned as much from local cultivators, but their firm belief in the superiority of their own methods and their inability to communicate in the local language precluded such lessons. The Tuskegee experts also faced nearly insurmountable problems relating to the lack of infrastructure. In order to get their ginning equipment from the beach near Lomé, where they had left it upon arrival a few months earlier, to Tove, they first had to widen the road to make it passable for their wagons. They then needed to hire thirty people to draw the carts, and they still took more than two weeks to return with the equipment. Such reliance on human muscle power also hindered the ginning process.54
Despite these frustrations, Calloway, Robinson, Burks, and Harris harvested one bale of Egyptian cotton and four bales of American cotton on their experimental farm in the early summer and five more bales of American cotton in November and December. Considering the enormous input of labor, land, and expertise, this was a meager harvest, but both Calloway and the Colonial Economic Committee considered it a success. The committee concluded that the local climate was indeed, as expected, favorable for the growing of high-quality cotton, that the indigenous population was willing to embrace the crop, and that plenty of land was available to grow cotton, perhaps as much as in Egypt. Calloway concurred, suggesting that production could be expanded further by creating markets where indigenous people could bring their cotton for sale, and by educating rural producers in agricultural techniques, especially the use of plows and draft animals. If these reforms were embraced, Calloway expected that “in a few years we shall be able to export many thousands bales of cotton from this colony. This will not have an effect on the market of the world; it will nevertheless be of great advantage to Germany and especially to the 2½ millions of natives of this colony.”55
The amount of cotton grown by the Tuskegee experts during their first year in Togo may have been exceedingly small, but the goal of the Colonial Economic Committee had never been to make Calloway and his colleagues into major cotton growers. What German industrialists instead had hoped for was to learn from these experienced cotton farmers and to then transfer that knowledge to local growers. Their goal from the beginning was to make cotton production in Togo a “Volkskultur,” a people’s culture, and not, as elsewhere in the German colonial empire, a “Plantagenkultur,” a plantation culture.56
This choice was partly based on the tremendous problems German cotton interests had encountered with the mobilization of labor for their plantations in German East Africa. These plantations, many of them run by German textile industrialists, had had trouble securing a sufficient number of African laborers, who by and large were not willing to work there. Though local German planters had tried to persuade the colonial administration to raise taxes in order to force rural producers to work for wages, the government had been reluctant to do so, fearing open rebellion.57
Such German experiences paralleled those of other colonial powers. In British East Africa it was clearly understood by experts that “the dearth of labour is the most serious difficulty…. Coolies must be brought from a distance, as the inhabitants, who get four crops a year off the land without putting themselves to any inconvenience whatever, cannot be got to see that there is any reason why they should work for hire.” Wage labor, in fact, was extremely difficult to institutionalize. In British Uganda as well, growing cotton had “consistently been opposed by the peasant growers who are its principal intended beneficiaries.” As a result, British colonialists came to believe that “the native will do better work when farming on his own account than when working for wages on a plantation owned by Europeans.”58
German cotton policy, like that of other colonial powers, was influenced by its encounter with the region’s inhabitants, the Ewe, and their old and thriving indigenous cotton industry. For centuries, rural cultivators had interspersed their fields with cotton plants, which local women spun into yarn and men wove into cloth. Throughout the nineteenth century, some of this cotton had also been traded across substantial distances. During the American Civil War, some had even entered world markets, as local rulers had created cotton plantations that they worked with slave laborers, allegedly exporting twenty to forty bales of cotton a month to Liverpool. As late as 1908, the German colonial government reported that manufactured European textiles had not yet destroyed the indigenous spinning and weavin
g industry. Such a thriving cotton textile industry indeed could be found throughout most of Africa, despite European imports of cloth.59
It was this thriving domestic industry that the German colonialists hoped to recast when they expanded their influence into the Togolese hinterland during the 1890s. They hoped that they would be able to change its internal orientation to an external one, just like the British had been able to do in India, and the Russians in Central Asia. Thanks to the exposure to “scientific” agriculture, infrastructure improvements, and incentives provided by “free” markets, indigenous farmers were to grow more cotton of a uniform quality and then sell it to German merchants—just like former slaves had done in the United States. This “Eingeborenenkultur”—native culture—was another attempt, after sharecropping, to solve the vexing question of labor that had been at the core of the world cotton industry since the emancipation of slaves in the United States thirty-five years earlier.60
Unable to mobilize labor for colonial cotton growing on plantations, and inspired by the expansion of “free labor” cotton in the United States as well as the seemingly successful transmission of these experiences to Togo by the Tuskegee experts, German cotton interests hoped to set up a small number of model farms that would serve as examples to the Ewe. Moreover, the German colonial administration, along with the Tuskegee experts, developed a number of policies to promote their common goals: to encourage Ewe cotton growers to produce more well-ginned and -packed cotton and move it speedily to market. First, to improve the quality of cotton, the Colonial Economic Committee, along with private German investors such as the Deutsche Togogesellschaft, set up gins throughout the cotton-growing areas of Togo. Growers thus did not need to gin the cotton themselves nor to transport the much heavier raw cotton over long distances. Purchasers, in turn, gained control of the cotton much earlier in the production process. Second, the colonial government tried to make the cotton more uniform in appearance by distributing seeds to growers. Here, the studies of the Tuskegee experts mattered a great deal, as they had experimented with Egyptian, American, Peruvian, and Brazilian seeds and had also cataloged existing seeds in Togo. After 1911, an American variety, mixed with Togo strains, was marketed under the name “Togo Sea-Island” and was the only strain distributed by the German authorities. Third, to encourage rural cultivators to grow more cotton, the colonial government set minimum prices for the purchase of cotton, presumably making it less risky for growers to plant cotton. Fourth, to export this cotton, Tuskegee experts, colonial authorities, and the committee concentrated on gaining control of the cotton market, at the beginning mainly by sending members of the cotton expedition, including Calloway and Robinson, to remote areas to purchase cotton from growers. Indeed, by 1902, the Tuskegeans had fanned out over a large area of Togo, running various experimental farms and purchasing cotton whenever there was an opportunity to do so. They had also participated in the building and supervising of cotton collecting stations in various towns.61
Price guarantees, ginning facilities, seed selection, and control over markets were critical measures to make more cotton available to German merchants, but even more crucial was the rapid development of an infrastructure to move cotton to the coast. When Calloway and his colleagues first arrived in Togo, it took fifteen days to go to Lomé and return, in wagons pulled by local workers. By 1907, when a railroad connected the most important cotton areas to the coast, transportation time had been cut to a few hours.62
In all of these measures, the colonial state played a central role. Indeed, prices, markets, and infrastructure were creations of the colonial administration. And the colonial state’s role went further: By taxing rural cultivators and making these taxes payable in labor, the state coerced them to, among other things, carry cotton from Tove to the coast, to build railroads, and even to clear land for cotton.63 By recasting the context in which rural cultivators came to make their decisions, they hoped to bend their inclinations toward embracing world market production of cotton.
Taken together, the efforts of the Tuskegee experts and the colonial government were spectacularly effective. Cotton exports from Togo rose from 31,863 pounds in 1902 to 238,472 pounds in 1904, and 1,125,993 pounds in 1909. This was only a minuscule part of German cotton imports (indeed, Germany never got more than half a percent of its cotton supply from its colonies), but the rate of expansion (increasing by a factor of thirty-five in seven years) suggested that colonial cotton would have a bright future.64
Yet despite such a promising beginning, after 1909, further increases in cotton exports eluded the Tuskegee experts, the Colonial Economic Committee, and the German colonial administration. In 1913, the last full year of German colonial rule in Togo, cotton exports were slightly lower than they had been in 1909. The limits to such an expansion were largely rooted in the ways cotton fitted into the agricultural schemes of local producers. Ewe cultivators, after all, had their own ideas about commodity production, ideas that did not necessarily correspond with those of the Tuskegee experts or the German colonialists.
As elsewhere in the global countryside, cultivators desired to maintain economic and social patterns that gave them control over their work, subsistence, and lives. Traditionally, women had interspersed their corn and yam fields with cotton plants. This provided them with an additional crop that did not require much additional labor, as the land had to be hoed and weeded in any case. At first the production and eventual export of cotton was not necessarily disruptive of these agricultural patterns. The fact that cotton occupied such a definite place within traditional work patterns and a long-standing gendered division of labor, however, placed severe limits on how much this culture could be extended. To the chagrin of German colonial authorities, it meant, among other things, that Togolese peasants refused to engage in the monocultural production of cotton, which according to a German report was much disliked because it was much more labor-intensive and not necessarily more profitable. Corn and yams, moreover, provided cultivators with food, no matter what the price of cotton. The prices German colonial administrators and merchants offered for raw cotton were too low to persuade peasants to risk abandoning their subsistence crops and to engage only in the backbreaking work of cotton monoculture. Indeed, even colonial cotton enthusiast August Etienne recognized dryly that an exclusive focus on the growing of cotton “entails some risk for peasant economies.”65
Removing cotton from the hinterland: a train loaded with cotton bales in the German colony of Togo, 1905 (illustration credit 12.5)
Moreover, cotton exports were limited by keen competition from indigenous spinners for the white gold. Hans Gruner, the head of the German administrative post Misahöhe Station, reported in December 1901, “As in other things the native artisans spoil the price of the raw material, as they receive for the products of their skill unusually high prices.” These spinners and weavers, said Gruner, though few in numbers, were willing to pay 50 pfennige for a pound of clean cotton—significantly more than the 25 to 30 pfennigs the German colonialists offered.66
Cotton spinning in Togo (illustration credit 12.6)
Such price discrepancies show that a market in cotton never developed; indeed German merchants who wanted to purchase cotton in Togo had to formally guarantee that they would not pay more than the price stipulated by the colonial administration. Throughout Africa, colonial authorities created such highly regulated and supervised markets, which became increasingly coercive to break peasants’ preference to sell cotton to the thriving and more profitable local cotton industry.67
European colonialists competed with African purchasers of raw cotton and the continued strength of the domestic cotton industry. They understood clearly, as British economist William Allan McPhee argued in 1926, that “part of the problem, then, is to divert the supply of cotton from the Nigerian hand-looms to the power-looms of Lancashire.” The goal was to replace indigenous cloth with imported cloth, to set people free to grow cotton to export it to Europe, a lesson that Europea
n cotton kings had learned in India first. Frederick John D. Lugard, a British colonial official in Nigeria, hoped for the decline of cotton manufacturing in the old weaving city of Kano (“Africa’s Manchester”) to facilitate greater exports, since “the cotton of Zaria will then cease to come to the looms of Kano.” To destroy that industry, a “better class of English cloth than that now imported is required, which will supersede the native, and so bring the raw cotton on to the market.” Best of all, “The industries of spinning thread, weaving and dyeing afford…occupation to many thousands who may possibly become additional producers of raw cotton.” Deindustrialization, in his eyes, was the prerequisite for incorporating this African territory and its people into the orbit of Manchester.68
Last but not least, the very fact that most African cultivators remained far removed from world markets and experienced little if any commercialization of their lives meant that they felt little economic pressure to produce cash crops, unlike, for example, upcountry farmers in the United States. Thus the Ewe could back up their preference for mixed farming with their ability to maintain it. In precolonial Togo, the Ewe had bought and sold some goods on markets and engaged in long-distance trade. But even after the arrival of the Germans, capitalist social relations had only very marginally penetrated Togo; rural cultivators resisted the logic of long-distance markets in favor of long-established local exchanges and safeguarding their own subsistence production. German colonial officials bemoaned that “unlike America, the peasant here is not dependent on cotton growing for his subsistence. The latter always has access to other crops, and his needs are so low, that he can live without any cash income for extended periods of time.” The “dread of starving” that British abolitionists had hoped would replace the “dread of being flogged” as a motivation for colonial people to produce crops for world markets failed in Togo in the face of plentiful alternatives. Such resistance to the global marketplace, moreover, had astonishing staying power, because the Germans were unable to institute systems of exploitive credit relations.69
