Child labour, Africa’s colonial system, and coercion: The case of the Portuguese colonies, 1870–1975

ABSTRACT

Labour studies in the African colonial period are facing a revival, but literature on the role and working conditions of children remains over-generalized. At the same time, child labour has played a central role in economic activities in Africa, and it still does. This article contributes to filling this gap by studying Portuguese colonial Africa as a narrative of tension between labour market forces, public policy, and (limited) agency of children. Labour scarcity facing demand hikes contributed to the increased use of children for labour in the colonial period. We contribute to the history of African labour by compiling data on the – until now – largely neglected use of child labour in mining and agriculture in the Portuguese African colonies. We find children were used to support adults or, with less agency, simply replaced (often forced) adult labour in plantations, mining, and other activities abandoned by adults. (Promised) wage differentials, taxes, forced labour, pass systems, and forced cultivation schemes acted as (dis)incentives to labour migration. Intra and inter-country movement of large numbers of adult labourers stimulated the demand for child labour.

KEYWORDS:

• child labour
• agency
• forced labour
• Angola
• Mozambique
• Portuguese colonies

Acknowledgements

I thank Antonio Pedro Machoche, Ben White, Bridget O’Laughlin, Francisco Alar, James Sidaway, and Marc Wuyts for helpful suggestions; I also appreciate the comments of participants at the African Economic History Workshop at Wageningen and the European Social Science History Conference at Belfast. Ewout Frankema, Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, Kleoniki Alexopoulou, Erik Green, and Peter Bergeijk provided particularly helpful comments. Finally, I am indebted to three anonymous referees and the editor, Alfonso Herranz-Loncan, for their detailed comments in improving this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 See, for example, the case of the Ghana complaint on the working conditions in the Portuguese colonies (Monteiro 2013).

2 Horrell, Humphries, and Weisdorf (2021) present a more nuanced perspective encompassing different types of households.

3 Part of the discussion of whether colonization increased child labour or worsened its conditions resembles the literature for developed countries about the effects of industrialization (e.g. Stearns 2009).

4 The colonial period led to the loss of land and cattle by the older household heads, which meant a loss of leverage over their unmarried sons (Grier 1994). In addition, in South Africa young men without access to property until marriage left for waged labour or on their own.

5 ‘No Swazi male under the first payment of tax [18 years] and no female child shall undertake employment with any person unless such youth/female child had first obtained written permission from the chief under whom he or she lives. If any person disobeys this order they may be punished if taken before a native court’ (King Sobhuza II, quoted in Simelane 1998, 591).

6 From the free online dictionary: ‘(offensive) a small Black or Aboriginal child (perhaps from Portuguese pequenino, tiny one)’.

7 This relates to previous evidence for Europe regarding the glass sector in Portugal where the leading firms used less child labour (Goulart and Bedi 2007).

8 The posts were ‘surface boys’, ‘engine boys’, ‘drill boys’, ‘smiths’ or ‘boss boys’ (Grier 1994, 39).

9 Mantero ([1910] 1954) is a source with an agenda and, therefore, should be read cautiously. He was a plantation owner defending labour conditions in São Tomé and Príncipe plantations during the Cadbury controversy. See below for further details.

10 However, the employment of children in the public departments of Agriculture and Forestry was even higher (Chirwa 1993).

11 Later on, children would also join liberation movements such as the Zambian and Mozambican ones by working in refugee and military camps (Grier 2009).

12 Until then, the most important role for Mozambique had been supporting the route to India, and Portuguese interest had been limited to gold, ivory, and slave trade. The penetration inland was slow and most administration and army personnel were of Indian origin.

13 The company was financed by England and had considered planting opium, but dedicated itself instead to sugar plantation and factory production (Head 1980).

14 Colonial Portugal was also a complex weaving of hierarchy and race. Building upon the basic white–black segregation, the empire was stratified into multi-layered production tasks. First, Portugal restricted the access of non-whites to intermediary positions across the empire. Administration and commerce positions were only available to upper-middle classes from Cape Verde and India (Batalha 2004). This was also applicable to the design of the empire, with India as the colonial head office of Mozambique until 1752. Second, a minority of the local population who had ‘assimilated’ the Portuguese ways had been co-opted for the Portuguese administration, such as local leaders, policemen and others. By the end of the colonial era, these assimilados amounted to no more than 1% of the population (Mosca 2005). Finally, many white settlers were illiterate and unskilled, coming from rural Portugal, being poor ‘even by the standards of colonial Africa’ (Mahoney 2003). They were also condemned to lower hierarchical positions.

15 See Martins et al. (2021) for a discussion on the role of international organizations in promoting change in labour conditions in the Portuguese colonies.

16 The salaries of the mine workers paid in gold constituted the territory’s major source of income and balanced the commercial and capital accounts (Mosca 2005). Other important contributors were Angolan diamonds or the revenues from the railroad (Lains 1998).

17 While we briefly discuss the influential British Masters and Servants Act and the Portuguese Regulamento do Trabalho dos Indígenas, 1899, and the Colonial Act of 1933, it we chose not to discuss the Portuguese legislation in detail in this paper, as this is done in a companion paper. See Martins et al. (2021).

18 See van Waijenburg (2018) for a review of different types of forced labour and estimates of the colonial state’s ‘revenue’ through this type of contribution.

19 In the meantime, a consumption industry had developed in textile, soap, tobacco, cereal, furniture, brewery, and typography to produce for the internal market, together with extractive and cement industries (Fortuna 1971; Mosca 2005). However, most exports were still of vegetable origin (69%) and since World War II there was a strong concentration in fewer commodities, which in Angola meant coffee (Fortuna 1971). In industry, labour-intensive technologies had dominated, but by the 1960s, following the metropolis example and with the support of foreign capital, labour-saving technologies were introduced.

20 Nonetheless, some conditions were better than elsewhere. A South African consultant complained that ‘colonial legislation in Angola only allows six workers per compartment or housing unit. In South Africa [ … ] it’s unlimited, but de facto, forty-eight’ (Cleveland 2010, 104).

21 Hugh Tracey collected Chopi folk songs in the 1940s, and one went as follows:

‘It is time to pay taxes to the Portuguese, The Portuguese who eats eggs, And chicken!! Change that English pound!’ (in Vail and White 1983, 888).

The last sentence was a reference to another ‘tax’, as the workers returning from the South African mines had to exchange their pounds at the border (with a 10% discount).

22 In a very different context, Fagernäs (2014, 63) finds that the enactment of birth registration in the US ‘doubled the effectiveness of minimum working age laws’.

23 Alesina, Giuliano, and Nunn (2013) argue that the use of the plough favoured male physical characteristics and therefore male economic preponderance over women. However, in a context where males were often absent or scarce, the use of oxen or the plough became a responsibility of women and male children.

Additional information

Funding

This research benefited from the financial support of the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology under the project [PTDC/IIM-ECO/5303/2014].