Migrant cocoa farmers of southern Ghana: a study in rural capitalism, by Polly Hill

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Notes

1 Before Hill's research, agricultural officials had relied on a study of a single cocoa-farming village in Asante, based on research carried out in the mid-1930s (Beckett 1944).

2 Export crop production was by no means unknown in southern Ghana or other parts of West Africa. As the transatlantic slave trade declined over the course of the nineteenth century, rising demand for vegetable oils in Europe allowed both European and African traders, and African farmers, to segue into producing palm and other vegetable oils for export to Europe.

3 As Simon Ottenberg pointed out in an early review of Migrant cocoa farmers, Hill did not attempt to explain the correlation between farm organization and kinship arrangements (Ottenberg 1964, 1433–34).

4 Hill described these different kinds of labor contracts in The Gold Coast cocoa farmer, but had not yet discovered the land-buying companies of the southeast. By the mid-1950s when she began research for her first book, labor hiring was common throughout the cocoa-growing regions.

5 During the colonial era, most of the cocoa grown in West Africa was of the slow-maturing Amelonado variety, imported from Brazil. In recent decades, Amelonado has been gradually replaced by hybrid varieties that mature much more quickly (Takane 2001).

6 Cf. Okali (1983); Allman and Tashjian (2000); Austin (2005); Amanor (2001).

7 ‘Hired labor’ here includes both labor paid in cash or kind by the day or on a piece rate basis, and people who worked on contract – either cultivating and harvesting a cocoa farm for the season in exchange for share of the crop, or working as a crew for a group price that was negotiated in advance and paid when the job was completed (Hill 1956; Okali 1983; Austin 2005).

8 Hill was careful to record that some growers acquired multiple farms or expanded their plots more than others, but attributed differences in farm size to the ongoing process of expansion, rather than interpreting them as signs of emerging class stratification. Later observers were less sanguine (see e.g. Amanor 1999, 2001; Boni 2005, 2006).

9 Both geographers by training, Watts and Mortimore each carried out research in northern Nigeria, but presented and interpreted their findings very differently. Mortimore's work centers on physical geography, and he centers his analysis on Hausa farmers’ ‘adaptability’ to changing ecological conditions. He tends to eschew theoretical debates, focusing his scholarly critiques on works that generalize from sketchy or inaccurate evidence (Mortimore 1988). Gifted with enormous intellectual energy, Watts carries on simultaneous theoretical debates on a wide range of social and ecological topics with scholars from many disciplines, illustrating and defending his positions with empirical material drawn from an equally voluminous body of secondary literature as well as his own field research. An avowed Marxist, Watts both appreciates Hill's empirical work and criticizes her vigorously for underplaying the role of merchant capitalism and class formation in West African rural life (Watts 1983, reissued with a new introduction in 2013).

10 Silent violence was reissued in 2013, with a substantial new introduction that drew on Watts’ subsequent research in the Niger Delta to situate northern Nigeria's agrarian economy in the turbulent aftermath of the oil boom and the country's encounters with structural adjustment and climate change (Watts 1983, reissued with a new introduction in 2013).

11 Interestingly, Clough's findings overlap somewhat with Hill's early work on cocoa farmers in Ghana. In her first book, The Gold Coast cocoa farmer (1956) – based on surveys carried out before she discovered the land-buying companies organized by migrant farmers – Hill reported that farmers who borrowed money using their farms as collateral often spent borrowed funds on funerals, marriage expenses and ‘litigation’ (Hill 1956, 78ff.).

12 Hill's findings on farm organization, rural inequality and famine in northern Nigeria are recapitulated in Dry grain farming families: Hausaland (Nigeria) and Karnataka (India) compared (1982), which compares Hill's findings on rural economic life in northern Nigeria with south India. One reviewer acknowledged Hill's empirical contributions, but questioned her conclusions, especially on India, arguing that the book failed to demonstrate its claims of ‘urban bias’ or to develop a useful model of ‘dry grain farming’ that applies to both regions (Guha 1983).

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Sara Berry

Sara Berry is a retired professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. She has done research on land, development, agrarian change, political economy and socio-economic history in sub-Saharan Africa, with a primary emphasis on Nigeria and Ghana. Publications include Fathers work for their sons: accumulation, mobility and class formation in an extended Yoruba community (1985), No condition is permanent: the social dynamics of agrarian change in sub-Saharan Africa (University of Wisconsin Press, 1993) and Chiefs know their boundaries: essays on property, power and the past in Asante, 1896–1996 (Heinemann, 2001).