⇱ Index page

The Internationalist Archive

Ruth First (1925-1982) was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and became a prominent voice against apartheid policies through her writings, which included investigative journalism that exposed the oppressive practices of the South African government.
First was deeply involved in the anti-apartheid movement, working alongside figures such as Nelson Mandela and Joe Slovo. Her commitment to justice led her to join the armed struggle against apartheid, becoming a member of the African National Congress (ANC) and its armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe.

First was assassinated by a letter bomb sent by agents of the apartheid government, in 1982, while in exile in Mozambique.

For issue #48 of The Internationalist, we draw from First’s important essay ‘The Mozambican Miners: A Study in the Export of Labour’ (Selected Writings, Inkani Books, 2023). In this excerpt, she explores the historical role of Mozambique as a labour source for South African capital accumulation under Portuguese colonial rule.

The use of the colony of Mozambique as a labour reserve, exporting labour outside the territory where it fuelled centres of South African capital accumulation, is one of the dominant characteristics of the Portuguese colonisation of Mozambique in the late nineteenth and throughout the twentieth century. It is also a continuation of the dependent character of Portuguese colonialism and Portuguese capitalism throughout their history.

A detailed periodisation of Portugal’s occupation of Mozambique has yet to be produced. [1] But it is clear that from the fifteenth century onwards, the activities of Portuguese mercantile capital, through the trade in gold, then in ivory, and then in slaves, were unable to fuel processes of primitive accumulation, which would consolidate a Portuguese capitalist social formation and a Portuguese metropolitan bourgeoisie. On the contrary, Portugal’s weakness within the world system and her subjection to unequal international competition blocked her transition from merchant to industrial capital.

Thus, in Mozambique, in the period 1785 to 1870, the Portuguese state had occupied itself with collecting customs duties along the coast and with the mono-export of slaves. By 1870, at the height of the imperialist power rivalry in Africa and the consolidation of British imperialism in the southern African region, Portugal could exploit her colonies only unevenly and by proxy. Accordingly, in the period of the Chartered Companies, Portugal subcontracted her colonial exploitation in the north of Mozambique to British, French, German and other international capital. Under the system of Chartered Companies, the Portuguese government leased out a great part of Mozambique by granting concessions to private foreign capital to administer huge tracts of the colony. Thus the Nyassa Company, established in 1891 by largely German capital, had jurisdiction over an area of 190,000 km. The Mozambique Company, established in the same year by the British and French capital, controlled a concession of 155,000 km. And the Zambesi Company, established in 1892 by the French capital and others like the Société du Modal of 1904 and Britain’s Sena Sugar Estates, constituted a significant sector of the colonial presence.

At home, the Portuguese economy was archaic and bankrupt. In the colonies, the shortage of Portuguese capital resulted in heavy reliance on British, European and, later, South African capital. This meant that the Portuguese colonial system lacked the capacity to valorise the economic and labour resources of the colony. In the past slaves had been used not for production but for sale as export commodities. The prazos, far from being agricultural estates, had, in fact, been installed to guarantee the circulation of commodities in regions crossed by trade routes. [2] So, too, with the turn of the nineteenth century, Portugal’s more secure physical presence in the south - after the defeat in 1895 of the Gaza state - led in small part only to the organisation of forms of labour exploitation within the colony. The immediate response to the defeat of the rebellion of l897 had been to profit from the export of labour, as this was the time of the establishment and rapid early growth of the South African mining industry. This dictated cooperation up to the hilt with the South African economy. Beginning just before, but increasingly rapid after 1945, particularly in 1954, the Portuguese capital in Mozambique grew. This capital was dominated by the large monopoly groups which had come to exercise increasing influence over the Portuguese state. At the same time, these monopoly interests extended their presence, and yet they opened the colonies to a new phase in the entry of foreign capital. The period saw growing industrialisation, but it was industrialisation dominated by the export sector and one with emphasis on the consumption demands of a growing settler population.

Portugal’s loss of ground in the Mozambican economy in the 1960s and the 1970s illuminated the two cardinal characteristics of the Mozambican economy, which have been consistent throughout the historical phases of Portuguese colonialism:

The continuing dependence on foreign capital. The role of Mozambique as a service economy within the Southern African region: these services comprised the provision of railway and harbour facilities for exports and imports from South Africa and Rhodesia and, centrally, the function of Mozambique as a labour supply area.

The colonial structure of the Mozambican economy was accordingly the outcome of a double dependence. On the one hand, it was the product of dependence on a relatively backward capitalist economy constituted by the Portuguese colonial power. At the same time, it was subordinated to the needs of the Southern African economic complex. This latter integration became the predominant aspect of the structure of the Mozambican colonial economy increasingly. The productive forces of Mozambique were shaped not according to the needs of capitalist development in Portugal but according to the needs of capitalist accumulation in Southern Africa. Portugal played the part of the rentier, deriving the major source of income from invisible trade and speculating on selling the labour-power of its African workforce.

A TWO-STATE SYSTEM

With the establishment of the gold mining industry on the Witwatersrand that labour export from Mozambique came to be organised on a huge and systematic scale. Before that, Mozambican labour had migrated to the Natal sugar plantations and the diamond fields of Kimberley, but this flow of labour had taken place before the Portuguese colonial state had established its hold over southern Mozambique — south, that is, of the River Sabi. The mining revolution in South Africa required heavy capital inputs as well as large and sustained supplies of cheap labour. Within South Africa, gold mining interests intervened actively in state policy to create a cheap controlled labour force from which rapid capital accumulation could be guaranteed. At the same time, the mining industry explored territories in Africa to its north, and even as far afield as China and other parts of Asia, in search of social formations where wage labour had not yet become generalised and where forms of cheap labour power could be derived. Mozambique proved to be the critical labour supply area in the formative years of the gold mining industry. The foundations of that industry coincided with the defeat of Gugunyana in 1895, the subordination of the Gaza state, and the imposition over a large part of southern Mozambique, of a military government under which harsh and punitive measures were used to collect taxes and maintain colonial order. [3] Now the Portuguese colonial presence could be extended beyond the leased areas of the north, beyond the trading posts of Inhambane and the fort of Lourenqo Marques, and the way was open for the Portuguese administration to cooperate with South African mining interests to route labour to them and to profit from this trade in labour. [4]

This cooperation was institutionalised in state-to-state treaties for the sale of the labour force. The mining industry needed long-term and sustained arrangements to obtain cheap African labour. The Portuguese colonial state calculated on a continuing source of revenue and on assistance in building and maintaining the territory’s infrastructure. The Mozambican labour exodus to the mines was officially formalised for the first time in 1897. The Regulamento of that year constituted the first of a series of international agreements with the South African authorities.

The labour export had thus, since 1897, been formally organised and controlled by the two-state contracting parties. The Portuguese colonial government was guaranteed an income from the traffic in labour. This guaranteed income, in turn, gave the colonial state an enduring vested interest in continuing and enlarging the trade in labour. It was the existence of vast catchment areas of tied labour which enabled the mining companies, operating through their monopolistic labour recruiting body, to force reductions in the wages of mine labourers in the early years of the industry, to undermine the resistance of African workers in South Africa to these reduced levels, and to maintain consistently low levels of wages over decades.

Notes:

[1] These summary remarks on the periodisation of Portuguese colonialism in Mozambique are based on a seminar presentation to the Centro de Estudos Africanos (Centre for African Studies) during April 1977 by Nogueira da Costa and Luis de Brito. For the later period (see the following page) this material is based on a draft paper by Luis de Brito, ‘O colonialismo portugués desde os finais do seculo ate 1930’ (‘Portuguese colonialism from the end of the century to 1930’). Work on the periodisation of Mozambican industrialisation: D. Wield, “Some Characteristics of the Mozambican Economy, Particularly Relating to Industrialization”, Working Paper, Centro de Estudos Africanos. Maputo: UEM, 1977.

[2] [Ed.] Prazos were feudal estates acquired by Portuguese colonialists and Goan traders and soldiers to exploit natural resources and formed the basis of Portuguese settlement and colonial expansion between the sixteenth and seventeenth century.

[3] [Ed.] The kingdom of Gaza was initially established in Mozambique in the 1830s by Soshangane, the Ndwandwe general who fled from Zululand (eastern South Africa) after his defeat at the hands of the Zulu king Shaka. Ngungunyane, grandson of Soshangane, was the last ruler of the Gaza state, which held territory in what is now South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique. He led a rebellion against Portuguese rule in 1895 and was defeated.

[4] [Ed.] Lorenco Marques was the capital city under Portuguese colonial rule until independence in 1975 when it was renamed Maputo.



Excerpted from Ruth First: Selected Writings, with permission from the publisher Inkani Books.

The Internationalist Archive