When Salazar first came to power in 1928, the fast-growing Portuguese textile industry—it quadrupled its size between 1901 and 1924—was getting no more than 1 percent of its ginned cotton from the African colonies, buying huge amounts of North American and Egyptian cotton in the world market thus decisively contributing to the negative balance of payments of the State.[96] The above-mentioned charted companies in Mozambique were repeatedly denounced in Portuguese press, both because of their foreign capital basis and their inability to transform Mozambique into a territory supplying Portuguese industries. Already in 1926, the newly inaugurated dictatorial government launched legislation to bring to an end the domain of the chartered companies, replacing it in large areas with the so-called cotton zones. Inside these perimeters, concession holders had purchasing exclusivity over peasants’ production at prices fixed by the government. The holders bought, ginned and exported to Portugal all the cotton produced inside their zones. Concession holders were entitled to force local native populations to cultivate cotton through physical coercion, an arrangement directly inspired by the Belgian colonial rule in Congo, which according to Portuguese colonial officials had achieved “brilliant results.”[97]
Through the new labor legislation issued in 1928, the previous system of forced labor of rounding up natives and displacing them to plantations was replaced by forced crop cultivation requiring agriculture workers to remain in their own villages and work their own land, producing cash crops to be sold to the concession holder. In spite of the joint efforts of concessions’ overseers and colonial agents, the main objective of incorporating indigenous population into capitalist production of commodities for the metropole was hard to achieve, with only 80,000 peasants, out of a total population of more than 4 million, incorporated into the cotton system by 1937.[98] The colonial authorities were especially concerned with the provinces of northern Mozambique and its population of two and a half million people occupying an area four times the size of the Metropole and with no visible contribution to the economical welfare of the Portuguese empire.
In 1938, Salazar’s New State created the Board of Export of Colonial Cotton (Junta de Exportação do Algodão Colonial), an economic coordinating organ, part of the corporatist structure institutionalized by the constitution of 1933 that made it the more developed corporatist regime of the fascist family. The Board not only organized cotton exports from the colonies; it also intervened directly in the process of capturing the peasantry for cotton production. The Board designated the areas in each concession for growing cotton, and, in accordance with the standardization tasks of many of the corporatist organisms, it also defined the various qualities of cotton and set the price paid to the peasants by concessionary companies and to the concessionary companies by Portugal’s textile industry. With the colonial state guaranteeing cotton purchase price independently of prices in international markets, concessionaries were quick to intensify its efforts to force natives into production. In 1940, only two years after the Board implemented its new system, there were already, and only for the northern provinces, about half a million natives incorporated in the cotton regime. For the entire territory of Mozambique the numbers reached about 800,000. From 1942 to 1946, out of a total of 28 million tons of cotton imported by Portugal, 24 million were produced in the African colonies. Cotton had become in a few years the first Mozambican export, the northern region producing about 60 percent of all colonial cotton.[99]
These numbers that delighted Salazar and strengthened his imperial vision were directly related to one of the darkest pages of Portuguese colonialism. Historiography has detailed the brutal character of Portugal’s cotton regime and its systematic use of violence. Daily beatings and whipping by colonial officers and concessionaries’ foremen were the norm to force peasants into cotton plots and leave to second place food crops. Allen Isaacman offers a detailed survey of the grim stories, rumors, gossip, and songs depicting the colonial state sanctioned violence spread out through the Mozambican countryside.[100] As a case in point, consider the guerrilla war for Mozambican independence begun in 1961 by FRELIMO in those northern cotton districts where the culture was more present, when several thousand cotton growers demonstrated for better labor conditions. There are many different versions of what happened in the village of Mueda, but Eduardo Mondlane, the founder of FRELIMO, had no doubts about making the killing of unarmed protesters by the colonial police a founding myth of the would-be postcolonial country, converting the cotton regime into the main symbol of Portuguese oppression.[101] In his book Struggle for the Independence of Mozambique, published in 1969, the same year he was murdered by Portugal’s secret police, Mondlane recollected various statements of poverty, violence, and hunger associated with the cotton regime.[102]
It was in the brutal context of the cotton regime that the anarcho-syndicalist Aurélio Quintanilha was supposed to lead the Center for Cotton Scientific Research (Centro de Investigação Científica Algodoeira—CICA). The Center created in 1943 was the scientific branch of the Colonial Cotton Board, with several disciplines gathered around one unique object: cotton. To cover the multiplicity of issues related to cotton were created the departments of genetics, entomology, soil, botany, phytopathology, fiber technology, agricultural engineering and regional experiment stations.[103]
The establishment of a network of experimental fields distributed through the entire Mozambican territory was CICA’s first realization. Essays on 39 experimentation sites offered basic results about proper sowing timing, behavior of different breeds, and cultivation rotations.[104] More than anything, these first essays covering the different regions should produce enough information on the fundamental issue of where to plant cotton. The policy of just enrolling through coercion a growing number of natives led to the cultivation of cotton in improper areas with fast erosion of soils in vast areas.[105] Textile factory owners in Portugal also complained about the lack of reliability of colonial cotton with large annual variations of quantity and quality. In 1945, the number of cotton producers began to decrease and would stabilize around 500,000 for the next two decades, with some of the previous cultivated areas even being interdicted for cotton production. To compensate, cultivation was to be intensified in the most suitable ones.
96
On the importance of cotton for Portugal’s economy, see M. Anne Pitcher,
97
Allen Isaacman,
98
Nelson Saraiva Bravo,
103
On the first phase of the center, see A. Quintanilha, “Introdução,” in
104
Mário de Carvalho, “Resultados de Experimentação Algodoeira em Moçambique,”
105
For an early account of soil erosion problems related to cotton, see Domingos H. Godinho Gouveia “A cultura do algodão nas suas relações com o problema da erosão do solo na Colónia de Moçambique,”