German East Africa - Economy
Even in the last decade of the nineteenth century, when much of their manpower and energy was devoted to the task of establishing political control, the Germans began, if slowly, to introduce new crops, development capital, and modes of transportation. The earliest plantations were established in the hinterland of Tanga and in the Kilimanjaro and Usambara mountain areas.
The object of encouraging as an experiment the export of certain products to the Fatherland was to prove to the fanatics at home, who were always demanding information as to the commercial value of the country, that it could produce worse raw material at a higher price than any of its competitors. Unfortunately, official hopes in this direction were scarcely justified.
The crops of greatest long-run importance were coffee, cotton, and sisal (the last introduced in 1892). Rubber plantations, very important before World War 1, were insignificant later. Although missionaries on Kilimanjaro induced some Africans to grow coffee, and the Nava west of Lake Victoria had cultivated it before the arrival of the Europeans, the German emphasis was on European-owned plantations, not on small-scale peasant agriculture.
To this end Africans were persuaded in various ways to give up some of their land. Further the need for plantation labor led to the imposition of a hut tax, payable in cash, which forced Africans to seek wage labor. Some would have been prepared to do so in any case, but not at this stage in sufficient quantity for German needs and not as plantation workers.
Under German and British colonial rule, customary land tenure systems survived with only slight alteration. Unlike in Kenya, large tracts of land were not alienated for European settlement, and as long as the supply of land was adequate, customary practices continued to be followed much as they had been earlier. Although both colonial administratlons declared unoccupied land to be the property of the crown, customary practices were little affected.
There were, however, innovations in tenure systems introduced in a few areas where permanent crops were planted. Among the Chagga around Mount Kilimanjaro, for example, the introduction of coffee meant that land with coffee bushes on it remained under permanent cultivation. And because of the commercial value of the crop rights to coffee land became increasingly individualized. In addition, in some areas new tenancy arrangements were introduced; these new contracts more closely resembled snarecropping. As with nyarubarja tenancy, part of the crop went to the landnolder, but the position of the sharecropper-tenant was less secure than that of the nyarubanja tenant and he could be thrown off the land witn little notice. These new tenant arrangements were prevalent in areas around Lake Victoria where tenants had been used in the past and where there were now migrant newcomers who wished to farm.
At this early point plantation agriculture contributed relatively little to the economy, and ivory, collected (and often paid for with firearms) by Arab and Swahili traders, still played an important part in exports. The export of significant quantities of cash crops had to await the development of transportation facilities from the coast to the interior.
The construction of roads and bridges from Tanga to the Kilimanjaro area began as early as 1894, and in 1896 work began on a railroad to run from Tanga via southern Usambara to what the Germans then called New Moshi (later Moshi) at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro, completed in 1911 and opened in 1912. A railroad running west from Dar es Salaam (which became an im-portant town only under the Germans) to Kigoma, a port on Lake Tanganyika (near the old market town of Ujiji), begun in 1905, was completed in 1914. Other rail lines were begun and telegraph lines constructed.
The Germans were also quick to open research facilities — the Department of Surveying and Agriculture was established in 1893 and agrohiological research centers set up at various points. Before World War I German East Africa was the best mapped area in the region.
As transportation links opened the interior and more land was alienated from Africans to Europeans, the number of plantations grew — from 180 in 1905 to 758 in 1912. In the course of this growth, Africans were brought into the German-controlled monetary economy (many had already been involved in a market economy of a different kind) but, as Adolfo Mascarenhas puts it, "the methods were coercive and the benefits [to Africans] were largely incidental."
There were, however, a few places where Africans, responding to the market, produced as peasant farmers. Thus, just before the beginning of World War I, the Haya of Bukoba District accounted for three-quarters of the output of coffee and the Sukuma near Mwanza for three-quarters of the peanuts.
Coercion of African workers occurred in two contexts: getting the Africans to go to work when and where they were wanted and their treatment while at work. Getting Africans to work sometimes involved direct recruitment just short of slavery. More often the mode was indirect; a hut tax was levied, and except for a few groups engaged in cash-cropping themselves, the only way to obtain the money was to work for Europeans (or Asians) either on plantations or as carriers. In a number of cases, especially where the akida worked directly on the local population in the absence of the mediating influence of a traditional chief, the collection of taxes as well as recruitment of wage workers could he brutal. So too could be the disciplining of workers by those who employed them.
In a moment of mental aberration certain mineral deposits were allowed to be worked. This was afterwards recognized by the Government to have been a particularly bad stroke of policy; firstly, because it meant procuring labourers for the concessionaires, and, secondly, because it brought a most undesirable, uncultured class of man into the country — namely, the English prospector. Now an Englishman was not exactly persona grata with Teuton administrators, but an English prospector was about the last word, the limit, the outside edge.
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