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- Convenors:
-
Cláudia Castelo
(Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa)
Margarida Faria (IICT)
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- Discussant:
-
Maria-Benedita Basto
(Université Paris Sorbonne Paris 4)
- Location:
- C6.01
- Start time:
- 29 June, 2013 at
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This panel intends to analyse alternative ideas on agricultural development of Portuguese colonies in Africa that arose in the techno-scientific field in the decolonisation era, often challenging the discourse and practices of the colonial state and of the white settlers.
Long Abstract:
After the Second World War, in the field of agriculture sciences there were examples of individuals and institutions that generated new ideas and practices regarding the rural development of Portuguese Africa, sometimes challenging the colonial administration and the white settlers' interests, discourses and practices. Experts with vast field knowledge and prolonged contact with African populations, proved to be open to endogenous knowledge and understanding of local agriculture and livestock systems.
Contributions to alternative views (varying in nature and degree) surrounding rural development issues were made by professors such as Botelho da Costa (soil science), technicians such as Amílcar Cabral (later the leader of PAIGC) or research bodies such as: the Missão de Estudos Agronómicos do Ultramar; the Instituto de Investigação Agronómica de Angola; the Missão de Inquéritos Agrícolas de Angola; and the pilot-project on the Rural Extension of Andulo (planned and led by Hermann Pössinger of the IFO-Institute in Munich) which would lead to the creation of the Missão de Extensão Rural de Angola.
This panel intends to present and analyse alternative ideas for agricultural development of Portuguese colonies in Africa that arose in the techno-scientific field in late colonialism and eventually their legacies after political independencies. The communications may focus on agents and sites of production of those alternative views and discuss their contexts of production, as well as their contents and impacts in late and postcolonial Africa.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Bárbara Direito (Centro Interuniversitário de História das Ciências e da Tecnologia, NOVA FCT, Portugal)
Paper short abstract:
This paper will discuss proposals regarding African land tenure in calls for "rural development" in late colonial Mozambique
Paper long abstract:
Drawing on evidence from Mozambique, this paper will discuss the concepts of "rural planning", "rural/communitarian development" and "cooperativism" as put forth in the post-war period by experts in Portugal and in its African colonies, and focus specifically on their proposals regarding land tenure for Africans. It will interpret these concepts in the light of 1920s and 1930s calls for an agrarian intervention in African production. As a means of addressing Portuguese mercantile interests' demands for agricultural commodities and the decline of settler farming, worsened by the Great Depression, plans created under this framework included cash crop expansion, the promotion of "rational" agricultural practices and technical assistance for Africans, but also population displacement and resettlement. In contrast to previous legislation which excluded the majority of Africans from land tenure and viewed them mostly as squatters, these plans proposed new views concerning African land access and use. This transformation was justified by the need to increase yields and by a narrative on the improvement of living standards for Africans, but it was also based on paternalism and coercion, elements which were also present in post-1945 calls for African "rural development". The paper will also analyse these concepts and policies designed in this context in Mozambique in the light of the international circulation of policies and techniques regarding "development" in post-war Africa.
Aharon deGrassi (College of the Desert)
Paper short abstract:
Using archives and ethnography, I examine anthropologist Luis Polanah’s alternative ideas about rural development during his work with the Junta de Povoamento Provincial in Malanje, Angola. Two case studies illuminate the colonial context and current influence on land, law and rural development.
Paper long abstract:
I analyse, firstly, the work of mestiço Mozambican anthropologist Luís Polanah with the Provincial Settlement Board (JPP) while living in the village of Kinglês, Malanje, 1969-1971. He was responsible for the Support Group of the JPP's Malanje Regional Commission for Rural Reorganization during a land rush occasioned by new transport infrastructure in one of the heaviest areas of white settlement in Malanje. Secondly, I situate Polanah's experiences and his later contributions to the Rural Extension Mission in the broader canvas of JPP activities, and rural development strategy in Malanje and Angola. Polanah emphasized social contexts of indigenous agricultural production (largely cassava) - in contrast to technocratic and bureaucratic approaches, and amidst military and cultural counter-insurgency following the 1961 cotton revolt - and thus the need to "take into account the targeted people, the characteristics of the regional economy, the lived historical and political circumstances …" In addition to projects by Community Development Teams, he sought to title native land to prevent further settler expropriation, which I examine through a case of land conflict between locals and a prominent settler-bureaucrat. Lastly, as post-war infrastructure reconstruction and land privatization occasioned post-colonial land rushes in Malanje, I examine a current land dispute near Kinglês in order to trace the memories, landscapes, ideas, projects, and social networks through which Polanah's work resonates in current rural development efforts in Malanje and Angola, particularly the importance of anthropological methods and insights and the real but limited protections of public interest in efforts at smallholder and community land registration.
Luís Filipe Madeira (Universidade da Beira Interior)
Paper short abstract:
In order to understand the impact of the new rural development ideas on public policy, one should monitor the budgetary evolution of agriculture. Considering that the colonies’ budgets were mere propaganda tools, the new ideas impact over the political priorities of the regime should be reassessed.
Paper long abstract:
The reflection about the innovating ideas and practices, after the Second World War, in the Portuguese Colonial Empire, would be incomplete without analyzing the impact of those innovations upon the colonial policy. In so doing, a quantitative methodology founded on the public finances study was chosen. Since the majority of the public policies registered in the Portuguese colonies' financial year accounts under the designation of public expenditure, sometimes in absolute terms, some others in relative terms, is underestimated, thus not corresponding to the real public financial flows which permitted their implementation ; we shall here try and carry out a comparative analysis between the figures registered in the official financial documents as agricultural policy and an alternative version of those figures, closer to the reality, which reassess the weight of agriculture within the colonial public policies' framework by considering a set of public expenses which had not been registered in the colonies' financial year accounts and that, in spite of not having been the object of study by academics focused on the Portuguese colonial public policies of the twentieth century third quarter, were indispensable for government and colonies' public administration. The comparative analysis of the position occupied by the agricultural sector of both official and corrected versions in the hierarchy of the colonial government's priorities will prove that the new ideas and practices introduced in the imperial rural space after 1945 did not have the expected impact on the financial allocation of resources implemented by the Portuguese colonial policy.