Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (24 page)

An indignant War Office investigator pointed out that the settlers were forcing the army to pay inflated prices for their goods. African farmers were paid substantially less for their maize. In Kenya the rate was 6
s
. 20 cents per bag compared to 13
s
. a bag for that of the settlers. White farmers argued that if the Africans were paid too much their lazy natures meant that they would reduce production. The colonial administration had been bullied out of taking the more reasonable and much cheaper course of action, which would have been to encourage peasant production rather than subsidize white-owned farms. The Native Commissioner for Mt Darwin in Southern Rhodesia ‘found
there was no convincing reason for compelling Africans to work on increased acreages for Europeans while their own acreage was reduced and settlers sold their maize at twice the price of African maize’.
⁶³
In the maize- and peanut-producing region of Mrewa the commissioner wondered to ‘what extent food production is being increased in European areas by removing 440 growers from the Reserves which between them sold 40,300 bags of maize and 12,700 bags of shelled nuts during the current year.’
⁶⁴

By agreeing to pay white farmers more for their crops and accepting their demands for African conscripted labour, the colonial governments reinforced labour migration and rural neglect. In the African reserves a number of factors came together to promote poverty, malnutrition and a rise in infant mortality. Concentration on the war effort meant that welfare and development schemes were neglected, the conscription of able-bodied men into the army and as farm labourers diverted too many men away from subsistence farming, while poor rains in 1942 led to crop failure on the reserves in 1943.
⁶⁵
However, the Northern Rhodesian colonial administration did have some success in protecting the reserve population of women and children from hunger. In an attempt to avert hunger if millet crops should fail it was made compulsory for everyone to grow at least some extremely drought-resistant cassava. For the women on the reserves it made sense to adopt this new plant. It could be cultivated in the same fields in which they had previously grown their staple millet, and so it did not depend on scarce male labour to cut down trees and clear new land. Its drought resistance was prized and it had the added advantage that it could be grown as a cash crop. The government bought large quantities to feed the labourers it employed on road-building.
⁶⁶
Those who grew cassava survived the droughts of 1942 and 1949 better than those who stuck to growing the traditional millet. But cassava’s spread carried a price. The preparation of manioc flour is laborious, and as it is seen as women’s work it substantially increased the workload of peasant women. Porridge made from manioc is also less nutritious than that made with millet, and in the long term the nutritional quality of the cultivators’ diet declined.
⁶⁷

Elsewhere in East Africa the forced conscription of African labour to work on sisal plantations had a particularly baleful impact on the
reserve populations. It is a sign of the British government’s desperation but also of its cavalier attitude towards the lives of its colonial subjects that Tanganyikans were impressed into working, virtually as temporary slaves, on the sisal plantations. On at least one estate the men lived in appalling conditions with no housing, firewood or proper medical attention for the painful sores associated with sisal cutting.
⁶⁸
Meanwhile, their families left behind on the reserves were reduced to hunger. Unfortunately, a government drive for more maize had persuaded the African farmers to plant corn, which is even more drought-sensitive than millet. Lack of labour and of rain in 1942 resulted in a devastating fall in the harvest. The dearth of food could not be compensated for with the usual imports of Burmese rice, and Churchill’s diversion of shipping from the Indian Ocean meant there was no hope of emergency imports of food. Famine deaths were confined to the area of Ugogo but hunger was widespread. Even the workers on the sisal plantations had their ration of one kilogram of meal a day reduced to 316 grams. Children were sold in return for grain. This is remembered in Tanganyika as ‘Europe’s famine’.
⁶⁹

By caving in to settler demands the colonial East African governments failed to implement policies which secured the benefits of higher wartime prices for food for African farmers. Nevertheless, the official price, even for African maize, doubled, and many Africans made their own efforts to ensure that they were able to participate in the wartime bonanza. Some simply side-stepped the government and evaded controls by transporting their maize along pre-colonial trade routes at night. Black market maize fetched an even higher price than that paid to the settlers by the government purchasing boards.
⁷⁰
Whether East Africans went hungry depended on the ways in which the war disrupted their local economy. In areas where there was road-building, a disproportionate number of wage labourers compared to farmers led to a tendency towards over-selling and later hunger. In other areas the peasants held back food, planning for food shortages, or found that even if they produced a surplus of food they had nowhere to sell it.
⁷¹
The herders of livestock were probably the worst hit as the army’s insatiable demand for meat meant that they were forced to sell their cattle at prices well below the market value. The army sometimes paid even less than in the worst period of the Depression, and the stock
routes were too well policed to allow for the growth of a substantial black market.
⁷²

The most fortunate were those with ready access to markets. Around East Africa’s towns peasant production diversified into mixed farming.
⁷³
In Kenya, the African districts of Nairobi were filled every day with women from Kiambu selling vegetables and charcoal for a good profit. The Kikuyu sold their vegetables to army-run vegetable-drying factories where their potatoes and beans fetched double the pre-war prices. In the districts of Nyeri and Embu 11,000 families were issued with seeds and their planting schemes were organized by the Department of Agriculture.
⁷⁴
Even the famine in Kenya’s Central Province in 1943 was a source of profit to the Kikuyu tribe. The starving people of Machakos had plenty of money. Each month the soldiers fighting in the war sent home large remittances and their hungry families could be seen on the roads each day, fetching food from the Kikuyu farmers. ‘The District Commissioner estimated that during the three worst months the Kamba tribe of Machakos must have spent at least £100,000 each month on food in Kikuyuland and Kitui.’
⁷⁵
The Kikuyu were able to make seven times the price offered by the Maize Control Board for their crops, and four and a half times more money than the white settlers. The entrepreneurial saved up their money and invested in lorries and shops, and the newly prosperous disrupted social hierarchies within the reserves as they challenged the traditional authority of chiefs and elders and sought political representation and a voice in the colonial regime.
⁷⁶

By 1945 white settlers had infiltrated the colonial bureaucracies and were the owners of fully capitalized farms. Their numbers were swelled in the immediate post-war years by the arrival of young men intent on escaping Britain under a Labour government.
⁷⁷
Determined to take advantage of their new, much stronger position, the white settlers resented the economic challenge represented by the African proto-capitalists thrown up by the war. As soon as hostilities had ceased Kenyan settlers reverted to the old arguments of the 1930s, claiming the African farmers were denuding the land and they began pushing for the removal of the now relatively prosperous vegetable-growing African squatters
^*
from their farms. This set post-war Kenya on a
course towards internal conflict which came to a head seven years later with the Mau Mau conflict, when Kikuyu farmers rose in protest against repressive measures which deprived them of their land.
⁷⁸
A side-effect of this conflict was the consolidation of Kikuyu land-holdings which provided the basis for the 1950s ‘agricultural revolution’. Vegetable-planting schemes like the one associated with the long-closed military vegetable-drying plant were revived. African farmers were reorganized into high-productivity cash-crop farming and began growing European vegetables on a large scale. This is why Britain still imports fresh beans by air from Kenya.
⁷⁹

In the Rhodesias the political power of the settler communities had expanded to such a point that they were able to push through the creation of a Native Labour Supply Commission which recruited African labour to work on white farms right up until the 1970s, reinforcing the neglect of African farming.
⁸⁰
The bitter consequences of the resentments this caused are still being felt today in Zimbabwe (as Southern Rhodesia was renamed), where Robert Mugabe’s ‘land reform programme’ has dispossessed white farmers, and raging inflation has left the African population destitute, ravaged by hunger and a cholera epidemic in 2008.

WEST AFRICA AND THE DOLLAR DEFICIT

In 1939 West African farmers were faced with the same depressing prospect as East Africa’s settler farmers: their crops (cocoa beans, palm produce and peanuts) were surplus to requirements. In 1939 America and Britain already had one year’s worth of cocoa beans in storage and the farmers’ third best customer, Germany, had disappeared from the market.
⁸¹
Cocoa beans came very low on the shipping officials’ list of priorities and the farmers were faced with the prospect of harvesting a virtually worthless crop. In order to prevent the farmers from facing bankruptcy the British government bought up that year’s supply, much of which it destroyed. In 1941 the West African Cocoa Control Board was set up to organize the bulk buying of cocoa, and from 1942 it dealt with other products and became the West African Produce Control Board.

However, the immense wartime demand for food and the Japanese capture of south-east Asia revived the demand for West African foodstuffs, which in 1942 were suddenly seen as an untapped and valuable resource, as were the region’s supplies of tin, bauxite (for aluminium), iron ore, rubber, cotton and sisal.
⁸²
A Resident Minister for West Africa was appointed and for the first time a co-ordinated economic policy was applied to Britain’s four West African territories – the Gold Coast, Sierra Leone, the Gambia and Nigeria. The rising demand for foodstuffs meant that the Boards were able to sell West African produce for a good profit. But West African farmers benefited little from the revival of the food trade. The Boards continued to pay the producers low prices while the rising profits were channelled into the coffers of the British government, which used them to pay off some of Britain’s debt to the United States.

Before he set off to take up his post as Resident Minister for West Africa in June 1942 Lord Swinton met with the Minister of Food. Lord Woolton told him that the nutritionists had warned him that the British could not cope with a cut in their fat ration. He added, ‘It all depends on what you can do in West Africa whether we can maintain it or not.’
⁸³
Before the war Nigeria had been governed according to the 1930s’ philosophy that expensive modernization projects were not to be encouraged. Governor Sir Bernard Bourdillon had been implacably opposed to the rationalization of agricultural production and had vetoed the introduction of European-run plantations and even the import of hand-presses to ease the task of processing palm kernels. Although after 1940 he had adopted the new wartime approach and had approved the construction of a Pioneer Mill and the distribution of hand-presses for palm kernels, the backward state of the industry meant that an increase in palm oil supplies in 1942 depended entirely upon villagers stepping up production.
⁸⁴

Palm oil is obtained from a kernel inside the stone of the palm fruit. In West Africa the job of extracting the kernel was done by women and children who would crack the stone open, using a rock. In an effort to stimulate villagers into greater palm kernel production, collecting stations were set up across West Africa, and competitions were organized to see which school could crack open the most stones and extract the kernels. Lord Swinton visited one such school in a remote part of
eastern Nigeria where, to help them along with the work, the teacher and pupils had invented a song with a refrain which ran along the lines that they were ‘cracking Hitler on the head’.
⁸⁵
Given that it took up to a million of the feather-light kernels to make a ton in weight, West Africa’s wartime export of over 400,000 tons of kernels a year represented an incredible cracking effort on the part of its women and children. British housewives had West African villagers to thank for their weekly supplies of 2–3 ounces of margarine which supplemented the butter ration of 4 ounces.
⁸⁶
In his memoirs Swinton proudly related that ‘we won the battle of the fat ration’.
⁸⁷

The palm oil produced in Nigeria was marketed through the West African Produce Control Board, originally set up to deal with the problem of excess cocoa beans. The demand for West African oils was ‘virtually bottomless’ and a wartime use was found even for cocoa beans, which were sold to the United States for the production of emergency chocolate rations for the armed forces.
⁸⁸
The sale of Nigerian cocoa alone yielded £2,700,068. Similar sums were made on Nigeria’s other export crops, including palm oil.
⁸⁹
A substantial fund accumulated in British government hands, which it used to repay American loans. The Boards had been set up at the beginning of the war in a benevolent attempt to save colonial farmers from financial ruin. They provided the merchants and farmers with stability throughout the war but at consistently low prices, which were set at a minimum below which the government might have faced political unrest. But they were far below the market prices of the later years of the war and rose much less than the cost of living.
⁹⁰
Thus, the producers were cheated of the profits created by the eventual wartime boom in demand for food. This was an iniquitous way of raising a ‘forced loan’ from West African farmers.
⁹¹
And when the funds from the marketing boards were eventually reinvested in the region they were used to develop industry and gave little back to farmers.