Colonial administrators reimposed concessionary-style forced cotton cultivation in West Africa

Evidence

Inspector Kair discovered that Lieutenant Governor Antonetti was forcing the producers in the north to grow cotton in collective fields, instead of their own food crops, and to sell it at artificially low prices fixed by the administration, in collusion with a representative of one of the trading firms. Such procedures, Kair concluded, were nothing less than a kind of state management that recalled the arbitrary methods of the concessionary companies; these methods, he added, had long since been condemned. Far from making the well-being of the African its central preoccupation, the administration seemed primarily interested in ensuring that taxes were paid. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 816

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to earlier chapters on concessionary company abuses and the civilizing mission’s rhetoric versus coercive practice under Carde. — connects to: Colonial authorities confined Africans to arid reserves in lands they had not previously inhabited — Tavengwa Gwekwerere, Davie E. Mutasa, and Kudakwashe Chitofiri, Settlers, Rhodesians, and Supremacists:…, 17