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Lango Agriculture during the early Colonial Period: Land and Labour in a Cash-Crop Economy1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

John Tosh
John Tosh
Affiliation:
Polytechnic of NorthLondon
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Extract

This article seeks to explain the adoption of cotton-growing by the Langi of Uganda in the early twentieth century, on the assumption that considerations of ‘indigenous economics’ (notably labour constraints and the attraction of competing crops) were at least as important as the more usually stressed factors of administrative pressure, price incentives and petty trading by immigrant minorities. On the eve of the colonial period the Langi were already producing planned agricultural surpluses—principally sesame for trade with Bunyoro.

Cotton, which was introduced in 1909, could only have been grown on a significant scale at the cost of sacrificing the trade in sesame. This the Langi refused to do until the early 1920s, when the market for sesame declined and the buying price of cotton rose; partial alleviation of the threat of famine and changes in traditional dry-season occupations were also important. From 1931, however, cotton output in Lango ceased to expand. This stagnation was only partly a result of the Depression; once more the Langi found themselves producing as much as was humanly possible, given an extremely tough environment, a simple technology and a fully stretched labour-force.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 19 , Issue 3 , July 1978 , pp. 415 - 439
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1978

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References

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50 Miro District Report for May 1909, U.N.A. SMP/359/09.

51 Leakey, , ‘Report on Bachope and Bakeddi incidents’, 18 01. 1908Google Scholar, U.N.A. SMP/1528/07; Knowles to Wilson, 8 July 1908, U.N.A. SMP/1003/08; Lamb, ‘Cotton report on Palango District, 1910’, U.N.A. SMP/943.

52 E.g. Tufnell to Grant, 31 Oct. 1910, U.N.A. SMP/519/09; Report on Miro District for May 1911, LDA (Lango District Archives); Warne to Scott, 4 June 1913, LDA LDMP/ADM/9/46.

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54 Lango District Report for 1917/18, U.N.A. EPMP/N/120. This was in contrast to the Kumam area of the District where progress in cotton was much more rapid, and where by this date there were already two ginneries. To say, as does Wrigley (Crops and Wealth, 20), that in Lango ‘cultivation [of cotton] spread almost simultaneously with the establishment of administrative control’ is somewhat misleading.

55 As elsewhere in the article, the argument here would be strengthened by the inclusion of statistics. Agricultural statistics were in fact published annually in the official Blue Books and the Annual Reports of the Department of Agriculture. However, crop acreage figures are extremely unreliable, for reasons explained in Wrigley, , Crops and Wealth, 60Google Scholar, and Hyde, R. J., The Analysis of Crop Distributions in Uganda (Kampala, 1975), 9–22Google Scholar. Production figures are usually reckoned to be sounder, but in the present case special difficulties intervene. Until 1923 hardly a year passed without changes in the range of effective administration or the boundaries of Lango District, so that the figures cannot be used to plot the fluctuations in agricultural productivity from year to year. Throughout the period covered by this article, the Kumam were administered as part of the District, no distinction being made in the statistics between the two peoples. Lastly, no figures for the prices paid for any crop to growers in Lango District were recorded until the 1930s.

56 Paske Smith to Grant, II Mar. 1909, U.N.A. SMP/519/09; Lango District Report for Mar. and Apr. 1909, U.N.A. SMP/872/09; Fox to Grant, 13 June 1910, U.N.A. SMP/130; Lango District Report for Mar. 1911, U.N.A. SMP/193A.

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72 Report on Lango District for 1913/14, U.N.A. EPMP/Z/228/13; Report on Eastern Province for 1913/14, U.N.A. SMP/703/D; Agriculture Report, 1913/14.

73 Driberg, ‘Lango District’, 130.

74 8,022 cwt of sesame was exported from the six ports of Atura, Kwera, Palango, Abyece, Aputi and Kacung. This figure does not include produce shipped from the river ports in Kumam country. Agriculture Report, 1917/18.

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89 Lango District Report for June 1909, U.N.A. SMP/872/09; Jervoise to Provincial Commissioner, Eastern Province, 4 Dec. 1912, U.N.A. SMP/2404; Lango District Report for 1913/14, U.N.A. EPMP/Z/228/13; Musoke, P. K., articles in Ebifa, Apr. and Nov. 1912Google Scholar(I am grateful to Dr Michael Twaddle for allowing me to use his translations of these Luganda articles).

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91 ‘It is not the policy of this office to encourage the proletariat [sic] to indulge in the wearing of rags of cloth.… The old practice of nudity is hygienically the best for the mass of the people’. Driberg to Provincial Commissioner, Eastern Province, 13 Nov. 1917, Acholi District Archives, LDMP/40/15.

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