Page 52 - Afrika Must Unite

SOCIETY UNDER COLONIALISM 37

led to a catastrophic decline in the standard of living of the African
people.’1 In m any parts native agriculture was discouraged in
favour of cash crops; soil was ruthlessly exploited, sometimes
causing erosion; and millions were turned into low-paid workers.
For example, when Dutch settlers first appeared in South Africa
they found native tribes of strong, healthy people, who lived by
raising cattle, growing corn and hunting wild game. Today the
diet of these tribes is almost exclusively corn. ‘Laboratory rats
fed on a typical African’s diet,’ according to an article in the New
Scientist,2 ‘will eat their own offspring.’
It has been argued that Africans are poor because they do not
produce enough. But their capacity to work must be examined. It
is now generally agreed that m alignant m alnutrition is a major
cause of African fatigue. If African labour is ‘poor’ it is because
wages and conditions are poor.
There is, too, the question of incentive. W hat incentive had the
African worker under colonial rule, when his efforts only served
to enrich non-Africans ? During the last twenty years, African
miners have steadily increased the output of copper in Northern
Rhodesia; yet every penny of increased wages had to be bitterly
fought for. African workers, once they are liberated from
colonialism, will soon show the world what they are capable of,
in the same way as workers in Russia and China have done.
U nder the old regimes, Russians and Chinese were thought to be
incapable of running a modern industrialized country.
U nder colonialism, African workers have no effective
bargaining power. Trade unions are frequently disallowed by
law, and they are largely unorganized. They have either to
accept the pitifully low wages offered to them or suffer the
consequences of being without work, which, in certain regimes,
makes them liable to a variety of punishments. In South Africa,
under the gruesome regulations of apartheid, the African worker
is hounded and forced into conditions of helotry. Shameful
as these are, conditions for Africans in the Portuguese territories
probably surpass them though they have not so far received such
attention from critics.
For the Portuguese colonies in Africa are slave states, and have
1 Jack Woddis: Africa, the Roots o f Revolt, Lawrence & Wishart i960, p. 166.
2 20 August 1959.