African labor history is undergoing a resurgence judging by the appearance of these three important books. During the 1990s and into the early twenty-first century, historians working in East, West, and southern Africa published a remarkable number of first-rate histories of migrant laborers, rural workers, and the emerging urban working class, notably in the innovative Heinemann Social History of Africa series founded by Allen Isaacman and Jean Hay.Footnote ¹ Other historians published fine works elsewhere.Footnote ² Labor history of all kinds flourished. However, with new academic trends and the demise of the Social History series in the mid-2000s, African labor history seems to have entered a decline, although studies of precolonial slavery have continued to appear regularly. It is therefore gratifying to see a number of new labor histories published in the last two or three years.

The three books under consideration here all deal with forced labor during the early twentieth century, a topic that first received attention during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.Footnote ³ Two of these books, by Catherine Higgs and Eric Allina, examine the links between slavery and colonial forced labor in Portuguese Africa, in Angola and Mozambique. Although forced labor was imposed on Africans in all colonial contexts and regions, the Portuguese colonies are a particularly fruitful field of study. The long colonial presence in the islands of São Tomé and Principe, the coastal districts of the mainland colonies, and the Zambezi valley in Mozambique, combined with the persistence of slavery to create a legacy that was hard to break. As elsewhere, labor studies on Portuguese Africa merge with the history of slavery in the early decades of colonial rule, but they also take the history of forced labor into the era of decolonization. The Portuguese did not abolish forced labor in their colonies until 1961, considerably later than did the British and French. Since the books by Higgs and Allina both reference slavery in their titles, a key issue to consider is the degree to which colonial forced labor in Angola and Mozambique truly equated the slavery of earlier times. And if it did, how so? If it represented a new direction in coerced labor, was it directly comparable with labor regimes found in other parts of Africa, in British and French territories? Consideration of Opolot Okia's study of British policies and the debates concerning forced labor in early colonial Kenya will help to answer the last question.

Chocolate Islands is as much a study of antislavery activism and a travelogue as it is a history of unfree labor. In this well-researched and illustrated book Higgs revisits the labor controversies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in relation to the cocoa plantations of São Tomé and Principe. First studied in the current era by James Duffy, Portuguese colonial labor practices had long been a subject of concern in British antislavery circles. Duffy's perspective was long-term, from 1850 to 1920. In contrast, Higgs has chosen to focus on the labor controversy in the early years of the twentieth century during which the Quaker Cadbury family made strenuous efforts to ascertain whether the plantations that supplied cocoa destined for their famous Bourneville chocolate factory used Angolan slave labor. Duffy and other historians based their studies on the reports of crusading British journalist Henry Nevinson, who traveled to São Tomé, Principe, and Angola in 1905, as well on the letters and reports of Joseph Burtt, the investigator hired by William A. Cadbury. But Higgs' approach is different, as she emphasizes Burtt's more detailed research as well as a wider range of Portuguese sources. Burtt spent more time in the Portuguese colonies than Nevinson, especially on São Tomé and Principe, traveled more widely, and, unlike the journalist, learned Portuguese. (Neither spoke an African language.) Higgs' narrative follows Burtt's extensive travels from 1904 to 1907 in Portugal, São Tomé, Principe, and Angola but also his short visits to South Africa and Mozambique. Higgs' shows us these places very much as Burtt experienced them, with extensive quotations from his letters to Cadbury. She highlights the limitations of Burtt's perspective by adding context and details on conditions in the cocoa plantations and the realities of labor “recruitment.” In the end Higgs reaches essentially the same conclusion that Burtt did, that labor in the plantations of São Tomé and Principe was a form of slavery, despite the letter of the colonial labor codes, the rhetoric of Portuguese officials, and the efforts of some plantation owners to improve conditions.

The book is organized chronologically. In the prologue Higgs outlines the shared antislavery and proworker concerns of the Cadburys and Burtt and their membership in the Society of Friends. The Cadburys were well known for their establishment of Bourneville Village, a model workers' community, near their factory, a response to the working-class poverty of the cities of industrial Britain. In chapter one Higgs outlines the background to the cocoa controversy and the complications it created for the relationship between Britain and Portugal, long-standing allies. In 1901 William Cadbury had been alerted to the possibility that cocoa bought by the Cadburys was produced by slave labor when he noticed that the inventory for a São Tomé plantation included “200 black laborers.” This was not the first evidence of slave labor in the cocoa islands. A report from 1897 by British consul Clayton Pickersgill noted that contract laborers sent to the islands from Angola had sung, “in São Tomé there's a door for going in, but none for going out” (12). Portuguese critics had also highlighted the disturbing conditions in the islands. Cadbury consulted with antislavery friends and set in motion the train of events that led to Burtt being sent to investigate. In the meantime, in 1903, the Portuguese government announced by decree improvements to the conditions faced by plantation workers, including enforcement of five-year contracts and a fund (paid for by the workers) for their repatriation to the mainland at the end of their contract, as well as minimum wages. For Portuguese critics this was window dressing, “for the English to see” (14), but the Portuguese authorities emphatically defended the decree, and conditions for laborers were improved. However, the British, and particularly the Quakers, were most concerned about the impossibility of mobility for contracted laborers and the lack of a right to leave their employment.

In chapter two Higgs describes Burtt's reactions to the lush new world he found in São Tomé. Burtt had never been to Africa and, despite his concern for the underdog, held a romantic view of the tropics as well as the common racial stereotypes of the time. He had also come to like the Portuguese. Thus letters describing his first visits to large cocoa plantations (a few black-owned), some of which employed up to 1,500 serviçais (contract workers) were often uncritical. His racial views seemed to create a special category for black plantation owners; when referring to Africans he often used the derogatory language of colonial and racially stratified societies. However, he dutifully collected information on plantation productivity and finances, worker death rates, health conditions, work regimes, and plantation social structures, including the position of women. Yet at times he missed obvious abuse, as when he mistook the swollen stomach of a malnourished baby for plumpness (51). Higgs notes, “For all his utopian tendencies, Burtt could not span the cultural and linguistic divide between himself and the ‘patient creatures’ he had come to observe. The image of the African Burtt produced for Cadbury was a limited one” (52).

After three months on São Tomé, Burtt went by steamer to Principe, its small cocoa-producing neighbor. Conditions there, described in chapter three, were in some ways worse due to the devastation caused by sleeping sickness, introduced to the island by tsetse-infected cattle from the mainland. Both local people and plantation workers suffered high death rates. Burtt discussed with some of the planters the question of repatriation of serviçais at the end of their five-year contracts—a key concern for Cadbury. Forty percent of the workers' wages were set aside to pay for it, but by September 1905 it appeared that not a single serviçal had been returned home to the mainland. Numerous serviçais had perished attempting to escape on small boats. None of their children attended school.

In December 1905 Burtt started the next stage of his investigations, on the Angolan mainland. Chapter four concerns his research in Luanda and other parts of the coast, while in chapter five Higgs recounts his observations along the “slave route” to the far east of Angola. Luanda and Benguela to the south had been two of the major export ports of the Atlantic slave trade, although slavery in Portuguese Africa was technically abolished in 1875. Nevertheless, de facto slavery continued as freed slaves became serviçais on Angolan plantations, locked into recurring five-year contracts, as on São Tomé and Principe. In Angola, however, labor and health conditions on the plantations and other work places seemed to be worse. One of Burtt's aims in Luanda was to observe the recruiting process, as well as to visit the interior of the colony where the serviçais originated. In Benguela he commented on the brutality of British railway engineer John Norton Griffiths, in charge of 1,700 African construction workers. In nearby Catumbela, he heard about the rubber boom of the 1890s, but Catumbela was also a processing point for labor contractors overseeing the delivery of serviçais to São Tomé and Principe. Nevinson had already described for his readers in Harper's the process in which “slaves” were driven to the coast by a Portuguese trader, “shackled, tied together, and beaten along with whips” (84).

Although his own romantic and racist view of Africa as a “sensual woman” remained, Burtt was gradually awakening to the realities of “the depravities of this place” (82). A visit to Moçâmedes in the south of Angola confirmed that serviçais on a plantation producing oranges, sugar cane, and bananas were not free at the end of their five-year contracts. At Ambrizette, in the north of the colony, Burtt met an antislavery activist missionary and heard more stories of abuse of African laborers; at Cabinda, he learned about a more lenient system of one-year contracts. He thought this “a good one” (92). By this point Burtt was well informed on the contract system and “wroth” over its abuses. However, his view was that it should be reformed, not abolished. The main problems, in his view, were the profits made by recruiters, the lack of effective Portuguese control over much of the colony, a tolerance for corruption, and trade in alcohol.

In July 1906 Burtt, with a colleague and a number of porters, began the 750-mile journey from Benguela up the main “slave” route to Kavungu near the border with the Congo Free State to further investigate the contract labor system. Outside Catumbela he found an abandoned ankle shackle, clear evidence of the movement of captives, as well as a number of skeletons and a decomposing corpse. The first town en route was Bailundo, where the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions had established itself. Higgs takes time to discuss the complex relations between the missionaries and the Portuguese and the background to the Portuguese defeat of the Ovimbundu king of Bailundo, Mutu ya Kavela, in 1902. When Nevinson visited Bailundo in 1905, the slave trade was still practiced, and slaves were sent to the coast in caravans mixed with free porters. The practice continued in August 1906. At a Plymouth Brethren mission station at Ochilonda Burtt heard more stories of enslavement, in particular the account of a young man, Ngumba, as told to the missionaries. Higgs notes that for the first time Burtt provided Cadbury with a detailed account of enslavement in which the African participants were all named and their personal struggles and worries were outlined. He was now beginning to see Africans as human beings, although still not equal to Europeans. Previously, in São Tomé and Principe and in Luanda, among other places, he had had chances to interview rare Portuguese-speaking laborers about their experience in the contract system, but had failed to do so. Nor, Higgs notes, did he think to employ Africans to interview people on his behalf until his return to Luanda, a year and a half after his arrival in Africa. Higgs includes Burtt's observations and experiences of the long caravan route. Burtt reached Kavungu in October 1906, where he collected further evidence relating to the slave trade from Katanga, Kasai, Barotseland, and other territories to Catumbela. In the 1890s the main traders were Ovimbundu, but Portuguese trading firms were also major participants. Some took advantage of the ostensible border with the Congo Free State, where slavery and forced labor were rampant and were stationed just “out of sight” of a Portuguese fort.

Back in Luanda, Burtt completed his first report for Cadbury, which Higgs summarizes. Now agreeing with Nevinson, he concluded that

His work in Angola completed, Burtt then traveled to Mozambique and to Johannesburg, the subject of chapter six. His research in Lourenço Marques (modern Maputo) lasted just two weeks. He was quickly persuaded by Portuguese officials and the British consul that the large-scale migration of Mozambican laborers to the gold mines of the Witwatersrand was nothing like the contract system in São Tomé and Principe, and that the Mozambicans went voluntarily. Burtt noted that the contracts in the mines were far shorter, averaging nine months, the wages were five times higher than in the cocoa plantations, and the death rate was half that on the plantations, although mine accommodation was bad and the workers were exposed to fine dust. The Transvaal was British territory in 1907. Burtt considered migrant labor from southern Mozambique only and did not investigate conditions in the central Mozambican territories controlled by concessionary companies, especially the Companhia de Moçambique (Mozambique Company), the subject of Allina's book.

In chapter seven Higgs discusses the politics of the controversy as Burtt's final report was edited and moderated, even if its basic conclusions remained the same. In response, the Portuguese and the planters defended the contract system in the cocoa islands and Angola. The question for Cadbury Brothers was what to do with the report, now that it was proven that their cocoa imports from the islands were produced with slave labor. In the end they decided, as a last resort, that they, as well as fellow chocolate firms Fry and Rowntree, “cease buying S. Thome cocoa” (147). However, the controversy was not over and continued for decades into the 1950s and beyond, when another radical journalist, Basil Davidson, took up the cause of forced labor in the Portuguese colonies (162). Higgs' final point about the linkage between an old controversy and modern-day exploitation of cocoa laborers in twenty-first century Africa is well taken.

Higgs' fine-grained study is unlike more conventional labor histories. It connects debates over labor reform in far-off Europe directly to the hard lives of voiceless Angolan contract workers and slaves. In the process of following Burtt on his journeys, we learn much about forced labor, plantations, and Portuguese colonial rule in the cocoa islands and Angola. We also learn about the motivations and concerns of socially-minded business people, the Cadbury family, who were committed to antislavery yet needed a reliable supply of good quality cocoa such as that from São Tomé and Principe for their chocolate factory. Higgs also highlights alternative ideas about labor in the era of high imperialism. On the one hand there was the Portuguese approach, which emphasized improvement in material conditions yet great coercion; on the other was the British approach, which allowed greater mobility but appeared less concerned with harsh racial discrimination. Yet, in a curious way, the book replicates some of the weaknesses of Burtt's own research. There are few African voices here, and no oral history. Although the final chapter takes the controversy past 1907 and the production of Burtt's report, there is little research on changing conditions for the serviçais given that the Portuguese did introduce reforms in 1910, at least on paper. One annoyance is that the references are hard to deconstruct, as there is only one for each paragraph; the information contained in each paragraph cannot easily be connected to a specific source.

In Slavery By Any Other Name, Eric Allina builds on the now impressive scholarship in English on forced labor, migrant labor to South Africa, and forced cotton production in colonial Mozambique.Footnote ⁴ British concern over slavery and labor in the Portuguese colonies hardly extended to the territories of private concessionary companies. There was no equivalent to the labor scandals of the Congo Free State or the cocoa islands in Sofala and Manica, the two large provinces controlled by the Mozambique Company, between 1892 and 1942. Outside awareness of this particularly abusive labor regime has been negligible even though, Allina argues, Portugal relied on forced labor more than any other colonial power. Thus one of the book's achievements is to add depth and complexity to our knowledge of labor in early colonial Africa.

The evidentiary basis for the book rests on the rediscovered archive of the Mozambique Company. Lost since 1942, when the Portuguese state took direct control of central Mozambique, the archive was to have been shipped to Portugal, but it never arrived. Its subsequent location remained a mystery until 1977, when it was found by staff of the national archive of the newly independent Mozambique at the original company headquarters in Beira. But as the contents of the several thousand boxes were not cataloged and not part of the regular national archive collection, they were not fully accessible until the 1990s. Allina's sources also include interviews with about 100 Mozambicans. Unfortunately few of these voices appear in the text or the references, and they are not listed along with the bibliography. As in the case of Higgs' Chocolate Islands, the African voice is nearly always heard indirectly, and we must infer from the actions and practices of Mozambican peasants and laborers what they might have been thinking. Allina, like Higgs, does include an excellent set of photographs and good maps.

The Mozambique Company was unique in that it ruled its territories uninterrupted for fifty years, far longer than other concessionary companies in Africa did and, Allina argues, ruled with “more autonomy from the state than any other chartered company in Africa” (2). In 1899 Portugal passed a colonial labor law that applied to all “natives” in its possessions. It remained in force with few changes until 1930. There were to be some exemptions including chiefs, women, men over sixty, and boys below fifteen. But as there was almost always a great shortage of labor in the farms and mines of white settlers in Sofala and Manica, the exemptions were rarely honored.

The Portuguese, not surprisingly, had their own official discourse on labor that served to conceal its realities. Allina quotes a leading Portuguese colonial official and idealist of forced labor, António Enes, who wrote, “Work is the most moralizing of missions, the most instructive of schools … the education that will manage to transform beasts into men.” Enes believed that the abolition of slavery had allowed Africans the “liberty not to work”; remaining in freedom meant that they existed in a “savage state” (6–7). Portugal's civilizing mission, therefore, was to bring enlightenment through hard labor. The colonial discourse linking forced labor and “civilization” did not change much over the next fifty years, despite the introduction of the League of Nations Convention on Forced Labor in 1930. Forced labor was referred to as “contract” labor, under which Africans had to work either for the state, in this case the Mozambique Company, or private employers, in order to become civilized. But the idea of a contract was an illusion designed, again, “just for the English to see,” as the laborers saw no contract, signed nothing, and typically had few ways out. Workers were “contracted” initially for four months, and in later years for six months or one year. Frequently they were not free to return home until replacement workers arrived at the work place. In theory they were paid wages, but these were often a fiction or were reduced through repayment of debts, fines, and for loss of work days through illness. Incomplete tasks often meant no pay at all.

In chapter one Allina outlines the earlier history of Portuguese colonialism in the region, Portugal's desire to recover its status as an imperial power, and the context of the founding of the Mozambique Company—the scramble for Africa in the late nineteenth century.Footnote ⁵ The company's founder, Joaquím Carlos Paiva de Andrada, negotiated with Portugal for a concession that was 50 percent larger than Portugal itself. The company was given state-like powers, although it remained within the Portuguese empire. It had its own laws, bureaucracy, and fiscal authority. It maintained a police force and was obliged to construct a port, a railway, roads, and a telegraph system. It was also expected to settle 1,000 Portuguese colonists in the first five years. Concessionary companies like the Mozambique Company brought significant benefits to the Portuguese colonial project. They saved state revenues and, in time, would contribute a portion of their profits to Portugal. They mobilized capital for investment. They allowed colonial expansion on the cheap. But few were given control over such a rich territory as was the Mozambique Company, given the potential of Manica in particular, with its good agricultural lands and sources of gold. Andrada's first task was to conquer the powerful Gaza state of Gungunhana, who receives a sympathetic portrait. This was accomplished in the mid-1890s. The next stage was to attract large-scale investment and white settlers to Manica. But the “most valuable asset” of the territory was to be its African labor force. As white settlement increased, so did the farmers' “insatiable” demand for African labor, and the company found itself increasingly hard-pressed to supply workers, especially given the terrible reputations of many of the white farmers. Company officials, to their frustration, found themselves spending more and more time on labor “recruitment.” Instead of utilizing mechanization, the settlers preferred to inhumanely overwork their laborers. The monstrous abuses of the system were hidden under a formal discourse that emphasized legal processes. But the use of the term “recruitment,” Allina says, masked the impressment of tens of thousands of recrutados each year.

In chapter two, Allina examines recruitment and labor practices. Chiefs played a key role in supplying a quota of workers who were taken under guard to the workplace. Children were often included, despite the labor code. When chiefs failed to provide enough men, company police had to search the villages and assemble the required quota. Many recruits were malnourished or ill before they even got to the work site. Some ended up in the mines or as porters, but the most dreaded jobs were in the settler maize farms where shifts lasted approximately twelve hours per day, from “sun to sun” (50). The farmers had to provide a midday meal, but this was inadequate, often rotting maize meal and foul water. The labor code mandated “hygienic lodging,” but frequently employers failed to provide any shelter. Physical assaults were common, both from employers and company police, who wielded the palmatória (a ribbed wooden paddle that pulverized flesh) and the chicotte (whip). And the work was very hard, including clearing trees and bush so that new fields could be opened up. Under this regime the death toll was heavy, especially in famine years such as 1912. Workers aimed merely for survival. As company rule became more bureaucratized, innovations such as passbooks and a doubling of the hut tax were introduced. But the passbooks enabled evasion, as men resisted by changing their names.

Criticisms of the system, discussed in chapter three, were rare. In Mozambique there was no public debate. A handful of company officials occasionally expressed concern in internal communications. One, José Luiz Ferreira, a district administrator, was more persistent. Portugal effectively defended itself in the discussions in Geneva over “The Question of Slavery.” The major powers in the League of Nations were themselves implicated. In 1930 Portugal did, however, issue a new labor code for its colonies. There were few improvements, and it included penalties for creating fear and spreading “false information” about labor conditions, suggesting widespread communications amongst Africans. Very occasionally an African voice appears in the company records protesting brutality or counseling resistance—for example, Chief Sadzungira of Gorongosa, who refused to supply any more workers after the deaths and crippling of many of his people, and Zaba of Moribane, who warned recruits to avoid being sent to work in the mud.

One of the book's strengths is its detailed discussion of the limited but real options that Africans could use to reduce their exploitation. Chief among them, and the subject of chapter four, was mobility and flight, often by taking advantage of Manica's location along the border with Southern Rhodesia. Whole communities and villages evaded forced labor by decamping across the border. Company officials found districts depopulated as people utilized their mobility. Men fled into the bush to avoid recruiters. Chiefs moved back and forth from Portuguese to British territory. There were other borders: across the Zambezi River to Portuguese colonial territory (as opposed to company territory) and districts to the south where it was possible to enter the migrant labor force of the South African mines. Such mobility was countered with repression, sometimes deportation to São Tomé, and, in the wake of the First World War, an extension of labor “contracts” from six months to one year. In the increasingly tightly administered space of company territory and with the targeting of chiefs in order to ensure compliance (the subject of chapter five), evasion and flight dwindled, and other strategies of resistance and adaptation involved greater engagement with the colonial economy. As in other colonial systems, chiefs were incorporated into the colonial administration through a stick and carrot approach: the payment of a bribe or a small share of tax revenue. One company strategy (and conversely a means for Africans to avoid forced labor) was to exempt a community if its men constructed and repaired roads and ditches in their district. This had advantages for the local population, as it allowed the men to stay close to their homes. But there was at least one major revolt when people were pushed to the edge, in Barué district in 1917, where thousands of men had been forced into wartime porterage. Here, in the wake of the war came influenza, floods, and devastation.

Allina is very perceptive on the gender and intergenerational dynamics of forced labor, discussed in chapter six. Company oppression was directed mostly at male laborers, but deflected on to women and youth. One of the contradictions of colonialism that we have seen in other places was that colonial rule rested on the compliance of chiefs and elders while, at the same time, many younger men were able to increase their autonomy through wage labor. But in Sofala and Manica, chiefs and senior males were able to pass their obligations on to their juniors. Youths in their turn might devise an escape route through voluntary engagement in the labor market. Women also suffered, especially when held as hostages by company police until fleeing men returned from the bush. And women had very few opportunities in the voluntary wage labor market. Young women left behind while their husbands labored or fled might return to their natal families. The whole system placed enormous stresses on families.

Some men avoided being “contracted” through cultivation of a minimum area of land, while others were exempted through practice of a profession such as tailoring or teaching. Voluntary work had its benefits, as workers could choose an employer, and many men labored in the mines or as transport operators or plowmen with their teams of cattle. By 1925 about 40 percent of the company workforce, which totaled about 105,000, were voluntários. The final option was upward mobility, the subject of chapter eight. In the 1920s, the company reaffirmed the role of the Catholic Church in its territories. Mission stations began to emphasize the teaching of agricultural skills. African peasant farmers, although operating on a much smaller scale than the large farms of the settlers, and without any state aid, produced a number of food crops including significant quantities of millet and some maize for sale. By the 1930s, white farming was in decline and Africans in Manica owned 20 percent of the colony's cattle. Women, too, sometimes profited from their own work, especially beer brewing. Successful agriculture and beer went together. The aspiring petty bourgeoisie was still in a very precarious situation, but at least not subject to forced labor.

Despite the fine-grained description and analysis, one of the premises of the book, highlighted in the title, is still controversial. It is the argument that the brutal labor regime of the Mozambique Company was a kind of “modern slavery.” Throughout, Allina uses such language as, “the company enslaved tens of thousands of Africans annually” (41); “the period of labor enslavement slowly increased over the years” (47); “demands for the company's modern slaves drove … ‘recruitment’ to … a frenzied pace” (49). The wording is deliberate. For some of Allina's interviewees, forced labor was experienced as slavery, and the point is well taken. Allina prefaces his discussion of slavery and forced labor as follows: “In the precolonial era, in most parts of Africa lasting until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, African slaves were rarely treated as chattel, but as socially marginal individuals with fewer rights than others” (9). This ignores the important debate over the characteristics of African slavery between what we may term the Miers/Kopytoff and the Meillassoux/Lovejoy schools.Footnote ⁶ Allina appears to follow Miers and Kopytoff, who argue that servile members of African communities tended to be assimilated into lineages over two or three generations. In contrast, Meillassoux and Lovejoy show that the patterns highlighted by Miers and Kopytoff were typical only in smaller-scale societies in some parts of the forest regions of West Africa. There were, in fact, many places in nineteenth-century Africa on both sides of the continent where extreme violence, natal alienation, and commercialization governed slavery, where a “slave mode of production” prevailed. Thus Allina's understanding of slavery in Africa is certainly true for some places and societies, but it is not true for others. His interpretation allows him to elide meanings: colonial forced labor was slavery. At the same time, he acknowledges “forced labor did not shear the web of social relations that sustains individual identity and personal sovereignty as thoroughly and completely as did chattel slavery” (15). It is clear from his evidence that conditions for forced laborers in Sofala and Manica were worse than on the cocoa plantations of São Tomé and Principe, where some of the planters built hospitals and were concerned to improve conditions. Yet in the end, on the “chocolate islands,” the plantation workers were unambiguously slaves, being taken by force and lost to their kin forever. In contrast, in Mozambique Company territories, forced laborers who survived did return home to their families. What we can say in the end is that forced labor short of outright enslavement, such as in Sofala and Manica was, in the experience of those who suffered it, worse than certain forms of slavery.

Okia's Communal Labor in Colonial Kenya deals with a shorter period, but as it was contemporaneous with the Mozambique Company, some comparisons are possible. Okia's aim is to highlight a rather less-known variation of forced labor. Communal labor in Kenya and many other British colonies was not the same as state-administered labor for public or, indeed, private purposes. Communal labor was an invented category of African “tradition” that was set in motion through the indirect rule system and the creation of “tribes.” In Kenya the 1912 Native Authority Ordinance enabled chiefs to mobilize labor for “traditional” purposes, yet the reality was that much of the work that communal laborers were forced to do, such as road maintenance, was in no sense traditional, even where in precolonial times there was some form of labor mobilization by chiefs. Not only did indirect rule in parts of Kenya allow colonial rule on the cheap, it also provided free labor. The system was rife with abuses, with children and women frequently substituted for men, while senior males and chiefs utilized the system for their own advantage. In addition, it was unpaid.

One of the difficulties in studying communal labor is that the most specific sources are relatively sparse, given that it took place in the context of Native Authority administrations under chiefs, rather than through the direct control of the colonial state. Thus Okia relies on the records of the few activist missionaries, in particular those of Archdeacon Walter E. Owen, as well as Colonial Office and Kenyan state archives. Although particular abuses are highlighted, Okia is not able, given the limitations of the sources, to provide a systematic analysis and quantification of communal labor as a whole. Parts of the book, therefore, cover well-trodden ground,Footnote ⁷ while the emphasis is very much on the colony's western provinces. But by examining the direction of Kenyan labor policy in the context of Colonial Office missives, he shows how communal labor escaped the general tendency through the 1920s to place limits over the use of forced labor. Even the International Labour Organization chose to see communal labor as something separate from forced labor, and the 1930 Convention on Forced Labour ignored it, just as it ignored forced labor in the territories of the Mozambique Company. Communal labor was indeed forced because when an African man in colonial Kenya resisted it he was punishable by flogging, imprisonment, or fines.

In chapter one Okia provides a continental overview of three categories of forced labor: labor for private interests, labor for government purposes, and communal labor. Although the categorization is useful, there is not much new here, although we are reminded how pervasive forced labor was—at least until the 1930s and resurging again during the Second World War. In chapter two Okia examines the legal foundations of forced labor in British-ruled Kenya. From 1912 communal labor was placed on a firm legal footing through the Native Authority Ordinance, which reinforced the powers of chiefs to compel their subjects to work for “communal purposes.” Able-bodied African men were liable for communal labor for up to six days every three months. In theory this applied to all men, but as in the case of the territory of the Mozambique Company, chiefs and senior men were able to evade communal labor or send youths or even women and children in their place. Formalizing Africans' obligations to work under the direction of their chiefs was not only directed at communal labor in African Native Authority jurisdictions, but also at driving young men into the wider labor market so as to ensure adequate labor for the colonial state and white settlers. Thus, communal labor stimulated the labor supply that underwrote the colonial economy. It also neatly fitted with the ideological underpinnings of colonialism in British Africa between the wars, which was the concept of trusteeship. In the discourse of trusteeship, the cooption of so-called traditional forms of labor contributed to colonial development through a partnership with African authorities. From 1920 the legal framework for forced labor in Kenya became more complex with an amendment to the Native Authority Ordinance. Africans were now also potentially required to contribute sixty days of paid labor for state purposes. This led to a huge increase in the labor force of the colonial state and provided cheap labor for construction and maintenance work of all kinds. As in Mozambique, there were some exceptions for Africans who worked in specific jobs in the interests of the colonial state. Once again, it was the poor who mostly bore the burden of forced labor.

In chapter three Okia reprises the early history of white settlement in Kenya and the pressure settlers placed on the Kenyan state for exploitation of African labor for private benefit. This demand for state-recruited labor on the farms and in the businesses of the settlers stimulated considerable controversy and, at times, the intervention of the Colonial Office. Much of this labor was not compulsory, but was migrant labor from Kenya's largest ethnic communities, the Kikuyu, Luyia, and Luo. Once again Okia covers a well-known history of push-and-pull factors and African responses.Footnote ⁸ As in parts of Mozambique, mass porterage in Kenya during the First World War diverted labor from settler businesses, normalized compulsion, and set the stage for renewed settler demands.

From 1919 into the mid-1920s vigorous debates over forced labor, particularly over government recruitment for private purposes, took place both within the colonial administration and between the Colonial Office, the Kenyan government, and its humanitarian critics, including the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society (ASAPS), which viewed state recruitment of forced labor as a new form of slavery. Too much of the book, especially chapters four and five, concerns the evolution of these debates and elaborate accounts of the views of the various major players such as the first Native Commissioner John Ainsworth; Governors Henry Belfield, Edward Northey, and Robert Coryndon; and critics such as Dr. Norman Leys and Archdeacon Owen, rather than the experience of Africans on the ground. Yet the fact that these debates occurred draws attention to differences in tone—and sometimes in substance—between British and Portuguese colonialism. Rather than being a straight line of extreme oppression, as in Mozambique, British policy sometimes wavered, as it did during the labor crisis of 1924–25 over the Uasin-Gishu railway extension, even though forced labor was largely accepted and justified in the typical discourse of African “idleness.” Even the ASAPS supported communal labor, as it was “traditional.” Only in chapter six, where Owen's protest over communal labor abuses, particularly as they affected women and children, is highlighted does the experience and resistance of ordinary Africans come to the foreground. In the end, the principle of trusteeship prevailed and communal labor continued.

Although Communal Labor in Colonial Kenya is a welcome addition to the literature, the text is sometimes repetitious and many of the endnotes include lengthy commentary, much of which could have been incorporated in the text. Unfortunately there is no map.

A reading of these three books shows that certain patterns in the history of colonial forced labor become more apparent through the use of a comparative approach. There was a wider imperial context, and metropolitan and settler companies often established themselves or secured contracts in more than one colony, even across empires. For example, we see that the Norton-Griffiths company was implicated in major labor abuses in its railway construction projects in both Angola and Kenya. More critical research on colonial business history would also enhance our knowledge of labor in Africa.