Cassava in Atlantic Africa, 1500–1900

Despite cassava’s prominence in the global exchanges that transformed African farming systems after 1492, historians have paid this “New World” domesticate little attention. Among African food crops, cassava occupies the fourth largest area of cultivated land, after maize, sorghum, and millet, and the continent produces over half of the world’s cassava supply (IAEA 2018:9). Yet cassava remains marginal in African historiography, as it does in scholarship on food globalization, agrarian studies, and ethnographic work on commodity flows, except for a handful of articles linking the plant’s spread to Portuguese imperialism and the Atlantic slave trade (see O’Connor Reference O’Connor and Curry-Machado2009). Domesticated in southern Brazil over eight thousand years ago, cassava had spread throughout South and Central America by the second millennium BCE. In the sixteenth century, Tupinamba women taught early Portuguese colonists in northeastern Brazil how to grow and prepare cassava roots and leaves for consumption, work that involved removing their linmarin content, which is a source of cyanide when eaten (Sousa Reference Sousa1971:174–80). By the century’s end, the successful substitution of cassava meal and flour for wheat products in colonists’ diets had given rise to Portuguese-run cassava plantations, where Amerindian and African slaves processed the roots for the manufacture of cassava-based gruel, biscuits, and bread, which “occup[ied] first place” in settler and slave diets (O’Connor Reference O’Connor and Curry-Machado2009:15). Meanwhile, the coarse cassava meal known as farinha de guerra (“war flour”) fed the “subsistence…underbelly” of the Atlantic slave trade, provisioning ships and functioning as exchange for captives on the west-central African coast. Cassava meal’s high calorie content and long shelf life made it equally useful for the soldiers, merchants, and captives crowded into Portugal’s African slave ports, where Brazilian farinha was imported in “extraordinary” quantities through the early 1600s (Carney & Rosomoff Reference Carney and Rosomoff2011).Footnote ³

Discrepant scholarly claims about when, where, and why cassava arrived in Atlantic Africa reflect the varying dynamics of its introduction in specific settings, but two points merit attention with respect to the plant’s career in Mozambique. First, Portuguese “agency” did not accomplish these botanical transfers, as many scholars have implied. The new cultigen indeed appeared first near Portuguese factories linked to Brazil via the Middle Passage: Loango (north of the Congo River) in 1608, then Kongo and Luanda further south, then by the late 1600s west of the Niger Delta and in the Gulf of Guinea (Vansina Reference Vansina1997; Karasch Reference Karasch, Kiple and Ornelas2000). However, ocean shipment of the vegetative material needed for cassava propagation required knowledge and labor before, during, and after the voyage far exceeding what Portuguese actors alone could provide, itself evidence of strong motivation. Second, it was cassava’s value as a processed food commodity—not as a subsistence crop—that catalyzed its adoption and spread in Atlantic Africa. Specific processes of incorporation varied from place to place. In Luanda and the Gulf of Guinea, planting material did not arrive until after imported farinha was a fixture in local markets; elsewhere, the sequence was reversed. But nowhere have historians found African farmers growing cassava as a food staple before growing it for the market. In Luanda, cassava was introduced “entirely for Portuguese use” on plantations worked by enslaved women; male slaves processed the roots into farinha to serve “the needs of the Portuguese table” as well as to meet an “insatiable” food demand from missionaries, soldiers, overland caravans, slave ships, and captives awaiting transport. Broader displacement of the indigenous staples sorghum and yam as a daily food source occurred much more slowly, following the adoption of cassava to make farinha for the coastal market (Vansina Reference Vansina1997:255–72). In the Gulf of Guinea too, cassava had “circulated as a consumable product” in the seventeenth century and been seen growing near the Ouidah slave port in the eighteenth century, but it was cultivated “extensively” along the Dahomey coast only in the nineteenth century, to supply farinha to slave ships and the royal army (Juhé-Beaulaton Reference Juhé-Beaulaton2014). Although cassava was furnishing “daily bread” along the littoral and major trade routes by the late 1700s, botanical evidence confirms that no such transition occurred further inland until the mid-1800s (Vansina Reference Vansina1979:12).

Reorientation of an agrarian food system on this order would have required direct involvement, if not leadership, from the women who performed most of the farming and provisioning work. Integrating any new cultigen into established farm routines involves major adjustments and risks, but turning that plant into a staple crop requires “deep reorganizations” of the agricultural calendar and “considerable upheavals [in] the whole rhythm and style of daily life” (Vansina Reference Vansina1979:10–12). Cassava, with its peculiar challenges, “from the beginning…meant not merely a new crop, but a whole new production system” (Von Oppen Reference Von Oppen1991:2). Women would have needed years to breed varieties with desirable characteristics suited to local environments. With its longer growing cycle, cassava might have forced contentious changes to land use patterns, crop mixes, labor timing, and task allocation. The multistep process of detoxifying the roots and leaves would have increased women’s workload multifold, as would the creative effort needed to turn cassava into socially palatable fare. Incorporating a starch with cassava’s distinctive texture and taste into local diets required new recipes, cooking methods, eating routines, and food management strategies, all of which demanded not only culinary and technical skill but patience in the face of entrenched preferences.

Just as important, and contrary to stereotypes of cassava as a foodstuff of last resort, spatial patterns in the crop’s spread in precolonial west-central Africa indicate that it was only in areas with a flourishing farinha market that women incorporated cassava into ordinary diets—only, that is, when they were convinced of its commercial success. A drought-tolerant starch source requiring less field labor than sorghum or yams may well have suited men’s interests; in landscapes beset by slave raiding and war, a crop that tolerated poor soils, had a flexible harvest schedule, contained a natural pest repellant, and produced durable travel food would have had a major edge over existing staples. But as Achim Von Oppen makes clear in his analysis of four hundred years of agricultural change in northwestern Zambia, cassava cultivation took off only when and because women developed an “active interest” in its value as an edible commodity. If cassava’s agronomic advantages promised to enhance food security, its marketability offered women a new basis for economic autonomy: “for the first time…the opportunity to gain direct access to imported goods, mainly cloth, certain beads, salt, and copper ornaments,… ‘currencies’ in all manner of social transactions” (Reference Von Oppen1991:7). Equally important, recentering farming systems and diets around cassava propelled it to the forefront of cultural definitions of womanhood (Von Oppen Reference Von Oppen1991; Vansina Reference Vansina1997). A shift of such magnitude, once accomplished, would have been difficult to reverse.

Serving “the Uses of Life”: Cassava as Commodity in Precolonial Mozambique, 1700–1900

Details of cassava’s arrival in eastern Africa remain obscure and (mildly) contested, although written sources indicate a coastal introduction for Mozambique, in the context of Portuguese imperialism and the late eighteenth-century surge in Indian Ocean slave trading. Here too, most accounts credit European initiative and ignore (or reject) African involvement. According to some, French ships carried the first cassava from Brazil to Mauritius in 1736, then two years later to Réunion, whence the cultivar spread to Madagascar and the mainland (Karasch Reference Karasch, Kiple and Ornelas2000). Portuguese reports, though, laud compatriot politicians who introduced cassava as a tool of empire: Governor Pedro de Saldanha de Albuquerque in the south, who in 1760 “obliged” European residents of Lourenço Marques to grow cassava as a substitute for imported food; and Governor Balthazar Manuel Pereira do Lago in the north, who used “entrepreneurial genius” and “some coercion and despotism” to establish cassava on the coast of present-day Nampula, opposite the Portuguese settlement on Mozambique Island (Vicente da Gama Reference Vicente da Gama1859). Occupied since the early sixteenth century as a fortified mercantile and political capital for Portugal’s Indian Ocean empire, Mozambique Island relied on slave labor and mainland food sources, including settler agriculture, to provision its residents and overseas visitors (Newitt Reference Newitt and Brockey2008). By the mid-1700s, with the town’s booming ivory and slave export trades creating more mouths to feed on land and sea, Pereira do Lago grew concerned that if African farmers were to adopt the lucrative crop, they would stop supplying the ivory needed to buy Portuguese imports. In 1768, the governor announced “a three-year moratorium on the debts of all [settlers]…who would raise 400 feet of cassava in virgin soil, and a bonus of 100 cruzados to those cultivating more than 600 feet,” with “severe penalties” for anyone who refused (Vicente da Gama Reference Vicente da Gama1859; Domingos Reference Domingos and Curto2016:326–28). The scheme “provid[ed] so much [cassava] for the residents, and their homes, families, and slaves every year that they sell large enough quantities to partly sustain the troops, and even the ships that anchor there” (Varella Reference Varella and de Carvalho Dias1954:286). By the nineteenth century, coastal northern Mozambique was “a country planted over with cassava,” with slave-operated “manufactory” centers producing “cassava meal, tapioca, and cassava starch (olanga)” to export and feed the Island (Salt Reference Salt1816:34; Producções do Districto de Moçambique 1881:52).

Although similarly linked to Portuguese empire, coastal commerce, and slavery, cassava’s early history in southern Mozambique followed a different trajectory, propelled by African farmer decision-making in prosperous communities where “the land was tended by women” and crop surpluses had long fueled local and regional trade (Longle Reference Longle1886:29). As in the north, cassava likely arrived here in the mid-eighteenth century, when Portuguese residents were few and settler plantations nonexistent. The first written reference to cassava here appears in 1798, courtesy of a passenger on a British East India Company ship anchored at Lourenço Marques, who noted cassava plants “growing wild…in the old gardens where the Portuguese had formerly sown them” (White Reference White1800:53). African communities ringing the town showed more serious interest in the starchy root; by the 1830s, Lourenço Marques was surrounded by “a very productive country, abounding in rice, corn, red millet, bulrush millet,…sweet potato, cassava, groundnuts” (Teixeira Reference Teixeira1918:63). But it was along the littoral of today’s Inhambane province, “one of the best watered portions of this side of the great continent,” where African farmers most enthusiastically embraced cassava, quick to take advantage of its twofold utility for consumption and exchange (McLeod Reference McLeod1860:183). Near Inhambane port, some three hundred miles north of Lourenço Marques, cassava belonged to a select group of African-grown crops—with “[c]oconuts, cotton, coffee,…sugar cane, cana fistula, tobacco, and others”—that were observed to “serve the uses of life, and give material to commerce” (Botelho Reference Botelho1835:98–99). Thirty years later, the earliest available agricultural records from Inhambane District confirm the existence of a robust market for cassava in its processed form, sustained—and likely initiated—by entrepreneurial women farmers along the coast. From 1863 through 1869, the reported annual production of cassava meal (farinha) averaged 3,270 panjas (91,000 liters); it then skyrocketed in 1870 to 30,000 panjas (840,000 liters). At that time, farinha sold for 460 réis per panja, five times the market price per panja for groundnuts or sorghum.Footnote ⁴

The timing of these developments suggests that in coastal Inhambane, as in coastal west-central Africa, women turned a non-indigenous plant into an edible commodity in response to a demand for portable sustenance accompanying the emergent slave export trade. Slave trading from Inhambane port, on the rise since the 1770s, increased substantially in the early 1800s, as Britain’s crackdown on slavery north of the equator and escalating demand for plantation labor from the Mascarene Islands, Brazil, Cuba, and the U.S. made east Africa a major new source of captives. Cassava meal, the convenience food so vital to the Atlantic slave trade, would have offered the same commercial advantages and gendered opportunities on the Inhambane coast, where the environment—sandy soils, tropical climate, and easy river access to the sea—also played well to cassava’s botanical traits. As external slave demand grew, an influx of European, South Asian, and African merchants to Inhambane town transformed the small Portuguese outpost into Mozambique’s “most significant slave port” (Chewin & Delius Reference Chewin and Delius2020:96; Harries Reference Harries2014). Between the 1820s and 1840s, the coastward flow of captives swelled as the invading armies of the Gaza Nguni, the devastating 1820s drought, and wars allegedly “provoked by the Portuguese” created a “large and cheap” supply of people for sale. This terrible cycle continued even after external demand declined after mid-century, as captives generated by the Gaza succession war (1858–62) and ongoing Gaza-Portuguese conflict were absorbed by a new internal demand for bound female labor. This trade was supported by Gaza elites, who wanted autochthonous “slave wives” for agricultural and domestic work, as well as merchants in Inhambane town desiring concubines and household slaves (Harries Reference Harries1981:313). Through the 1870s and 1880s, political violence accompanied by drought, locusts, and cattle epizootic brought famine and heightened insecurity, especially further inland. King Ngungunhana’s 1885 signing of a treaty of vassalage with Portugal, which enhanced Gaza access to firearms, encouraged more relentless battering of the countryside. In some coastal areas, displaced families sought refuge in stockaded villages from two ruthless imperial armies (Alpers Reference Alpers2018:16–17; Harries Reference Harries2014:332).

Meanwhile, as Gaza soldiers and a motley crew of Afro-Portuguese and Asian slave traders (“Christians, Mohammedans, Banyans, Parsis, Gentiles and others”) scoured the landscape for women and girls, the rise of male labor migration to the Transvaal in the 1870s, along with the expansion of “commércio ambulante [walking trade]” to provision migrants, swelled overland foot traffic and the demand for portable food (Xavier Reference Xavier1881:490; Longle Reference Longle1886:16). Written sources from the region make clear, however, that it was principally VaChopi women in southern Inhambane who responded most energetically to the new food market, and that women’s cassava achievements were especially impressive in Zavala. Observing this stretch of the littoral, with its “great plantations of pineapples, cassava, sugar cane, tobacco, and beans,” nineteenth-century visitors heaped praise on Zavala for its “vast and beautiful settlements, where domestic animals and granaries loaded with corn, cassava, peanuts and sweet potatoes, etc., abound,” and some fields contained “cassava plants nine feet tall” (Xavier Reference Xavier1894:10; Serrano Reference Serrano1894:442–43).

The American cultivar enjoyed no such prominence in the arid interior at this time. There, cassava remained a minor crop, cultivated in small quantities as a boundary-marker for fields of cereals and legumes; in some areas, wild cassava served as a forage food in times of shortage (Mauch Reference Mauch1969:63, 120; Elton Reference Elton1872:24; Serrano Reference Serrano1894:433). Contrary to scholars’ longstanding claim that women throughout southern Mozambique adopted cassava only in the 1860s as a labor-saving “subsistence” crop that “released male labour from the domestic economy,” female farmers in Zavala and neighboring coastal areas had been growing and selling cassava products for decades before migrant labor began (Harries Reference Harries1994:85–86). Through the 1890s, their cassava meal, known as rale, continued to top the ranking of edible exports from Inhambane, with a reported 22,172 kilograms produced for export in 1897, and more than quadruple that amount in 1899. Meanwhile, total export quantities of other crops either grew just slightly (groundnuts and cowpeas), decreased by a large margin (pearl millet), or plummeted (maize and rice). Non-staple edible crops (coffee, cashews and coconuts) followed similar downward trends (Cardoso Reference Cardoso1907:81–87).

Perhaps most important, and again contrary to hoary stereotypes, cassava in mid- to late-nineteenth-century Zavala was anything but a “famine food” limited to desperate times or desolate environments. In a setting described as “magnificent, capable of [producing] any and all kinds of crops” and “exceedingly fertile in all kinds of foods,” Zavala residents were preferentially consuming cassava as their starchy staple throughout the year (Schwalybach Reference Schwalybach1881:142; Botelho Reference Botelho1835:98). By the early 1870s, women had not only integrated the edible commodity into their crop mixes but had also so thoroughly reoriented their provisioning system around cassava that the Zavala chiefdom—admired for its agricultural wealth—was also known for its cassava-centered cuisine. As one European observed during a trek through the area,

By the early 1890s, when inland food shortages were so severe that households closed their granaries to strangers, cassava-based prosperity freed Zavala residents to share food—and drink—with sudden visitors. In an area where it was “rare [to find] a household without its own still…for making alcohol from sugar cane, maize, sorghum, sweet potatoes, …even bananas,” women were also distilling cassava roots into a potent liquor. When a high-ranking Portuguese officer happened upon the home of a Zavala sub-chief, he was greeted “ceremoniously” with “a goat and a bottle of aguardente [spirits] made from cassava” (Andrade Reference Andrade1894; Serrano Reference Serrano1894:443). Portuguese colonizers would later revile cassava gin for its high alcohol content, but on this occasion, there were no complaints about the liquid offering.

“Simply Food” or a “Cash Crop”?: Cassava Debates in Colonial Zavala, 1895–1975

A strange thing happened to cassava in early colonial southern Mozambique, with important consequences for how later scholars, donors, and policymakers would perceive its role in agricultural development. Like their British counterparts elsewhere in Africa, Portuguese administrators trumpeted their new colony’s potential for commercial growth, a goal they understood as “the development of a cash crop,…a low bulk, high value non-food crop suitable for export” (Carswell Reference Carswell2003:523). With a nascent colonial regime eager to prove “effective occupation” by securing a revenue base, visions for Inhambane District and its “industrious” residents had for some time prioritized opening trade arteries to the interior for supplying ships from “Marseilles, Rotterdam,…Natal, Zanzibar, and Bombay” with commodities sought by industries abroad (Xavier Reference Xavier1881:481). Yet while these dreams of export-oriented agriculture focused geographically on the littoral, they excluded cassava, the crop with the longest track record for commercial success.

In turn-of-the-century written sources, an emerging set of discursive binaries—opposing “plants grown for food” to “plants grown for trade,” “subsistence crops” to “cash crops,” and “black” (or “native”) to “white” (or “non-native”) farming—relegated cassava (if they mentioned it at all) to a feminized “subsistence” economy irrelevant to modernization through plantation agriculture. Official eyes trained instead on male settlers, concentrated in northern Inhambane, whose “amateur” efforts to grow rubber, sugarcane, coffee, coconut palm, sisal, and the oleagineous jikungo nut offered wishful “signs…of an important development in the not too distant future.” It is ironic that, at a time when the Inhambane governor described export agriculture as “almost exclusively” African, racial and gendered notions of a subsistence/cash crop divide not only erased coastal women’s commercial history, but also reified a distinction that denied the very core of the market-linked provisioning system their foremothers had built (Cardoso Reference Cardoso1907:27–43, 81–91; Lyne Reference Lyne1913). Historians, hewing close to archival sources, have perpetuated this error by reading the same colonial binary into sources from precolonial Mozambique. Their gender-bifurcated lens, helpful for illuminating the “peasant”-led “commercial revolution” that supplied raw materials to industrial Europe in the nineteenth century, simultaneously obscured such crucial processes as coastal Inhambane’s precolonial food trade boom, a female-led “commercial revolution” of at least equal importance for the region’s future (Newitt Reference Newitt1995:319).

Exiled to an imaginary subsistence realm, cassava faded from early colonial records, even as women in Zavala continued to center their farming routines, food culture, and trade networks around the adopted staple. Apart from the Portuguese commander who included it among the crops African conscripts grew to feed the Zavala military post, colonists fell silent on cassava in their written reports (Fundo do Século XIX 1898). Ethnographic sources, meanwhile, show that coastal women cultivated the plant as energetically as before, still using its roots, leaves, and bark not only to feed people and livestock, but also for fertilizer, medicine, ritual objects, and currency for paying fines. Tailoring the mix of sweet and bitter varieties they planted each season to localized agroecologies and palates, women relied on cassava to balance immediate and long-term food needs, preparing freshly harvested roots and leaves in assorted ways for daily meals while also making storable cassava products, such as rale, for later consumption (Earthy Reference Earthy1933:28–38). Many women also continued to produce rale for local markets, judging by the steady supply of “farinha de mandioca” exchanged with Indian merchants “for either money or printed cotton cloth” (Cabral Reference Cabral1910:104–5). In 1911, the considerable control Zavala farmers exercised over their cassava fields and harvests received an unexpected boost, when the chiefdom (now a “circumscription”) was designated Mozambique’s first “native reserve.” With land-hungry colonists poised to move into southern Inhambane, reserve status protected Zavala from large-scale plantation agriculture (Direito Reference Direito2015:363–64). Coming at a time when male labor migration was also on the rise, the legal protection bolstered women’s de facto authority over household fields with a collective de jure right to the arable landscape, and left decisions about what and how to cultivate, and for which purposes, more clearly up to women than before. Meanwhile, Portuguese officials, disdainful of women’s “rudimentary and harmful” methods and presumed subsistence focus, dismissed cassava as irrelevant to colonial development, an error they would soon regret (Cabral Reference Cabral1910:103).

Colonial attitudes began to change in the 1920s, when women turned their virtually unfettered management of cassava to a new commercial purpose: the sale of home-distilled cassava gin. Known in XiChopi as makwene, and made from very bitter cassava varieties eaten only in times of famine, the beverage had been part of women’s cassava repertoire since at least the mid-nineteenth century. As we have seen, cassava gin proved handy in precolonial times, its long shelf-life, social utility, and easy convertibility to food, services, or other goods giving it distinct advantages over rale. Commercializing makwene made excellent sense in colonial Zavala, where survival depended more than ever on women’s ability to move nimbly among multiple provisioning strategies. With roughly half the male population engaged in migrant labor, cash obligations mounting, increased availability of consumer goods, and alcohol offering respite from heightened personal and social stress, makwene was the most “liquid” of assets, an obvious recourse for communities familiar with cassava-based responses to exogenous change. Given the wide range of agricultural and tree products women were known to distill in precolonial Zavala, the conspicuousness of cassava gin in colonial records is especially striking, not least because of questions it raises about women’s decision to specialize in the notoriously potent drink. Distillers were well aware that excess consumption of makwene could be lethal—or, at the very least, that “smoke would come out of [a person’s] head” who over-imbibed (Filomena Chiponde, interview, Maita, March 9, 2019). But they weighed such risks against household food supply, family needs, and local demand; and in choosing to sell makwene when they did, women displayed again their talent for repurposing cassava to make ends meet, while engaging with capitalist markets on their own terms.

Once again, women’s successful marketization of a cassava product drew attention to the Inhambane coast, though this time in a way that stigmatized their achievement. Portuguese colonists had been railing for some time against “native alcoholism” in Inhambane, blaming Africans for copying distillation techniques from settlers (Enes Reference Enes1893:49). Legislative prohibitions against African distilling were “as abundant as [they were] ineffective,” especially in the four southern circumscriptions (including Zavala) that most frequently violated these laws (Capela Reference Capela1973:13; Henriques Reference Henriques1916:127). The colonial state, anxious to protect Portuguese wine revenues, worked strenuously to regulate all forms of African alcohol production. But authorities consistently singled out cassava gin, “the distilled beverage whose use among natives is the most inveterate…[and] is, without doubt, the most toxic,” and scapegoated VaChopi women for turning Inhambane into a “country of drunkenness” where makwene destroyed “reason and virility,” causing “the physical and moral wasting of the black population” (Pimenta Reference Pimenta1940:23; Enes Reference Enes1893:40; Capela Reference Capela1973:112). These diatribes had little practical effect, since by the early 1930s makwene—“not previously made…on such a large scale”—was being produced and “illicitly” sold (“a garrafão [5 gallon jug]…for £1”) year-round (Earthy Reference Earthy1933:46). But baseless charges that coastal women were diverting “many hundreds of hectares [of cassava] annually for the manufacture of…a terrible poison” revealed an important shift in colonial attitudes toward the “subsistence” crop (Silva Reference Silva1927). Whatever women were actually doing with their cassava, their demonstration of its agronomic and commercial potential struck a nerve among Portuguese settlers struggling for an agricultural triumph of their own, just as news of lucrative industrial uses for cassava began to trickle into Mozambique from abroad.

By the 1930s, globally circulating stories of cassava’s “nearly limitless possibilities” as an industrial starch had piqued the interest of Portuguese officials and investors in Mozambique, spurring the discursive reinvention of cassava as a cash crop worthy of European attention. Colonial agronomists and settlers wrote excitedly about mushrooming international demand for cassava products—livestock feed, “flour, tapioca, starch, spirits, alcohol, glucose”—and brainstormed about ways to maximize yields, fight disease and pest threats, and breed varieties for monocropped plantations. In the 1930s, the administration backed settler efforts to industrialize production of the colony’s “greatest present element of wealth,” newly appreciative of cassava flour as an inexpensive source of carbohydrates for worker rations and famine relief (Grilo Reference Grilo1929:270; “Cultura da Mandioca” 1932; Domingos Reference Domingos and Curto2016). Early initiatives clustered along the southern Inhambane coast, starting with an “exclusive” ten-year contract for the firm Monteiro de Barros to build a factory to “manufacture cassava products” just south of Zavala (Vieira Reference Vieira1934:27).

After World War II, with cassava now considered vital to economic development, colonial officials resumed documenting its production. A 1947 inspection in southern Inhambane reported that two Portuguese settlers had higher cassava yields by weight than any other crop, while in Zavala itself, “native” farmers (gender unspecified) produced an annual average of one million kilograms of cassava “flour and root,” twice the quantity of maize and higher than any other product except groundnuts (Pires Reference Pires1947:196, 210). State interest in cassava intensified through the 1950s, sparked by the colony’s escalating food crisis and costly reliance on imported foods.Footnote ⁵ Grasping the crop’s symbiotic potential during the forced cotton regime, the Portuguese began to require African farmers to increase cassava production, both to buffer household food supply and to aid food-deficit areas (Isaacman Reference Isaacman1996). In Zavala, women were assigned additional half-hectare cassava plots they called sivunu (“subsidies”), because they “were controlled by the Portuguese and did not benefit us” (Marta Munguambe, interview, Maita, March 9, 2019). Such feelings aside, women’s energetic response to this official campaign enabled many not only to fill their cotton and cassava quotas, but also to sell leftover roots (Fuller Reference Fuller1955:151–53). Indeed, according to Portuguese investors in a processing plant under construction north of Zavala, the 1952 harvest there was so “extremely enormous” that much cassava spoiled “for want of factory” (Companhia Industrial de Dongane 1961).

Mid-century shifts in Portuguese thinking about cassava maintained the gendered binary that had erased women’s precolonial achievements and excluded cassava from development plans. Acknowledging the root’s market potential when male settlers controlled its cultivation and sale, colonial commentators continued to deny the history of female cassava enterprise on the coast. The most generous official report from southern Inhambane obliquely acknowledged women’s responsibility for cassava yields only when the author chastised men for leaving farming to “women and boys” (Pires Reference Pires1947:311). In more typically distorted accounts, local administrators assured superiors that the “food situation in [Inhambane District] continues to be good,…cassava being planted…with the good pace that is transforming this crop here, from simply food into a cash crop.” The Companhia Industrial de Dongane made the remarkable claim that before the 1950s, administrators and investors had overlooked cassava’s “huge” commercial potential because the plant had “only been used…in its natural state, to provide [African] food needs” (“Estado Geral das Culturas” 1956). Such ludicrous assertions contradict evidence that women continued through the late colonial period to sell rale to Portuguese and Indian merchants at Zavala’s ten designated “commercial towns,” and that many expanded cassava production for sale after colonially-appointed chiefs (régulos) advised them to do so in the tired soil of old cotton plots. By this time, it is worth noting, the absence of makwene from official lists of home-distilled and “abused” spirits in Zavala suggests that women had reprioritized rale in their marketing strategies, perhaps needing a saleable product they could more readily use than gin for family sustenance (Delgado e Silva Reference e Silva and dos Santos1970:17, 76–78).

Ironically, close on the heels of the colonizers’ rehabilitation of cassava as a raw material for, among other things, factory-made food, specialists in the rising field of nutrition science targeted cassava—and the women who grew and cooked it—as a cause of the “native food problem.” As elsewhere in colonial Africa, European concern that “a malnourished or deficiently fed population is…languishing, unproductive…[and] incapable of progress” rested largely on data gathered from urban male workers, whose diets were indeed dominated by high-starch, low-protein foods (Pimenta Reference Pimenta1940:5–6; Reis Reference Reis1959). The “indolence and apathy” allegedly caused by excess cassava consumption in Mozambique required correction through “rational and convenient nourishment.” Proposed scientific fixes entailed adding proteins, fats, and vitamins to African meals, while public officials recommended “centers of social promotion” where African mothers would learn modern cooking methods, “alimentary hygiene,” and “civilized” domestic ways (Silva Reference Silva1955:706–11; Delgado e Silva Reference e Silva and dos Santos1969:106; GTPSM 1964:124–25).

These ideas percolated down through the colonial hierarchy such that, by the late 1960s, Portuguese officials in Zavala watched for signs of African “development and progress” via dietary change, even while admitting their “incomplete and imperfect” knowledge of rural diets (Silva Reference Silva1955:707). Apparently unaware that in most years since at least the 1830s, cassava had anchored plentiful and nutritionally diverse foodways along the coast, colonial observers measured African alimentary progress in terms of cassava’s replacement with more refined complex carbohydrates:

By equating dietary evolution with increased consumption of nutrient-poor processed foods, such pronouncements accomplished two things. Most obviously, they documented the local impact of Portuguese food culture and its relationship to widening class differences in Zavala (Adam Reference Adam2006:74–75). More importantly, scientists’ and administrators’ discursive downgrading of cassava exposed a harmful dietary trend triggered by colonial rule. This trend was due in no small part to Portuguese miscastings of the edible commodity first as a feminized “subsistence” crop, then as a cash crop for white men, and finally as a female-managed food source that impeded African development. The costs of this history for rural livelihoods and food security have become increasingly clear in post-independence Zavala, under the influence of neoliberal policies and GR4A value chain schemes.

Hungrier “Living Through Cassava”?: Dietary Costs of the Impala Value Chain, 1975–Present

In independent Mozambique, the colonial subsistence/cash crop framing of cassava proved difficult for state and development actors to shake, even where the mythical binary plainly diverged from facts on the ground. The new Frelimo government did attempt another approach, as one Zavala grower recalled: “We started to sell cassava in 1975 when Lourenço Marques changed its name to Maputo. Frelimo motivated production so we could sell [cassava] and with the money organize our life and buy food” (Clementina Madade, interview, Bungane, March 10, 2019). The civil war halted these efforts, disrupting food production, processing, and transport throughout the country for the next sixteen years. In Zavala, perhaps for the first time since the nineteenth century, women grew cassava purely for sustenance, and “no one sold or exchanged” cassava products (Florinda Tivane, interview, Mudiwe, March 8, 2019). The root crop’s advantages as a food source in conflict settings made it a high-priority target for hungry soldiers on both sides. Even women who concealed unharvested cassava by cutting plants to the ground lost roots to combatants who roamed fields at night in search of food: “matxangas [Renamo]” who “stole cassava without any fear,” and “masotxa [Frelimo soldiers] who said they were protecting us, but when they found cassava harvested it without the owner’s approval” (Florentina Nhamuave, interview, Macucule, March 8, 2019). In a conflict so ruinous and prolonged, the El Niño-related droughts of 1982–84 and 1991–92—too severe for even most cassava to survive—brought the region’s crippled food system to its knees. With Renamo denying access to humanitarian relief convoys even in Inhambane’s most afflicted areas, famine claimed tens of thousands of lives across the province, and over one hundred thousand countrywide (Aragón et al. Reference Aragón, Barreto and Epstein1998).

In Zavala, the wartime loss of cassava’s exchange value only strengthened women’s desire to restore its commodity functions after the war. Following the 1992 peace accord, “the best thing that happened was the beginning of small-scale cassava sales” (Carolina Maita, interview, Maita, March 9, 2019). As Angelica Muzime explained, “After the war, we recuperated cassava production. We regained our strength and willingness to produce. We even went back to growing cassava to sell, eat, and make rale.” Indeed, the large population of war-displaced Inhambane residents in the capital city created a sudden explosion of demand for cassava grown over two hundred miles to the north. Seizing on the new market opportunity, female wholesalers known as maguevas launched a highway truck trade to provision VaChopi households in Maputo, and women in Zavala—especially those living near the coastal EN1 highway—“began again to cultivate cassava on large plots” (Angelica Muzime, interview, Macucule, March 9, 2019). “Women came to buy [guevar] cassava to sell,” interviewees recalled. “We saw cassava being put in large sacks to be sold in Maputo” (Clara Mudiwe, interview, Maita, March 8, 2019). This post-war traffic in fresh roots flourished through the late 1990s and early 2000s, accompanied by a rising demand for processed foods such as rale to provision highway travelers. Reflecting on that time, interviewees highlighted their autonomous control over cassava production, their revival of a cassava-centered cuisine, and their intentional marketing of cassava foods to serve multiple “uses of life.” “We produced cassava the way we wanted” was a common refrain, with time-tested agroecological and gastronomic criteria once more guiding their varietal selection, cropping schedule, and cultivation techniques. Women spoke excitedly about selling cassava when, how, and in the quantities they chose, whether one molho (bundle) of roots at a time, “one tin [lata] of rale for three hundred,” or by the “100-kilogram sack for five hundred to eight hundred meticais.” Through these years, they used their cassava income “to buy soap and other things” such as clothing and food, and “to give to children to study” (Felismina Macie, interview, Bule, March 9, 2019). Having returned the New World cultivar to its dual role as a staple food easily converted to cash, goods, or services, Zavala farmers could again proudly claim that “we live through cassava [ha hanya hi mipawu].”

It was in this context that the SABMiller/DADTCO value chain arrived in Zavala, its promises to commercialize women’s “subsistence” crop wrapped in a familiar discursive package. In 2014, DADTCO trucks en route from Morrumbene to Maputo began making casual root purchases along Zavala’s stretch of the EN1, flagged down by a handful of large-scale female growers with cassava already available for sale (Felicidade Chissico, interview, Maita, August 4, 2016). The following year, the firm installed a new platform for its mobile processor on the outskirts of Quissico, the district capital, and set to work implementing a Zavala extension of the project. DADTCO’s Dutch managers and Mozambican field agents, working with district extensionists and “technicians” hired by their Dutch-funded partner International Fertilizer Development Center (IFDC), toured Zavala to promote the initiative as a poverty-reduction scheme. Not surprisingly, their audiences of predominantly female farmers and male community leaders responded with enthusiasm to news that a “secure” market for “surplus” cassava had arrived in their midst, although some farmers grumbled about the firm’s derisory purchase price (at MT1.5–2 per kilogram of fresh roots, barely one-tenth the maguevas’ going rate). DADTCO representatives, oblivious to local competition, blamed SABMiller for tying their hands and shrugged off the complaint, unaware that it signaled a deeper unease. Wittingly or not, language used to promote the value chain resurrected the colonial-era binary defining cassava as a low-value feminine food crop whose potential to become a legitimate commodity required control by modernizing outsiders. Besides misconstruing cassava’s historically fungible place within Zavala foodways, project publicity added insult to injury by implying that erasure of women’s record of “living through cassava”—as farmers, food processors, merchants, and cooks—was a sine qua non for reducing hunger.

Although DADTCO had in fact gone to greater lengths than other stakeholders to anticipate how poor Mozambican farmers might respond to the scheme, the firm had not accounted for the long shadow of local history, nor thought to question the relationship between an abstract cassava paradigm and the realities of cassava in particular contexts. DADTCO managers had designed every facet of its field operations from the perspective of risk-averse farmers cynical of benevolent capitalists and faddish anti-poverty schemes. Rejecting the popular model of contract (outgrower) farming, they offered instead a one-year “Cassava Purchase Guarantee” that did not “compel or restrict” growers to sell exclusively to DADTCO, but obliged DADTCO to buy from those growers first in subsequent years. Field agents also strove to redirect attention away from the low purchase price by showcasing more positive features of DADTCO’s approach: the opportunity to sell one’s cassava harvest all at once, regardless of variety or root size; the guaranteed payment at point of sale; and the greater earnings sure to follow once smallholders adopted “better” farming methods and increased yields. With their new income, participants would be able to afford home repairs, pay school and medical fees, and invest in livestock, land, and tools. Most importantly, cassava sellers would be able to buy food instead of growing it, a necessary step toward “food and nutrition security.” In Zavala, where DADTCO managers knew that cassava was “a real women’s crop,… processed by women,… [and] there are many, many single female households,” project messaging targeted female-dominated communities known for their cassava-heavy cuisine. Presuming a shared disdain for the “poor man’s food,” project stakeholders assured women that selling their cassava to DADTCO would enhance rather than endanger household food supply, enabling them to “choose what they want to buy” instead of stuffing their children with the starchy root (which “as a nutritious food is not very good”) (Suzanne Vlakveld, Skype interview, December 4, 2016). Value chain participation, in other words, would enable dietary development, whereby women replaced cassava with allegedly superior purchased foods. However earnest these intentions may have been, such claims not only echoed the racist paternalism of Portuguese colonizers, but maligned VaChopi cuisine and mothering practices at the same time.

Through 2016 and 2017, as DADTCO went about the systematic purchase and processing of thousands of tons of fresh roots, women understood with mounting concern the scheme’s impact on their ability to sustain life through cassava. As a synecdoche of the Impala project, the firm imperiled the female-managed flexibility at the heart of Zavala food history. While the GR4A cassava binary lacked the racist misogyny and moralism of its colonial predecessor, it still premised hunger reduction on ideas and practices that not only devalued women’s cassava record, but also struck at the foundation of the market-linked provisioning strategies women had devised around cassava two centuries earlier. In this context, even the value chain’s touted benefits posed an existential threat. Although it might be tempting to sell one’s cassava all at once, doing so—on the buyer’s schedule—compromised women’s autonomy, eliminated their most supple resource, and stripped them of potential sustenance, market access, and social influence until the next harvest. Maguevas might discriminate among their cassava, preferring certain varieties or sizes over others; they might take weeks to return from Maputo with payment, or haggle over pennies after the sale. But maguevas, most still farmers themselves, accepted the logic of female control over the production and use of an edible commodity that all agreed was essential to survival. They did not concern themselves with how mothers fed their children, or with cassava varieties or planting methods—technological conditions of market engagement farmers here had never faced.

DADTCO agents and project extensionists, by contrast, used the false lure of increasing profit through expanded production volume to entice farmers to grow more cassava than other crops, and to clear forests for additional fields. In training visits and demonstration plots, they urged farmers to adopt intensive cultivation methods: tight rectilinear plant spacing, monocropping, and chemical herbicide treatment of project-supplied planting stems. The latter, distributed free of charge, served as the value chain’s Trojan horse; while DADTCO indeed purchased all cassava types, CDM preferred bitter varieties with higher starch content and—for maximal throughput—a shortened growing cycle. Women who countered that these changes would increase their workload and exhaust the soil were dismissed as lacking marketing experience, a ridiculous claim. Among themselves and in our interviews, they expressed a more worrisome prediction, that by reducing species and varietal diversity, sacrificing uncultivated spaces to a cash crop, and applying standardized intensive practices across a variegated landscape, they would jeopardize the ecological integrity of their food system and their family’s survival.

By 2019, the prescience of women’s concerns was evident in Zavala’s altered landscape. Five years earlier, most cultivated land had consisted of intercropped fields, with strategically mixed plantings of mostly sweet and a few bitter cassava varieties. Food crops were interspersed with coconut palms, fruit trees, and patches of edible “wild” plants (such as amaranth and nkakana [Momordica balsamina]), while gently mounded or plowed soils were bordered by forest stands rich in forage foods such as mushrooms. Now, more uniform cassava-only fields with narrowly spaced rows were more prominent, especially on lands within walking distance of the highway and feeder roads. It is impossible to overstate the environmental and nutritional implications of this shift. Zavala is known for its unusually large repertoire of local cassava varieties, especially sweet types, and for its market-sensitive farmers’ willingness to experiment with introduced varieties and new varietal mixes in their fields. In the 1990s, at maguevas’ prompting, many women had increased production of the sweet hybrid variety Chinhembwe, whose sugary taste Maputo consumers preferred. When DADTCO arrived in Zavala, the prevalence and versatility of this variety—roots can be eaten raw and are easily processed into rale or flour—inclined value chain stakeholders to incentivize its adoption by gifting farmers with Chinhembwe planting stems and showcasing it in project fields. Largely because of their promotion of a variety women already grew for sustenance and sale, monocropped Chinhembwe fields visibly multiplied in 2016–17, as farmers began to prioritize the new market over traditional criteria for varietal selection. Before long, however, brewery complaints about Chinhembwe’s low starch content forced DADTCO to switch gears and begin promoting a small number of bitter types instead. In their eagerness for market options, many women again made a varietal shift. Although in our 2016 survey sample sweet cassava types still prevailed, by 2019 bitter varieties, especially the hybrid Gangasol, were rapidly gaining ground. Inedible raw, and much more time-consuming to process, bitter cassava is also less drought-resistant, an alarming trait in a region already vulnerable to climate stress.

Consistent with these changes, our 2019 surveys also revealed ominous new consumption trends. Both household dietary diversity (proxy measure for food access) and women’s dietary diversity (proxy measure for micronutrient intake) had declined among project participants since 2016, independent of socioeconomic status. Amplifying a shift noted in late colonial reports, the percentage of surveyed households who bought processed foods high in sugar, salt, and saturated fat had also increased, as had the range of purchased products. In addition to aspirational standbys (imported rice, pasta, sugar, white bread), sugary sodas, high-sodium bouillon powder, mayonnaise, South African polony, and a variety of sweets also appeared in respondents’ 2019 food lists. Semi-cultivated fruits (pineapples, mangos, oranges, papayas, melons) had retained their seasonal importance in daily diets, especially in poorer families. However, consumption of foraged plant and animal foods had declined since 2016, accelerating a trend evident through the twentieth century. This recent reduction in the quantity and variety of wild foods, clearly linked to cassava monocropping and clearing of forest spaces once protected for forage, threatens to sap rural diets of critical micronutrients not available from Zavala’s sparse retail food market, now or in the foreseeable future. If this trend continues, women’s fears about the corrosive effects of the Impala project on their agrifood system will prove prophetic. This outcome would represent a dramatic reversal of their long history of “living through cassava,” when the edible commodity remained firmly in female hands.