Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

Cotton is the mother of poverty: peasants, work, and rural struggle in colonial Mozambique, 1938-1961
ISBN: 9780435089764
Platform/Publisher: ACLS / Heinemann
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Ten pages at a time; Download: Ten pages at a time
Subjects: African;

Portuguese officials forced nearly a million African peasants to grow cotton in colonial Mozambique under a regime of coercion, brutality, and terror. This book explores the lives of Mozambique's cotton producers -- their pain and suffering, their coping strategies, their struggles to survive. The documentation for this book includes more than 160 interviews -- with former cotton growers and their families, but also with African police and overseers, and with Portuguese settlers, merchants, missionaries, and officials. The peasants' own stories, while acknowledging their bleak situation, provide evidence of agency, proactive struggle, and creative adaptation under difficult circumstances.