African cotton production and its roots  (Part I)

“In Africa, the history of why cotton is grown in which locales, by whom, in what quantity, and with which techniques involves international politics, colonial power, environmental factors, and, in many instances, coercion.” (Moseley and Gray, 2008)

It has long been thought that Arabs introduced cotton in Africa from Asia around the 11th century. Today, however, botanists believe that cotton originated simultaneously from different parts of the World, among Africa is part of. Archaeologists have found evidence of cotton weaving in Nubia dating from the BC era and in today’s Niger dating from the 1st and 2nd centuries.

Cotton has an ancient history in West Africa, going back well over a millennium. When the first domesticated cotton was cultivated that is not exactly known, but it was becoming more widely used during the tenth and eleventh centuries. Knowledge of cotton and the technological process for turning it into yarn and then into cloth were transferred from at least two separate regions: the upper Niger and Senegambia watersheds, and the environs of Lake Chad. Over the next several centuries, cotton was introduced into many other areas across West Africa.

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Centers of cotton textile manufacture and the trading of cottons regionally were therefore already established when the first Portuguese mariners sailed down to the Guinea Coast.

International trade between Europeans and West Africans came to be conditioned in part by the cultural values and preferences for certain types of textiles, especially cotton ones, that prevailed at ports and in their hinterlands at specific moments in time.

Some of these values and preferences persisted while others changed. Hence there was a certain logic to what European merchants experienced as irritating behavior on the part of Africans they traded with: scrupulous inspections of overseas cloth, insistent requests for certain cloths by name, by manufacturer, by fiber, or by color, and shrewd comparisons with the goods of foreign suppliers. West African traders knew their cloth and they knew their markets. They were exceptionally choosy and their choosiness must have added to the costs of doing business with them. Knowing in greater detail the specific types of textiles that where produced, traded, and imported in West Africa will surely reveal more about its social, economic and cultural history.

Cotton has been cultivated and woven in different regions of Africa for centuries. Schwartz explains how, in the pre-colonial period, cotton was cultivated to produce cloth for the household, shroud for ritual purposes and woven strips that were traded, notably in exchange for salt from the Sahara and kola from the tropical forests. (Schwartz, 1993) Cotton was then cultivated as a secondary crop, with little labour input and very low yields. Its widespread promotion in WCA first emerged as an answer to the procurement problems of the French textile sector at the end of the 19th century. Colonial efforts were motivated by the high dependency of French companies on imports from the United States (US), which was increasingly perceived as a strategic danger by the French textile industry.11

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Combined with the speculative activity, all these factors also resulted in “wild swings” in the world price of cotton. (Farnie, 2004) Cotton development in French African colonies was also motivated by the colonial Administration’s search for financial autonomy, and later, by the will to promote local development in its territories.14 The French cotton policy thus emerged from the convergence of interests of the colonial Administration, of industrialists and of the Metropolitan government, as the textile industry was one of the major job providers in the Metropole. (Fok, 1993) However, until the Second World War, cotton promotion was mainly supported by the private sector based in the Metropole and implemented by the colonial Administration with varying levels of support from the Metropolitan government.

Joseph Kabila once famously said..
"The West exploited Africa and now it wants to save it. We have been living with this hypocrisy for too long. Africa can only be saved by Africans..." 

News:
Mali has opened two brand new production sites for cotton and finally added a value chain on the ground, creating employment. It has also become the 2 largest African producer of rice with 2 million Tons and is finally in charge of their own gold reserves which they produce, which will see non producer of Gold loose its place of 4th largest Gold reserve . France loose its pool position....

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Sources:

JOURNAL ARTICLE,  Mapping the History of Cotton Textile Production in Precolonial West Africa, Colleen E. Kriger

A short analytical history of cotton institutions in West Africa,  Claire Delpeuch