ECAS 2013

Drawing on evidence from Mozambique, this paper will discuss the concepts of "rural planning", "rural/communitarian development" and "cooperativism" as put forth in the post-war period by experts in Portugal and in its African colonies, and focus specifically on their proposals regarding land tenure for Africans. It will interpret these concepts in the light of 1920s and 1930s calls for an agrarian intervention in African production. As a means of addressing Portuguese mercantile interests' demands for agricultural commodities and the decline of settler farming, worsened by the Great Depression, plans created under this framework included cash crop expansion, the promotion of "rational" agricultural practices and technical assistance for Africans, but also population displacement and resettlement. In contrast to previous legislation which excluded the majority of Africans from land tenure and viewed them mostly as squatters, these plans proposed new views concerning African land access and use. This transformation was justified by the need to increase yields and by a narrative on the improvement of living standards for Africans, but it was also based on paternalism and coercion, elements which were also present in post-1945 calls for African "rural development". The paper will also analyse these concepts and policies designed in this context in Mozambique in the light of the international circulation of policies and techniques regarding "development" in post-war Africa.

I analyse, firstly, the work of mestiço Mozambican anthropologist Luís Polanah with the Provincial Settlement Board (JPP) while living in the village of Kinglês, Malanje, 1969-1971. He was responsible for the Support Group of the JPP's Malanje Regional Commission for Rural Reorganization during a land rush occasioned by new transport infrastructure in one of the heaviest areas of white settlement in Malanje. Secondly, I situate Polanah's experiences and his later contributions to the Rural Extension Mission in the broader canvas of JPP activities, and rural development strategy in Malanje and Angola. Polanah emphasized social contexts of indigenous agricultural production (largely cassava) - in contrast to technocratic and bureaucratic approaches, and amidst military and cultural counter-insurgency following the 1961 cotton revolt - and thus the need to "take into account the targeted people, the characteristics of the regional economy, the lived historical and political circumstances …" In addition to projects by Community Development Teams, he sought to title native land to prevent further settler expropriation, which I examine through a case of land conflict between locals and a prominent settler-bureaucrat. Lastly, as post-war infrastructure reconstruction and land privatization occasioned post-colonial land rushes in Malanje, I examine a current land dispute near Kinglês in order to trace the memories, landscapes, ideas, projects, and social networks through which Polanah's work resonates in current rural development efforts in Malanje and Angola, particularly the importance of anthropological methods and insights and the real but limited protections of public interest in efforts at smallholder and community land registration.

The reflection about the innovating ideas and practices, after the Second World War, in the Portuguese Colonial Empire, would be incomplete without analyzing the impact of those innovations upon the colonial policy. In so doing, a quantitative methodology founded on the public finances study was chosen. Since the majority of the public policies registered in the Portuguese colonies' financial year accounts under the designation of public expenditure, sometimes in absolute terms, some others in relative terms, is underestimated, thus not corresponding to the real public financial flows which permitted their implementation ; we shall here try and carry out a comparative analysis between the figures registered in the official financial documents as agricultural policy and an alternative version of those figures, closer to the reality, which reassess the weight of agriculture within the colonial public policies' framework by considering a set of public expenses which had not been registered in the colonies' financial year accounts and that, in spite of not having been the object of study by academics focused on the Portuguese colonial public policies of the twentieth century third quarter, were indispensable for government and colonies' public administration. The comparative analysis of the position occupied by the agricultural sector of both official and corrected versions in the hierarchy of the colonial government's priorities will prove that the new ideas and practices introduced in the imperial rural space after 1945 did not have the expected impact on the financial allocation of resources implemented by the Portuguese colonial policy.