African and European Cocoa Producers on Fernando Póo, 1880s to 1910s

Abstract

The decline of the Creole or Fernandino planters of Fernando Póo came later and was less severe than has sometimes been said, while the indigenous Bubi inhabitants played a far greater role in the development of the cocoa economy than has usually been acknowledged. Social discrimination against Creoles and Bubi was of little significance. The re-direction of Fernandian exports to Spain from the 1890s had no negative effect on African producers, and Creoles and Spaniards united to fight tariff policies detrimental to their interests. Bubi suffered severely from land alienation, but they kept sufficient land to be able to participate fully in the cocoa boom. Creoles lost land through debt, but so did Spaniards. The beneficiaries of land transfers were black as well as white, and a map from around 1913 shows a roughly even mix of Spanish and Creole landowners. Black and white planters were united in every aspect of labour which involved relations with the authorities. Attempts to force poor Bubi into plantation labour collapsed quickly, and wealthy Bubi cultivators had little difficulty in finding labour to employ. Access to credit was equal for all landowners, and the evidence for Africans being more spendthift than Europeans is of dubious validity. The thesis of African decline becomes more plausible from the mid-1920s, due to Spanish immigration, the formation of joint-stock companies, and accentuated social discrimination, but the extent of that decline remains to be determined. The roughly tripartite equilibrium between Bubi, Creole and European cocoa producers in the early 1910s contrasts with descriptions of other cocoa-growing areas in western Africa, suggesting the need for a re-examination of the evidence for the Creole role in cocoa cultivation and for Creole economic decline from the 1890s in West Africa.