Corporate Paternalism on Colonial Angola Mines

In "Diamonds in the Rough: Corporate Paternalism and African Professionalism on the Mines of Colonial Angola," author Todd Cleveland travels to conflict-bearing regions in modern Angola to reconstruct the history of a Portuguese-led mining operation which spanned from 1917 until Angolan independence in 1975, which was followed immediately by the protracted Angolan civil war. One of the fundamental differences between Diamang's Angolan mining operations and those elsewhere in the Continent was the limited availability of labourers, which limited the normally disposable nature of African labour sources for Europeans.

Coupled with the seemingly inexhaustible need for manual labour which characterized Diamang's operations, these forces converged in a way which forced Diamang to look out for the welfare of the workers and their families, which often accompanied them and contributed to the mining effort in important ways. One of the foremost aspects of Diamang's operations was to provide adequate food and healthcare for it's workers - a stark contrast to many other such operations within the Continent.

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This policy not only enabled the company to retain it's limited labour supply, but also allowed them to institute a policy of corporate mercantilism which was grounded in wages remaining low. Low wages ensured that very little money circulated amongst the workers, which in turn forced the workers to purchase their provisions at the low-cost company stores, thereby ensuring worker dependence on the company in a calculated and successful paternalistic policy effort.

Though benefits like healthcare and company stores were attractive enough to bring in workers from the regions proximate to the mines, this alone did not supply all of the labour  necessary to conduct operations and maximize profits on a large scale.

Diamang remedied this problem with the division of labour into two categories: voluntarios (voluntary labourers who most often lived close to the mines and brought their families with them to sites), and contrados (forced labour contingents which were recruited from various locations and brought to the mines through an elaborate recruitment structure which involved training and socialization at a central location in Dundo). Many contrados stayed on as labourers even after their forced labour contracts expired. One point which should always be stressed in that none of the measures taken by the company were out of genuine concern or respect for African lives or the well-being of African people, but were rather profit-driven initiatives with a “humanitarian” twist due to the nature of operations and the limited availability of labour.

If the region had had an inexhaustible source of human labour, one can be sure that many more would have suffered and died at the hands of the colonizers. At the end of the day, the care of the labour force was for the good of the White people involved. One of the ways in which the aforementioned wage-based corporate mercantilism allowed for the further exploitation of diamond profits throughout the company's existence was that it allowed for manual labour to often remain preferable to mechanization, which occurred far less extensively than in other Continental mining operations. Though mechanization did occur, people were still carrying and loading mined material in buckets well into the 1960's and all the way up to Angolan independence in the 1970's. This was not a result of the inability to mechanize - in fact Diamang possessed greater investment capability than many of it's contemporaries - but rather due to the workability of the manual labour system employed by the company.

It should also be noted that where machinery was introduced, it most certainly did not lighten the workload of the average labourer. Any decrease in workload was funneled into other projects, ensure that each worker was exploited to maximum capacity by the colonizers. Over the course of the company's existence, the division of labour became more and more divided along the line of voluntario and contrado, in that voluntarios were often given lighter work than their contrado compatriots, who were increasingly selected for work such as prospecting, which was considered by many to be some of the hardest work, involving months out in the field in makeshift encampments with limited provisions and much tedious, heavy manual labour. This was done in part to encourage labourers to sign on voluntarily, thus ensuring a stable, voluntary labour force with which the company could dependably carry out it's operations.

As one might expect, security was of vital concern to Diamang, considering especially the extremely valuable nature of the diamonds which they were collecting. Workers were subjected to exhaustive security measures, particularly in the later stages of refinement, where workers were often strip-searched, had clothing burned, and were not permitted to have long hair or fingernails. A former security officer also said that body cavity searches were also employed in this effort. Eventually, Diamang relocated the final stages of refinement to one central location which was closer to the mines than it's headquarters in Dundo. One of the important distinctions between Diamang's operations and others throughout the continent was the high prevalence of family accompaniment to the mines alongside male labourers, including many women and children. Children as young as 8 years old did manual labour, and women worked extensively in the field of home-making and food provision.

Allowing family to accompany workers increased morale and productivity, while at the same time provided increased opportunities for the natural reproduction of the workforce. “Diamond in the Rough” represents an important and ongoing effort not only to construct African history in a way that is accessible to students around the world, but is also important in drawing attention to the overall relevance of African history, African affairs, and Africa herself in the global culture, which has been dominated by White supremacist ideology for hundreds of years. There is still much to be written and discovered about the Continent for an international audience, and this requires researchers and historians to visit Africa and collect extensive oral testimony from Africans; oral history being central to the African conception of history for thousands of years. It is this endeavor to which I wish to commit much of my own personal life, and this book has contributed greatly to my own personal conceptualization of this goal.