Neither Cameroon nor Tanganyika ever belonged to the most important coffee producers in Africa, let alone in the world. However, coffee was crucial to the economic, social, and cultural transformation of some African societies during the first half of the twentieth century. In this chapter, I compare the Kilimanjaro region of Northern Tanganyika and the highlands of West Cameroon, giving special consideration to two basic factors of production: land and labor. These two regions were centers of coffee production in colonial times, and kept this role after independence. The chapter aims to demonstrate how both internal factors and external political and economic interests led to specific land and labor patterns.

The production of a crop such as coffee for the international market imposes certain common conditions on agricultural economies, notably, for the combination of land, labor, and capital. In much of colonial Africa, there was a complex shift from communal land ownership, albeit often with individual usufruct, to individual ownership. Agricultural commercialization during the colonial period stimulated individual claims to land, and land sales, in many African communities. The expansion of cash crops also had a strong influence on changing patterns of land use. Since coffee is a permanent crop, in many regions land was no longer used for two or three years before being abandoned, but was occupied on a permanent basis. Crop production often led to large-scale recruitment of nondomestic labor and provided new opportunities for accumulation.