Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 January 2009
This article seeks to explain the adoption of cotton-growing by the Langi of Uganda in the early twentieth century, on the assumption that considerations of ‘indigenous economics’ (notably labour constraints and the attraction of competing crops) were at least as important as the more usually stressed factors of administrative pressure, price incentives and petty trading by immigrant minorities. On the eve of the colonial period the Langi were already producing planned agricultural surpluses—principally sesame for trade with Bunyoro.
Cotton, which was introduced in 1909, could only have been grown on a significant scale at the cost of sacrificing the trade in sesame. This the Langi refused to do until the early 1920s, when the market for sesame declined and the buying price of cotton rose; partial alleviation of the threat of famine and changes in traditional dry-season occupations were also important. From 1931, however, cotton output in Lango ceased to expand. This stagnation was only partly a result of the Depression; once more the Langi found themselves producing as much as was humanly possible, given an extremely tough environment, a simple technology and a fully stretched labour-force.
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55 As elsewhere in the article, the argument here would be strengthened by the inclusion of statistics. Agricultural statistics were in fact published annually in the official Blue Books and the Annual Reports of the Department of Agriculture. However, crop acreage figures are extremely unreliable, for reasons explained in Wrigley, , Crops and Wealth, 60Google Scholar, and Hyde, R. J., The Analysis of Crop Distributions in Uganda (Kampala, 1975), 9–22Google Scholar. Production figures are usually reckoned to be sounder, but in the present case special difficulties intervene. Until 1923 hardly a year passed without changes in the range of effective administration or the boundaries of Lango District, so that the figures cannot be used to plot the fluctuations in agricultural productivity from year to year. Throughout the period covered by this article, the Kumam were administered as part of the District, no distinction being made in the statistics between the two peoples. Lastly, no figures for the prices paid for any crop to growers in Lango District were recorded until the 1930s.
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