The Economics of Coffee Commercialization in Tubah, 1934-1961: A Critique of British Exploitation in Colonialism

Abstract

Virtually everything that has gone wrong in Africa since the advent of independence has been blamed on the legacies of colonialism. Is that fair? After the British colonial powers had acquired the Southern Cameroons for themselves, they adopted political, economic and social policies aimed at ensuring the maximum exploitation of the resources of the colonies for the development of British overseas. What were their commercial policies in Africa and why were there apparently such a disaster on coffee commercialization in Tubah? Colonial rule was not a benevolent political system. The lucrative nature of coffee business gave the latitude for the creation of the West Cameroon Marketing Board and the Tubah Cooperative Produce Marketing Societies which became a channel to export coffee from the peripheries of Tubah. The article illustrates that the coffee industry in Tubah served, not only as a ready source of cheap raw materials to feed the declining foreign markets, but also as a trading post for the British and European traders and merchants, and at the same time supported the importation of end-products because the British wanted an outlet for her own manufactured products in order to stave off declining domestic consumption, and falling rate of profit at home. The paper portrays cooperatives as monopolies in the colonial crusade of economic exploitation through the appropriation of coffee farmer surpluses and argues that the terms of trade that tele-guided coffee business in this former British sphere by the first half of the 20th century ultimately benefited the European buyers of the raw material and not so much the subjugated African producers.