Cultural response to forced labour and commodity production in Portugal's African colonies

Abstract

In the Portuguese colonies in Africa, forced labour was the principal feature I of commodity production. It was central to capitalist accumulation in Portugal. The common experience of forced labour and commodity production was (and is) widely remembered in the societies of Mozambique, Angola, Guinea‐Bissau, Cape Verde, and São Tomé e Principe. This contribution attempts to establish the historical relationship between what Amilcar Cabrai termed the cultural situation and the economic (and by long term implication the political) situation. It focuses on cultural forms such as songs, poetry and sculpture, as articulations of a collective memorization of the experience of colonial capitalist exploitation. It argues for a dynamic political mobilizational potential of such cultural manifestations in the process of national liberation. This article should be read in conjunction with the pictures of colonial commodities above. They respectively provide antagonistic images of colonial commodity production.