Taxation and fiscal statistics

Portuguese post commissioners were required by law to keep monthly service journals, in which they provided daily accounts of their activities, just as their French counterparts did.Footnote ¹⁶ Regardless of different writing styles and differing priorities, these journals contain information on the commissioner’s daily duties and of local events. They include references to ongoing construction works, visits by superiors in the administration or others, and public ceremonies. A fair proportion of the daily entries concern the administration of the colonial populations: commissioners noted meetings with local African authorities, census and tax collection operations, litigations between Africans, and gatherings for medical inspections. These activities were abundantly documented in the service journals: putting them on paper for their superiors to read was also a way the commissioners could create a good image of their own performance, since the administrator regularly read these journals.Footnote ¹⁷ The service journals thus served as a place for the commissioners to produce a certain image of themselves. Their accounts reflected their conduct as officials – active and diligent, or negligent and careless. Indeed, upon inspecting their journals, the district administrator praised or criticized their accounts, and consequently their activity.Footnote ¹⁸

Furthermore, a commissioner’s activities were condensed into summary monthly statistics provided at the end of each journal. This is something found in almost every journal for the period in question, and the most consistently provided kind of statistical record was of civil registrations of Africans and “native” disputes. These were related to a fundamental part of the commissioner’s job: controlling the African population, the majority of whom were placed under the “native” category.Footnote ¹⁹ In this sense, statistics served as a tool of population control: the population was “enumerated, classified, and territorially delineated, and became the target of interventions.”Footnote ²⁰ In Portuguese Guinea, the administration was to keep a record of all births and deaths (as well as marriages), which served the basic purpose of ascertaining how many people there were in the colonial territory. This information was of the utmost importance for one of the fundamental functions of the colonial state: taxation.Footnote ²¹ African men in the “native” category were obliged to pay certain taxes. In late 1950s Guinea, these were three: the native tax (imposto indígena, established according to the number of one’s wives), the labor tax (contribuição braçal), and the natural resources extraction tax (taxa de exploração de recursos naturais). While the native tax and 25 percent of the natural resources tax went directly to the colony’s central treasury, the labor tax (when remitted in money) and the remaining 75 percent of the natural resources tax, as well as other fees, went to the district administration and were its primary source of income.Footnote ²² Accurate collection of these taxes required a thorough census and meticulous control of the population. Yearly census operations allowed the district administration to forecast the coming year’s tax revenues. Consequently, tax collection was a central part of the administration’s activity and was a constant topic in the accounts of its daily routines.Footnote ²³ Such financial records constitute a crucial form of statistical record and are probably the most consistently kept throughout the entire series of journals in question, indicating that statistics on fiscal performance were seen as critical. They were also proof that the commissioner was dutifully fulfilling his task in administering the colonial population and promoting local economic development.

The keeping of litigation statistics stemmed from the commissioner’s role as the local justice of the peace from whom Africans, as “natives,” were to seek justice. Thus, since they were tasked with reconciling disputes between Africans, commissioners held both political and judicial authority over the “native” population. Keeping such statistics informed the colonial government about the local administration of justice: how many disputes there were, what their causes were, and how many had been settled or had to be forwarded to the municipal court.Footnote ²⁴

Monthly statistics thus constitute a kind of numerical summary of the life of the post. They express the administration’s control over the lives of Africans, who were counted, taxed, and tried. The state exerted its power over them, and the commissioners’ monthly statistics were the numerical expression of this fact.

However, there was a lack of standardization in how these statistics were collected, something to be found throughout the period and in every administrative post. In Calequisse, for instance, the local commissioner in early 1955 consistently noted native disputes, but did not include any civil registration numbers, something continued by his successor, Alexandre Gomes da Silva Braga, who arrived in July 1955. Only once did Silva Braga include civil registration and collected revenue,Footnote ²⁵ the latter of which was otherwise included only in the daily entries. The keeping of statistics was highly inconsistent across the district. It should also be noted that locally collected numbers were often unreliable due the administration’s shortcomings, and colonial officials in Portuguese Guinea themselves stated as much. For instance, during census season, when they could not visit the entire territory, they had to rely on information provided by African authorities. Furthermore, officials were aware of the population’s migratory movements, which complicated efforts at accurate counting.Footnote ²⁶ The impossibility of thoroughly controlling the territory under their jurisdiction led to blind spots in statistical records.

Work without workers? The collection of local statistics on labor recruitment

Local statistics were not unimportant, since they contributed to general colonial statistics, as shown by the colonial statistical yearbook (Anuário Estatístico do Ultramar) published by the Portuguese National Statistics Institute. In these yearbooks, Portuguese Guinea stood out for the lack of various kinds of data and for significant delays in handing over the data they did collect. To give an example of statistics directly concerning local administrations, for the 1960 yearbook Guinea provided no data at all on cases brought before municipal judges (the administrators themselves); this had already been the case in the 1958 volume.Footnote ²⁷ Other Portuguese colonies also struggled to provide this sort of information: in 1962, only Mozambique did.Footnote ²⁸ Inconsistent local data collection translated into gaps in wider surveys, making it difficult to have complete numerical representations of the colonial administration. If one looks at statistics as an “important language in the narrative legitimation of modernity, that is, for telling stories about progress,”Footnote ²⁹ these gaps and failures put the Portuguese colonial state in an awkward position. Portugal was not alone in this: in 1930s French West Africa, two statistical surveys on laborers had similarly failed to effectively reflect the labor realities in those territories.Footnote ³⁰

I see the uneven data collection—be it due to carelessness or a lack of capacity for doing actual counting—as a sign of the tensions within the colonial state that were expressed in its very bureaucracy.Footnote ³¹ This came with consequences, and indeed, statistics proved to be an issue at the higher levels of the imperial administration regarding policymaking in labor matters: in 1954, the Portuguese Overseas Administrative Inspectorate (a department of the Overseas Ministry) admitted that it lacked the statistics to counter international accusations of using forced labor.Footnote ³² This is confirmed by the approach at the local level. In Cacheu, for instance, statistics on workers are largely absent from the service journals for 1955, even if the commissioners noted that they were overseeing various public works (which was part of their economic development duties). Pinto Neves at Bula noted throughout his 1955 journals the various public works that were under way—mostly construction and repair of roads and public buildings, and improvements to the water tower—but nothing related to the workers carrying them out. Every commissioner noted the supervision and inspection of various construction works and agricultural projects; in this way, they presented themselves as committed and dutiful.Footnote ³³ The significant recruitment of African labor was a typical method for colonial states to overcome the scarce voluntary workforce available for public works.Footnote ³⁴ Notably, in Portuguese Guinea, the colonial state had resorted to significant contingents of forced labor to carry out the expansion of the road network in the 1920s.Footnote ³⁵ In the late 1950s, such strategies remained mostly unchanged, testifying to the survival of forced labor practices in the mid-twentieth century. By 1955, however, the workers carrying out the various local development projects in Cacheu are absent from administrative service journals. Such forms of recordkeeping (or its absence) thus rendered the workforce invisible.

The lack of recordkeeping about workers also concealed labor recruitment practices, triggering anxiety in the higher ranks of the administration,Footnote ³⁶ which tried to rectify the situation. For not only was statistical recordkeeping inconsistent, it also failed to respect instructions that were then in force. Thus, on February 23, 1956, the district administrator, Artur Martins Meireles, reminded commissioners across the district of their duty to include labor recruitment statistics in their service journals. As he explained, in 1950 the administration had imposed on commissioners the obligation to note in the last entry of each month’s service journal the number of “natives” employed in public works and “works of exclusive interest for the native population” (precisely those on which compulsory labor could be used).Footnote ³⁷

In reality, recordkeeping about such matters was not uniform or had been abandoned altogether, showing that officials were not complying with instructions in force. For the keeping of thorough records, the administration sent a specific record book; the aim was for the commissioners, starting in March 1956, to keep a daily record of activities, with a summary to be included at the end of each month’s service journal. The administration prescribed as the unit of measurement for African labor the work day, which resulted simply from multiplying the number of workers recruited by the number of days they worked. However, and in rather confusing fashion, some commissioners counted the number of recruited “natives” when in reality they were counting work days. The administration’s goal was to be “always aware of the workforce use” and to make possible the production of “serious and trustworthy native labor statistics.”Footnote ³⁸

This was significant, since Portugal was facing increasing international scrutiny of its colonial affairs, especially its African labor policies. In 1930, Portugal had refused to ratify the ILO Convention on forced labor by upholding national sovereignty against international interference and the moral benefits of forced labor. In the early 1950s, however, the country was giving signs of an at least apparent rapprochement with international labor norms in order to avoid isolation.Footnote ³⁹ Indeed, France had ratified the convention in 1937, and then abolished forced labor–even if rather vaguely—in 1946.Footnote ⁴⁰ Portugal stood out as reluctant and non-compliant in the matter. In the context of international meetings and exchange of information, possessing consistent and up-to-date data on labor became useful. The colonial administration therefore tried to enforce consistent data collection among its local agents. On the one hand, statistics served as a way of assessing officials’ performance; on the other hand, they were also a tool of compiling knowledge for use by the Portuguese government in its policymaking and international statements.

Workers and work days: different methods for counting the workforce

I will now look into the ways commissioners across the district counted and registered the recruitment of workers in their service journals. João Godinho Gomes, post commissioner of the island of Pecixe between October 1951 and February 1956, stood out in the district for the statistics on workers that he recorded throughout 1955, providing figures on the recruitment of workers by the state. He was a thorough recordkeeper, noting “native” civil registrations, money collected and remitted (to both the central and the district administrations), and “native” disputes brought before him and settled. He also recorded the number of animals slaughtered for African funerals and festivities (which were subject to the payment of fees), as well as the number of recruited workers, thus respecting the 1950 instructions. He also recorded the number of official notes he received and sent out.

During the first months of 1955, Godinho Gomes noted that he was recruiting workers for construction of the local missionary school and “other services.” In January, the workers amounted to 286, “all with an average of 3 days of work”;Footnote ⁴¹ since they had worked for an average of three days each per month, this meant the administrative post had benefited from approximately 858 work days from the African population. Moreover, the method for calculating figures for labor used by Godinho Gomes was the one prescribed by the colonial administration. He continued to employ workers in building the missionary school and in “other services” until April, always with an average of three days per recruited worker.Footnote ⁴² Godinho Gomes’s fixation on noting that he recruited workers for an average of only three days each suggests that he was determined to show that he was not abusing his recruitment prerogatives—workers still had most of the month to dedicate to their own activities—while also keeping a steady flow of labor for state projects.

At first, upon receiving the memo of February 1956 which reminded them of their obligation to keep workforce statistics, all commissioners responded promptly. Pecixe was no longer the only post where work days were counted, thus making for a more comprehensive pool of statistics. However, this did not mean that counting practices became unified, let alone that there was consistent data collection. Pinto Neves, the commissioner of Bula, did not wait until March to include in his service journal (in addition to the usual accounting of “native” civil registry and disputes) that during February the local “natives” had provided a total of 1117 work days in building a new road;Footnote ⁴³ and at the end of March 1956, he noted that “natives” had provided 308 work days, divided between road construction and repair, work at the administration’s farm, and “other works.”Footnote ⁴⁴ In April, however, Pinto Neves failed to record statistics on recruited workers, and Meireles was quick to remind him of this obligation.Footnote ⁴⁵

Other commissioners chose to be more specific when recording the numbers for the monthly workforce recruitment, by including charts which distinguished between the daily average of employed “natives” and work days per task. Such is the case with Joaquim Silva Saraiva, the post commissioner of Caió between May 1956 and July 1957. In May and June 1956, he recruited and assigned workers as follows:

Source: Posto Administrativo de Caió, diário de serviço, 31 May 1956, B1/A28.302, INEP-AHN;Footnote ⁴⁶ Posto Administrativo de Caió, diário de serviço, 30 June 1956, B1/A28.301, INEP-AHN.

The same tasks continued for the rest of the year, mobilizing similar amounts of forced labor. Recruitment significantly increased in October 1956 with the start of road repairs after the end of the wet season.Footnote ⁴⁷ A daily average of 150 workers were employed in that task for 3 days each (for a total of 450 work days).Footnote ⁴⁸ In November 1956, road repair work amounted to 1,800 work days (with an additional 320 assigned to town cleaning), and in December to 1,200 work days (a daily average of 40 Africans working through all 30 days of the month).

In Calequisse, with the arrival of memo no. 119 in February 1956, Commissioner Alexandre Silva Braga included in his service journal a “summary of the native workforce used in service,” but only between March and May. He noted the number of workers employed per day, followed by monthly totals. In March, this ranged between 5 and 12 per day, for a total of 222 work days.Footnote ⁴⁹ In April, the daily number of Africans employed ranged from 6 to 56: 500 work days were directed to road construction and repair, 66 to the administration’s farms, and 180 to “other works.”Footnote ⁵⁰ The 424 work days in May were divided among road construction and repair (150), farms (84), “various works” (20), and “other works” (168).Footnote ⁵¹ Since the service journal does not contain the average number of days per worker, this counting method conceals the actual number of recruited individuals (if they worked for one day or more). From June onwards, no data on labor recruitment was provided.

It was difficult to enforce collection of workforce statistics in a standardized way, and collection was not strictly enforced. This is shown by the fact that some commissioners recorded the numbers of Africans recruited instead of work days. For instance, Mário Joaquim Silva, post commissioner of Caió between December 1957 and April 1960, from 1958 onward recorded only the actual individuals recruited for such tasks rather than work days; he often mentions recruiting around eighteen individuals, which provoked no criticism from his superior. In Cacheu, Mário Lopes Pereira, who took over the post immediately after the memorandum on labor statistics was issued in February 1956, gathered his statistics in similar fashion. He added the numbers of individuals employed in different works to his monthly statistical record: road building and repair (185), town cleaning and weeding (50), farmwork (50).Footnote ⁵² Despite receiving a reprimand from his superior for this in June 1956,Footnote ⁵³ Lopes Pereira continued to record the number of workers rather than work days throughout his tenure, until March 1960.

It should be noted that the district administration reprimanded only two commissioners in the early months of the enforcement of memo no. 119. The fact that neither Martins Meireles nor his successors as administrator pointed out further disregard for uniform counting methods or for failing to keep workforce statistics at all, as gradually became the case once more for most of the district, shows that non-compliance by commissioners with previous directives may have resulted in part from negligence on the part of their superiors.

The invisibility of labor recruitment

Lopes Pereira’s counting system gives the monthly number of recruited workers. It still does not state the number of hours or days they actually worked, nor does it provide the actual number of individuals recruited, since it does not disclose whether the total is the sum of daily recruitments or of the actual individuals recruited. Thus, while the numbers served the purpose of showing that their authors were performing their duties, workers became invisible. Another element added to the opacity of commissioner-produced statistics. From May 1955 on, Godinho Gomes, the thorough recordkeeper of Pecixe, noted only the number of workers recruited for “various services”: 98 in May and 40 in June, all working an average of 3 days each.Footnote ⁵⁴ Formulations such as “various services” or “other works” make it impossible to know the type of labor done by the recruited workers, though one can try to make deductions by joining such information with the content of Godinho Gomes’ daily entries during those months, in which he noted that he was overseeing works such as the cleaning and preparing of plots of land at the farm, dyke construction, and cashew planting. In October, when the time came after the rainy season to repair roads and clean the local airfield, 800 workers were recruited for the usual average of 3 days each.Footnote ⁵⁵ One can surmise what tasks the workers undertook, but not in a very precise way.

Despite the renewed requirement to keep labor recruitment statistics, the fact that some commissioners did not specify tasks left the actual use of the workforce rather vague. Following the arrival of memo no. 119, Albertino Pires dos Santos Júnior, post commissioner in Caió between October 1954 and May 1956, also started including labor statistics in his service journals, using the work days system.Footnote ⁵⁶ Like Godinho Gomes in Pecixe, however, Santos Júnior recorded the workers as being recruited for “various works” without specifying the works in question. Again, by turning to his daily journal entries one can surmise that these workers were employed in farmwork at palm plantations and in building the local post office. In his daily entries, Santos Júnior’s successor, Mário Joaquim Silva, recorded work such as stone quarrying for repair of fountains, roads, and wells, construction of the health post and the commissioner’s house, improvements in the barn and missionary school, and agricultural work such as preparation of plant nurseries, planting, and orchard cleaning.

Sometimes Mário Lopes Pereira, while at the post of Cacheu, included in his statistics “various works” and “other works.” In April 1956, for instance, he recorded that he had recruited 19 Africans for “other works,” in addition to the 55 recruited for cleaning and weeding and the 126 at the farm.Footnote ⁵⁷ The works mentioned in the daily entries throughout the month include farmwork and weeding of the cemetery; Lopes Pereira also mentioned painting of the geodesic landmark and repairs to a fishing pier, so one can only assume that these were the “other works” recorded in his figures. In May of the same year, 60 people were assigned to weeding and cleaning, 102 to farm work, and 82 to “other works”;Footnote ⁵⁸ the “other works” in that month seem to have included improvements to the commissioner’s residence (expansion of the bathroom) and building of a garage for the jeep in the basement of the maternity.

The recruitment of African forced labor proved essential to the completion of state projects. The colonial administration exerted power over the local population, forcing them to do work for the state, and thus fulfil their “moral duty.” And this was far from exceptional: the local administration continuously recruited Africans to work on its farms and other agricultural projects, as well as for town cleaning and maintenance and for building public facilities and roads, the latter being seen as “the most effective way of consolidating colonial authority, while at the same time being paraded as symbols of progress.”Footnote ⁵⁹ African laborers were crucial in maintaining the colonial occupation of the territory with roads, public buildings, and farming operations; indeed, throughout the period the tasks remained fairly similar.

The allocation of African forced labor for colonial projects took a new form in 1961. Statistics on workers had been absent from the service journal for Bula ever since Homero Pinto Neves left the post in July 1956, and would reappear only in May 1961, when Mário Lopes Pereira, formerly stationed at Cacheu, became the local commissioner. Throughout his one-year stay, he kept consistent workforce statistics. However, the tasks for which he recruited workers began to differ from the usual ones. During the first months of his stay, between 74 and 897 individuals (it is clear that he retained his system of counting individuals rather than work days) were employed in building facilities for the military,Footnote ⁶⁰ which was a new addition to the usual tasks.

This new category of work reflected the changing political and military context in Portuguese Guinea in the aftermath of the massacre of Pidjiguiti, a violent police response to a dockworkers strike in Bissau on August 3, 1959 that led to numerous deaths.Footnote ⁶¹ Throughout 1961, following the start of the war in Angola,Footnote ⁶² the posts across the district witnessed an increasing military presence in their territories. In late August, the first soldiers moved into the new Bula facilities,Footnote ⁶³ shortly after the neighboring São Domingos district was attacked by the Liberation Movement of Guinea, a minor independence movement in the colony.Footnote ⁶⁴ In this context, statistics clearly show how the local administration took on the task of accommodating military units, and as usual recruited African workers to carry out the work needed to help the soldiers settle in (thus putting Africans at the service of the war effort). The recruitment methods and how they were actually distributed remain difficult to assess.

Overall, recruitment methods went relatively unmonitored. Some of the works mentioned above could have fallen under the “compulsory labor” recruitment method. However, the counting methods used do not allow us to determine exactly how these workers were recruited. The mechanisms under which they were recruited (forced labor, in-kind tax) also remain impossible to assess. Were they voluntary workers, or were they compelled by law to work? What are the so-called various services and other works? As well, the statistical methods in place let arbitrariness run free. While building a missionary school or a dyke was easily described as work benefiting the African population, thus justify the recruitment of forced labor, “various services” might conceal infringements of the law that were impossible to verify. Moreover, there was no way of clearly knowing how many actual Africans worked, or for how many hours or days. The keeping of statistics construed as a “value-free description”Footnote ⁶⁵ of reality is a way of concealing abuse.

Seeing the invisible: the gender of workers

The expansion of labor statistics throughout the district in early 1956, even if it was in most cases not long-lasting, shows how the administration systematically resorted to African forced labor to carry out state projects. Some of these statistics also provide valuable information on underexplored aspects of compulsory labor. Jorge Gomes Pimentel, who served as commissioner of Calequisse between August 1956 and June 1958 (briefly replaced by Júlio Pereira Pinto da Silva at the end of June 1957) recorded labor recruitment statistics, along with figures on disputes between Africans, from September to November 1956, before dropping monthly statistics altogether (though he still recorded figures for collected revenue in his daily entries).Footnote ⁶⁶ In September, no “natives” were recruited in Calequisse;Footnote ⁶⁷ in October, however, 230 “natives of both sexes, for a total of 11 work days” were recruited for road repair.Footnote ⁶⁸ In November, he specified that 30 men were recruited to clean the post’s farm and to put up a fence.Footnote ⁶⁹

Gomes Pimentel’s statistics reveal that African women were also recruited for compulsory labor, allowing us to see the gendered dimension of forced labor in colonial Africa. Marie Rodet pioneeringly pointed out the presence of women in forced labor practices in French West Africa, notably on plantations and at construction sites.Footnote ⁷⁰ Regarding other parts of the Portuguese colonial empire, Zachary Guthrie has explored the role women played in compulsory labor in central Mozambique in the 1950s using oral testimonies, which revealed that they could be compelled by the administration to cultivate certain crops.Footnote ⁷¹ For Portuguese Guinea, David Glovsky likewise conducted interviews which revealed the recruitment of women as forced laborers in the territory.Footnote ⁷² Gomes Pimentel’s data allows us to expand the analysis of female participation in labor recruitment, as it is assumed by the colonial state itself that it did not recruit only men for labor. Indeed, according to the Native Labor Code, the state could impose compulsory labor on women as well, though not for public works. However, Gomes Pimentel did record the recruitment of women for road repair, even though the law permitted employing them only for cleaning paths between native villages, and not on roads for motor vehicles.Footnote ⁷³ This was in fact a well-established practice, since sources from the 1920s and the 1930s reported the presence of women in road building and road repair sites.Footnote ⁷⁴ Thus, the recruitment of women for compulsory labor appears to have gone beyond what was permitted by law. This suggests that if forced labor recruitment practices violated the law it might sometimes have been preferable not to keep work recruitment statistics, or at least not clear ones.

Luciano Fernandes Garcia, who replaced João Godinho Gomes as commissioner of Pecixe in February 1956 and served there until May 1958, kept labor records only during his first months on the island, and dropped them from June 1956 on. His records also contain relevant information on gender. For February, he noted that 100 “natives” performed the usual average of 3 days of work—here he keeps the style of his predecessor—and specified that they were all women employed at the farm and in “other services.”Footnote ⁷⁵ In March, he noted that he had recruited 80 “natives” (“almost all female”) for 3 days on average in “public works” (unspecified), amounting to 240 work days. He also recruited 10 men, who cleaned the local fountain (the only task mentioned in the daily entries) “for half an hour.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Later, after he had already stopped recording labor recruitment statistics, he recorded on June 5, 1957, that he had begun the clearing of the site for a new quarry using 6 men.Footnote ⁷⁷

The recurring use of the word “natives” elides the gender of laborers. This aspect has only seldom been noted. Gomes Pimentel and Fernandes Garcia’s numbers further illustrate the local realities of labor recruitment practices, showing that by 1956 African women were also being recruited, sometimes in large numbers, to do work for the state. The unspecified “public works” and “other services” conceal their actual occupations, but these seem to have gone considerably beyond the tasks the law permitted. Inconsistent recordkeeping, different counting methods, and vague formulations all contribute to the unreliability of the figures on workforce recruitment in the district of Cacheu, with many commissioners abandoning records altogether at some point.