1920s–1930s: (Cash Crops, Rural Crises, and Peasant Protest — The Fundamentally Unfair International Economic System Giving Rise to Political Consciousness, …

1920s–1930s: (Cash Crops, Rural Crises, and Peasant Protest — The Fundamentally Unfair International Economic System Giving Rise to Political Consciousness, the United Africa Company Dominating West African Trade, Igbo Women Rioting in the 1929 Women’s War, the Gold Coast Cocoa Hold-Ups, and Chiefs Caught Between Colonial Loyalty and Peasant Demands): Commercial agriculture did not necessarily mean rural prosperity. Africans had to balance subsistence farming with export crops, while imported European manufactures gradually undermined Africa’s own economic development. Peasant farmers had no control over export prices nor over import costs, and the European commercial oligopoly kept African producers in a potential poverty trap — between the wars, they paid ever more for imports and received ever less for what they produced. This was especially acute during the 1930s, when Africans had to expand cash-crop cultivation at the expense of subsistence food crops merely to meet tax demands and compensate for falling prices — the result could be soil exhaustion and even famine, as in Niger in 1931. By the end of the 1920s, a handful of European companies dominated the West African import-export trade, including the enormous United Africa Company. African producers established farmers’ associations to protect their interests. In 1929, Igbo women in Nigeria rioted and attacked the offices of trading companies protesting the decline in export prices — this Women’s War resulted in dozens of deaths. In the Gold Coast, cocoa hold-ups — farmers refusing to sell until the price increased — protested the power of the commercial oligopoly, but companies simply bought from other sources while farmers ultimately needed to eat and pay taxes. The situation revealed tensions building within indirect rule: so-called traditional chiefs, answerable to the colonial administration, were frequently reluctant to support hold-ups, as they could not afford to embarrass the companies central to the system. Over time, chiefs and peasants would find their differences irreconcilable, and a younger Western-educated generation would perceive indirect-rule chiefs as obstacles to independence and modernization.