Our Africa – Macau Today

Dumpers of electronic materials and toxic metals are growing exponentially around the world, especially in Africa and the Indo-Pacific. According to a report released by the United Nations last week, the average annual growth rate of electronic waste between 2010 and 2022 was 30%, indicating that the former colonial empires, in addition to continuing to use the property lost with formal independence, are also importing electronic waste. They obtain raw materials at very low prices and use them as final deposits for televisions, computers, mobile phones and all kinds of electronic machines that are no longer used.

By 2023, Africans will generate an average of 0.44 kg of e-waste per person, compared to 3.25 kg per person in developed countries, a large proportion of which will be affected.

The UNCTAD report states that “developing countries bear most of the environmental costs of digitalization, but reap fewer benefits. They export low-value-added raw materials and import high-value-added equipment, while digital waste is also increasing. (…) Electrical and electronic equipment waste consists of organic pollutants and heavy metals such as mercury and lead, and is classified as hazardous waste under the Basel Convention.”

In January 2023, Spanish police dismantled a network that illegally exported more than 5,000 tons of electronic waste from Europe to West Africa via the Canary Islands.

The European Commission calculates that of the 2 billion tons of waste generated in EU countries (95 million tons of which are considered hazardous), between 15% and 30% are illegally exported by criminal organizations to countries in Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia. This does not mention legal exports, which are much larger.

It is understood that…

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When slavery was abolished, some countries were put into debt to pay compensation, but only to slave owners. Next came forced labor, a practice that was practiced differently throughout the former Portuguese Empire and culminated in the massacre in Lower Kasange, southern Angola, on January 4, 1961.

There, thousands of Angolan cotton field workers, fed up with the working conditions imposed by the Cotonan Company, launched a popular uprising with the support of the Portuguese colonial government. The rebellion was brutally suppressed and thousands of workers were killed. Even today, it is not known how many.

Cotonan and the colonial authorities then committed the historic Kasanchi Bay Massacre. A Portuguese-Belgian company was granted a concession to grow cotton in the area and forced the farmers to grow the fiber without receiving wages or selling it at a high price.

Farmers received no wages or were forced to sell their produce at prices far below world market prices. The obligation to grow cotton prevented families from growing their own food.

Arlindo Barbeitos, a poet who fought for independence in the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), described the situation this way:

“People were forced to grow cotton, and it didn’t matter if there was corn, sorghum, sweet potatoes, cassava, beans, or anything else they ate. It didn’t matter, the cotton was guaranteed. And the cotton could only be sold to certain companies that had a monopoly, the scales were fake, and the price was very low. If they didn’t produce enough cotton, they were beaten. I saw all this with my own eyes.”

During the uprising, the peasants destroyed crops, bridges, and houses. The colonial response was to send in Portuguese Air Force planes to drop bombs on the people. The death toll ranged from thousands to tens of thousands of peasants.

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I have only a stone left in my shoe, watching what replaces the old, renewed and re-adapted reality of slavery, today my feet are getting more and more painful, I do not rest until I go diving without obvious prejudice or naive certainty. Gilgamesh, Homer, Virgilio, Sant’Agostinho, Averroes, Petrarca, Loyola, Camões, Antonio Vieira, Fernando Pessoa and the minister of the dictator of Beira, Ermano Sarava, the storyteller on television, spread the waters and were shared in this decay. Whales, cod, sardines, jellyfish and jellyfish, as well as circus dolphins bring joy to scholars and patriots of the historiographical world.

I almost choked when I tried to taste a word I was totally unfamiliar with, “chibalo,” and I even admitted at first that it might be a teasing crow, because its phonetics are very close to the modern word origin popular among Spanish and widely used among young people, chavalo. 99.999% of the human race living in both hemispheres of the earth probably knows chibalos as well as I do, those unfortunate people who were placed in the mines and plantations of colonial empires to replace slaves and enslaved people.

After all, according to Wikipedia, “This was the concept of debt bondage or forced labor in the Portuguese Overseas Provinces of Asia and Africa, especially in Angola and Portugal (unlike other European empires in the 19th century). After the constitutional amendment in 1951, the Portuguese territories were no longer legally considered colonies, but were now designated as overseas provinces, formally part of the Portuguese state, as a way to ease international decolonization pressures. In 1869, the Portuguese officially abolished slavery, replacing slaves with Chibaros and used to build infrastructure in the African provinces, as only Portuguese and assimilated settlers were educated and exempted from this kind of forced labor.

Although a bit confusing, the Portuguese translation from Wikipedia is quite useful, as is the introduction by Professor Mosomi Marobela: “At the heart of the collapse of agriculture in southern Africa was the unpalatable colonial system of taxation – the tax on huts. It was the introduction of this taxation that created what Marx called a ‘reserve army of labour’, which was savagely exploited by mining capital. It was this forced labour that worked in colonial plantations and mines. Thus, according to Seddon (2002), “since the late 19th century, the term chibalo or xibalo has been widely used in Central and Southern Africa to describe various forms of oppressive labour introduced by Europeans.” In Botswana, for example, a man travelling to the South African mines was said to work as a makgoeng (white man) for six months as a migrant worker. Part of his meagre earnings went into paying taxes. But the consequences of this forced labour migration were profoundly damaging to the native economy, which was primarily an agricultural economy.”

Under Salazar, Mozambique used chibalo to grow cotton, and “Companhia do Niassa is an example of a company that thrived as long as they had access to unpaid labor. Portugal benefited directly from the fact that foreign investment was prohibited in Portugal’s overseas provinces. All men of working age were required to work in the cotton fields, which were therefore useless for food production, leading to hunger and malnutrition.”

Chibalo replaced “slavery which had only been abolished in 1901, just fifteen years after the end of the Portuguese Empire’s five centuries”. However, since the end of the 19th century, it had been strongly opposed by Portuguese colonialists and merchants, especially Theodorico de Sacadura Botte, then in the provinces of Maracuña and Magud”.