Although African men and women comprised the vast majority of the labor force on Angola’s colonial-era diamond mines, child laborers, or “minors,” also played important roles, primarily as mineworkers and plantation laborers. While these young male and female laborers’ daily tasks were often lighter than those assigned to adult males, they often worked side-by-side with more senior workers and were equally subject to physical abuse, poor rations, and injuries. Similarly, minors also employed many of the same strategies as their more senior coworkers to better their lives. Their experiences suggest that these young laborers were minors in name only.
Interview, João Paulo Sueno, August 12 and 15, 2005. Ethnic Chokwe represented approximately 80 percent of the African labor force over time on Diamang’s mines.
2.
Notable exceptions include: Nick Van Hear, "Child Labour and the Development of Capitalist Agriculture in Ghana," Development and Change 13 (1982): 499-514; Beverly Grier, "The Political Economy of Child Labor in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1890-1930," Journal of Southern African Studies 13, no. 3 (April 1987): 303-30; William Beinart, "Transkeian Migrant Workers and Youth Labour on the Natal Sugar Estates 1918-1948," Journal of African History 32, no. 1 (1991): 41-63; Wiseman Chijere Chirwa, "Child and Youth Labour on the Nyasaland Plantations, 1890-1953," Journal of Southern African Studies 19, no. 4 (December 1993): 662-80; Hamilton Sipho Simelane, "Landlords, the State, and Child Labor in Colonial Swaziland, 1914-1947," The International Journal of African Historical Studies 31, no. 3 (1998): 571-93.
3.
Alessandro Portelli, "The Peculiarities of Oral History" History Workshop12 (Autumn 1981 ): 102.
4.
Investors included individuals and corporations from Portugal, England, Belgium, South Africa, and America.
5.
For further information regarding this arrangement in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), see Jane Parpart, Labor and Capital on the African Copperbelt (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983); Jane L. Parpart, "The Household and the Mine Shaft: Gender and Class Struggles on the Zambian Copperbelt, 1926-64," Journal of Southern African Studies 13, no. 1 (1986): 36-56; Jane L. Parpart, "‘Wicked Women’ and Respectable Ladies’: Reconfiguring Gender on the Zambian Copperbelt, 1936-1964," in Wicked Women and the Reconfiguration of Gender in Africa, ed. Dorothy L. Hodgson and Sheryl A. McCurdy, (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2001), 274-92.
6.
Interview, Aida Fernando, November 22, 2005.
7.
Interview, Gabriel Alberto, August 16, 2005.
8.
Unfortunately, company accompaniment statistics are fragmentary, perhaps intentionally so as to conceal the number of minors present on the mines.
9.
Lisa A.Lindsay, Working with Gender: Wage Labor and Social Change in Southwestern Nigeria (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann , 2003), 9.
10.
Interview, Gabriel Alberto, August 16, 2005.
11.
Interview, Muhetxo Sapelende, August 11, 2005.
12.
In Terra Morta, Soromenho includes a passage that indicates that at least during the 1930s, in which the novel is set, sobas used to try to conceal their sons from cipaios. However, both oral and archival evidence suggest that, in practice, this was no longer possible as early as the 1940s. Castro Soromenho, Terra Morta (Rio de Janeiro: Casa do Estudante do Brasil, 1949), 139.
13.
For example: Interview, Paulino, August 11 and 12, 2005.
14.
Interview, Costa Chicungo, May 13, 2005.
15.
Diamang archive overseen by the Musuem of Anthropology at the Universidade de Coimbra (MAUC) in central Portugal. MAUC - Folder 86 12 o - Francisco Moreira da Fonseca Abreu, Relatório ao Snr. Representante da Diamang (June 16, 1928). Only slightly more than half of these recruits ultimately fulfilled their contracts. MAUC - Folder 86 17o - Letter from S. T. Kelsey to Diamang in Loanda (August 12, 1929).
16.
Interview, Paulino, August 11 and 12, 2005.
17.
Only during the initial years of World War II, owing to the reduced international demand for diamonds, did workforce sizes fail to grow. Other, periodic disruptions caused serious alarm among mine managers, but were quickly addressed by pressuring chefes do posto to produce additional coerced recruits.
18.
Diamang, Direcção-Geral na Lunda, Relatório no. A-549 (December 1961): 18. After Diamang and the state partially dismantled the contratado system in the 1960s, the company categorized workers according to their provenance: "not from the region" or "from the region" (the "region" being the administrative district of Chitato that surrounded the mines), rather than as contratados or voluntários (volunteers), respectively.
19.
Women and girls only featured on the mines in cafeterias, cooking, cleaning, and serving food to mineworkers. While these jobs were scarce, because they were remunerated they were highly coveted.
20.
To maximize profitability, Diamang focused on areas that featured less than ten meters of estéril.
21.
Lute J. Parkinson, Memoirs of African Mining (Self-published: 1962), 27.
22.
The rails were named after Paul Decauville (1846-1922), a French pioneer in light railways. His major innovation was the use of easily portable, ready-made sections of light, narrow gauge track.
23.
MAUC - Folder 86 52 - Mês de Março, Folha de Distribuição do Pessoal Indígena Homens-Mês (1948).
24.
Interview, Bartolomeu Lubano, August 19, 2005.
25.
Parkinson, Memoirs, 27.
26.
Interview, José Turiambe Muachiriango, August 15, 2005.
27.
By the mid-1930s, on certain mines Diamang was also providing fifty grams of peanuts for breakfast to increase fat intake. In the 1940s, the company was providing one 350-gram pirão (ball of cooked manioc flour) during mid-day meals.
28.
Interview, Lina Machamba, August 16, 2005.
29.
MAUC - Folder 86D,2 12o - J. Robalo, O Chefe da Spamoi, Spamoi Relatório Annual de 1959 (February 16, 1960): 15.
30.
Van Onselen has documented the presence of children serving as domestic servants on Rhodesian (Zimbabwean) mines. Charles van Onselen, Chibaro: African Mine Labor in Southern Rhodesia 1900-1933 (London: Pluto Press, 1976), 124.
31.
Only those minors employed as domestic servants in and around Dundo, Diamang’s headquarters in Lunda, have been omitted. As Dundo was far removed from the diamond mines, these youths had qualitatively different experiences. Others worked in Dundo as hospital auxiliaries, but again, these minors did not really have a "mine experience," and have thus been excluded from this examination.
32.
Interview, Gabriel Alberto, August 16, 2005.
33.
Interview, João Paulo Sueno, August 12 and 15, 2005.
34.
Spamoi is an acronym for: Serviço de Propaganda e Assistencia à Mão de Obra Indigena, or the Service of Propaganda and Assistance for Indigenous Labor.
35.
See: George Chauncey, Jr., "The Locus of Reproduction: Women’s Labour in the Zambian Copperbelt, 1927-1953,"Journal of Southern African Studies7, no. 2 (1981): 138-39.
36.
Interview, João Saluembe, November 21, 2005.
37.
Interview, Sacabela Sacahiavo, August 12, 2005.
38.
MAUC - Folder 86 52 (1947).
39.
Torre do Tombo Archive, Lisbon (TT) - TT - Folder AOS/CO/UL-8A3, Pt. 1: 1940-1964 - Relatório Apresentados pelos Administradores por parte do Govérno na Companhia de Diamantes de Angola Relativos ao Ano de 1938 (March 29, 1940): 18.
40.
Interview, Deque, August 10, 2005.
41.
Interview, João Paulo Sueno, August 12 and 15, 2005.
42.
ILO Official Bulletin, # 45 (XLV) 1962. Supplement II, No. 2 (April 1962): 195.
43.
MAUC - Folder 86 49o - Letter from F. Martins to the Director Geral da Diamang (February 3, 1947): 1.
44.
Interview, José Silva, November 21, 2005.
45.
Interview, Mateus Nanto, August 12, 2005.
46.
For more information regarding social tolerance in Diamang’s mine encampments, see Todd Cleveland, "Rock Solid: African Laborers on the Diamond Mines of the Companhia de Diamantes de Angola, 1917-1975," PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2008, 193-98.
47.
Interview, José Silva, August 12, 2005.
48.
Cleveland, "Rock Solid " 193-98.
49.
Although Diamang periodically considered adopting the male-dominated compound system that so many of the mines across the region employed, it never followed through. For an example of the South African compound system, see Robert Vicat Turrell, Capital and Labour on the Kimberley Diamond Fields 1871-1890 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 155.
50.
MAUC - Folder 86 18 - Letter from H. T. Dickinson to Colonel de Mello (July 17, 1929).
51.
Angola, Código do Trabalho dos Indígenas (1936), 15. In this case, the company consistently honored the former stipulation, but still often required children of all ages to share a room with their parents.
52.
Because Diamang became concerned with workers’ access to water only belatedly, no more than 15 percent of workers were ever housed in encampments that featured running water.
53.
Interview, Sacabela Sacahiavo, August 12, 2005.
54.
Interview, Martam Camanda, August 16, 2005.
55.
Jeanne Penvenne , African Workers and Colonial Racism: Mozambican Strategies and Struggles in Lourenço Marques, 1877-1962 ( Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann), 10.
56.
Interview, João Saluembe, November 21, 2005.
57.
Interview, Bernardo Montaubuleno, November 20, 2004.
