Thread by @ShakaRaSpeaks

Trading Companies, Enslavement & The Colonial Process

The capitalist institution which came into most direct contact with African peasants was the colonial trading company: that is to say, a company specialising in moving goods to and from the colonies. The most notorious were

the French concerns, Compagnie Française d’Afrique Occidentale (CFAO) and Societé Commerciale Ouest Africaine (SCOA) and the British controlled United Africa Company (UAC). These were responsible for expatriating a great proportion of Africa’s wealth produced by peasant toil.

Several of the colonial trading companies already had African blood on their hands from participation in the slave trade. Thus, after French merchants in Bordeaux made fortunes from the European slave trade, they transferred that capital to the trade in groundnuts from Senegal...

and Gambia in the middle of the 19th century. The firms concerned continued to operate in the colonial period, although they changed hands and there were a lot of mergers. In Senegal, Mauretania and Mali, the names of Maurel & Prom, Maurel Brothers, Buhan & Teyssere, Delmas...

& Clastre were all well known. Several of them were eventually incorporated into SCOA, which was dominated by a consortium of French and Swiss financiers. A parallel process in the French port of Marseilles led to the transfer of slave-trade capital into direct trade between...

Africa and France. After the end of the first World War, most of the small Marseilles firms were absorbed into the massive CFAO, which imported into French West Africa whatever European goods the market would take, and exported in turn the agricultural produce that was largely...

the consequence of peasant labour. CFAO also had British and Dutch capital, and its activities extended into Liberia and into British and Belgian colonies. It is said that SCOA and CFAO made a profit of up to 90% in good years and 25 % in bad years.

- Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Afrika