Rubber Production in Africa

Rubber—both synthetic and natural—has been produced largely because of its useful combination of malleability and resilience. Historically, natural rubber has been harvested across many parts of the equatorial world, with West, West-Central, and Equatorial Africa playing a significant—although not dominant—role in global production from the late 19th century onward. Conversely, synthetic rubber, developed in the early 20th century, has played a far more marginal part in Africa’s economic history. While natural rubber was indeed tapped, refined, and sold in Africa during the precolonial period, until about 1800, its impact was negligible on the societies that dealt with it. During the late 19th century, rubber increasingly exercised considerable influence on Africa. The demand for rubber exploded as new technologies, such as the bicycle and, later, the automobile, that needed it began to be mass-produced in the industrializing world. European colonial regimes occupying much of Africa in the late 19th century quickly capitalized on this demand, and the industry proliferated across much of Africa at the turn of the 20th century. African entrepreneurship was fundamental to the turn-of-the-century rubber boom, not least in West African colonies, such as French Guinea, where the state did not intervene in rubber production. Yet, some states in the rubber industry, notably the French Congo and the Congo Free State (CFS), later the Belgian Congo, and, to a lesser extent, Angola, were blighted by violence as they conceded land to companies that lacked capital and relied on violence. In these cases, European agents and African intermediaries, working for concession companies or the state, coerced Africans to tap wild rubber under threat of gruesome punishments, such as mutilation, imprisonment, or even murder. The legacy of coercive rubber production in these states during the fin de siècle was significant because many of the African societies drawn into them experienced considerable demographic collapses. The horrific conditions in which rubber was collected in the two Congos in particular eventually became global news, leading to the end of the CFS in 1908. However, Africa’s relative marginality in the world market, rather than the extreme violence, was a more sustained feature of rubber production in the 20th century. African cultivators might have decisively shifted away from collected wild rubber to planted rubber after global prices collapsed in 1912. And prices did recover in the wake of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 largely as part of the resulting global militarization in the lead-up to the Second World War. But, even then, rubber production in Africa remained marginal to global production. The development of a profitable synthetic rubber industry outside Africa; competition from Asian countries, such as Thailand; a spate of political upheavals; and many disastrous nationalization schemes set African rubber production back. At the same time, heavily capitalized Asian conglomerates, such as Sinochem and Bridgestone, have dominated the African rubber industry in the early 21st century. But whether they can reliably make a profit while safeguarding the environment and labor conditions remains to be seen.