Cocoa and the Cash Crop Economy
How the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century expansion of cocoa farming restructured Yoruba land tenure, labor arrangements, gender roles, and intergenerational wealth accumulation.
The Yoruba cocoa economy developed in southwestern Nigeria from the late nineteenth century onward, transforming the region into one of the world's primary exporters of Theobroma cacao. This agricultural expansion was not organized through European-owned plantations or coercive state-run estates, but through the autonomous initiatives of indigenous smallholders, migrant farmers, Christian converts, and returned captives . As cocoa production moved inland across the forest belt, it fundamentally altered pre-existing systems of landholding, dismantled older labor structures, modified the gendered division of agricultural work, and redirected family wealth toward formal Western education .
The history of Yoruba cocoa cultivation illustrates how customary African economic institutions responded to incorporation into the global commodity market. Rather than replacing ancestral lineage patterns with outright private property or rigid industrial wage labor, Yoruba farmers adapted existing concepts of tribute, kinship, and patron-client ties to manage the risks and opportunities of a long-term tree-crop economy .
Origins and Agrarian Diffusion
During the late nineteenth century, the regional economy of Yorubaland underwent a structural shift away from domestic slavery, the nineteenth-century palm oil trade, and regional subsistence farming, moving toward export-oriented cash cropping centred on cocoa and gbanja kola (Cola nitida) .
Agrarian Transition in Southwestern Nigeria:
[19th Century: Domestic Slavery / Palm Oil / Food Crops]
│
▼
[Coastal Experiments: Agege / Lagos Hinterland (c. 1870–1890)]
│
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[Inland Migration: Ibadan / Ọ̀ṣun / Ondó / Èkìtì Forest Belts (c. 1890–1950)]
Cocoa planting began in coastal zones such as Agege before spreading eastward and northward into the dense forest belts of Ibadan, Ọ̀ṣun, Ondó, and Èkìtì . This geographic spread was spearheaded by African enterprise. Elite merchants in Lagos, Christian mission converts, and Saro (liberated Yoruba captives who returned from Sierra Leone) introduced seeds, tested planting techniques, and established initial cultivation networks without direct European supervision .
Historiographical Silences in the Early Record
The historical record contains significant gaps regarding the earliest phase of peasant adoption between the 1870s and 1890s. Colonial archives and mission reports from this period focus almost exclusively on elite urban merchants in Lagos and Church Missionary Society (CMS) agricultural stations, leaving the day-to-day mechanisms of early peasant seed acquisition and experimental farming undocumented .
Furthermore, oral traditions and colonial records preserve competing accounts of the origin of cocoa planting in Yorubaland. Local accounts attribute the earliest successful commercial cultivation between 1874 and 1880 variously to the missionary J. P. L. Davies, the merchant Squiss B. Morgan, or unnamed returnees who brought pods from the island of Fernando Po (Bioko) .
The exact acreage and crop yields from 1890 to 1910 also remain undocumented in quantitative terms, because smallholders cleared forest plots and planted tree stocks entirely independent of colonial agricultural departments, which did not establish systematic statistical tracking until the trade had already matured .
Migration, Forest Frontiers, and Land Tenure
As accessible agricultural land around older urban centers like Ibadan became saturated, farmers moved eastward into open forest frontiers, particularly around Ondó and Ifẹ̀ . This movement was an organized migration of agriculturalists seeking virgin forest suitable for the high soil-nutrient demands of Theobroma cacao .
The Frontier Access Mechanism:
[Migrant Farmer from Ibadan / Ọ̀ṣun]
│
│ (Negotiates usufruct access; acknowledges territorial sovereignty)
▼
[Host Lineage Head / Bale / Landowning Family]
│
│ (Grants long-term tree-planting rights)
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[Payment of Ìsákọ́lẹ̀ (Customary Rent / Annual Tribute)]
Migrant farmers did not acquire land through open market purchases or freehold title deeds. Instead, they negotiated usufruct rights within customary tenure frameworks by paying an institutionalized rent or tribute known as ìsákọ́lẹ̀ .
Linguistic and Conceptual Analysis of Ìsákọ́lẹ̀
- Orthography and Diacritics: Ìsákọ́lẹ̀
- Tone Pattern: Low-High-High-Low (
ì-sá-kọ́-lẹ̀) - Morphological Breakdown: Derived from the verb phrase ṣá oko lẹ̀ (literally: to clear or mark out a farm upon the earth) nominalized by the prefix ì-.
- Literal Gloss: The institutionalized payment or material recognition rendered for the clearing and productive use of another lineage's territorial land.
- Functional Meaning: An annual payment, delivered originally in farm produce and later in cash, made by a tenant or migrant farmer to the lineage head (baálé) or territorial authority who holds ancestral custodianship of the land .
- Social Work of the Term: Ìsákọ́lẹ̀ is not an economic purchase price that alienates the land from its original owners. It is a formal, recurring acknowledgement of the host lineage's underlying sovereignty. By paying ìsákọ́lẹ̀, the migrant farmer secures undisputed rights to plant, harvest, and maintain perennial tree crops across decades, while the host lineage preserves its ultimate territorial title and political supremacy .
The Scholarly Debate on Land Commodification
Economic historians and legal scholars disagree over the extent to which the perennial nature of cocoa altered customary Yoruba land tenure.
- The Individualization and Commodification Thesis: Scholars such as P. C. Lloyd and H. A. Oluwasanmi argue that tree crops fundamentally disrupted communal landholding . Because a cocoa tree lives and produces for several decades, planting trees permanently ties up the plot of land beneath them. Lloyd and Oluwasanmi argue that this biological reality, combined with rising commercial land values, turned land into a de facto commodity, giving rise to individual ownership, land pledging, mortgage practices, and outright land sales .
- The Negotiated Customary Continuity Thesis: Sara S. Berry challenges the view that customary land tenure was destroyed by market forces . Berry demonstrates that commercialization did not replace communal systems with western-style private property. Instead, customary rules proved remarkably fluid and negotiable. Lineage heads used customary prerogatives to accommodate thousands of migrants through ìsákọ́lẹ̀ contracts, maintaining lineage authority and family claims across generations while absorbing massive commercial expansion .
The Transformation of Agrarian Labor
The cultivation of perennial tree crops required a reorganization of agrarian labor. In the nineteenth century, Yoruba agricultural labor relied on three primary institutions: domestic slave labor, pawnship (ìwọ̀fà), and reciprocal lineage work groups (àárò or ọ̀wẹ̀) . The rise of the cocoa economy coincided with the colonial suppression of slavery and the steady decline of pawnship .
Precolonial Labor Forms Colonial Cocoa Economy
┌───────────────────────┐ ┌────────────────────────┐
│ Domestic Slavery │ ──[Suppressed]─►│ Hired Wage Labor │
│ Pawnship (Ìwọ̀fà) │ ──[Declined]───►│ (Savanna / Northern │
│ Reciprocal Group: │ │ Migrant Workers) │
│ Àárò / Ọ̀wẹ̀ │ ──[Declined]───►│ │
└───────────────────────┘ └────────────────────────┘
The Decline of Reciprocal Labor (Àárò)
The àárò was a mutual-aid labor arrangement in which young men from related households rotated labor across each other's farms in turns. While effective for seasonal clearing and planting of annual food crops like yams and cassava, àárò was ill-suited for the continuous, year-round maintenance, spraying, weeding, and staggered harvesting required by mature cocoa groves .
As cocoa revenues expanded, farmers shifted away from reciprocal labor obligations toward hired wage labor . A commercial labor market emerged, drawing seasonal and permanent migrant laborers from northern savanna communities and non-cocoa producing regions into the cocoa belt . These laborers were remunerated through daily wages, task-based contracts, or sharecropping arrangements, fundamentally altering the social relations of production in rural towns .
Gender Roles and the Division of Labor
The expansion of cocoa intensified a gendered division of labor across Yoruba farming communities, reorganizing household production and the distribution of income .
Household Economic Specialization:
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Yoruba Farming Household │
├──────────────────────────────┬───────────────────────────────┤
│ Men │ Women │
├──────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────────────┤
│ • Direct ownership of cocoa │ • Processing of food crops │
│ plantations and trees │ (cassava, palm oil, maize) │
│ • Control of export income │ • Local and regional trade │
│ • Supervision of hired labor │ • Provisioning food for cash- │
│ • Field clearance and farm │ crop producing regions │
│ expansion │ │
└──────────────────────────────┴───────────────────────────────┘
Anthropologist Jane I. Guyer established that Yoruba men largely monopolized the ownership of cocoa trees, the management of plantation plots, and the direct revenue generated from export crop sales . Although women contributed labor during peak harvesting periods, such as carrying harvested pods and assisting in seed fermentation and drying, they rarely acquired independent ownership of cocoa acreage .
Instead, Yoruba women shifted their economic focus toward independent food processing (such as turning cassava into gàrí), local food crop cultivation, and regional retail trade . Because vast expanses of prime forest were converted from food staples to cocoa, urban centers and specialized cocoa districts required extensive food imports. Women stepped into this commercial opening, dominating the marketing networks that provisioned the cash-crop zones and maintaining distinct, autonomous income streams outside their husbands' export revenues .
Wealth, Accumulation, and Intergenerational Mobility
Extensive empirical research conducted in the 1950s by Galletti, Baldwin, and Dina revealed sharp economic stratification among cocoa producers in Western Nigeria .
Income Stratification Among Yoruba Cocoa Producers (Galletti et al., 1956):
┌───────────────────────────────┬───────────────────────────────┐
│ Farmer Stratum │ Share of Regional Cocoa Income│
├───────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────────────┤
│ Top 10% (Wealthiest Families) │ > 33.3% (Over one-third) │
│ Bottom 10% (Poorest Families) │ < 2.0% (Under two percent) │
└───────────────────────────────┴───────────────────────────────┘
Despite this income inequality, the agrarian system did not solidify into a classic European model of agrarian capitalism, wherein wealthy landed elites continuously buy up land, mechanize production, and permanently dispossess a landless rural proletariat .
The Agrarian Capitalism Debate: Berry vs. Hill
Economic historians have debated whether West African cocoa farmers operated as rural capitalists or as smallholders anchored in customary lineage networks.
- Polly Hill's Model (Southern Ghana): In her study of Ghanaian cocoa farmers, Polly Hill argued that migrant farmers operated as genuine rural capitalists. They pooled capital through institutionalized companies, purchased land outright as commercial assets, and continuously reinvested accumulated profits into buying new land frontiers in an ongoing process of capitalist expansion .
- Sara S. Berry's Model (Western Nigeria): Berry demonstrated that Yoruba cocoa farmers followed a different economic logic . Rather than reinvesting profits exclusively into expanding agricultural estates or physical farm capital, Yoruba farmers channeled their agricultural surplus into social networks, chieftaincy titles, town patron-client structures, and formal education for their children .
Yoruba Cocoa Capital Reinvestment Cycle:
[Cocoa Export Revenue]
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[Investment in Lineage & People] ──► [Town Chieftaincy / Social Standing]
│
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[Funding Formal Western Education]
│
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[Intergenerational Exit: Children enter Civil Service, Law, Medicine, Urban Commerce]
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[Rural Labor Shortages & Agricultural Stagnation (1970s onward)]
"Fathers Work for Their Sons"
In her study Fathers Work for Their Sons, Berry analyzed how cocoa accumulation interacted with social mobility . Yoruba farmers viewed formal Western education as the most secure vehicle for intergenerational advancement . Profits from cocoa harvests were spent on school fees, uniforms, books, and boarding costs to send sons and daughters through primary schools, secondary grammar schools, and universities .
This investment strategy achieved its intended goal: the children of cocoa farmers entered the civil service, teaching, the legal and medical professions, and modern urban commercial trades . However, it also produced an intergenerational exit from rural agriculture . By the 1970s, an educated younger generation declined to work as manual agricultural laborers or manage rural farms .
When combined with the Nigerian petroleum boom of the 1970s, which drew remaining rural youth into urban construction and service jobs, the cocoa belt experienced acute labor shortages, wage inflation, neglected tree stocks, and widespread agricultural stagnation .
Imperial Extraction and Class Formation Debates
The structural position of Yoruba cocoa farmers within the wider British colonial and postcolonial economy remains a central subject of scholarly debate.
Theoretical Perspectives on the Yoruba Cash-Crop Economy:
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Vent-for-Surplus Theory (Hla Myint, 1964) │
│ • Export agriculture activated previously idle land and │
│ labor without reducing domestic food security. │
│ • Smallholder initiative produced spontaneous prosperity. │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Marxist Political Economy (Toyin Falola, 1984; │
│ Gavin Williams, 1980) │
│ • Peasant producers were subordinated to volatile world- │
│ market price shocks and British merchant cartels. │
│ • Colonial and post-colonial state marketing boards │
│ extracted surplus value to fund urban development. │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
Vent-for-Surplus vs. Imperial Extraction
Hla Myint used the expansion of West African peasant agriculture to illustrate the classical "vent-for-surplus" theory of international trade . Myint argued that export production allowed African societies to utilize land and labor that had previously been surplus or idle, generating new wealth without undermining the domestic food supply .
Marxist historians, including Toyin Falola and Gavin Williams, reject this interpretation as an idealized view of colonial capitalism . Falola argues that cocoa production subordinated Yoruba farmers to volatile world-market price cycles, unfavorable terms of trade, and the oligopolistic price-fixing practices of European merchant firms .
Williams highlights how state marketing boards, established under late colonial rule and expanded in the post-independence era, fixed producer prices well below international market values . The state extracted the resulting surplus revenue to finance urban infrastructure, bureaucratic salaries, and industrial projects, effectively using cocoa farmers as an exploitable tax base .
Agrarian Class Differentiation
Scholars also disagree on whether the cocoa economy produced a permanent, rigid class structure in rural Yorubaland.
- Gavin Williams's Position: Williams argues that cash-crop production fostered clear socio-economic class differentiation . The concentration of produce buying licenses, credit access, and transport infrastructure in the hands of wealthy merchants and political elites created an exploited rural peasantry subject to state extraction and merchant dominance .
- Sara S. Berry's Position: Berry argues that rigid hereditary agrarian classes failed to consolidate in the Yoruba countryside . Because wealthy farmers invested their surplus in kinship patronage, community institutions, and educating their children for urban careers, land and wealth were constantly redistributed rather than concentrated into permanent family-held agricultural dynasties . The flexibility of customary land allocation and the rapid generational exit from farming prevented the emergence of a closed, hereditary landed aristocracy .