Of course, East Africa's coastal regions belonged to an export-oriented economy and could not represent the full picture of East Africa. The conditions inland were especially starkly different. Fernandes had previously seen only East Africa's rapid surface-level development and prosperity; to understand the true situation in depth, he would need to experience it for some time.
Maputo City.
"We have currently resumed production at seventy-one plantations around Maputo. There had originally been four to five hundred plantations of varying sizes around Maputo. After taking over, we comprehensively integrated the local plantations, ultimately forming seventy-one super-large plantations."
"The main labor force on the plantations consists of the Black slaves left behind by the Portuguese. The Portuguese had more than forty thousand Black slaves in Maputo, and during the war they forcibly conscripted many more Black people. Before livestock and machinery arrive from the east, these people can maintain plantation development. But when that time comes, the plantations will have to become large farms."
Tropical plantations were typically labor-intensive industries. Take cotton harvesting, for example—in the nineteenth century, achieving mechanization was extremely difficult.
The world's three major cotton-producing regions—the United States, India, and the Far East Empire—were all densely populated areas. The United States, for instance, had introduced vast numbers of Black slaves because its cotton plantations lacked manpower. During the Civil War, the South's plantations were filled with Black people; the Northern capitalists must have been green with envy.
Yet East Africa's positioning for southern Mozambique was clearly not the cultivation of tropical cash crops such as cotton, but grain farming.
With fertile black soil and vast plains like those of southern Mozambique, it would be a crying shame not to grow grain. The land here could be said to be even more fertile than that of the Great Lakes