UNESCO Ancient Civilizations of Africa (Editor G. Mokhtar)

Ancient Civilizations of Africa
of the equestrian order. In each province, a resident procurator, who was
likewise a high-ranking eques, supervised the procurators of the districts
(tractus), which comprised a number of estates (saltus); at the lowest level,
the procurators of the estates were, in most cases, ordinary freedmen. The
task of these procurators of saltus was to conclude contracts with the
conductores, ensure that the regulations were observed, act as an arbitrator
in disputes between conductores and colonic and assist the former in the
collection of rents. We see from the Souk-el-Khemis inscription which
dates from the reign of Commodus that the conductores and the procurators
responsible for supervising their management of the estates collaborated
to cheat the tenant farmers of their statutory rights and took arbitrary
decisions to increase their burden of obligations. These conductores were,
in fact, men to be reckoned with, powerful capitalists, to whose influence
the procurators were not immune. Many writers believe, like A. Piganiel,
that the future condition of the farmers under the Byzantine empire was
already foreshadowed by that of the tenants described by the Souk-el-
Khemis inscription. From the fourth century onwards, the term coloni
denoted all peasants cultivating imperial or privately owned estates
throughout the empire. They were free men, in principle, but their freedom
was increasingly curtailed by laws forbidding them to leave the land
they were working on. The landowner was responsible for the payment
of the taxes levied on the tenant's produce, and could only discharge his
responsibility if the farming cycle was undisturbed: this induced him to
tie the peasant to the land, so that the latter's legal status tended to
resemble that of the slave. This trend resulted in the serfdom which
prevailed in the West during the Middle Ages as the common lot of the
descendants of colonists and of the descendants of rural slaves.
The pattern of development of agriculture in Africa under the later
empire continues to be a controversial subject; generally speaking, modern
historians have been struck by the large number of properties not subject
to levies and therefore uncultivated, from which they have inferred that
there was a fairly rapid extension of areas of land allowed to run to waste.
C. Lepelley has recently shown that the problem is a more complex one,
and that the situation was not as alarming as it was thought to be, at
least in proconsular Africa and the province of Byzacium. It cannot be
said that there was a mass flight from the land or a disastrous decline
in agricultural output. Until the invasion of the Vandals, Africa was to
remain the source of the food supplies of Rome, which was deprived, after
the foundation of Constantinople, of the Egyptian quota of corn; moreover,
the prosperity of Ifriqiya in the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries,
which is vouched for by Arab sources, cannot be explained if we accept
the proposition that the typical symptoms of a recession are discernible. 31
However, food shortages were not unknown, mainly owing to natural
31. C. Lepelley, 1967, pp. i35~44-
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