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New Labor History in Sub-Saharan Africa: Colonial Enslavement and Forced Labor

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 November 2014

Stephen J. Rockel
Stephen J. Rockel*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Extract

African labor history is undergoing a resurgence judging by the appearance of these three important books. During the 1990s and into the early twenty-first century, historians working in East, West, and southern Africa published a remarkable number of first-rate histories of migrant laborers, rural workers, and the emerging urban working class, notably in the innovative Heinemann Social History of Africa series founded by Allen Isaacman and Jean Hay. Other historians published fine works elsewhere. Labor history of all kinds flourished. However, with new academic trends and the demise of the Social History series in the mid-2000s, African labor history seems to have entered a decline, although studies of precolonial slavery have continued to appear regularly. It is therefore gratifying to see a number of new labor histories published in the last two or three years.

Type
Review Essay
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 86 , Fall 2014 , pp. 159 - 172
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2014 

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References

Notes

Editor's Note: An article by Catherine Higgs, whose work is reviewed in this essay, appears in this issue of ILWCH. See “Happiness and Work: Portuguese Peasants, British Laborers, African Contract Workers, and the Case of São Tomé and Príncipe, 1901–1909,” pp. 5–71.

1. Notable works include Echenberg, Myron J., Colonial Conscripts: The Tirailleurs Sénégalais in French West Africa, 1857–1960 (Portsmouth, NH, 1991)Google Scholar; Atkins, Keletso E., The Moon is Dead! Give Us Our Money! The Cultural Origins of an African Work Ethic, Natal, South Africa, 1843–1900 (Portsmouth, NH, 1993)Google Scholar; Harries, Patrick, Work, Culture and Identity: Migrant Laborers in Mozambique and South Africa, c. 1860–1910 (Portsmouth, NH, 1994)Google Scholar; Penvenne, Jeanne Marie, African Workers and Colonial Racism: Mozambican Strategies and Struggles in Lourenço Marques, 1877–1962 (Portsmouth, NH, 1995)Google Scholar; Isaacman, Allen F., Cotton is the Mother of Poverty: Peasants, Work, and Rural Struggle in Colonial Mozambique, 1938–1961 (Portsmouth, NH, 1997)Google Scholar; Brown, Carolyn A., We Were All Slaves: African Miners, Culture, and Resistance at the Enugu Government Colliery (Portsmouth, NH, 2003)Google Scholar; Rockel, Stephen J., Carriers of Culture: Labor on the Road in Nineteenth-Century East Africa (Portsmouth, NH, 2006)Google Scholar.

2. From the 1990s, see White, Luise, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago, 1990)Google Scholar; Crush, Jonathon, Jeeves, Alan, and Yudelman, David, South Africa's Labor Empire: A History of Black Migrancy to the Gold Mines (Boulder, CO, 1991)Google Scholar; Berger, Iris, Threads of Solidarity: Women in South African Industry, 1900–1980 (Bloomington, IN, 1992)Google Scholar; Moodie, T. Dunbar, with Ndatshe, Vivian, Going for Gold: Men, Mines, and Migrations (Berkeley, CA, 1994)Google Scholar; Cooper, Frederick, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge, 1996)Google Scholar; Sundiata, Ibraham K., From Slaving to Neoslavery: The Bight of Biafra and Fermando Po in the Era of Abolition, 1827–1930 (Madison, WI, 1996)Google Scholar; Cordell, Dennis D., Gregory, Joel W., and Piché, Victor, Hoe and Wage: A Social History of a Circular Migration System in West Africa (Boulder, CO, 1996)Google Scholar; Manchuelle, François, Willing Migrants: Soninke Labour Diasporas, 1848–1960 (Athens, OH, 1997)Google Scholar.

3. As in Duffy, James, A Question of Slavery: Labour Policies in Portuguese Africa and the British Protest, 1850–1920 (Oxford, 1967)Google Scholar; Clayton, Anthony and Savage, Donald C., Government and Labour in Kenya, 1895–1963 (London, 1974)Google Scholar; van Onselen, Charles, Chibaro: African Mine Labour in Southern Rhodesia (London, 1976)Google Scholar; Mason, Michael, “Working on the Railway: Forced Labor in Northern Nigeria, 1907–1912” in African Labor History, ed. Gutkind, Peter C.W., Cohen, Robin, and Copans, Jean (Beverley Hills, CA, 1978)Google Scholar; Northrup, David, Beyond the Bend in the River: African Labor in Eastern Zaire, 1865–1940 (Athens, OH, 1988)Google Scholar; Zegeye, Abebe and Ishemo, Shubi, eds., Forced Labour and Migration: Patterns of Movement within Africa (London and New York, 1989)Google Scholar.

4. Vail, Leroy and White, Landeg, Capitalism and Colonialism in Mozambique: A Study of Quelimane District (London, 1980)Google Scholar; First, Ruth, Black Gold: The Mozambican Miner, Proletarian and Peasant (Sussex, 1983)Google Scholar; Isaacman, Cotton is the Mother of Poverty; Harries, Work, Culture and Identity; Penvenne, African Workers and Colonial Racism.

5. Here Allina repeats one of the myths of East African history. He refers to the colonial desire to build railways that would replace human porterage, “mostly undertaken by slaves, especially for east African ivory caravans” (21). In fact, East African porters in the ivory and textile trades were rarely slaves. They were, rather, professionals who developed a unique labor culture. See my own Carriers of Culture.

6. Among others, Miers, Suzanne and Kopytoff, Igor, eds., Slavery in Africa (Madison, WI, 1977)Google Scholar; Klein, Martin and Lovejoy, Paul, “Slavery in West Africa,” in The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, ed. Hogendorn, Jan S. and Gemery, Henry A. (New York, 1979), 181–212 Google Scholar; Meillassoux, Claude, The Anthropology of Slavery (Chicago, 1991 [1986])Google Scholar; Miller, Joseph, “The World According to Meillassoux: A Challenging but Limited Vision,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 22 (1989), 473–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Klein, Martin A., Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa (Cambridge, 1998)Google Scholar; Lovejoy, Paul, Transformations in Slavery, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 2000)Google Scholar. Martin Klein and, to a lesser extent, Joseph Miller, take a middle position. It is also notable that Allina gives almost no attention to patterns of slavery in eastern Africa and the Indian Ocean.

7. Clayton and Savage, Government and Labour in Kenya.

8. Stichter, Sharon, Migrant Labour in Kenya: Capitalism and African Response, 1895–1975 (London, 1982)Google Scholar; Cooper, Frederick, On the African Waterfront: Urban Disorder and the Transformation of Work in Colonial Mombasa (New Haven, CT, 1987)Google Scholar; White, The Comforts of Home.