Before the mid-1930s, British and French officials were unable to sustain a straightforward discussion of the labor question, even in the secrecy of government correspondence. The quest of European governments to define a progressive mission for themselves in the colonizing of distant peoples and the long history of anti-slavery movements led – through international conferences and humanitarian agitation – to a focus on free labor as the basic test of the responsible colonizer. But the dichotomy of free and coerced labor offered little guidance to the daily practice of colonial administration and left in the shade an enormous and ambiguous terrain where colonial governments exercised power over how Africans worked.

The questions colonial officials had most difficulty posing in the 1920s and early 1930s concerned work as a social process: the relationship of how people worked to the way they lived, to the expectations they brought to the workplace, to the ways in which they experienced the power of employers and colonial officials, to the relationships they formed and the aspirations they acquired through employment and urban life, and to the ways they reproduced themselves. By this time, colonial thinking was so deeply caught in the conception of the African as immersed in “tribal” culture and obedient to “chiefly” authority that they could only conceive of a wage worker outside a village framework as “detribalized.”