What remains of labour: the changing and unchanging working realms of African societies.
Panel His22 at conference ECAS 2019 Africa: Connections and Disruptions.
This panel explores the changing nature of labour, social stratification and social change in African societies from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.
Long Abstract:
Connections and disruptions can be understood by examining, as the Call for Panels proposes, the "positionality of the observer: from the colonial administrator, to the African farmer, to the entrepreneur, to the nurse". This categorisation based on occupations reveals the centrality of the labour perspective. This panel focuses on labour in connection to two questions prioritised by ECAS 2019: social stratification and social change.
1. Marxian social sciences and historical research dealing with social stratification in Africa identified it with working class formation: stratification meant inequality between classes. This however assumed an understanding of 'workers' as formal sector employees in male-dominated workplaces, etc. In doing so, it tended to downplay or disregard key areas of labour and e.g. the informal sector, indigenous entrepreneurship, gendered dimension of work, child labour, etc. Can an enlarged view of labour in Africa provide a better understanding of social stratification?
2. Numerous studies show that in Africa inequality is increasing in a context of political liberalisation and globalisation. Does this contradiction arise from the fact that the optimistic view of African politics is not reflected in society (because more unequal) and the workplace (because more insecure and repressive)? If inequality is a form of social change, what is its direct link with labour transformations and casualization? What is different today from the past when labour in Africa was also overwhelmingly casual?
The historical methodological approach is integrated with economic, sociological and anthropological perspectives.
This paper reexamines class formation in Freetown between 1884 and 1900. It shows the importance of personal networks to artisan efforts to secure a place in a changing society. It shows how networks were crucial to artisan resistance to social change in the abscence of worker organisations.
Paper long abstract:
Between 1884 and 1900 established artisans in Freetown were forced to compete for employment with a large number of workmen entering jobs traditionally reserved for trained artisans. In response artisans formed a trade union, the Mechanics' Alliance, as well as a newspaper, The Artisan in 1884. Both initiatives were designed to reaffirm the privileged position of artisans vis-à-vis other categories of workers and to establish clear boundaries between different categories of workers. The Mechanics' Alliance as well as The Artisan had lost their importance by 1886. The literature considers a nascent class consciousness to have been the most important legacy of these initiatives. This interpretation ignores subsequent developments.
Leading artisans had access to extensive personal networks which included some of Freetown's most prominent individuals. Personal connections and prestige secured these artisans'place in ongoing discussions on labour. It afforded them participation in discussions on government policy and support from the Freetown press for new class-based organisations in the 1890s. Personal networks thus sustained support for the artisans' in the absence of formal organisations while other workers lacked such support. Ultimately artisans' attempts to reintroduce a strict hierarchy between categories of workers were unsuccessful as their rhetoric never resulted in the desired intervention by the colonial administration. Nevertheless studying these networks allows for new insights into workers' attempts to control processes of social change and stratification. This study shows how connections were formed and utilised in a context of disruptive social change to craft a new hierarchy among workers.
What is considered labour, and who is considered to be a worker, has changed considerably over the last century in Zambia, resulting in large gaps in our understanding. This papers surveys these gaps and suggests ways they might be overcome.
Paper long abstract:
Zambia's workers are among the most closely studied in Africa, or some are at least. Existing studies have predominately focused on male mineworkers and this has left large gaps in our understanding about the country's recent economic history. This paper identifies how these gaps might conceivably be covered by examining efforts to identify and categorise the country's workforce from the haphazard surveys carried out by the British South Africa Company to present-day censuses and labour force surveys. Assumptions about what constituted labour, and who could therefore legitimately be considered a 'worker', have underpinned all these efforts and although the scope of categorisation has progressively widened over the last century, serious problems remain with who is understood to comprise the workforce. Changes in how the workforce has been classified also makes identifying changes in labour over time challenging. Nevertheless, this paper optimistically argues that it is possible to use previously under-utilised documentary sources and oral history to create a better and more accurate understanding of labour in Zambia and how this changed over the twentieth century.
This paper incorporates the broader socio-cultural context of decolonising mining communities in Africa in discussing workers' negotiation of the colonial/post-colonial boundary in contribution to how we can conceptualise labour over such a transition period.
Paper long abstract:
Colonial encounters in Africa engendered new forms of social stratification characterised by the influence of the formal sector on the labour market. However, the re-examination of the role of labour in extractive communities during the period of decolonisation suggests there is a need to enlarge the boundaries of the dominant Marxist concept of labour and class beyond the formal sector. The largely under-studied informal sector has been indirectly connected to the mining sector—contributing to, and being affected by spill-over effects such as job creation.
While this necessitates a historical analysis that incorporates the roles of non-waged actors including women and children in the context of late/post-colonial gold mining in Ghana, there has been a paucity of research to demonstrate how labour, both formal and informal, negotiated the colonial/post-colonial boundary within extractive communities, something which should illuminate the broader socio-cultural development of Ghana's gold mining communities as a whole.
Using in-depth analysis of a wide range of archival records alongside qualitative interview data from retired mineworkers, chiefs and long-term residents of the mining communities of Obuasi and Konongo, this paper seeks to contribute to knowledge about the labour in decolonising mining communities. It draws attention to the ways in which indigenes and migrant mineworkers in these communities negotiated the colonial/post-colonial boundary in their relationships with other actors in the industry (state, capital, local authorities etc) as well as their actions in meeting the challenge of accessing mineral wealth within decolonising cosmopolitan mining communities.
This paper explores how the unpaid domestic labour of African mineworkers' wives in the Katangan Copperbelt was essential to establishing and displaying social hierarchies between different ranks of mineworkers, and between mineworkers and other urban inhabitants.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores how the unpaid domestic labour of African mineworkers' wives in the Katangan Copperbelt was essential to establishing and displaying social hierarchies between different ranks of mineworkers, and between mineworkers and other urban inhabitants. While missions and some colonial officials across Africa sought to produce young women who were educated in domestic arts and child-rearing to serve as suitable "modern" wives for urban wage laborers, Katanga provides a different and perhaps unique case. The policies of the mine company Union Minière ensured that women married to its workers were encouraged- and could afford- to concentrate on creating the perfect "modern" home. Women's production of what Europeans read as a clean, ordered home, with well-dressed and well-cared for children, influenced their husbands' prospects of promotion. The use of 'modern' electric ovens and western-style furniture created distinctions between mining camps and neighbouring cités, understood by mineworkers and their families as displaying their own advancement.
Secondly, this paper examines how, from the 1980s, economic decline, inflation, and delays in - or the absence of - mineworkers' paycheques made women's economic contributions newly essential to mineworkers' households. Most women contributed through entrepreneurial and trading activity. The success of these activities often depended, in part, on their husband's jobs, which provided money for investment in their businesses, and access to networks of potential customers and investors. Women's contributions, in turn, allowed their husbands to maintain identities as "workers" even as their jobs ceased to reliably provide sustenance for their families or even themselves.
We use a mixed methods approach to explore if employment on large farms can lead to welfare gains. We find a low wage level. For many workers employment has been a survival strategy, however, for a group of informants wage work has enabled them to educate their children and accumulate assets.
Paper long abstract:
Set against a backdrop of growing rural populations and shrinking land sizes, this paper asks if employment on large farms can lead to economic welfare gains at the household level. Following a decade-long focus on smallholder agriculture, Large-Scale Farming (LSF) has again been promoted claiming that LSF can generate more jobs and higher wages than the small-scale sector (Collier and Dercon 2013; Oya 2010). The historical literature on LSF in colonial Africa is nonetheless more pessimistic. In African countries where LSF was pursued; the colonial authorities intervened to keep wages low and a class of impoverished workers with limited or no access to land emerged (Arrighi 1970). To enter this debate, we apply a mixed methods approach. We estimate long-run real wages from 1920-2017 using a subsistence-basket approach (Allen 2001). To complement the quantitative measure, we collect Life History Interviews with former farm workers. We find a low real wage, however, there have been periods of improvements during the 1970s and late 1990s. The qualitative data confirms the low level of wages yet convey different life trajectories. For some informants wage work has been a survival strategy. Yet for other informants wage work has allowed them to invest in children's education and accumulate land and livestock. The paper concludes that in a context where it becomes increasingly hard to live off the land; rural wage work might enable poor households to obtain an income to survive and in some cases accumulate important assets.
This paper discusses the role of agents, lawyers and consumer rights activists in facilitating income redistribution in South Africa.
Paper long abstract:
This paper discusses the role of agents, lawyers and consumer rights activists in facilitating income redistribution in South Africa. The funding and positioning of these agents derives from a space where boundaries blur between redistributive welfare, wages, debt, and financialised capitalism. South Africa's democratic transition - combined with financial liberalisation and growing unemployment - encouraged a borrowing boom. In its most recent guise it has seen sophisticated new technologies of biometric registration bringing millions of poor 'social grant' recipients within the ambit of multinational which in 2012 won the tender from the government's South African Social Security Agency (SASSA) to deliver these grants. It has used its access to beneficiaries' biometric details to offer its own loans (via subsidiaries) and to allow airtime sellers, the electricity provider, other microlenders and funeral insurance sales agents to sell them products, ensuring repayment through direct deductions from their grants on - or before - payday. Attempting to regulate the otherwise untrammelled activities of these lenders, hybrid private/corporate/community-based initiatives have stepped in where the state refuses to go. In a setting where unemployment or casual/underpaid employment is rife, activist/advisers attempt both to promote sustainable householding and also to curb borrowing. But their concern about the collateralisation of welfare - about the erosion of people's socio-economic rights to redistribution (including social security/assistance, education, nutrition, and secure housing) - often fails to recognize that life without borrowing, worldwide, has become increasingly impossible.
This paper traces the role of borderlands in Southern Africa as spaces of class formation and labour mobilization. It draws from cases across Mozambican borders to propose the borderland as a 'field' in which ranges of spatial and temporal effects contribute to the commodification of labour.
Paper long abstract:
Trans-frontier labour migration has been at the centre of studies of labour and class formation in Southern Africa. However, this literature has focused on long-distance return migration and on the well-documented pull of mines and other historically prominent labour migration destinations. Borderland regions, where a large share of agricultural production and processing in Southern African countries takes place presently, have attracted academic interest instead as spaces of political and economic informality and hotbeds for illicit economies. This paper draws from a review of cases of borderland economies straddling Mozambique and neighbouring countries to propose a reinterpretation of the role of borders as 'fields' in which a range of spatial effects such as distance from alternative livelihoods and 'otherness', contribute to the mobilization and commodification of wage labour. Borderland migration creates as geographic and time-bound window in which inhabitants of the borderland become workers. While many other instances of capital and labour encounters enabled by borders have been documented in spaces of steep socio-economic disparities, in the Southern African case the effect is accentuated by historical processes. Recruiting workers from among groups that have historically retained access to the means of production and some ability to refrain from selling their labour power is considerably difficult. The paper shows how borderland economies use the border to source, to regulate and to discipline labour in an attempt to adapt to the character of capitalism in the region and the particular class formations that have arisen.
The biggest shifts the South African mining industry has witnessed since 1994 has been the inclusion of women in underground mining occupations. By centring the experiences of women miners, this paper will look at how the underground mining world has changed since the inclusion of women in mining.
Paper long abstract:
In South Africa previously, women were forbidden from working underground. In post-apartheid South Africa and in keeping up with democratic ideas of non-sexism, policies to redress the exclusion of women have been adopted. While legislatively women have been 'included' in the underground workplace, their experiences tell a different story. This paper, through a feminist lens, will look at what is happening with women in mining. I will show the 'other' sides of mining and the heterogeneity of women working underground. The focus will be on women's experiences and understandings of their work and of themselves in the masculine world and how they negotiate the underground space.
Data to be presented was collected through the use of participant observation where I worked underground in a Platinum mine as a winch operator and lived with the workers for over a year in Rustenburg, South Africa.
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