Migrant labor is one of the most extensively studied subjects of Africa's colonial history, helping to inaugurate the professional study of Africa in multiple academic disciplines. Anthropologists in the 1940s, working to outline the impact of colonial rule, used migrant labor to demonstrate the changes occurring within African societies previously considered immunized by "tradition" against major social change. Economists in the 1950s and 1960s, seeking to gauge the prospects of economic transformation in Africa, examined migrant labor between the "traditional" and "modern" sectors of the economy in order to divine what future changes in the balance between these two putatively separate economic spheres might follow from increased investment under colonial and then post-colonial development schemes. Scholars of African politics and society in the era of independence used migrant labor to examine the relationship between states and citizens in newly independent countries, as well as to forecast how this relationship would continue to evolve following the end of colonial rule.Migrant labor was also an important subject for the first professional historians of Africa. Just as the anthropologists who inaugurated the professional study of Africa used migrant labor as an indisputable marker of cultural dynamism, so too could historians use migrant labor as an indisputable marker of diachronic change. The historical study of migrant labor took some time to develop, as the first wave of historians of Africa were predominantly interested in researching precolonial Africa, so as to establish an authentically African past for the emerging postcolonial future. During the 1970s and 1980s, however, increased historical interest in studying colonial rule brought a rapid proliferation of migrant labor histories, diffused through a confluence of closely related historiographical strands.1 One was the focus on African workers as key actors in challenging and ultimately overcoming colonial rule, and a potential force for ushering postcolonial Africa further along the path toward modernity.2 Another was the animated debates, inspired by underdevelopment theory, over Africa's historical relationship with global capitalism.3 Still another was the equally animated debates over the role of material relations in shaping African societies, as well as the proper analytical framework (or mode of production) through which these relations ought to be categorized and understood.4 Hovering over these historiographical nodes was the reigning paradigm of social history, in which economic relationships were understood to be the primary driver of historical change, and to offer the most perceptive lens into the broader arc of history's march toward the present.Migrant labor was well-positioned to feature prominently in all of these historiographies. For labor historians, migrant workers presented a discrete group of individuals whose actions-protests, evasion, strikes, and so on-c
{"title":"Introduction: Histories of Mobility, Histories of Labor, Histories of Africa","authors":"Zachary Kagan Guthrie","doi":"10.1353/AEH.2016.0000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/AEH.2016.0000","url":null,"abstract":"Migrant labor is one of the most extensively studied subjects of Africa's colonial history, helping to inaugurate the professional study of Africa in multiple academic disciplines. Anthropologists in the 1940s, working to outline the impact of colonial rule, used migrant labor to demonstrate the changes occurring within African societies previously considered immunized by \"tradition\" against major social change. Economists in the 1950s and 1960s, seeking to gauge the prospects of economic transformation in Africa, examined migrant labor between the \"traditional\" and \"modern\" sectors of the economy in order to divine what future changes in the balance between these two putatively separate economic spheres might follow from increased investment under colonial and then post-colonial development schemes. Scholars of African politics and society in the era of independence used migrant labor to examine the relationship between states and citizens in newly independent countries, as well as to forecast how this relationship would continue to evolve following the end of colonial rule.Migrant labor was also an important subject for the first professional historians of Africa. Just as the anthropologists who inaugurated the professional study of Africa used migrant labor as an indisputable marker of cultural dynamism, so too could historians use migrant labor as an indisputable marker of diachronic change. The historical study of migrant labor took some time to develop, as the first wave of historians of Africa were predominantly interested in researching precolonial Africa, so as to establish an authentically African past for the emerging postcolonial future. During the 1970s and 1980s, however, increased historical interest in studying colonial rule brought a rapid proliferation of migrant labor histories, diffused through a confluence of closely related historiographical strands.1 One was the focus on African workers as key actors in challenging and ultimately overcoming colonial rule, and a potential force for ushering postcolonial Africa further along the path toward modernity.2 Another was the animated debates, inspired by underdevelopment theory, over Africa's historical relationship with global capitalism.3 Still another was the equally animated debates over the role of material relations in shaping African societies, as well as the proper analytical framework (or mode of production) through which these relations ought to be categorized and understood.4 Hovering over these historiographical nodes was the reigning paradigm of social history, in which economic relationships were understood to be the primary driver of historical change, and to offer the most perceptive lens into the broader arc of history's march toward the present.Migrant labor was well-positioned to feature prominently in all of these historiographies. For labor historians, migrant workers presented a discrete group of individuals whose actions-protests, evasion, strikes, and so on-c","PeriodicalId":43935,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ECONOMIC HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2016-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/AEH.2016.0000","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66757827","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article explores the events surrounding Ghana’s successful transition to the right side of the road in order to shed light on one of the longest periods of military dictatorship in Ghanaian history. In particular, this paper traces the ways in which drivers, as mobile workers, coordinated with and supported state officials to achieve major technological and infrastructural transformation. These large-scale projects challenge an image of postcolonial dictatorships as ineffective, authoritarian, and isolationist regimes. Instead, the success of what the government called “Operation Keep Right” highlighted the close relationship between the Acheampong state and Ghana’s large class of mobile workers in achieving visions of technopolitical progress, national development, and regional integration. Even in the context of increasing economic crisis in the 1960s and 1970s, projects like “Operation Keep Right” complicate a narrative of seemingly inevitable postcolonial decline and push scholars to revisit the politics of postcolonial dictatorship through the experiences of citizens.
{"title":"“Nifa Nifa”: Technopolitics, Mobile Workers, and the Ambivalence of Decline in Acheampong’s Ghana","authors":"J. Hart","doi":"10.1353/AEH.2016.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/AEH.2016.0007","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the events surrounding Ghana’s successful transition to the right side of the road in order to shed light on one of the longest periods of military dictatorship in Ghanaian history. In particular, this paper traces the ways in which drivers, as mobile workers, coordinated with and supported state officials to achieve major technological and infrastructural transformation. These large-scale projects challenge an image of postcolonial dictatorships as ineffective, authoritarian, and isolationist regimes. Instead, the success of what the government called “Operation Keep Right” highlighted the close relationship between the Acheampong state and Ghana’s large class of mobile workers in achieving visions of technopolitical progress, national development, and regional integration. Even in the context of increasing economic crisis in the 1960s and 1970s, projects like “Operation Keep Right” complicate a narrative of seemingly inevitable postcolonial decline and push scholars to revisit the politics of postcolonial dictatorship through the experiences of citizens.","PeriodicalId":43935,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ECONOMIC HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2016-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/AEH.2016.0007","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66758161","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay takes as its starting point a question: do historians of Africa’s early and more recent pasts need each other’s labor histories when studying the relationship between work and mobility?1 A response in the negative foregrounds the differences between the economic and political worlds of Africans living before the fifteenth century and the economic and political worlds of merchant capitalism, industrial capitalism, colonialism, independence, and neoliberalism.2 This answer suggests that as people moved for the purpose of work from the early modern period, the ties forged (and severed) between people and with objects were dramatically changed from the strategies of earlier communities. We may well ask whether “labor” is even an applicable concept for periods before interactions between Africans and Europeans. It is easy to agree that there are great differences in the histories of movement and work across the chronological divides that structure African historiography. But we might also imagine these divides as thresholds through which we peer, gaining a rich but necessarily partial view of each other’s knowledge about the common problems and questions that animate our scholarship in different ways. When we survey each other’s fields to (at the very least) keep abreast of trends that impact our teaching, we
{"title":"Tracing the Itineraries of Working Concepts across African History","authors":"Kathryn M. de Luna","doi":"10.1353/aeh.2016.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aeh.2016.0009","url":null,"abstract":"This essay takes as its starting point a question: do historians of Africa’s early and more recent pasts need each other’s labor histories when studying the relationship between work and mobility?1 A response in the negative foregrounds the differences between the economic and political worlds of Africans living before the fifteenth century and the economic and political worlds of merchant capitalism, industrial capitalism, colonialism, independence, and neoliberalism.2 This answer suggests that as people moved for the purpose of work from the early modern period, the ties forged (and severed) between people and with objects were dramatically changed from the strategies of earlier communities. We may well ask whether “labor” is even an applicable concept for periods before interactions between Africans and Europeans. It is easy to agree that there are great differences in the histories of movement and work across the chronological divides that structure African historiography. But we might also imagine these divides as thresholds through which we peer, gaining a rich but necessarily partial view of each other’s knowledge about the common problems and questions that animate our scholarship in different ways. When we survey each other’s fields to (at the very least) keep abreast of trends that impact our teaching, we","PeriodicalId":43935,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ECONOMIC HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2016-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/aeh.2016.0009","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66757845","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article explores the migration of boys and young men from their parents’ homes out onto the coffee, sisal, and tea estates of the settler colony of Kenya. Age and gender figured prominently in their decisions to leave home and work for wages. Young men viewed their physical mobility, financial independence, and distance from elder surveillance as essential to enjoying their youth and rethinking their manliness and coming of age. As they made demands on their elders to acknowledge and ritually authenticate their newfound maturity, they sparked heated debate about and complicated their generational and kinship relations. Age also mattered a great deal to the British colonial state. One of the primary tasks of the state was to ensure the profitability of the settler and multinational firms that produced Kenya’s most important cash crops. With one hand, the state levied its authority, often violently, to draw the young into the wage labor market. With the other, pulled along by social reformers, British officials tried to shield communities from what they believed to be the breakdown of generational, patriarchal authority by legislating underage labor, regulating recruitment, inspecting farms, and fining unscrupulous employers.
{"title":"Earning an Age: Migration and Maturity in Colonial Kenya, 1895–1952","authors":"Paul Ocobock","doi":"10.1353/AEH.2016.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/AEH.2016.0002","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the migration of boys and young men from their parents’ homes out onto the coffee, sisal, and tea estates of the settler colony of Kenya. Age and gender figured prominently in their decisions to leave home and work for wages. Young men viewed their physical mobility, financial independence, and distance from elder surveillance as essential to enjoying their youth and rethinking their manliness and coming of age. As they made demands on their elders to acknowledge and ritually authenticate their newfound maturity, they sparked heated debate about and complicated their generational and kinship relations. Age also mattered a great deal to the British colonial state. One of the primary tasks of the state was to ensure the profitability of the settler and multinational firms that produced Kenya’s most important cash crops. With one hand, the state levied its authority, often violently, to draw the young into the wage labor market. With the other, pulled along by social reformers, British officials tried to shield communities from what they believed to be the breakdown of generational, patriarchal authority by legislating underage labor, regulating recruitment, inspecting farms, and fining unscrupulous employers.","PeriodicalId":43935,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ECONOMIC HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2016-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/AEH.2016.0002","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66757881","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article reinterprets Dogon migration to colonial Ghana for European clothing as a phenomenon modeled on age group initiation practices on the Dogon Plateau. In initiation rites, young boys who were candidates for the prestigious Association of Masks were subjected to a test, undertaken in caves. Boys who underwent this initiation could only occupy the highest social hierarchy when they mastered the secret language of masks, the sigi so. Labor migration to Ghana in the early and mid twentieth century built upon and altered these social rites; with the rise to prominence of migration, mature men were reborn by migrating to Ghana, where they learned English and brought modern clothing back to their villages. Clothing and other imported items reproduced local institutions of social promotion and reinforced the hierarchical status of their age group. Thus, through migration, young men were initiated into Dogon society through the same processes emphasized by existing initiation rites: uncovering another world, acquiring new knowledge, and adopting new perspectives. For relatives who remained in the village, the human nature of migrants changed, as their modern clothing upon their clean bodies conferred upon them the image of men who had reached new social heights.
{"title":"Reinterpreting Labor Migration as Initiation Rite: “Ghana Boys” and European Clothing in Dogon Country (Mali), 1920–1960","authors":"I. Dougnon","doi":"10.1353/AEH.2016.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/AEH.2016.0003","url":null,"abstract":"This article reinterprets Dogon migration to colonial Ghana for European clothing as a phenomenon modeled on age group initiation practices on the Dogon Plateau. In initiation rites, young boys who were candidates for the prestigious Association of Masks were subjected to a test, undertaken in caves. Boys who underwent this initiation could only occupy the highest social hierarchy when they mastered the secret language of masks, the sigi so. Labor migration to Ghana in the early and mid twentieth century built upon and altered these social rites; with the rise to prominence of migration, mature men were reborn by migrating to Ghana, where they learned English and brought modern clothing back to their villages. Clothing and other imported items reproduced local institutions of social promotion and reinforced the hierarchical status of their age group. Thus, through migration, young men were initiated into Dogon society through the same processes emphasized by existing initiation rites: uncovering another world, acquiring new knowledge, and adopting new perspectives. For relatives who remained in the village, the human nature of migrants changed, as their modern clothing upon their clean bodies conferred upon them the image of men who had reached new social heights.","PeriodicalId":43935,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ECONOMIC HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2016-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/AEH.2016.0003","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66757887","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In the first half of the twentieth century, most of Fernando Pó’s contract workers came from societies in southeastern Nigeria which had been heavily impacted by the transatlantic and internal slave trades. These contract workers were recruited by a new generation of labor recruiters, dispatched covertly by Spanish imperial employers, through a form of kidnapping known as panya. Panya was the largest labor smuggling and trafficking network in colonial West Africa, bringing tens of thousands of migrants to long and obligatory contracts on Fernando Pó. In contrast to scholars who have interpreted this history as a holdover from the pre-colonial period, this article argues that panya arose from the contractual order of Spanish imperial rule. Extensive archival research reveals the voices of those caught in the warp of post-abolition colonial labor regimes, in order to rethink the passage from the pre-colonial slave trade to imperialism within West African history. Using a series of vivid and precise petitions submitted by those who found themselves on the island of Fernando Pó, the article shows how these sources contain the potential to reconceptualize the disjunctures between enslavement in the slave trade and the recruitment of contract labor.
{"title":"Panya: Economies of Deception and the Discontinuities of Indentured Labour Recruitment and the Slave Trade, Nigeria and Fernando Pó, 1890s–1940s","authors":"Enrique Martino","doi":"10.1353/AEH.2016.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/AEH.2016.0004","url":null,"abstract":"In the first half of the twentieth century, most of Fernando Pó’s contract workers came from societies in southeastern Nigeria which had been heavily impacted by the transatlantic and internal slave trades. These contract workers were recruited by a new generation of labor recruiters, dispatched covertly by Spanish imperial employers, through a form of kidnapping known as panya. Panya was the largest labor smuggling and trafficking network in colonial West Africa, bringing tens of thousands of migrants to long and obligatory contracts on Fernando Pó. In contrast to scholars who have interpreted this history as a holdover from the pre-colonial period, this article argues that panya arose from the contractual order of Spanish imperial rule. Extensive archival research reveals the voices of those caught in the warp of post-abolition colonial labor regimes, in order to rethink the passage from the pre-colonial slave trade to imperialism within West African history. Using a series of vivid and precise petitions submitted by those who found themselves on the island of Fernando Pó, the article shows how these sources contain the potential to reconceptualize the disjunctures between enslavement in the slave trade and the recruitment of contract labor.","PeriodicalId":43935,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ECONOMIC HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2016-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/AEH.2016.0004","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66757948","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In Central Africa, and especially in the former Middle-Congo, flight as temporary migration was an important defense against brutal forced labor under the colonial state. The impact of flight movements thus became one side of a shifting balance of terror. This article seeks to follow compulsory labor and migration from the decline of concession company rule after World War I to the continuities of postcolonial labor services in the 1960s and 1970s. A “topographic analysis” helps to find particular hotspots of forced labor; the article especially focuses on Madingou, a region where various forms of compulsory labor became a particularly unbearable package. The combination of forced labor and work on the Congo-Océan railway line until the early 1930s; the subsequent attempts at reform, which gave way to a new intensification of forced labor during World War II; and, finally, the ambiguous reforms and hidden continuities through the late colonial state and into the independent administration—all left their mark on the district. Throughout these historical transitions, local populations proved quite able to adapt, initially through flight movements into neighboring colonies, then increasingly into districts where more benign conditions reigned, and finally into the urban centers of Brazzaville and Pointe-Noire.
{"title":"Hunting “Wrongdoers” and “Vagrants”: The Long-Term Perspective of Flight, Evasion, and Persecution in Colonial and Postcolonial Congo-Brazzaville, 1920–1980","authors":"A. Keese","doi":"10.1353/AEH.2016.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/AEH.2016.0006","url":null,"abstract":"In Central Africa, and especially in the former Middle-Congo, flight as temporary migration was an important defense against brutal forced labor under the colonial state. The impact of flight movements thus became one side of a shifting balance of terror. This article seeks to follow compulsory labor and migration from the decline of concession company rule after World War I to the continuities of postcolonial labor services in the 1960s and 1970s. A “topographic analysis” helps to find particular hotspots of forced labor; the article especially focuses on Madingou, a region where various forms of compulsory labor became a particularly unbearable package. The combination of forced labor and work on the Congo-Océan railway line until the early 1930s; the subsequent attempts at reform, which gave way to a new intensification of forced labor during World War II; and, finally, the ambiguous reforms and hidden continuities through the late colonial state and into the independent administration—all left their mark on the district. Throughout these historical transitions, local populations proved quite able to adapt, initially through flight movements into neighboring colonies, then increasingly into districts where more benign conditions reigned, and finally into the urban centers of Brazzaville and Pointe-Noire.","PeriodicalId":43935,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ECONOMIC HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2016-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/AEH.2016.0006","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66758069","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Migration between select “Third World” and “Second World” countries were often organized around bilateral labor migration regimes. As a result, individuals from Angola and Mozambique who came to work and train in East Germany are categorized as labor migrants; an analysis of workers’ motivations to migrate is missing. On the basis of oral history interviews collected in Angola and Mozambique, this article examines the myriad reasons for which young Angolan and Mozambican men and women temporarily relocated to East Germany. These reasons included economic, educational, emotional, and security considerations. The migrants’ complex understandings from below are discussed through the categories of labor, educational, war and emotional migration, providing an important corrective to the top-down designation as “labor migration.” Rather than abandoning the term altogether as an analytical category, this article suggests that it may serve as a shorthand, provided that scholars take seriously the motivations for migration, rather than obliterate these motivations through an uncritical use of the term. This approach challenges the prevailing conceptions of migrants as passive participants in socialist labor migrations, as well as the limited conceptions of labor migration often adopted by outside observers.
{"title":"From Luanda and Maputo to Berlin: Uncovering Angolan and Mozambican Migrants’ Motives to Move to the German Democratic Republic (1979–1990)","authors":"Marcia C. Schenck","doi":"10.1353/AEH.2016.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/AEH.2016.0008","url":null,"abstract":"Migration between select “Third World” and “Second World” countries were often organized around bilateral labor migration regimes. As a result, individuals from Angola and Mozambique who came to work and train in East Germany are categorized as labor migrants; an analysis of workers’ motivations to migrate is missing. On the basis of oral history interviews collected in Angola and Mozambique, this article examines the myriad reasons for which young Angolan and Mozambican men and women temporarily relocated to East Germany. These reasons included economic, educational, emotional, and security considerations. The migrants’ complex understandings from below are discussed through the categories of labor, educational, war and emotional migration, providing an important corrective to the top-down designation as “labor migration.” Rather than abandoning the term altogether as an analytical category, this article suggests that it may serve as a shorthand, provided that scholars take seriously the motivations for migration, rather than obliterate these motivations through an uncritical use of the term. This approach challenges the prevailing conceptions of migrants as passive participants in socialist labor migrations, as well as the limited conceptions of labor migration often adopted by outside observers.","PeriodicalId":43935,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ECONOMIC HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2016-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/AEH.2016.0008","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66757724","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper revisits the historiography of forced labor and mobility in southern Mozambique during the Portuguese colonial era by reexamining several key works in the field. It seeks to understand how the population of southern Mozambique constructed a social imaginary on the margins of the civilizational fiction designed by colonial rule. Avoiding a state-centered or legalistic reading of this history, the article stresses the fragility of the colonial/modern design and the fundamentally compulsory character of colonial labor, and contrasts these against the diverse responses developed by colonial subjects. In particular, the article seeks to understand how the “repertoires of power” that colonial rulers used to consolidate their power reframed the processes of migration and social mobility. Colonial rule altered preexisting practices and conceptions of mobility within southern Mozambique, transforming them into exercises more analogous to domestic forms of resistance. As the dynamics of social mobility preceded the formation of the modern/colonial state, they can be reconstituted as a parallel logic and rationality, which existed alongside the constructions of the colonial enterprise; as a result, many of the policies undertaken by the colonial state were primarily geared toward ending this relative autonomy and controlling the movement of the colonized population.
{"title":"Migration and Forced Labor in the Social Imaginary of Southern Mozambique, 1920–1964","authors":"H. Hernández","doi":"10.1353/AEH.2016.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/AEH.2016.0005","url":null,"abstract":"This paper revisits the historiography of forced labor and mobility in southern Mozambique during the Portuguese colonial era by reexamining several key works in the field. It seeks to understand how the population of southern Mozambique constructed a social imaginary on the margins of the civilizational fiction designed by colonial rule. Avoiding a state-centered or legalistic reading of this history, the article stresses the fragility of the colonial/modern design and the fundamentally compulsory character of colonial labor, and contrasts these against the diverse responses developed by colonial subjects. In particular, the article seeks to understand how the “repertoires of power” that colonial rulers used to consolidate their power reframed the processes of migration and social mobility. Colonial rule altered preexisting practices and conceptions of mobility within southern Mozambique, transforming them into exercises more analogous to domestic forms of resistance. As the dynamics of social mobility preceded the formation of the modern/colonial state, they can be reconstituted as a parallel logic and rationality, which existed alongside the constructions of the colonial enterprise; as a result, many of the policies undertaken by the colonial state were primarily geared toward ending this relative autonomy and controlling the movement of the colonized population.","PeriodicalId":43935,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ECONOMIC HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2016-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/AEH.2016.0005","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66758001","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
States, industrialists and African authorities in colonial southern Africa generally perceived migrant work in masculine terms—especially inter-territorial mobility, the complexities of which fueled the assumption that inter-colonial migration was predominantly undertaken by men. The biases of colonial actors, in turn, brought about later scholars’ obliviousness to women’s experiences, leading them to perpetuate representations of migrant work as a male phenomenon. This article challenges this masculinist understanding of migrant work by focusing on Malawian women’s migration and work in colonial Harare between the 1930s and 1963. It particularly highlights the complexities of these migrations, examining women’s encounters with different territorial regimes, gendered legislation, and transnational controls stretching from Malawi to Zimbabwe. It argues that the colonial states of Malawi and Zimbabwe, urban authorities, and Zimbabwean employers all joined together to exclude women from the legal migrant work stream. However, Malawian women defied the conventional notion of women as sedentary dependents of migrant husbands by migrating to Harare. In Harare, they further contested their exclusion by undertaking various forms of work for survival. This article traces these women’s experiences through discourse analysis of colonial records and oral accounts of two generations of Malawian women and men.
{"title":"Gendered Exclusion and Contestation: Malawian Women’s Migration and Work in Colonial Harare, Zimbabwe, 1930s to 1963","authors":"Ireen Mudeka","doi":"10.1353/AEH.2016.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/AEH.2016.0001","url":null,"abstract":"States, industrialists and African authorities in colonial southern Africa generally perceived migrant work in masculine terms—especially inter-territorial mobility, the complexities of which fueled the assumption that inter-colonial migration was predominantly undertaken by men. The biases of colonial actors, in turn, brought about later scholars’ obliviousness to women’s experiences, leading them to perpetuate representations of migrant work as a male phenomenon. This article challenges this masculinist understanding of migrant work by focusing on Malawian women’s migration and work in colonial Harare between the 1930s and 1963. It particularly highlights the complexities of these migrations, examining women’s encounters with different territorial regimes, gendered legislation, and transnational controls stretching from Malawi to Zimbabwe. It argues that the colonial states of Malawi and Zimbabwe, urban authorities, and Zimbabwean employers all joined together to exclude women from the legal migrant work stream. However, Malawian women defied the conventional notion of women as sedentary dependents of migrant husbands by migrating to Harare. In Harare, they further contested their exclusion by undertaking various forms of work for survival. This article traces these women’s experiences through discourse analysis of colonial records and oral accounts of two generations of Malawian women and men.","PeriodicalId":43935,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ECONOMIC HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2016-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/AEH.2016.0001","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66757874","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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