Introduction Work across Africa: Labour exploitation and mobility in Southern, Eastern and Western Africa

New developments in Africa’s labour studies and labour history are emerging in relation to subjects such as transnational studies and so-called global history. The assumption is that labour relations, workers’ life histories, and the analysis of production and exchange chains go beyond national borders. The special issue that follows contains a selection of articles presented over two panels at the European Conference of African Studies in Lisbon in 2013. The call for papers aimed to attract African-based labour studies, from historical to more contemporary themes. Although the historical perspective is predominant, these papers are multidisciplinary in nature; they present history in the light of economics, geography, anthropology and sociology. In the 1970s and 1980s, African studies were significantly altered by the work of numerous scholars looking at labour conditions, and at the relations between workers and employers (or capital) in specific historical and geographic situations. Much of this work drew on Marxist classics and assumed that characteristic capitalist labour relations were inevitably going to become more and more common on the African continent. Parts of the continent, notably South Africa, where some level of industrialization had already been attained, were the richest sites for exploration along these lines.

However, it became clear that the forward march of industrialization in Africa was seriously faltering just as it was shifting gears internationally. Cities were growing fast but it was so-called informal sector activity that dominated the lives and livelihood options of the mass of poor migrants who had a complex relationship to the countryside. Literature with a structural emphasis and an interest in political economy created discontent among Africanists who were seeking evidence of African initiative and ‘voice’, and who felt trapped by ill-fitting conventional approaches. New work situations required new lenses and fresh approaches that also promised the possibility of new ways to look at the past.

This part issue thus tries to encompass the earlier literature but also considers various approaches that go beyond a standard proletarianization narrative. The substance of these approaches can be grouped into several themes. The first theme considers changes in classic patterns of interregional labour migration and the initial dependence on masculine labour forces; the second looks at new forms of movement and migration within and beyond national borders; the third considers new ways of exploring agrarian history from a labour perspective; and the fourth focuses on gender and the relationship of work and household. While exploitation remains a key concept, these authors are alive to the reality that there are spaces, even in very exploitative situations, in which individuals bargain and succeed in at least petty forms of accumulation that have differentiated outcomes.

The authors make use of a wide range of sources. Interviews with workers or former workers are important. Girma Negash places such interviews against the backdrop of a wide range of theoretical and comparative reading. Enrique Martino has uncovered riches in Spanish, British and Nigerian official archives, mission sources and periodical literature as well as in relevant published material going back deep into the colonial period. Helena Pérez Niño explores a literature in Portuguese and English read against a systematic survey of contract farmers she conducted that allowed her to look in depth at their past trajectories. Alex Lichtenstein makes use of labour union-related archives extensively collected in South Africa. These articles offer an informed and thoughtful set of comments read against the current African development thrust in two respects: the type of industrial development based on a cheap export industry (à la Bangladesh) and the frequently reiterated call for agricultural development based on privatization and titling in order to build up Africa’s supposedly untapped gigantic agrarian potential.

Transformations in labour relations and labour exploitation

The history of African workers and their relationship to production and profit can be pursued as a particular history, divergent from that of Europe or Asia or Latin America. But it also has a place in a universal and global history shaped theoretically through a materialist conception of history. This is particularly relevant if...