Peasants or Proletarians? 1890s-1940s

1. Peasants or Proletarians? 1890s-1940s HI177 | A History of Africa since 1800 Term 2 | Week 2 | Dr Sacha Hepburn

2. Today’s lecture • Making colonialism pay • The settler model • The extractive economy • Migrant labour • African workers, farmers and entrepreneurs • Gendering the colonial economy • Women and work • Female (labour) migrants

3. Making colonialism pay (i): the settler model • Settler colonialism was highly uneven • Europeans were vulnerable to tropical diseases • Physical presence was restricted: southern Africa, highlands of Kenya • Whites benefitted from policies of racial exclusion • Land • Africans forced to work for whites • Taxation • Forced labour policies • ‘A welfare state for whites’ - Phimister

4. Large European settler home in colonial Kenya European domesticity in the colonies – Karen Blixen at home in Kenya, c. 1920s White farmers in Southern Rhodesia, c. 1920s

5. Making colonialism pay (ii): the extractive economy • Extraction and transport of raw materials from colonies to the industrial economies of western Europe • Plantations as a form of extraction • Mineral wealth • Particularly prominent in Southern Africa: gold, diamonds, copper, lead. Later uranium, cobalt. • Industrialisation and urbanisation – migrant labour linking rural and urban areas

6. Diamond mining, Kimberly, South Africa, c. 1890s Black and white mineworkers, Langlaagte Deep Gold Mine, South Africa, c. 1890s

7. Making colonialism pay (iii): migrant labour • Migrant labour key to industrial and mining economies of Southern Africa • White mineworkers from Britain, Australia, the United States and elsewhere (took highly-paid, skilled jobs) • African workers from across region and as far north as Tanzania (forced into low-paid, ’unskilled’ jobs) • Migrant labour system • Chiefs helped with labour recruitment • 6-12 month contracts • Cheap for the mining companies

8. Workers’ quarters in South African mining compounds, c. 1940s

9. Indigenous entrepreneurs and the ‘cash crop revolution’ • African peasant producers in the broad belt of tropical western, central and east Africa • E.g. Gold Coast and Ivory Coast • African farmers established cocoa farms from the 1880s • By 1914, Gold Coast was world’s largest single supplier of cocoa • Massive wealth could be generated: Felix Houphouet-Boigny, wealthy cocoa planter and first President of independent Ivory Coast

10. Peanut farming in Senegal, c. 1930s Labourers on a cocoa farm, Gold Coast, 1925

11. Gendering the colonial economy • Early histories: focus on wage labour and male workers • Cash-based nature of urban economies • Women’s access to resources and housing often mediated through men • Women contributed to urban economies through various economic activities • Women’s reproductive labour in towns crucial to daily and generational reproduction of labour power

12. Women and migration • Female migration to urban areas challenged patriarchal nature of African social hierarchies • Gendered and generational nature of struggles over female migration

13. Conclusions • Making colonialism pay • The settler model • The extractive economy • Migrant labour • African workers, farmers and entrepreneurs • Gendering the colonial economy • Women and work • Female (labour) migrants