Introduction
During the colonial period in Africa, Africans worked either due to market forces, the demands of taxation or because of the implications of a threat. In regard to this threat, most Africans would have had, at the very least, a passing familiarity with the coercive labor apparatus of bula matari . 1 At the time of the passage of the Forced Labour Convention in 1930, forced labor was permitted by legislation in most British colonies including Nigeria, Gold Coast, Sierra Leone, Gambia, British Cameroon, Nyasaland (Malawi), Togoland, Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika. For the rest of Africa, colonial rule was equally synonymous with forced labor. 2 And yet, Elliot Berg writing in his classic study of labor force development in Africa came to the conclusion that overall in Africa,
After 1930 resort to forced labor of either the direct or indirect type came to play a role of steadily declining significance. It by no means disappeared. But the trend clearly was toward increasing freedom in the market. 3
Berg is almost correct. In British colonial Africa, government paid forced labor was already gradually declining by the mid-1920s and continued along this downward trend after 1930. However, as the historian Alexander Keese points out, this turn of events in the early 1920s has given the false impression among scholars that the British completely did away with forced labor in their Africa colonies by this early, date with the exception of wartime and emergencies. 4 In this sense, the Forced Labour Convention is construed as an epistemological break with the past that created a new threshold for conceptualizing acceptable labor practices. 5
However, Berg failed to account for the widespread use of so-called “traditional” labor in colonial Africa, before and after the passage Convention. “Traditional” labor was a type of unpaid forced labor that was used primarily for infrastructure development projects that were supposed to directly benefit the local community required to do the work. It was intended to represent a continuation of customary, reciprocal , collective labor in the village areas. In French colonies it was known as prestations while in the British colonies it was usually called communal labor. In regard to the Forced Labour Convention then, far from being an epistemological break, the discourse of “traditional” labor, reflected in the exemptions to the definition of forced labor found in the Convention, represented continuity.
“Traditional” labor has been described as somehow outside the orbit of traditional forced labor practices. In regard to colonial Kenya, scholars have tended to see communal labor as a milder coercive labor practice. 6 Regardless of the way “traditional” labor has been interpreted, the work, itself, hovered around the shifting boundaries of involuntary servitude. Although “traditional” labor was not defined as forced labor, there were penalties for noncompliance that could include fines , imprisonment or even corporal punishment. In addition, the “traditional” carapace of communal labor, as a purely reciprocal labor arrangement, hid the economic utility of the work as a labor process that allowed the colonial state to extract surplus from the peasant sector. The lack of recognition of the pervasiveness of “traditional” labor, as well as its fiscal importance, reflect gaps in the scholarship on forced labor in colonial Africa and the impact of the Forced Labour Convention.
African labor history has traditionally focused on labor migration, proleterianization, slavery, forced labor, worker resistance and unionization. 7 Scholars dealing with the colonial forced labor have usually paid more attention to forced labor for private purposes due to its more immediate association with the slavery. 8 However, coercion was clearly not restricted to the private sector. Colonial administrations also forced Africans to work for state purposes. Although carried out with greater frequency, coercion for the material needs of the colonial governments has received less attention in the literature on forced labor in colonial Africa. 9 And, out of these various case studies of government forced labor , the focus has tended to emphasize the paid form of this type of labor and the machination of administrative policy. 10 In regard to Kenya, scholarship on forced labor 11 during the colonial period has also primarily focused on state and private actors due to its tumultuous history as an “African colony” dominated by European settlers. 12
Anthropologists have long studied communal labor in Africa as a feature of the domestic economy. 13 More recently, scholars have focused more attention on voluntary, or altruistic, labor performed in service of a common goal. 14 Though voluntary labor was, essentially, a rebadging of communal labor, the meaning of the work changed, to a degree. Voluntary labor was supposed to be given freely and, unlike communal labor, the local communities exercised more control over the work projects. However, the work could also be coercive, when controlled by central political authorities, and it also could reinforce social inequalities. 15
In 2015 the African Studies Review devoted an issue specifically to this topic. 16 Although there has been less scholarly work on voluntary labor in Africa, post-independent states in Africa, for example Tanzania and Kenya, harnessed voluntary labor as a development model rooted in self-reliance. 17 With this “reinvention” of communal labor, voluntary work became linked to concepts of work, citizenship and development.
In Tanzania, Emma Hunter’s work on voluntary labor showed how the postcolonial government borrowed and reconstructed the colonial era communal labor practice, known as kazi ya kujitolea , or “voluntary work,” into tangible notions of self-reliance as “voluntary work in nation building” under the national development program called ujamaa or “familyhood.” 18 Similar to Hunter, Kara Moskowitz’s work on Kenya’s post-independence self-help program, known as harambee , or “let’s pull together,” showed how it was justified as a continuation of traditional communal work ethos but transformed into a vehicle for strengthening citizenship in local communities. But, harambee was also a contested institution that engendered inequality of access to resources while strengthening the power of local politicians. 19 Moreover, the state, at times, employed coercion to make people contribute money to self-help projects or would withdraw funding. 20
Outside of anthropological works, there has been little historical work done on communal labor by scholars focused on labor history. Babacar Fall’s Forced Labour in French West Africa, 1900–1946, is a general history of forced labor in French West Africa that also delves into the issue of prestations. 21 My own 2012 work, Communal Labor in Colonial Kenya: The Legitimization of Coercion discussed the pervasiveness of communal labor during the early period of Kenya Colony but did not give significant treatment to the time period after 1930 and the impact of the Forced Labour Convention.
Although African labor history has largely ignored communal labor, with the rise of Global Labor History since the 1990s, there has been an attempt to situate regional or local working-class formation and labor processes as part of the larger global trajectory of commodification of labor linked to the maturation of capitalism. 22 Marcel van der Linden writes that “Global Labor History focuses on the transnational-and indeed the transcontinental-study of labor relations and workers social movements in the broadest sense of the word.” 23 However, even with the ascendancy of Global Labour History, there is a tendency to describe the development of labor processes in Africa, or the work experience, as a unique phenomena apart from Global Labor History . 24 More specifically, Willem van Schendel, assets that labor historians have actually struggled to find a place for communal labor in Global Labor History . 25 He contends that communal labor, at least in the case of India, was not commodified since it did not involve wage labor nor lead to production of commodities. 26
However, the Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations, 1500–2000, taxonomy of global labor relations contends that, globally, there are four types of labor: nonwork, reciprocal , tributary and commodified. 27 Although precolonial forms of village collective labor would fall under the reciprocal labor category, with the att...