For my money, the most important years in African historiography are 1976–1977.^{Footnote 1} Two books published in those years, Charles van Onselen’s Chibaro and Frederick Cooper’s Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa, transformed how African historians did their work.^{Footnote 2} What both books did was to break down labor into its constituent parts – not to make anyone study something we call “labor history,” but to show us that the study of separate acts allows us to see what Africans were actually doing in the last two centuries, and to begin to think about the meanings Africans attached to what they were doing and the motives behind some of their actions. The differences between these books are great, but let me push the comparison a bit further. Both were dissertation books. Both made extensive use of archives in Africa. Both were written in the heyday of a social history that purported to be about workers and peasants and proletarians from the bottom up, but which was actually about the organizations they formed for their protection, whereas these books attended to work rather than “the workers” or “the poor.” They were of a moment in African history.

Maybe the biggest impact of Thompsonian academic Marxism for Africanists was that it made scholars look to the practices of creating a labor force in England to jump start an understanding of capitalism in Africa. Early comparative moves in the field compared the continent to other diasporic communities, not to white people in the eighteenth century. A way of writing about slavery on Zanzibar and in Virginia or about collieries in Yorkshire and Wankie did not emerge in a vacuum. There had been murmurs of dissatisfaction with the concerns of African history for a few years at least. It’s unlikely that van Onselen or Cooper reflected on Terence Ranger’s writings, but in 1975 he criticized the idea of the “useable past:” the history of kings and kingdoms was useful for pride because it couldn’t be used for anything else.^{Footnote 3} Two years later we have two books that transformed the historiography of the regions they studied. Let me give one example: Clayton and Savage’s Government and Labour in Kenya was published in 1974; Plantation Slavery in 1977. In every possible sense, the space between these two texts is greater than three years.

I want to talk about Cooper’s first three books – Plantation Slavery, From Slaves to Squatters, and On the African Waterfront – which were published, not written but published – over a mind-boggling ten year period, during which he produced an edited collection in which not all the authors worked as quickly as he did.^{Footnote 4} As Cooper has entered the ionisphere of global history and wins book prizes in European history it’s possible to lose sight of his East African roots. Indeed, we see the careful reader of imperial debates in each of these books, and the last third of On the African Waterfront presages the big decolonization book, Decolonization and African Society.^{Footnote 5} I’m not disputing that, of course, but I think such a reading can make us forget how much these books took us into Africa. Cooper’s first book revealed the skilled world – by which I do not mean agency or resistance or resilience – of slaves; it showed clearly how the work slaves did in fact shaped the demands that were made on them and their ability to negotiate those demands. Clove pickers could destroy a branch if they removed the clove to close to its stem. There were not enough overseers to police every line of clove trees. It made the most sense, to slave owners and slaves alike, to instruct slaves in proper harvesting techniques and make sure the work of harvesting was not onerous so as to keep a labor force and trees intact. His evidence for this was archives and interviews, with the descendants of slaves and the descendants of overseers and a number of really savvy imams. Forty-one years later, this insight sounds quaint. But for African historians, to see the actual data on what slaves did and how it shaped plantation economies, changed the field forever. The change happened very fast, and most often in a Marxist framework, so I don’t think Cooper ever got full credit for this, but more than any single scholar, Cooper made African historians engage with broader worlds of scholarship and history – all because of his close and critical attention to the local.

This attention produced three books, each about labor on the East African coast, that are like nothing else in African history. As Cooper moved from slaves to ex-slaves he brought custom and the rights that inhered from custom front and center in his analysis. For these men and women, slavery was not just a matter of bondage, it was secure access to land and the rights to certain crops. Freedom was not the absence of bondage but newly vulnerable relations to land and the new crime of stealing crops that slaves had had every right to. Former slaves sought legal contracts by which they could maintain land use (they never really got rights to coconuts back): they became squatters losing whatever legal or economic clout they might have had as migrant laborers. This is not an uncommon story in the history of abolition but Cooper’s is a local one, with careful attention to meaning. And if someone were to complain – someone like me, perhaps – that African historians of the last twenty or so years have made the concept of customary do too much work in their analyses, it’s a testimony to the power of Cooper’s work.^{Footnote 6}

On the African Waterfront may have begun to take the story further, but again, because of Cooper’s keen attention to and respect for local processes it became a history of workers and men who didn’t want to work who often used urban space and steamship companies’ practices to avoid the order and enforced discipline of organized labor. Yes, it’s a story that happens elsewhere, but there were critical ways with which casual labor in Mombasa struggled to keep their labor casual. The shape that struggle took went beyond maintaining weekend dance competitions, it was wildcat strikes and public meetings in which scabs were identified and had their hair cut in humiliating shapes. The way dock labor in Mombasa was decasualized was also distinctly local: by the early 1950s it became necessary for African trade unionists to negotiate with wild cat strikers. African men could do what white men could not do. In this we see the origins of Decolonization and African Society that colonial labor processes had created such disorder that extraordinary measures, including decolonization, were required to deal with them.

Full circle and full disclosure: in 1996 Cooper published Decolonization and African Society and van Onselen published The Seed in Mine; The Life of Kas Maine.^{Footnote 7} No one seemed to remark on this as a wonderful coincidence or another watershed – in fact I only realized it when Cooper mentioned it after I gave this talk. Instead these books seemed to show the extent to which African history and historiography had changed, that the field was stronger for twenty years of engagement with Africans and the work they did in Africa. That engagement meant, put simply, that The Comforts of Home would not exist if it weren’t for On the African Waterfront – actually it wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the other two books but that’s a longer essay. Nor would Kenda Mutongi’s Matatu. ^{Footnote 8} Cooper gave us the opening through which to see the discipline of casual labor. This may not be what’s most important about these three books, however. What is important is Cooper’s sustained engagement with place, and the issues so critical to the people who lived and worked there.