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 we focus on the ways in which the capitalist mode of production has expanded within African economies, producing changes in the societies formed outside this sphere entirely. The article by Girma Negash begins with the claim that the late imperial government pushed for a capitalist transformation of Ethiopian society. The materialist conception of history here simply means a focus on the relationship between the workers and the owners of the means of production, the state and the aristocracy, and on how this related to the transformation from an ‘imperial’ (the word ‘feudal’ is never used by Girma Negash) to a capitalist mode of production. In northern Sidama, rural servile labour preceded rural wage labour. Following Perry Anderson's argument in Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, Girma Negash recognizes that labour in the imperial economy was not yet to be understood as a commodity (Anderson Reference Anderson1974). However, compared with the situation in Europe that occasioned Anderson's classic argument, in Ethiopia, land and the ‘natural economy’ continued to play a significant role.

In Martino's article, the same materialist conception of labour history emerges but in a different way. In the Spanish colonial labour system on the island of Fernando Pó (now Bioko), indentured rural workers were linked to the land not by force of nature (as they had no land rights) but by a special social linkage – the dash system of credit and patronage. Dash was fundamental to the recruitment system among south-eastern Nigerian rural workers who crossed the sea in order to work, often in appalling conditions. Although these papers go beyond the traditional worker–proletarian paradigm, they continue and contribute to the revival of the Marxian view of a world in which different class interests played out in opposition to each other, while also enlivening labour history in these African contexts.

In these cases, market expansion was not directly the primary cause of the transformation of labour relations into a free wage labour system as classically stated, for instance, in Maurice Dobb's Studies in the Development of Capitalism (Reference Dobb1963 [1946]). In the case discussed by Martino, the contradiction was made possible given the scarcity of labour as perceived by the employers. The money distributed by dash to the workers increased to the point that it also induced an increase in the bargaining power on the part of workers (braceros). This was especially true from the 1950s onwards, when braceros acquired so much bargaining power that they made substantial earnings – £60 for a two-year contract.

Girma Negash points out, however, that the penetration of capital into local agriculture was also determined by a range of factors specific to the Ethiopian context, such as the scale of taxation and the scarcity or abundance of land and capital. In the case of Ethiopia, the Stalinist parenthesis represented by the Derg regime (1974–87) must be highlighted as one of those historical moments that disrupted the ineluctability of the capitalist transformation of society. However, this excursus failed, and a capitalist road reappeared with the return of smallholder farming. Following the Schumpeterian approach, this he sees as an early stage of capitalist transformation dominated by family production in today's Ethiopia (Schumpeter Reference Schumpeter1942).

During the colonial period, Mozambique was a classic provider of long-distance migrant labour across frontiers, notably to South Africa but also, for example, to Nyasaland's tobacco farms dominated by white settlers (Vail and White Reference Vail and White1980; First Reference First1983). In the violent post-independence struggle between FRELIMO and RENAMO, many Mozambicans fled across the border to Malawi as refugees, where they were particularly available to employers looking for cheap seasonal labour. However, peacetime brought an impressive spread of tobacco cultivation in the densely populated sections of Mozambique that were relatively close by. The rise of the shadowy multinational corporations was accompanied by the spread of a contract farming system, transforming the lives of former migrants. Today, some are themselves employers of labour, notably those who hail from Malawi. Pérez Niño captures the scale of contract labour in central Mozambique as an arrangement that has become favourable to capital and to at least some native contractors. For the present, outgrower farming has ‘resolved’ the migrant labour question. She sees the emergence of this system as not merely avoiding (for now) the contentious issue of land-grabbing (Cotula Reference Cotula2013; Hall Reference Hall2011) and the uphill battle of titling land in conventional capitalist terms, but also as perfecting (for the moment) a new kind of cheap labour system: with reference both to the contract farmers and their migrant employees, and to unpaid family labour. The commodification of livelihoods she describes transcends the conventional boundaries between wage, migrant and contract labour. However, she is very aware of the ways in which contract workers in particular could find advantages in the system: both in the nature of the contract and (even more so) through its interstices. The system, with its complexities, has thrived in the past fifteen years but Pérez Niño indicates that apparently Manica Province, which has similar ecological conditions and where more economic options opened up, has not enjoyed the same success.

Between the 1930s and the 1970s, South Africa experienced an impressive process of industrialization in which market forces were strongly engaged by the state (Freund Reference Freund2013). Although the heart of this process was increasingly to be found in heavy industry with close links to mining, the consumer industry was far from unimportant. Little that it produced, however, was exported; it depended on a heavily protected local market. One of the most influential industrialists, with the core of his empire in Durban, was Philip Frame. Trained in the textile industry of Saxony, Frame understood the industrial technology of his time and also the need for close links to the state. An official government adviser at times and a close associate particularly of Nico Diederichs as Minister of Finance, Frame depended on the statutory differentiation of the locations-cum-homelands as sources of massive amounts of cheap labour (Wolpe Reference Wolpe1972; Lacey Reference Lacey1981; McDowell Reference McDowell2000).

In the 1970s, however, cheap labour began to find a voice and challenged Frame and his competitors in Durban and its surroundings. Alex Lichtenstein looks at the earlier phases of a new order in which so-called semi-skilled labour found a way of organizing and blocking production. Instead of completely arbitrary forms of control, which Lichtenstein refers to as ‘the law of the firm’ – in isiZulu, umthetho we femu – management began to search for elements of cooperation and order based on some kind of consent. Lichtenstein traces the struggles between an older ‘moderate’ union with a practised history of organizing Coloured and Indian workers, and a new insurgent and independent union with shadowy connections to the underground union networks of the South African Confederation of Trade Unions linked to the African National Congress. At first, the former aided the latter, but in the 1980s they became rivals with profoundly different self-conceptions. The longer-term trajectory led to the substantial decline of the industry in more globalized times.

The transnational or global dimension

As worryingly noted by Gareth Austin, the adjective ‘global’ is undergoing a generalized inflationary process among historians. Here we are studying Africa's global labour history but scarcely using that term. Our departure point is the criticism of globalization made by Frederick Cooper and Austin (Cooper Reference Cooper2001; Reference Cooper2005: 91–112; Austin Reference Austin, Beckert and Sachsenmaierforthcoming). Furthermore, we are influenced by the positive stance proposed in the writings of Marcel van der Linden (Reference van der Linden2013). The goal is to extend internationalized labour history to neglected occupational groups such as touts, prostitutes, women in the household, and household production units in agriculture, taken as a whole together with the more conventional categories of indentured, migrant wage labour and unionized workers. (These categories are far from mutually exclusive.) How do they relate to one another?

The transnational or transborder element of labour history is considered by Pérez Niño, Girma Negash and Martino. Lichtenstein's article highlights the change that occurred from the time when African men were obliged to work in order to pay tax and accumulate cattle, originally buying horses, guns and other material goods that were useful in a rural economy, to a time when the countryside became apparently irredeemably impoverished. The pressure was outwards and women supporting households were soon involved alongside men – the gender element therefore emerged in relation to the question of mobility.

Pérez Niño plays with the importance of a boundary that first separated the territories of two colonial powers, Britain and Portugal, and then those of independent Malawi and colonial Mozambique, and, finally, the two independent countries at peace. But her focus is ultimately on Mozambican conditions. In the heyday of Portuguese colonialism, male migrants were pushed out via forced labour and tax systems. If Angónia was at first an important source of mine labour for South Africa and Southern Rhodesia, it increasingly became, in the last years of colonial rule, a source of cheap labour for tobacco estates in nearby Malawi, where the transport system made a commodified labour system more feasible. With wartime conditions, vulnerable Mozambican refugees were increasingly involved.

As noted by Girma, there are very few studies on the labour history of Ethiopia and even fewer on labour in the conventionally labelled periphery of the country. The transnational is not present here but the movement of labour with which this article is concerned, ‘Kembata labour’, is intra-provincial. Following a global labour history approach, Girma substitutes ‘transnational’ with ‘interconnected’. He does so by overlooking a national-based discourse in order to concentrate solely on the factor of labour in the agricultural production system. Then, there are the interconnections that Girma makes between foreign interests – Italian and Dutch – and local power. The sugar estates in Wonji and Metahara regions established by the Handelsvereeniging Amsterdam, a Dutch multinational firm, in the 1950s were in effect an important engine for labour mobility.

Labouring in agriculture and the household

The rural situation in Africa offers an apparently simple but actually very complex terrain for the labour historian. As the need for cash expands and rural livelihoods involve migrations in many directions, across boundaries and over very large distances, a transition to capitalism – if there is one – turns out to be vastly more complicated than what is proposed by the development literature preoccupied by the titling and privatization of Africa's underused acres (Bernstein Reference Bernstein2002; Reference Bernstein2004; Reference Bernstein, Akram-Lodhi and Kay2008).

South Africa is a country in which a notoriously forcible transition to a racially exclusive system of titling and private landholding was well established in the nineteenth century. This was accompanied by the survival (and creation) of ‘locations’ where the majority of the population lived in a juridically preserved pre-capitalist regime where cash needs could be met largely through male migrancy. Wolpe argued that the apartheid system was at least partially intended to buttress this bifurcated system in decline (Wolpe Reference Wolpe1972). Lichtenstein here considers the consequences of the system's complete collapse as a serious source of subsistence. The willingness of women to work in large numbers in the factories that he discusses was emblematic by the 1970s.

Pérez Niño takes a zone in central Mozambique – Angónia – which seems at first sight to have been a paragon of Samir Amin's labour reserve model (Amin Reference Amin1972). Densely populated but far from transport routes and commercialized activity, its men depended heavily at one time on work far from home in the wider region, including in the mines of the Witwatersrand. Isolation was intensified in the phase of civil war after independence in 1975, when many inhabitants were turned effectively into refugees. However, this same region – with structured intervention by capital and the state – has been turned into a systematic and effective contract labour recipient zone.

Pérez Niño considers this at a theoretical level in terms of capital's ability to transform the use of a particular geographic space and its people. As FRELIMO consolidated power in Mozambique and looked towards potential sources of revenue, a reorganization of labour possibilities loomed that enhanced profitable agricultural production in populous Angónia. This occurred once the socialist phase, a key hiatus simultaneous with that in Ethiopia, had been abandoned. Labour was mobilized through market compulsion in a sense, but also through clientelism and familial relationships on the ground. It would seem, too, that the native Chichewa-speaking population itself promoted tobacco cultivation, matching the attractions this reorganization held for the state and capital. The decline of the old estate system in southern Malawi, followed by ‘fast-track land reform’ on tobacco farms in Zimbabwe, made the prospects of tobacco in Mozambique attractive. Migrants’ situations vary considerably with the different phases of tobacco production: at peak labour time their services can be considerably more highly rewarded than in slacker periods. Moreover, their Malawian bases are variable; some are virtually landless, coming from districts still more heavily populated than Angónia. Casual workers can also be contrasted with more long-term tenants who repeatedly work specific pieces of land. Angónia now appears to produce something like one-third of Mozambican tobacco, a major export.

Contract farming itself is a remarkably varied terrain with advantages for some and new forms of exploitation for others. It is notable that it is less remunerative than other activities available in better-off regions of Mozambique. The contract farmer can be described as a ‘hired hand on [his] own land’, but Pérez Niño rejects as too reductive the view that these producers are simply proletarians in disguise. Once the household itself is turned into a site of commodity production in contract farming, households can be analytically dissected to investigate internal forms of exploitation. It could be argued that migration, including long-distance migration, offered more possibilities for earning cash in the interstices of the system. However, Pérez Niño observes possibilities that emerge through theft, clientelism and other means, whereby workers are able to even out conditions within what she calls skewed power relations. Here, the comparison with Martino is inevitable; both suggest that the context for exploitation, subsumption and growing commodity production is richer than these terms may at first suggest.

In Martino's work, the dash system, based on ‘wage advance’ or ‘conditional credit’, was the basis of ‘indentured’ labour performed by Nigerian workers in Spanish Guinea plantations. It is the sine qua non condition for what Martino calls ‘debt peonage’ or ‘debt bondage’ (paraphrasing Alessandro Stanziani). In the late phases of colonial rule, it actually threatened to overwhelm the social order (Stanziani Reference Stanziani, Campbell and Stanziani2013). Contract labour brought an unpredictable, camouflaged element to the development of a class relationship.

The issue of contract labour in agriculture is analysed by Girma Negash as well. In contrast to the case of Fernando Pó, where Nigerian workers’ contracts became the vehicle for contestation and sabotage, in Ethiopia's northern Sidama they were a stabilizing force. Individuals were able to enter into contracts that were guaranteed by the imperial power and the imperial family itself. Moreover, contract workers were eager to settle in Sidama, which offered more possibilities than home. As in Angónia, a phase during which the state attempted to stamp out any movement into a capitalist transition posited a socialist system isolated from the international market. Thus, the contract system was wiped out, replaced by a landowning peasantry that owed its existence substantially to state intervention. With the fall of the Mengistu regime, however, a new commercial era emerged in which contract farming and migration again took off, notably with the growing importance of khat cultivation. However, contracts are now arguably less stable and involve a daily wage element that hints more at proletarianization. Conditions do not yet allow for any real conclusion to this story, but it points in a capitalist direction.

Gender, labour and the household

Pérez Niño makes useful suggestions about the importance for labour historians to look inside the household. Male contract farmers take advantage of unpaid female household labour and, additionally – and in an often conflictual manner – of the poorly paid labour of younger unmarried males. Women are apt to concern themselves with the continued production of food for the household, leading to potential conflicts – over time and effort – with tobacco growing. Youths work in good part in order to build up a fund that will permit them to pay bride price. Fathers, to cite Sara Berry, do not yet ‘work for their sons’ in this patrilineal corner of Mozambique, but the new tobacco regime creates potential tensions between sons and their parents (Berry Reference Berry1985).

Alex Lichtenstein's article is principally concerned with gender. As he points out, the proletarianization model that occupied left-leaning African studies in the 1960s and 1970s was premised, often unconsciously, on the assumption that it was men who were the workers. Here, he concentrates on the growing use of women in the Frame plants. In the eyes of capital, women made pliable and conforming workers who were as cheap as possible. For labour organizers, they were a challenge. How to speak to them? What was their language and what were their main concerns as workers?

Dependent on their wages as they were, and sometimes living with men who were out of work, women often had to cope with taking charge of dependants themselves. Some – particularly those who were resident in hostels – met with violent assaults, including rapes, in intense phases of labour struggle. Forming a thin occupational layer, men associated with the established union, the Textile Workers Industrial Union, were promoted so as to exert a kind of gendered hegemony that had to be broken down. The essentially male organizers of the National Union of Textile Workers, according to Lichtenstein, blitzed the women with mass meetings, the distribution of pamphlets, organizing drives, cultural events and face-to-face interactions. This, rather than threatening them and exerting pressure, seemed to be in their best interests. Lichtenstein cites examples showing that women regarded the union as independent of company control and influence, and as treating them with individual respect and dignity. They felt that perhaps this union could be theirs. They acquired a sense of the importance of union independence and their resistance to pressures from supervisors. Women had been programmed to see themselves as subordinate to men and to avoid confrontation with them, since this was inappropriate. As innovative organization succeeded in the heady days of the mid-1980s, they participated in a process that ‘helped proletarianize the anti-apartheid struggle’. The struggle for autonomy had barely begun and the textile industry was due to go into a nosedive, notably in the present-day province of KwaZulu-Natal, but Lichtenstein shows that at least a few key women had nonetheless developed by then a working-class consciousness.

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The four themes highlighted here hopefully help point the way to a revival of labour studies, especially with a historical dimension, that draws attention to critical aspects and particularities of African society in transformation. At the same time, and signposted with some of the classical theoretical readings to which we refer, we hope that this is also understood within the framework of a more universal and global understanding of labour.