This essay illuminates the worldwide transition to free labor from various forms of unfree labor by examining that process in the particular conditions of Southern Africa's encounter with Britain. Dr. David Livingstone's servants—whose descendants in Malawi have been called “Magololo,”1 a term used throughout this essay to distinguish them from the “Kololo” conquerors of Bulozi in contemporary Zambia and parts of Namibia—exemplify this global development. Between 1853 and 1861, over a hundred young Magololo men worked as porters, deckhands, and guides and showed Livingstone the very places in southern Africa whose “discovery” (for Britons) made Livingstone famous. Owing tribute labor to their king, Sekeletu, they initially performed these tasks as subjects. But, after Livingstone's return from England in 1858, they labored for wages; they were among the first groups of Africans in the region to make the emblematic modern move from formally unfree labor to formally free labor. This transition, which would form the core conflict of indirect rule in British Africa, radically altered Livingstone's relationship with his guides: They rebelled against him in 1861. This is one side of the story. The other side follows from the fact that one cannot sensibly speak about workers without the story of their employers. Accordingly, this essay revisits the well-known story of Livingstone's life but offers a different perspective than other biographies. It is the first study to combine the long-familiar documentary evidence with oral sources, for the specific purpose of retelling the Livingstone narrative (in its many renderings) from the viewpoint of his relations with the Magololo workers. In that way, it can shed light on the beginnings of the transition to wage labor in this region.

In May 1903, 380 Africans were recruited from British Central Africa (modern Malawi) by the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association on one-year contracts to work in the gold mines. It was an experiment designed to test the potential for recruiting cheap black labor for the mines from the region north of the Zambesi. By the end of the contract period, more than a quarter of the men were either dead or permanently disabled. Their struggles to adapt to the harsh working conditions in the mines fueled a racist discourse among white South Africans about “Tropical Africans,” which focused on their supposed susceptibility to disease on the one hand, and their supposed “natural indolence” on the other. Notwithstanding these issues, the mine owners considered the experiment a success and moved rapidly to expand recruitment from the region in the years that followed. This article tells the story of this pioneering group of migrant workers, detailing their grim encounter with modernity and the power of capital in South Africa. It also suggests ways in which their experiences helped to determine the conditions of employment for the generations of migrant mineworkers that followed them.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, the allegation that slaves were harvesting cocoa off the west coast of Africa on the Portuguese island colony of São Tomé and Príncipe became an international scandal, not only because slavery had long been outlawed, but also because one of the major purchasers of that cocoa was the Quaker chocolate company, Cadbury Brothers. The Portuguese denied the charge of slavery and claimed that African workers on the islands were not only happier than Portuguese peasants, but also more content than many European workers. This article explores this claim and argues that the conflicting interpretations of what the British called the crisis over “slave cocoa” and the Portuguese called “the English cocoa controversy” can be explained by differing perspectives about work.

Focusing specifically on colonial Ghana between 1855 and 1914, this article aims to situate the history of child labor in colonial Africa within the larger historiography of African labor history. Relying primarily on the records of the Basel Mission, this article complicates the narrative of labor history by studying how the mission acquired and sustained the labor of children and youth at various mission stations as part of the greater “missionary project.” This article argues that childhood in colonial Ghana can be viewed as a site of contestation between the competing interests of patriarchy, race, and colonial and missionary authority, in which the labor of children was used to achieve a larger degree of control and influence in the region.

Mobility and wage labor are two key variables that help to explain some of the complexities of the labor history of colonial Eritrea. Focusing on the initial period of Italian colonization, between the 1880s and 1920s, this article analyzes the relationship between the two above-mentioned variables. Based on previously unexplored archival sources and documents, the authors conclude that wage labor did contribute to the mobility of workers throughout the region (and not vice versa). In the period under consideration, Eritrea did not become a settler colony, despite Italy's initial efforts to import a national labor force. Instead, through a mix of capital investments in construction and transport, and increasing military recruitment, the Italian regime contributed significantly to an increase in free wage labor in the region. Within a year of Italy's 1911 invasion of Libya, it needed to reinforce its colonial army. From 1912 onward, in return for wages, tens of thousands of Eritreans entered the Italian colonial army to fight on the Libyan front. This military employment left voids in the local labor market, which were filled by people from neighboring countries, particularly Ethiopians and Yemenis. A relationship thus developed and continued between mobility and wage labor.

In this article I analyze how African gender categories have interacted with those produced and imposed by French colonization and how these forced interactions may have given rise to specific kinds of resistance from local populations. Using the case study of forced recruitment for the private agricultural firm Société Anonyme des Cultures de Diakandapé (SACD) in the region of Kayes in Mali from 1919 to 1946, I examine the complexities of resistance to forced labor from a gender perspective, with a special focus on how resistance was shaped by struggles around (re)construction and (re)definition of local and colonial masculinities.

This article examines the impact that indigenization policies had on labor and on the cultures of work in postcolonial Nigeria. Scholars have studied indigenization in the context of nationalist politics, statecraft, and development in postcolonial Africa. However, we have little knowledge of how working classes experienced and interpreted indigenization schemes. Focusing on the indigenization of shipping, this article discusses both how Nigerian seamen anticipated the establishment of the Nigerian National Shipping Line and the actual impact of Nigerianization on their working lives. By taking a close look at changes in shipboard hierarchies, labor relations, and the culture of work on NNSL vessels, we can gain a deeper understanding of how broader political processes associated with decolonization and postindependence shaped working-class lives in postcolonial Nigeria.

White workers and white working-class politics have been neglected in the historiography of South Africa during the second half of the twentieth century. This article seeks to extricate white workers from this historiographical neglect and fracture homogenizing representations of white, specifically Afrikaner, experiences of democratization. It does so by reintroducing class to a debate dominated by race. Employing a discursive analysis sensitive to issues of class, it shows that white workers were confronted with democratizing change and disempowerment more than a decade before the end of apartheid and suggests that class politics continue to inform white responses in post-apartheid South Africa. In this way, it argues for a historical, discursive approach to uncovering the power dynamics of class and the complex intersection of working-class and racial identities in the late twentieth century.

African labor history is undergoing a resurgence judging by the appearance of these three important books. During the 1990s and into the early twenty-first century, historians working in East, West, and southern Africa published a remarkable number of first-rate histories of migrant laborers, rural workers, and the emerging urban working class, notably in the innovative Heinemann Social History of Africa series founded by Allen Isaacman and Jean Hay. Other historians published fine works elsewhere. Labor history of all kinds flourished. However, with new academic trends and the demise of the Social History series in the mid-2000s, African labor history seems to have entered a decline, although studies of precolonial slavery have continued to appear regularly. It is therefore gratifying to see a number of new labor histories published in the last two or three years.

In 2011 Walmart's bid to buy a controlling stake in South Africa's Massmart Holdings, Inc. went before the country's Competition Commission and Competition Tribunal, both of which would determine whether to grant the merger outright or to place conditions on it. Massmart Holdings comprises a number of branded subsidiaries in the South African market, including Walmart-style general merchandise dealers, electronics retailers, do-it-yourself building suppliers, and food wholesalers—Game, Dion, Builder's Warehouse, and Makro, respectively—as well as the more recently acquired food retailer, Cambridge Food. South African unions, most prominently the South African Commercial, Catering and Allied Workers Union (Saccawu), with support from the Global Union Federation UNI Global and, in the United States, the United Food and Commercial Workers, fought the merger.

In his first televised address as prime minister on March 2, 2014, Ibrahim Mehleb reiterated what has become a familiar term of state rhetoric used to contain labor unrest, widely referred to as “the wheel of production” (‘agalat el-intag) discourse. The true meaning of the “wheel of production” iteration was expressed in Mehleb's call on “Egyptians to help rebuild the nation and halt strikes and protests.” When representatives of the state—or state-allied political actors, including some labor unions—proclaim that the “wheel of production must turn” in response to strikes and other labor demonstrations, they are suggesting that the protesters are behaving selfishly, in their own economic interests. For laborers to make demands for better wages and working conditions during a time of national crisis is presented to the public as a threat to economic stability and national security that is harmful to all Egyptians. Ironically, though not unexpectedly, in the same address Mehleb pledged to address many of the basic demands raised by protesting workers: a decent standard of living, the even distribution of resources, the rooting out of corruption, and institutional reform of the public sector—all while maintaining workers’ rights. Although state agents' rhetorical commitment to decent standards of living and social and economic rights is not novel, the simultaneous conjuring of the “wheel of production” to halt protests has a more recent history occasioned by the last three years of revolutionary transformations.