This book advances research into the government-forced labor used widely in colonial Kenya from 1930 to 1963 after the passage of the International Labor Organization’s Forced Labour Convention. While the 1930 Convention intended to mark the suppression of forced labor practices, various exemptions meant that many coercive labor practices continued in colonial territories. Focusing on East Africa and the Kenya Colony, this book shows how the colonial administration was able to exploit the exemption clause for communal labor, thus ensuring the mobilization of African labor for infrastructure development. As an exemption, communal labor was not defined as forced labor but instead justified as a continuation of traditional African and community labor practices. Despite this ideological justification, the book shows that communal labor was indeed an intensification of coercive labor practices and one that penalized Africans for non-compliance with fines or imprisonment. The use of forced labor before and after the passage of the Convention is examined, with a focus on its use during World War II as well as in efforts to combat soil erosion in the rural African reserve areas in Kenya. The exploitation of female labor, the Mau Mau war of the 1950s, civilian protests, and the regeneration of communal labor as harambee after independence are also discussed.

This book advances research into the government-forced labor used widely in colonial Kenya from 1930 to 1963 after the passage of the International Labor Organization’s Forced Labour Convention. While the 1930 Convention intended to mark the suppression of forced labor practices, various exemptions meant that many coercive labor practices continued in colonial territories. Focusing on East Africa and the Kenya Colony, this book shows how the colonial administration was able to exploit the exemption clause for communal labor, thus ensuring the mobilization of African labor for infrastructure development. As an exemption, communal labor was not defined as forced labor but instead justified as a continuation of traditional African and community labor practices. Despite this ideological justification, the book shows that communal labour was indeed an intensification of coercive labor practices and one that penalized Africans for non-compliance with fines or imprisonment. The use of forced labor before and after the passage of the Convention is examined, with a focus on its use during World War II as well as in efforts to combat soil erosion in the rural African reserve areas in Kenya. The exploitation of female labor, the Mau Mau war of the 1950s, civilian protests, and the regeneration of communal labor as harambee after independence are also discussed.

The various manifestations of coerced labour between the opening up of the Atlantic world and the formal creation of Haiti.

Ending slavery and creating empire in Africa: from the "Indelible stain" to the "light of civilization"--Law to practice: "certain excesses of severity"--The critiques and defenses of modern slavery: from without and within, above and below -- Mobility and tactical flight: of workers, chiefs, and villages -- Targeting chiefs: from "fictitious obedience" to "extraordinary political disorder" -- Seniority and subordination: disciplining youth and controlling women's labor -- An "absolute freedom" circumscribed and circumvented: "Employers chosen of their own free will" -- Upward mobility: "improvement of one's social condition" -- Conclusion: forced labor's legacy.

The first comprehensive and authoritative history of work and labour in Africa; a key text for all working on African Studies and Labour History worldwide.

Diverging from the studies of southern African migrant labor that focus on particular workplaces and points of origin, Bound for Work looks at the multitude of forms and locales of migrant labor that individuals—under more or less coercive circumstances—engaged in over the course of their lives. Tracing Mozambican workers as they moved between different types of labor across Mozambique, Rhodesia, and South Africa, Zachary Kagan Guthrie places the multiple venues of labor in a single historical frame, expanding the regional historiography beyond the long shadow cast by the apartheid state while simultaneously exploring the continuities and fractures between South Africa, southern Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa. Kagan Guthrie’s holistic approach to migrant labor yields several important conclusions. First, he highlights the importance of workers’ choices, explaining not just why people moved but why they moved in the ways they did: how they calculated the benefits of one destination over another, and how they decided when circumstances made it necessary to move again. Second, his attention to mobility gives a much clearer view of the mechanisms of power available to colonial authorities, as well as the limits to their effectiveness. Finally, Kagan Guthrie suggests a new explanation for the divergent trajectories of southern and sub-Saharan Africa in the aftermath of World War II.

"Revolutions are relatively new, rare and extraordinary events in history, which is perhaps one reason why historians and social scientists alike continue to be surprised and fascinated by them. Although this interest goes back to at least the early modern revolutions in England (1640-1660) and the Netherlands (1568-1648)"--

Sample Text

“A call to arms in the class struggle for racial equity”—the hugely influential work of political theory and history, now powerfully introduced by Angela Davis (Los Angeles Review of Books). This legendary classic on European colonialism in Africa stands alongside C.L.R. James’ Black Jacobins, Eric Williams’ Capitalism & Slavery, and W.E.B. Dubois’ Black Reconstruction. In his short life, the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution, leading movements in North America, South America, the African continent, and the Caribbean. In each locale, Rodney found himself a lightning rod for working class Black Power. His deportation catalyzed 20th century Jamaica's most significant rebellion, the 1968 Rodney riots, and his scholarship trained a generation how to think politics at an international scale. In 1980, shortly after founding of the Working People's Alliance in Guyana, the 38-year-old Rodney would be assassinated. In his magnum opus, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Rodney incisively argues that grasping "the great divergence" between the west and the rest can only be explained as the exploitation of the latter by the former. This meticulously researched analysis of the abiding repercussions of European colonialism on the continent of Africa has not only informed decades of scholarship and activism, it remains an indispensable study for grasping global inequality today.

Originally published for the first time in English in 1979 this book represents one of the earliest Marxist analyses of the impact that colonialism had on Africa during the first half century that followed the Scramble. Nzula’s co-authored book, together with all his writings in the Negro Worker, are assembled here. The political experience of its African co-author resulted in a book which is alight with commitment to the liberation of the Continent, yet always tempered by an explicit theoretical understanding of capitalism in its imperialist phase. The book opens with an outline of Africa’s role in the world economic system. Successive chapters reveal how Western capitalism conjured up a brutally exploited working class and dispossessed peasantry throughout the African continent. Each major region of Black Africa is analysed. Meticulous information as to the facts of oppression and many of the early urban and rural struggles against colonialism before the Second World War is set out. Robin Cohen’s introduction is a valuable summation of Nzula’s life and of the background to this book. The appendices bring together many of Nzula’s little known writings.