ECAS 2013

This study investigates the unique relationship between labor and combat in Africa and the Americas during the early modern era, comparing and contrasting the forms and outcomes of combative labor among enslaved populations for whom fighting was an occupation. Combative labor - defined here as productive work through the deliberate and systematic application of martial skills - has hardly figured in labor historiography. Studies dealing with combat practices under slavery at best speak only to other historiographies. We propose to advance discussions about combative labor within the fields of labor history and slavery. Scholars of combative systems among enslaved populations of the Americas generally limit themselves to the artistic, symbolic and rebellious dimensions of slave combat while overlooking or deemphasizing its productive aspects. Africanists have sometimes seen the service of slave armies in terms of productive labor - Richard Roberts in particular has analyzed this service in the context of slave-raiding and the sourcing of war captives as production in the Senegambian region - however such studies stop short of situating combat within explicit labor historiographies or "following" slave combat into the diaspora. The comparative approach that we propose here reveals continuities and discontinuities as well as similarities and differences in combative labor between Africa and the Americas, despite the variations that existed between slave systems on either side of the Atlantic. Defending and bolstering establishments responsible for their enslavement in order to gain status and rewards was a widespread feature of slave systems in both Africa and the Americas.

Legitimate trade triggered economic and urban growth in Ghana but internal disputes between ethnic groups on the coast of Ghana and between Ashanti and British colonisers affected trade on the coast and in the interior. As a result, specially trained Yoruba and Hausa men were brought from Nigeria to Accra and Kumasi by the British to deal with internal disputes among ethnic groups and to handle the rebellion from Ashanti.

By 1900 hostilities among ethnic groups had ceased and Ashanti, the dominant force against British incursions in the interior was finally defeated, paving the way for free flow of goods from the north of Ghana to the south and vice versa.

The cessation of hostilities after 1901 also led to the demobilization of the forces from Nigeria. Instead of returning to Nigeria, the Yoruba and Hausa fighters took up residence in Accra. Their reason was simple- Accra had grown to become an important urban and commercial centre and they therefore took advantage of the trade opportunities that the city offered.

Using oral and archival sources this paper discusses the Yoruba and Hausa Special Forces in Accra. In particular the paper traces the transformation of this important labour group- from mercenaries to traders. The paper adopts a biographical approached to discuss individual life histories of some of the soldiers and their specific contribution to Accra's urban and economic growth.

The focus in this paper is to examine the birth organization, structure of Postal, Telegraph and Telephone union(PTT) in a comparative and transnational perspective. Why and how was this organisation organized at local level and why did it became a global actor? In the context of politics, how did the Cameroonian politics contribute to the rise and demise of PTT? How did the movement came into the global web of Postal Telegraph Telephone International (PTTI) and did that affiliation benefit in the movement? What were the dynamics responsible in the globalization of the PTT? The importance of telecommunication cannot be emphasized enough as historically very important in world history as well as African social history. In a world of renewed globalization, informed with intensified Information Communication Technology (ICTs), with cell phone communication almost causing a revolution in world communication it is important not to ignore such a working class history that had dealt with postal services long before modern ICTs came into place . Up till then the activities of the PTT in terms of dynamics which led to its rise, decline and fall has not caught the attention of researchers working on the history of such workers' union in Africa. The attempt here is to fill that gap using the materials dug out from the International Institute of Social History (IISH), Amsterdam archives, its library which I was opportune to work in it from 1st September 2012 to 31st January 2013.

This paper attempts to contribute to two key questions in African labour history. Firstly, what roles did Africans play in the development of labour systems, ideologies and capitalism? (Freund, The African Worker, 1988) And secondly, by way of revisiting the Weberian dilemma, what are the connections between and the impact of the evangelical spread of Christianity and the ideologies of capitalism and its related work ethic? (Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 1997)

Stepping back from the study of "organised workers", this thesis deals with a great variety of African labour customs. Central to this is the intersection between religion and the changing practices and understandings of work, time use and production within the mission stations and the wider context of nascent capitalism and imperialism. Historians commonly treat missions narrowly as religious or humanitarian institutions but like any enterprise of such ambition they had to be economically viable and so can be thought of as small-scale economies employing both free and unfree labour.

Zanzibar is fundamental to this study as it has long been a transnational space as part of the Omani empire and it was equally important to the Africans employed by the mission, who circulated considerably throughout eastern central Africa. Moreover, comparisons and connections are made further afield such as Mozambique or Madagascar, where missionaries' employment of slaves was commonplace. This is, therefore, a transnational project designed to illustrate the changing roles of the African worker at this revealing moment in African history.

Fernando Po, the last remnant of the Spanish Empire in the Bight of Biafra, was a typical plantation island that relied on imported workers. The acute labour shortage on the cacao plantations of Spanish Guinea opened the way for significant labour population displacements, with contract workers drawn from Cuba and from all along the Gulf of Guinea.

This research focuses on, and the presentation will show, archival material from the middle decades of the 20th century and the Nigeria-Fernando Po labour connection. With the archival documents we trace the logistics and installation of, first, the labour laws that turned the trading based migrant populations of the island into a tightly regulated penal and contract labour force; second, the recruiters in Nigeria who ran a clandestine smuggling network on canoes which brought over tens of thousands of mostly Igbo workers; and third, the Anglo-Spanish Labour Treaty of 1942 that regulated this migration with indentured labour conventions.

New analytical frames for African labour history, that take into account the rise of "multipolar geopolitics" and "global history", allow for a repositioning of the material of the case study from its localized region and specific decades, onto the trajectories of the legal tools, economic tricks and conventions that had been configured around the imperial Atlantic economies in the previous centuries. The capitalist shape of this longue durée has endured, and can even be seen in contemporary Equatorial Guinea, where the fast expanding construction sector relies on tens of thousands of indentured Chinese workers.

This paper analyses the political organisation by informal transport workers, and their partial achievements in claiming rights at work from employers in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania's largest city, from 1995 to the present. The paper takes issue with the influential view that trade unionism and work-place labourism are no longer a viable option for defending workers' interests. From less despondent approaches to the possibilities for labour(ism) it borrows the insight that making sense of workers' unrest requires a political economy approach. This entails, first and foremost, locating workers within their economic structure, and understanding their relationship to capital. The paper thus starts by sketching out public transport in Dar es Salaam, the employment relationship predominant in the sector and the balance of power between bus owners and workers. The paper then analyses workers' organisation since 1995, their goals and the strategy that workers developed in conjunction with the Tanzania transport workers union. The paper documents workers' partial achievements in achieving the formalisation of the employment relationship between bus owners and workers. The conclusion reflects on the broader lessons that can be learned from this case study.

The ILO Minimum Age Conventions, adopted from 1919 - 1973, got their form in the post World War I context of industrialization, urbanization, social instability and a growing trade union movement, and were modeled on the late 19th century European labor legislation. It was a time of heavy unemployment, and the workers also saw child labor as competition on the labor market.

Ethiopia is one of the poorest countries of the world with a population of 85 million and a median age of 16.9 years. Primary education has been expanded and now reaches about 75% of the relevant age-group, while only 15% continue secondary education. The contribution of the younger generation to the productivity is essential and child labour is the prevailing norm. In the Ethiopian Constitution adopted 1995, the rights of children were addressed: the right to life, to education and to protection from labour exploitation. Ethiopia is signatory to the ILO-Convention 138 and its national law has set the age-limit to 14 years. Ethiopia is a beneficiary of the World Bank's lending program stipulating the strengthening of market economy, with implications for children's employment and working conditions.

During 2012 we did a study interviewing children working in the agricultural sector to discern how the globalisation of economy and human rights norms affect their lives. The situation for child agricultural workers in Ethiopia is an illustration of how child workers as agents are finding ways to manage within the legal and economic structures based on experiences from the West.

In a context where state institutions and development organizations are disengaging from supporting the working poor, entrepreneurialism is preached as the skill that individuals should have to found their means of survival and, possibly, of social improvement. The outcomes of these interventions, however, have been far from opening up opportunities of social mobility or even entrepreneurial success. In post-industrial Europe and North America, the proliferation of flexible labour is producing widespread forms of social instability and precariousness. In a similar way, in the developing world, the emphasis on informality and self-employment, and the promotion of small-scale enterprises are furthering conditions of exclusion and marginalization.

In Addis Ababa's inner city, since the mid - 2000s, under the impact of development programs promoting small-scale enterprises, the street economy has undergone through a pervasive process of formalization that has come to advance the realization of an authoritarian form of developmental state, while imposing a regime of unskilled and badly paid labour on the street. Drawing on 16 months of fieldwork between 2009 and 2010 on the street economy in Addis Ababa's inner city, this paper focuses on how notions of entrepreneurialism and wage labour pervaded the interactions between government officials and the 'street youth' involved in these development programs. In doing this, I will show how the implementation of small-scale enterprises triggered a reconfiguration of forms and experiences of marginalization through labour and how ideas of being 'workers' provided 'street youth' with a way of navigating and narrating political subjugation and social exclusion.

Is Southern theory formation a process of engagement, critique and transformation of western theory from a southern perspective, or a process of alternative and autonomous theory formation? (von Holdt, 2012). This paper attempts to deal with this question by analysing the South African engagement with Northern theory in three examples from labour studies. The first engagement is explored in the 'labour aristocracy debate'. By considering the works of Davies (1973) and Johnstone (1994), this part underlines how the definition of labour aristocracy in South Africa could be different from the European ones, and how a local/authentic aspect, 'race relations', could be integrated into the debate based on 'class relations'. The second example is Maree's (1982) engagement with the 'democracy and oligarchy in trade unions' in his study on the independent trade unions in the 1970s. By considering Michels's (1962) 'iron law of oligarchy', this part highlights Maree's argument that instead of democratic organisations inevitably becoming oligarchic as Michels would predict, there was a contrary trend of oligarchic organisations becoming more democratic. The third engagement is analysed in the use of the concept 'institutionalisation of conflict' (Dahrendorf, 1959) by South African scholars in their investigation of 'industrial conciliation' as embodied in the Industrial Conciliation Acts of 1924 and 1979. The paper argues that different from the two previous cases the use of this concept is not critical in the sense that it would be false when applied to South Africa, but the case in point itself is criticised as being detrimental.

Starting from the case study of floriculture, this paper readdresses the general question of economic dualism in Kenya. Like during the colonial rule, today capitalist accumulation is achieved by forcing peasant labour force out of the subsistence sector to produce agricultural exports of low added value. However, the outflow of labour force is no more the direct outcome of land expropriation, discriminatory or coercive laws and taxes, but of deficit producers' economic necessity. In that dual economy, labour cost minimization is a myopic strategy from a macroeconomic point of view: by depressing remittances, it implies food recession, which inflates the wage rate and causes the fall of the rate of profit. Promoting the development of the informal non-agricultural economy might contribute to resolve this contradiction in the process of accumulation.

The paper focuses on the analysis of the manpower of Dolcevita Factory in Asmara, starting from its privatization in 2004. The most of the "working population" is female in a cultural context that used to consider the man as breadwinner. The organization within the Factory is aimed to ease female evereyday life and to reduce the absenteeism, so there are a kindergarten and the company canteen. Thanks to ethnodemography it is possible to carry out a business ethnodemographic research based on original data concerning the manpower. Furthermore, it is possible to compare production and employment levels; the demographic trends at the national level and inside the Factory. Moreover, the aim of this research in progress is to analyse the impact of the socio-economic effects due to the female labour market on the traditional gender role system. In nowadays Eritrea, the opportunity to work in the private sector represents a new trend by the national service based on the idea of self-reliance and can garantee a better salary than the national service. The ethonodemographic method tries to use both quantitative and qualitative data, in order to promote an emic interpretation of the quantitative trends and to carry out an exhaustive research.

Understanding the dynamics underlying the development and retreat of the Southern Africa labour migration system requires long-run and region-wide reconstruction of the ways capital relied for its reproduction on certain patterns of incorporation of migrant labour but also of its impact on the organization of production and reproduction in specific areas of smallholder farming where migrant labourers came from. The Angonia plateau in central Mozambique is a case in point. Angonia has been shaped by a labour flux that advanced, retreated and reversed the logic of who goes where for wages, since chibalo was abolished in 1964. This flux has variously involved Mozambicans and Malawians nowadays employed inwardly in the flourishing and labour-intensive tobacco sector, but otherwise found in mines and plantations from the Zambian copperbelt to Sofala, from the Witwatersrand to Kasungu. This flux has been reconfigured in processes of profound societal disruption, such as the long Mozambican civil war that during a decade expelled over 90% of the district's population to Malawi.

This paper considers what the case of Angonia has to offer to understanding the evolution of the regional system and conversely explores the impact of labour migration inwards and outwards, on the local forms of household accumulation, land use and transfer and labour mobilization along cleavages of gender, cohort, and class. Supporting evidence stems from the researcher's recent fieldwork in Angonia and from an exhaustive review of the historical literature.