Frederick Cooper

Struggle for the city : migrant labor, capital, and the state in urban Africa

The essays in this volume explore the interaction between migrant African labour and the cities in which they worked. These urban structures are viewed as attempts by the state and capital to control not only the workers time, but space as well -- and by extension -- the workers life. The compounds that enclosed diamond mine workers, or the pass systems that limit where workers may move are researched. The efforts to resist, or at least gain information by workers are documented, as are the relationships of migrants to their often rural kinsmen. Detailed research on specific topics in 19th and 20th century history deal with a number of African countries while taking a fresh critical look at the goals of those in power, the contradictions and tensions these structures generated, and the reactions of workers.

‘Our Strike’: Equality, Anticolonial Politics and the 1947–48 Railway Strike in French West Africa

This essay is both a reinterpretation of the place of the French West African railway strike in labor history and part of an exploration of its effects on politics and political memory. This vast strike needs to be studied in railway depots from Senegal to the Ivory Coast. Historians need both to engage the fictional version of the strike in Ousmanne Sembenes Gods Bits of Wood and avoid being caught up in it. Interviews in the key railway and union town of Thies, Senegal, suggest that strike veterans want to distinguish an experience they regard as their own from the novelists portrayal. They accept the heroic vision of the strike, but offer different interpretations of its relationship to family and community and suggest that its political implications include co-optation and betrayal as much as anticolonial solidarity. Interviews complement the reports of police spies as sources for the historian. The central irony of the strike is that it was sustained on the basis of railwaymens integration into local communities but that its central demand took railwaymen into a professionally defined, nonracial category of railwayman. The strike thus needs to be situated in relation to French efforts to define a new imperialism for the post-war era and the governments inability to control the implications of its own actions and rhetoric. Negotiating with a new, young, politically aware railway union leadership in 1946 and 1947, officials were unwilling to defend the old racial wage scales, accepted in principle the cadre unique demanded by the union, but fought over the question of power - who was to decide the details that would give such a cadre meaning ? The article analyzes the tension between the principles of nonracial equality and African community among the railwaymen and that between colonial power and notions of assimilation and development within the government. It examines the extent to which the strike remained a railway strike or spilled over into a wider

French africa, 1947-48: Reform, violence, and uncertainty in a colonial situation

Focusing on 1948 gives us the opportunity to recapture the diverse and conflicting ways in which people at the time viewed their future possibilities. They did not know how things would turn out. What some people thought would be pathways to change ended up as blind allies; many ended up with what they could get, not what they wanted. Students of history— guild members and others—are often tempted to do history backwards, to write as if the present we have was inevitable, to construct a genealogy from where we are, to look for origins of what we now know, and to forget all the futures that people once imagined but did not get to see. We tend to look for the logic of a system, for the nature of a regime and fail to realize how contested and uncertain political and social arrangements were at any moment, especially at particular moments—including 1948. Analyses of the end of colonial empires provide a vivid example of the limitations of doing history backwards and the possibilities of studying conjunctures when different futures were in play. We now live in a world of nearly two hundred nation-states, each jealous of its sovereignty. Most of those states did not exist in 1948. So the temptation is to look for the roots of the nation and to assume that territorial sovereignty was what people wanted all along. The colonial powers appear in such a story only as obstacles, defenders of a status quo that they should have known was past its time. France is sometimes seen as worse than Britain in that regard, stubbornly clinging to a “colonial myth.”1 Often, the story is written as if it

A parting of the ways: Colonial Africa and South Africa, 1946–48

Bill Freund stands out among historians of Africa for his research in different parts of the continent. I make no claims to be following Bills path, but hope to bring some of what I have learned f...

We Are No Longer in France: Communists in Colonial Algeria

between conservative and accommodationist positions. Cole describes how two linked processes generated the krio: creolization (the formation of the krio culture especially from diverse west African and Atlantic sources), and, later, “(krio)lization” (56) (the absorption of upcountry sierra Leoneans into the patterns of krio society). The latter process is hard to distinguish from the first, and is of unclear value in his analysis. As importantly, we are told both that those undergoing (krio)lization “enriched” (59) krio culture, and that the “act of becoming krio had the effect of ... virtually eviscerating the ethnic identity of the (krio)lized person” (56). it is not clear how Cole wants us to understand the nature of krio society. was it a product of its own absorptive and flexible genius, or a society determined by its colonial setting? His chapter on late nineteenth century educational reforms, for example, explains the new-found Muslim krio interest in colonial education variously as the result of colonial government manipulation, edward Blyden’s reform campaign (against various government and krio critics), and a new realization among Muslim krio that this was the road to success in the colonial economy. even though a trend toward accommodation followed a long century of rivalry, exclusion, and conflict between the Yoruba, Muslim, and Christian elements, these tensions were set to carry forward into the twentieth century. Cole, in his quest to reveal the foundations of an inclusive krio society, does too little to explore how the enduring “cultural and religious heterogeneity” (9) he recognizes shaped change. Cole opens a new perspective on krio history that promises to be valuable because it reaches for and outlines a broader, more complex story. But he also leaves aspects of this story, especially concerning the dynamics within krio society, in need of more careful and enquiring treatment.

African Studies: History

African and African-American intellectuals long sought to counter primitivizing ideologies of their times by pointing to narratives of African state building. The real breakthrough in writing African history occurred as colonial rule was crumbling and the quest for a usable past – notably a usable national past – attracted young scholars in Africa and beyond. If the 1960s witnessed an emphasis on the particularity of African societies, disillusionment with Africas present brought about a wider consideration of its past, especially the ways the slave trade and colonization constrained the continents possibilities. Scholars attempt to document varied forms of imagination and communication, of networks and institutions, in different temporal and spatial frameworks.

Decolonization and African Society. The Labor Question in French and British Africa

1. Introduction Part I. The Dangers of Expansion and the Dilemmas of Reform: 2. The labor question unposed 3. Reforming imperialism, 1935-40 4. Forced labor, strike movements, and the idea of development, 1940-45 Part II. Imperial Fantasies and Colonial Crises: 5. Imperial plans 6. Crises Part III. The Imagining of a Working Class: 7. The systematic approach: the French code du Travail 8. Family wages and industrial relations in British Africa 9. Internationalists, intellectuals, and the labor question Part IV. Devolving Power and Abdicating Responsibility: 10. The burden of declining empire 11. Delinking colony and metropole: French Africa in the 1950s Conclusion: 12. The wages of modernity and the price of sovereignty.

The late decolonizations: southern Africa 1975, 1979, 1994

The most important holdouts against the abdication of imperial power in the 1950s and 1960s were colonies with substantial white settlement. But despite the sustained efforts of settlers in Rhodesia and South Africa to retain power and the determination of the Portuguese government to retain colonies, their ultimate fate was determined by the regional and world-wide process which rendered empire indefensible. Take Rhodesia. In order to maintain white rule, Rhodesian settlers gave up their place in an empire that was intent on devolving power to black majorities. The unilateral declaration of independence in 1965 kept in place colonial institutions – a bureaucracy and police apparatus that enforced white landownership and racial segregation – but cut them off from imperial power. When African political movements, well aware of the rights Africans now had elsewhere, turned to guerilla warfare, the state fought back, but it faced a regional problem – armed groups finding sanctuary in now-free neighboring territories – and a global one, economic boycotts and isolation. In the end, colonialism could not be maintained without imperialism, not least because white Rhodesians vitally depended on their sense of participation in “European civilization” and in the comforts, securities, and opportunities of a worldly bourgeoisie. However divided and uncertain the guerilla movement, it won the international battle to be identified with self-determination and progress.

Introduction: from colonies to Third World

On April 27, 1994, black South Africans, for the first times in their lives, voted in an election to decide who would govern their country. The lines at polling stations snaked around many blocks. It had been over thirty years since African political movements had been banned, and the leader of the strongest of them, Nelson Mandela, had spent twenty-seven of those years in prison. Most activists and observers inside and outside South Africa had thought that the “apartheid” regime, with its explicit policy promoting white supremacy, had become so deeply entrenched and its supporters so attached to their privileges that only a revolution would dislodge it. In a world that, some thirty to forty years earlier, had begun to tear down colonial empires and denounce governments which practiced racial segregation, South Africa had become a pariah, subject to boycotts of investment, travel, and trade. Now it was being redeemed, taking its place among nations which respected civil rights and democratic processes. This was indeed a revolution – whose final act was peaceful. Three weeks earlier, a part of the vast press corps assembled to observe the electoral revolution in South Africa had been called away to report on another sort of event in another part of Africa. On April 6, what the press described as a “tribal bloodbath” began in Kigali, capital of Rwanda. It started when the plane carrying the countrys President, returning from a peace discussions in Arusha, Tanzania, was shot down.

Workers, peasants, and the crisis of colonialism

In the late 1930s and 1940s, colonial rule choked on the narrowness of the pathways it had created. Trying to confine Africans to tribal cages, seeking to extract from them what export products and labor it could without treating them as “workers,” “farmers,” “townsmen,” or “citizens,” colonial regimes discovered that Africans would not stay in the limited roles assigned to them. Instead, the constriction created the very sort of danger administrators feared. Urban unrest within a very rural continent challenged colonial governments; a small number of wage workers threatened colonial economies; a tiny educated elite undercut the ideological pretenses of colonialism; supposed “pagans” worshiping local gods and ancestors produced Christian and Muslim religious movements of wide scope and uncertain political significance; and commercial farmers – in a continent of “subsistence” producers – made demands for a political voice for themselves and opportunities for their children that colonial systems could not meet. These problems came together in the years after World War II, a war which had exposed the hypocrisy of colonizing ideologies and the weakness underlying the apparent power of colonizing regimes. The conjuncture of diverse forms of African mobilization and the loss of imperial self-confidence produced a crisis in colonial policy and colonial thinking, a crisis that would lead governments, in something of a panic, to swing the pendulum toward an obtrusively reformist conception of their own role. But from the vantage point of the 1940s, it was not clear where all this ferment would end.