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The New International, Summer 1956

A. Giacometti

The Working Class Movement in Tropical Africa

Part I: Africa’s Changing Economic Organization

From The New International, Vol. XXII No. 2, Summer 1956, pp. 121–133.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

Introduction

Within the last few years Africa’s societies have changed rapidly and fundamentally. The general trend is well known and irreversible: a change from a tribal society to an industrial one, from a subsistence economy to a market economy, and from colonial status to independence.

The African labor movement has been a product of this process. Today, it has become more and more an active factor, a leading and unifying force in the battle for African emancipation.

The rise of the labor movement took place simultaneously with the decline of European colonialism in Asia and Latin America; it has reached maturity as European colonialism, backed by the economic and military might of the United States, is preparing its last ditch stand on the African continent.

European colonialism is a concrete reality in Africa; Russia and China are remote myths. Stalinism attempts to use this situation to influence the new parties of African nationalism and the African labor movement. Its purpose is to use the African masses as pawns in a battle which is not their own: as the requirements of Russian foreign policy change, their struggles will be paralyzed or turned into disastrous adventures.

Africa is now a stake in the power struggle between the United States and Russia. Its future depends on the extent to which the African people will be able to defend their own interests against these two great powers. In short, it depends on their struggle for independence, for the control of the administration and the economy of the continent. The success of this struggle, again, depends on its being conducted by the Africans’ own organizations and leaders, with their own methods and their own ideas.

Today the burden of this struggle rests in the main with the African working class. Its cause is the cause of all socialists and democrats.

Finally, it is at least as important to know one’s allies as it is to know one’s enemies. We hope that the following notes, concerning the formation and the rise of the African working class, its organization into a social and political movement, and its intervention in the politics of African independence, will serve this purpose. [A]
 

The Economy

African society is the product of the African economy. To understand the society, basic facts about the economy must first be recalled.

The economy in Tropical Africa is colonial, organized to produce the maximum amount of profit in the shortest possible time. As the rate of profit is in ratio to the amount of variable capital, the most profitable enterprise in a backward area is based almost exclusively on the exploitation of a labor force.

In a sparsely populated country with a low level of technical development, too weak to resist conquest, this principle led to the triumph of an economy in which the colonized country sold its raw material and its labor, and bought finished products in exchange, thereby maintaining indefinitely technical backwardness and a low standard of living.

Thus, the great capitalist societies that built the African economy of today invested in those economic activities that could be carried on with hardly any equipment at all, such as marketing of agricultural products, of timber, etc., or those which demanded very little equipment in proportion to the return, such as mining. In order to carry the wealth out of the country, transport facilities were needed: railways, roads and harbors. [B]

The railways, the harbors and, in the long run, the mines needed a stable labor force to operate efficiently; the railwaymen, the longshoremen and later the mineworkers became the stable core of the African working class.

The plantations needed first of all land, which they acquired by driving out the African tribes that inhabited it. Second, they needed large masses of seasonable workers, who were constituted by the uprooted peasants and tribesmen who had had their land taken away from them, or who were no longer able to make a living from the exploitation of their land alone. When voluntary labor wasn’t available in sufficient numbers, it was made available by force. Roads, railways and harbors were built with forced labor, at a tremendous cost in human lives and leading to a further disorganization of African agriculture.

Thus, a second category of workers arose: an unsettled, unorganized mass of unskilled proletarians, people who were “de-tribalized,” that is, torn out of their customary way of life, without being “urbanized.”

There were several important consequences to this “cheap labor” system. One of them has been a tremendous development of migratory labor. Over 100,000 men, women and children migrate each year from the Belgian territory of Ruanda-Urandi to Uganda and Tanganyika. About 140,000 migrate from Nyasaland to Southern Rhodesia and to the Union of South Africa. Officially about 100,000 and, unofficially, about 200,000 more, leave the Portuguese colony of Mozambique, also to work in Southern Rhodesia and in South Africa. Over 130,000 workers migrate to the Gold Coast from the neighboring territories under French and British rule.

These are only the most important migratory currents. There are also seasonal migrations within the different territories, but their volume is difficult to assess. In French West Africa, for instance, there is such a migratory current from the territories of the interior (French Sudan, Niger Colony and Upper Volta) to the coastal areas (Senegal, Dahomey, Togoland and Ivory Coast.) [1]

This migratory labor system, however, has disastrous consequences for the economy. First of all, it is impossible for a migrant to become skilled or efficient because of his working and living conditions. He travels sometimes hundreds of miles, often with his family, exposed to diseases and to great hardships. His wages are very low because, being in dire need, he is in no position to bargain with the employer. He hopes that subsistence agriculture will fill the gap between the wage and what is needed to keep him and his family alive; the employer knows this, and determines wages on the assumption that they are not supposed to keep a man alive by themselves. Furthermore, if the migrant works on plantations, his job is generally seasonal, and never lasts long enough to give him a chance to acquire some skill. In addition, labor laws, even if they exist, are almost impossible to apply in a situation where the majority of workers is not permanently settled – this, of course, also applies to trade unions.

Finally, the migrant labor system tends to contribute by its very existence to the further destruction of the subsistence economy. If entire families set out looking for work and food in other territories, it may lead to the depopulation of whole regions; if only men migrate, the backbreaking work of subsistence farming is left to the women alone. “Accordingly, not only will those who are left behind suffer physically, but native African agriculture and tribal life will weaken and deteriorate. Inferior methods of cultivation necessitated by the absence of the stronger and more experienced may reduce the crops, and the worsening of the population to food potential may in turn lower the standard of living in the subsistence sector. Thus the needs of the plantations may be met at the expense of production for subsistence.” [2] [C]

A second, related consequence of the “cheap labor” system is the instability of even the industrial workers in the urban centers. George Pad- more gives a description of African society in Gambia in the early 1930’s, which shows the urban proletariat in its early stages. He writes:

An industrial proletariat in the modern sense of the word hardly exists in Gambia. Most of the so-called workers are landless peasants rather than proletarians. The others are people who plant ground-nuts, drift into the “Colony” where they turn their hands to odd jobs until the crop season, when they return to their farms in the “Protectorate.” In other words, they are semi-proletarians, with one foot in the country and the other in the town but with their ideology definitely rooted in rural life ... Apart from this class of urban toilers there is a small class of skilled artisans. They come closer to the definition of a modern proletariat. They are chiefly employed by the Public Works Department and the trading companies. Boat building for the Gambia River trade is carried on along the Bathurst waterfront by native shipwrights. Some of them are independent builders, others are employed by the companies and by private traders who are mostly Syrian. There is never a shortage of labor in the Colony, for apart from the hundreds of idle-bodied men always available, private employers as well as government hire women and children. They are even cheaper than the unemployed. [4]

To some extent this situation still exists today. It is difficult to generalize about the situation in Tropical Africa, for not all territories developed at the same pace. Certain territories are entering today a stage of economic development reached by other territories twenty years ago. What may no longer be true today in Gambia, is true in French Equatorial Africa or in Mozambique.

In 1949 a sociological survey was undertaken by the University of Natal among the African workers of the Dunlop rubber plant in Durban. Among other things, it showed that 93 per cent of these workers still owned land in the reserves, and that only 4.8 per cent had had their families living with them in an urban area for at least three years. [5] Here too, in one of the most advanced sectors of the continent, we have workers “with one foot in the country and the other in town.”

The reliance on a piece of land in the subsistence sector also accounts lor the extremely high turnover rate in industrial jobs. In Durban, an analysis of approximately 7,500 jobs held by 2,200 persons between 1917 and 1942 showed that 50 per cent lasted less than 6 months, 68 per cent less than one year and only 5 per cent more than three years. However, the survey also showed that, at Dunlop’s “the longer the African worker’s experience of wage employment, the shorter is his absence from it.”

Within the framework of a colonial system developing without meeting any resistance, the impact of the industrial revolution was far more destructive in terms of social values and human lives in Tropical Africa than it had been anywhere else. Nowhere else was the working class so defenseless. [D] China, Japan, or India, North Africa and the Middle East, all had a large class of artisans, organized in guilds that would often foreshadow trade unions. In Tropical Africa, no such class existed except, to some extent, in West Africa. [E] There was no industry comparable to the foundries or textile works that existed, for instance, in India before the British conquest.

Towards the end of the 1930’s, the African working-class was composed of a tiny nucleus of transport workers and miners, most of the miners being migratory; of a mass of peasants doing forced labor on plantations or public works, or producing cash-crops for trading companies under conditions of peonage; finally a mass of landless, migrating peasants. All but a tiny minority were unskilled.

The coming of World War II changed this picture in the more advanced regions. First of all, it lifted the colonial economy out of the depression. Strategical raw materials boomed; industry had to be built in certain sectors after the loss of European industry and the difficulty of communicating with the rest of the world. [F] East Africa and the Sudan became war bases. Here are examples of the jump that occurred in the production of coal, electricity and minerals in certain African territories (the figures for coal are in 1,000 t., for electricity in 1,000 kw.-hrs. and the minerals are exports other than gold in million U.S. dollars):

Thus the second world war extended a process to Tropical Africa that had only begun in the Union of South Africa during the first world war. A rapid industrial growth transformed the social structure of the Belgian Congo, of the Rhodesias and, to a lesser extent, of the British territories in East and West Africa. A working class, about twice the size of the prewar working class, developed. [G] [10]

But even more important than the numerical growth was the qualitative change that took place in the new working class.

Industry and mining on a large scale could not be pursued profitably with a migrating and unstable labor force, by definition incapable of sustained work or of acquiring skills. Even the plantations found that cash crops could not be exploited efficiently with migrant labor.

Moreover, tribal life had been disorganized to such an extent by the migrations that certain regions were in danger of being depopulated to to the point of seriously diminishing food production. This in turn drove more people out of the subsistence economy, forcing them to try to make a living elsewhere. In Nyasaland, for instance, the extent of seasonal migration became so large that the government had to introduce legislation in 1948 creating a closed season for emigration between November and February, in order to ensure that crops for local consumption and for export would be planted.

So, the large companies in Tropical Africa began to settle their labor force near the place of employment by providing certain facilities that had not existed before (relatively decent housing, easier access to skilled jobs, etc.) This is a policy that has been followed by Firestone in Liberia, by Unilever in West Africa and especially by the Union Minière du Haut Katanga in the Belgian Congo. In 1925, when migrant labor was still prevalent in the Belgian Congo, the Union Minière employed 13,849 African workers who had with them 2,507 women and 779 children. By 1952, the company had built mining villages which housed 18,465 men, 14,647 women and about 28,000 children. As Basil Davidson puts it, “while rural populations in the central basin of the Congo dwindle and threaten to disappear, here in the arid Katanga modern industry has created an entirely new urban population.” [11]

In 1952 it was found that over half of the 20,000 Africans employed by the Union Minière had been steadily employed by this company for ten years, and that 3,566 had worked for it over sixteen years. [12]

Employing migrant labor on a large scale for mining today only subsists on the South African Rand. In the copper mines of Southern Rhodesia an intermediary system exists. There, a large portion of the African mineworkers is settled within bicycling distance of the mines, while others still migrate from Nyasaland and Mozambique.

Orde Browne remarked in 1946:

“In all cases, however, it will be observed that the employer is a large mining concern; the great numbers usually required, and the considerable capital available, no doubt account for the more advanced and experienced policy of these important undertakings.” [13]

These are the basic factors which shaped the African economy, the African society and the African working class. The economy consists of three sectors in uneasy balance; a primitive tribal sector of subsistence farming; the African cash-crop sector, composed of small peasants who produce for the market; thirdly, the European commercial sector. In 1950, 60 per cent of the total adult male population was engaged in production for subsistence, 18 per cent were peasants producing for the market and 13 per cent were wage workers employed outside of the framework of indigenous rural economy. The trend, however, is towards the last two sectors growing at the expense of the first. Numerous people give up subsistence farming in order to acquire consumers goods and also because subsistence farming can’t keep up with the increase in population. In the African cash-crop sector, many peasants also leave in order to escape the exactions and the state of bondage that are imposed upon them by the authorities or the companies, and become migrant laborers. [14]

The proportion of people producing for the market is strongest in the Belgian Congo, where industry has developed, and in the Gold Coast, where cocoa growing dominates agriculture. It is weakest in French West Africa. Within the wage-earning population, agriculture occupies one third of the total. Large masses of migrant labor, instability of the African urban population, a high rate of turnover remain characteristic of a large part of the African working class.

Southern Rhodesia, the Belgian Congo and the Union of South Africa are the only territories south of the Sahara where heavy industry exists to a significant extent, and consequently where an industrial working class, other than miners and railwaymen, exists. [H]

If one applies to African society the image of the pyramid, we have the three sectors described above superimposed, with subsistence farming forming the base; on top, a small point of permanent wage workers, with an even smaller top composed of permanent industrial workers. An African bourgeoisie hardly exists, except in the Gold coast, in Nigeria and in the Ivory Coast (F.W.A.), where it has developed from the top layers of the native peasantry.
 

The Working Class

It is time now to turn to statistics for a closer look at the African working class, its numerical strength, its nature and its composition.

Before going any further, however, a remark is in order about statistics in Africa. Practically all vital statistics including labor statistics are unreliable, and can be considered at best as approximations, at worst as deliberate attempts to hide reality. Contrary to export-import statistics, which are always plentiful and accurate, census figures and vital statistics are often highly conjectural, being usually based on sampling or on even more approximate methods. Labor statistics have begun to appear only in recent years, under the pressure of the trade union movement in Africa and, to some extent, of democratic opinion abroad: so far the reports of the colonial powers to the United Nations remain the most complete data available.

Each territory publishes its own estimates and establishes categories according to its own criteria, often at variance with criteria used by other governments. The French government, for instance, in an attempt to mask its failure to develop the colonies, has inflated the category “industry” by adding workers employed in construction and public works to those employed in manufacturing. According to one estimate, out of a total of 140,000 workers classified under “industry” for the whole of French Africa (excluding Madagascar) in 1951, no more than 30,000 were employed in “manufacturing,” i.e. industry proper. [16] The difference is all the more important as the vast majority of “public works” and “construction” workers are common laborers, and often employed only temporarily.

Some governments classify processing of agricultural products (cotton ginning, oil pressing, etc.) under “agricultural,” others classify it under “industry,” again inflating the latter category, even though much of the processing is done on plantations and is closely related to rural life. Here, as in other respects, British statistics seem to be more reliable than the others.

Another misleading habit of the French government is to classify under “government service” people who are compelled by the local administrations to perform what amounts to forced labor (road building and repairs, etc.). In a 1951 statistic the French government included 145,000 workers under “administration and public services” for all of French Africa, out of which it is estimated that two thirds represent forced labor. [17]

In our tables, we have not separated construction, public works and manufacturing for the sake of expediency. Generally speaking, “construction and public works” is much more important in French Equatorial Africa, Nyasaland, Uganda, Gold Coast. The reverse is true only in the Belgian Congo, in Southern Rhodesia and in Madagascar, although in the latter case the statistics are questionable. Here are three examples:

We have tried to isolate civil-servants only under “government service.” When this was not possible, they are classified under “other.” Only the figure for the French Cameroons has been left unchanged: it is a safe assumption that at the most one fourth of the 35,400 are civil servants.

The category “agriculture” includes fishing, cattle breeding and, in the case of the British territories, agricultural processing industries. “Mining” also includes quarrying. “Other” is a catch-all category including everybody who can’t be classified elsewhere: white collar workers in private industry and commerce, salespeople in shops, teachers, domestic servants, waiters, etc. plus other categories which couldn’t be isolated otherwise (Southern Rhodesia, Belgian Congo, French West Africa). The statistics for Somaliland, Sierra Leone and the British Cameroons are incomplete but still include the majority of the wage earners of these territories. [18]

The high proportion of wage earners in the Rhodesias reflects the relatively high degree of industrialization of these territories, as we have seen earlier.

Gambia has been left out, because no data other than the total number of wage-workers could be obtained. In 1952 this total was 3,062, or 1.1 per cent of a total population of 291,593. [19]

Certain other countries had to be left out altogether because no data could be obtained that were anywhere near complete. This is the case in particular for Ethiopia, which publishes numerous export-import statistics, but hardly anything on its population. To find a complete estimate of the country’s working class, we would have to go back to the fascist statistics of the Italian occupation period, which gives 54,400 as the figure for the total non-Italian working class in 1937 and 89,000 in 1939. [20] The only contemporary figure available is the number of workers employed in manufacturing, i.e. in canneries, sawmills, repair shops, printing plants, brick factories, etc. This figure is 8,552 for 1951. The largest industry appears to be the lumber industry, with 12 enterprises and 1,215 workers; the largest single concentration of workers is a cotton mill in Dire-Dawa with 1,070 workers. [21] The personnel employed by the Franco-Ethiopian Railroad, which includes workers in French Somaliland and in Ethiopia, numbered 4,077 in 1952. The Ethiopian Air Lines, a subsidiary of TWA, employed 241 people in 1950. (Guide Book of Ethiopia, Chamber of Commerce, Addis Ababa 1954)

Aside from these industrial workers, there is a large number of agricultural workers on coffee and cotton plantations, about which no data are available. Finally, there are probably a few oil workers in the Ogaden province, where American companies have started drilling recently, and a number of longshoremen in Massawa and Assab. The official propaganda sheet New Times and Ethiopia News tells us nothing except that “there are ample resources available at wages far below existing rates in Europe and the United States. The Ethiopian worker is intelligent, affable, willing to learn, and is a hard worker.” (March 26, 1955.)

Figures about Liberia are almost equally difficult to obtain. The largest enterprise by far is the Firestone rubber plantation (1,240 square miles) which employs between 25,000 and 30,000 workers. The main concentrations of workers other than Firestone’s seem to be about 400 in the new Boomi-Hills iron mine, which is owned by US Steel, and the Monrovia harbor. [22]

The Portuguese colonies of Angola, Mozambique and Guinea publish statistics but they are few and fragmentary.

For Angola, reliable estimates vary between a total figure of approximately 400,000 (300,000 “free” workers and 100,000 forced laborers) and a total figure of 779,000 [23] (400,000 “free” and 379,000 forced). Official sources admit to 101,994 forced labors in 1949. [24] According to Basil Davidson, little difference exists between forced and “free” labor in the interior, while some differentiation has begun to appear on the coast. We also know that 17,402 workers were employed in mining in 1949. [25]

Of Mozambique, even less is known. A rough idea is conveyed by the figures for the native, economically active population for 1940. [26] The total native population is about 5 million. Out of these, 2,280,555 live “on the land,” i.e. are peasants. Then, 104,415 people leave the colony to work abroad (Union of South Africa, Southern Rhodesia) – this figure probably fell short of reality by about 50,000 already in 1940. The rest is divided as follows:

This figure includes employers as well as workers, but it is reasonable to assume that the latter constitute a great majority, especially among the native population. This may, however, not be true in commerce, included under “others.” For 1952, we have the following figures for wage earners [27]:

“Manufacturing” means building materials, food, textile, leather, chemical industries and electrical power. The overwhelming majority of the above workers is composed of Africans, with a small handful of Europeans and Asians.

There are also railroad-workers and longshoremen in Beira and Lourenço-Marques, the two outlets of Rhodesia to the sea. No data are available concerning their number. As to forced labor, nothing has been published since 1928. The figure was 143,128 in 1927 and 207,233 in 1928. [28]

The territories included in the above table have a population of 91,596,000, that is, approximately 80 per cent of the total population of Tropical Africa. The wage workers represent about 5 per cent of this population, or 4.5 million.

Out of these, about a quarter is composed of workers in manufactur ing, mining and railway transport. As we have seen, manufacturing means almost always light industry: there is no heavy industry to speak of except in Southern Rhodesia and in the Belgian Congo.

About a third are agricultural workers: the largest single group The rest is scattered among various occupa tions; in terms of working class organization and consciousness, the civil servants carry weight in the territories under French rule, the shop and distributive workers in the British territories.

The vast majority of these workers is unskilled. Here is the ratio for four territories [29]:

On the Firestone plantations in Liberia the ratio in 1947 was 22,000 common laborers to 2,500 skilled and semi-skilled workers. [30] Even in modern, highly mechanized industrial enterprises, unskilled workers often predominate. The “Chaniers navals et industriels du Congo Belge” in Leopoldville employs a total of 3,284 workers, out of which 270 are white collar workers and engineers, 450 riveters and 2,215 unskilled. [31]

It should be added that many of the “skilled” workers are actually semi-skilled, and some of the “semi-skilled” barely specialized unskilled workers, at least in the French statistics.

Women and children are still employed on a large scale, often at heavy work. Characteristically, the number of children employed is often higher than the number of women. In Tanganyika (1949) 22,775 women were employed – 11,150 in agriculture – as against 39,362 children and 411,851 men. In Nyasaland, the proportion was 4,826 women to 17,519 children and 72,347 male common laborers. In Togoland under French rule 1,441 women, 2,160 children and 17,468 men were employed in 1954. [32]

Numerically, this working class may seem very weak but its role is out of proportion to its numbers, due to its organization and because of its strategic position in the economy.

For purposes of comparison, let us recall that in China there were only two million industrial workers in 1937, that is 0.5 per cent of the total population. [33] In Russia, only 10 per cent of the population earned their living from industry, mining and transport in 1913. [34] [I]

Furthermore, the extent of proletarianization goes far beyond the actual core of wage-workers. In French West Africa, in British East Africa, in Central Africa and in the Portuguese colonies the old forms of tribal and peasant life are collapsing very rapidly as the destruction of the subsistence economy continues. Pierre Naville quotes an authority who states that in French West Africa the immense majority of peasants “no longer remain within the framework of the old social institutions of the peasantry which protected them. On the contrary, they are exposed, in the villages themselves, to powerful factors tending towards proletarianization, such as labor requirements they cannot possibly fulfill, carrier duties, the emigration of young people ...” [35]

(In the next installment Comrade Giacometti analyzes the trade union movement of Tropical Africa. – Ed.)

* * *

References for Table “Industrial Classification of Wage-Workers
in the Principal Territories of Tropical Africa.”

1. 1952 (estimate; United Nations Demographic Yearbook 1954, New York 1954).

2. 1952 (Information from Non-Self-Governing Territories: Summary and Analysis Transmitted Under Article 73e of the Charter During the Year 1953; United Nations, New York 1954.) The total number of European workers was 45,500 in 1953. (Source: see note 10.)

3. 1952 (Annual Report of the Trusteeship Council for 1953, United Nations, New York 1954.)

4. 1954 (Report of the United Nations’ Visiting Mission to Trust Territories in East Africa in 1954, New York, 1955.)

5. 1953 (Information from Non-Self-Governing Territories. etc.; A/3107, December 22, 1955.)

6. 1954 (Source: as [5].) The total number of wage-workers on the Comoro Islands, a dependency of Madagascar, was 9,760 in 1954.

7. 1954 (Information from Non-Self-Governing Territories, etc. A/3109, January 16, 1956.)

8. 1953 (Report of the Belgian Government to the Trusteeship Council of the United Nations 1954/1955.)

9. 1953 (Source as [7].)

10. 1952 (Review of Economic Activity in Africa 1950 to 1954, United Nations, New York 1955.)

11. 1951 (Source: as [10]).) The total number of non-African workers was 19,500 in Northern Rhodesia (1952) and 51,400 in Southern Rhodesia (1951).

12. 1952 (Source: as [7].)

13. Includes Senegal, French Guinea, Ivory Coast, French Sudan. No data could be obtained for Dahomey, Niger Colony, Mauritania and Upper Volta, which have a total population of 7,430,000. However, the majority of wage-earners in FWA are included in our figure: according to an official statistic quoted in Le développement de l’économie de marché en Afrique tropicale (United Nations, 1954), the total number of wage earners for French West Africa was 244,300 in 1947.

14. 1947 (Pierre Naville: Données statistiques sur la structure de la main d’oeuvre salariée et de l’industrie en Afrique Noire, Présence Africaine, 13, Paris, 1952.)

15. 1951 (Source: as [10].)

16. 1947 (Report of the British Government to the. Trusteeship Council of the United Nations.) Estimate of “cocoa farming” and “public service” as the two main categories.

17. 1954 (Rapport annuel du Gouvernement français a l’Assemblée generale des Nations Unies sur l’administration du Togo placé sous la tutelle de la France, année 1954, Paris 1955.)

18. 1954 (Rapport annuel ... sur l’administration du Cameroun ... année 1954, Paris 1955.)

19. Not counting Togoland and the Cameroons under British administration, nor Somaliland.

* * *

Footnotes

A. Not all parts of Africa are included in this survey. North Africa and the Sudan have been left out, as they are distinct from the rest of the continent by culture, by language and by history. The problems of these countries are more closely related to those of the Middle East and are also better known. At the other extremity, the Union of South Africa again represents a special situation, not comparable to the situation in the other parts of Tropical Africa. However, it is difficult to understand the problems of the labor movement in Southern Rhodesia, for instance, without reference to the same problems in South Africa. For this reason, the labor movement in South Africa has also been considered here, to the extent that its history and its present situation helps to understand the labor movement in the rest of the continent.

B. Since the purpose of the trading companies was not to equip the continent but to exploit it at the least possible expense to themselves, these transport facilities have always been inadequate instruments for economic development. Most of the time, the rolling stock is antiquated, the roads are mere tracks, there are ferries instead of bridges, the harbors are bottlenecks of trade. Therefore, colonial governments, periodically announce “development plans for overseas territories," which are usually only plans to modernize transport equipment. Applying the time- honored principle of “socializing" expenses and pocketing profits, the great trading and mining companies that own Africa got the governments to pay for the modernization of the means by which they are looting the continent. Typical in this respect is the French plan of government investments (FIDES) or the "economic development plan" of the Portuguese government. For a detailed discussion of these plans, see: A.L. Dumaine, La signification réelle du second plan d’équipment et de modernisation des Territories d’Outre Mer, Présence Africaine, April–July 1955, Marcel Willems, Un bilan de la colonisation francaise: l’économie de l’Afrique noire, Les Temps Modernes, April 1955, and Un plan de développement des colonies portugaises in Présence Africaine, August–September 1955.

C. An interesting account of the mechanism of migrant labor in British East Africa, combining genteel understatement with unusual frankness, may be read in Major Orde Browne’s report to the British Colonial Office:

“The migration (from Ruanda-Urundi) is of a somewhat complicated nature. The natives concerned inhabit an area which though fertile, productive and healthy, is nevertheless so densely populated that they are constantly exposed to the risk of famine, and furthermore have few local resources from which they can obtain a modicum of cash to purchase the more obviously desirable imports. The motive behind the migration is therefore not only a desire to earn the better wages available in British Territory, but also frequently the hope of securing ampler nourishment than is available in their homes. The obvious and traditional goal of their peregrinations is Uganda, where the local proprietors of the very considerable native plantations are well pleased to employ these wandering strangers, offering them little in the shape of cash, but attractive conditions, easygoing employment and ample food. To such a degree has this established itself that Uganda would be gravely inconvenienced were there any interruption in the normal flow. In Tanganyika the movement has been more recent in origin, and the food factor has hitherto outweighed the desire for cash; there have in the past been serious crises owing to the resources of the Territory being suddenly overstrained by a flood of semi-starving and diseased immigrants. There is, however, a definite tendency of late to endeavor to utilize this source of labor, and the situation is growing rather more like that in Uganda. In Kenya the problem has not so far taken concrete shape.” [3]

If it is remembered that 40,000 people starved to death in Ruanda-Urundi in 1944, the above, freely translated into English, could be summed up as follows: the economies of Uganda and Tankanyika are dependent on a state of permanent undernourishment bordering on starvation in Ruanda-Urundi.

D. Not only against mistreatment, low wages, etc., but also against massive lay-offs or dismissals as occurred during the depressions. Mining and plantation farming, the two underpinnings of the colonial economy, are particularly sensitive to depressions. Padmore reports that in Northern Rhodesia, due to the crisis in agriculture and the rationalization and speed-up in the copper mines, employment in mining and on the plantations dropped from 79,000 in 1931 to 40,000 in 1932. At the same time, production rose:

In South West Africa, the employment in mining dropped from 7,750 in 1930 to 1,719 in 1932. At that time, the 1,719 Africans were paid £141.487, while the 393 Europeans, also employed in the mines, were paid £125,765. The situation has changed little in this respect. In Southern Rhodesia, employment in mining did not decrease from 1931 to 1932, but increased from 35,000 to 36,000. The payroll for the mineworkers, however, decreased from £624,000 to £571,000. In the Belgian Congo, the mineworkers employed by the Union Minière du Haut Katanga were 17,257 in 1929 and 3,758 in 1932. [6]

E. A.W. Pim writes that West African societies before the colonial conquest were “military in type but all had established industries, some showing a considerable artistic development, and possessed substantial internal commerce.” In East Africa, the only comparable society was the Kingdom of Buganda in Uganda. [7]

F. Internal trade in Africa amounted to 7.7 per cent of the total volume of exports in 1938; by 1948 it had risen to 13.0 per cent as a result of the war. (Naville, Structure de l’industrie et du commerce, Présence Africaine, 13.) [8]

G. The increase of the urban African population is another striking indication of the simultaneous development of industry and of an urban proletariat. In 1940 Leopoldville, the capital of the Belgian Congo had about 45,000 African inhabitants; in 1954 it had nearly 250,000. The African population of Elizabethville grew from 8,301 in 1940 to 33,496 in 1948. [9] Brazzaville, Dakar and other cities grew at the same rate. numerical growth was the qualitative change that took place in the new working class.

H. In 1948, the Southern Rhodesian government built a steel mill at Que Que which produced 36,000 tons of pig iron and 25,000 tons of steel in 1953. In 1954 a small blast furnace and an open hearth furnace were added; pig iron production is expected to rise to 80,000 tons annually and steel production to 65,000 tons. A small manufacturing industry has also arisen: steel tubes at Que Que, machine-tools at Salisbury, etc. The relative degree of industrial development of the main areas of Tropical Africa can be measured to a large extent by the consumption of crude steel (thousands of metric tons) and of energy (equivalent of thousands of metric tons of coal per capita). The following figures apply to 1953 [15]:

I. In 1930, three years after the Chinese revolution, there were only 800,000 industrial workers in China (excluding miners and railroad workers, but including some artisans in the cities.)

* * *

References

1. Pierre Naville: Travail, salaires et prix, Présence Africaine, 13, Paris 1952.

2. ILO Committee on Work on Plantations, General Report, Third Session, Geneva 1955.

3. Major G. St.J. Orde Browne, Labor Conditions in East Africa, H.M. Colonial Office, London 1946.

4. George Padmore, How Britain Rules Africa, London 1936.

5. Dept, of Economics, University of Natal: The African Factory Workers, Oxford 1950.

6. Padmore, op. cit.

7. Sir A.W. Pim: The Financial and Economic History of the African Tropical Territories, Oxford 1940.

8. Pierre Naville, La structure de l’industrie et du commerce, Présence Africaine, 13, Paris, 1952.

9. Basil Davidson, African Turning Point, New Statesman and Nation, May 29, 1954, and Le Congo Belge au carrefour de son destin, Présence Africaine, April–July 1955.

10. Pierre Naville, La structure de l’industrie et du commerce.

11. Basil Davidson, New Statesman and Nation, May 29, 1954.

12. Basil Davidson, Présence Africaine, April–July 1955.

13. Orde Browne, op. cit.

14. Le développement de l’économie de marché en Afrique Tropicale, Nations Unies, New York 1954.

15. Review of Economic Activity in Africa 1950 to 1954, United Nations, New York 1955.

16. Marcel Willems, Un bilan de la colonisation française: l’économie de l’Afrique noire, Les Temps Modernes, April 1955.

17. Ibid.

18. See sources for table Industrial Classification of Wage-Workers in the Principal Territories of Tropical Africa.

19. Non-Self-Goveming Territories: Summary and Analysis of Information Transmitted to the Secretary-General During 1953, United Nations, New York 1954.

20. Confederazione Fascista di Industriali: Industria in A.O.I., Roma 1939.

21. Economic Handbook of Ethiopia, Addis Abbaba 1951.

22. Georges Balandier, La main d’oeuvre chez Firestone-Libéria, Présence Africaine, 13, and: Gerard Periot, Le Libéria sous les satrapes et l’exploitation américaine, L’Observateur, April 23, 1953.

23. Basil Davidson, Angola: économie du colonialisme, Présence Africaine, August–September 1955.

24. [Provincia de Angola], Annuario Estatistico, Luanda 1949.

25. Ibid.

26. Provincia de Mocambique, Censo da Populacao em 1940, Lourenço-Marques 1944.

27. Provincia de Mocambique, Estatistica Industrial 1953, Lourenço-Marques 1954 and: Annuario Estatistico 1952, Lourenço-Marques 1954.

28. Colonia de Mocambique: Annuario Estatistico 1934, Lourenço-Marques 1935.

29. See sources for table Industrial Classification of Wage-Workers in Principal Territories of Tropical Africa.

30. Balandier, op. Cit.

31. [No note in printed version]

32. Pierre Naville, Données statistiques sur la structure de la main d’oeuvre salariée de l’industrie en Afrique noire, Présence Africaine, 13.

33. Pierre Naville, La Chine future, Paris 1952.

34. T. Cliff, Stalinist Russia, London 1955.

35. Delavignette, Paysannerie et prolétariat, Peuples d’outre-mer et Civilisation occidentale. Quoted by Naville in Données statistiques.

 
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