8 - Family wages and industrial relations in British Africa

Summary

Something like the French Code du Travail was not a solution available to the British Colonial Office. Legislation had to come from individual colonies and their governors, and Whitehall in the late 1940s was trying to show that it was giving colonies more of a voice in their own affairs. Where settlers were a factor, they got the first chance to use Legislative Councils, whereas in French Africa the influence of colons and commercial was diluted and subordinated to the larger tasks of post-war imperialism. The Colonial Office could often do little more than try to “inculcate a sense of urgency” into colonial governors in regard to his policy initiatives. The tension between imperial center and colonial periphery made it difficult to paper over the ambiguity – felt in London as well as Nairobi – between modernizing reforms and deeply-rooted ideas about race and African culture.

The absence of an institutional capability to act on a pan-African scale was not, for British policy makers, altogether a bad thing. It meant there was no incentive for African trade unionists to organize on a similar scale. The French West African strike intended to influence the code debate in 1952 or those over its implementation would have no anglophone equivalent. No regional trade unions emerged comparable to the West African CGT, and unions had trouble focusing at an empire-wide level on issues of equality with metropolitan workers.