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Relocating Labor: Sources from the Nineteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Stephen Rockel
Stephen Rockel*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Extract

It is generally recognized that during the period from ca. 1450 to 1900, when commercial relations between sub-Saharan Africa and the outside world were extended and strengthened, a wide range of systems and institutions for mobilizing labor were in use in different regions. I speak here of those operating beyond the primary locus of household and lineage. Such means of labor production and control ranged from chattel slavery to pawnship, corvées, various kinds of patronclient relations, bride service, cooperative labor, and also, in more and more contexts over time, wage labor. Slavery, of course, has received the attention of many scholars, as have some of the other categories. However the study of wage labor in precolonial times is still in its infancy.

For those wishing to pursue research on precolonial wage labor in Africa the lack of documentary sources has proved to be a significant barrier. The nature of proletarianized or semi-proletarianized wage labor in colonial societies or societies closely tied into the capitalist system usually demands of researchers that they look to sources of an official or institutional nature. For example, one can think of the records of companies, trade unions, benefit societies, colonial governments, courts, commissions of inquiry, and so on. But for precolonial Africa these types of documentary sources usually do not exist. This has led many scholars to say that the concept of wage labor is itself not useful when contemplating African labor systems before the onset of colonization. They point to the lack of a cash currency, continuing ties to the land, the temporary nature of much work, the absence of a bourgeoisie, apparent lack of worker consciousness, and so on. But there are other difficulties less related to such theoretical conceptions and generalizations about the supposed non-existence of wage labor which have severely taxed the most resolute historian, and help explain the dearth of written sources.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 22 , January 1995 , pp. 447 - 454
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1995

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References

Notes

1. For the purposes of this paper wage “labor” is defined as work exchanged for payments in an accepted currency.

2. Berry, Sara, Cocoa, Custom, and Socio-Economic Change in Rural Western Nigeria (Oxford, 1975).Google Scholar Berry points out that the labor employed on cocoa farms was remunerated in a number of different of ways, including wages, credit for setting up a farm, and the provision of tools. But from the earliest years of cocoa farming some farmers employed wage laborers.

3. A good example of a list of East African porters in which the headmen's names are followed only by the number of men in their gang is in MacKenzie to Jackson, 10 November 1888, Mombasa Letters, IBEA Co. File 1A, 1888-89, Box 63, MacKinnon Papers, School of Oriental and African Studies, London. For the early colonial period in Kenya see Cooper, Frederick, On the African Waterfront (New Haven, 1987), 30, 36–40.Google Scholar

4. Gutkind, Peter, “The Boatmen of Ghana: The Possibilities of a Pre-Colonial African Labor History” in Hanagan, Michael and Stephenson, Charles, eds., Confrontation, Class Consciousness, and the Labour Process: Studies in Proletarian Class Formation (New York, 1986).Google Scholar

5. Coquery-Vidrovitch, Catherine and Lovejoy, Paul E., eds. The Workers of African Trade (Beverly Hills, 1985).Google Scholar

6. Campbell, Gwyn, “Labour and the transport problem in Imperial Madagascar, 1810-1895,” JAH 21 (1980), 341–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7. I am not the first to make use of such sources. Donald Simpson used some of the same wage lists and contracts in his Dark Companions (London, 1975).Google Scholar Simpson found them useful for this account of some well-known caravan leaders, headmen, and porters in their role as facilitators of the European exploration of East and Central Africa. I am proposing that these sources are potentially useful for social and economic historians among others.

8. Johnson, William Percival, My African Reminiscences 1875-1895 (Westport, Conn, 1970/London, 1924), 111Google Scholar; Martin, B.G., Muslim Brotherhoods in Nineteenth-Century Africa (Cambridge, 1976), 158.Google Scholar For a discussion of Swahili “business literacy” in nineteenth-century East Africa see Geider, Thomas, “Early Swahili Travelogues” in Graebner, Werner, ed., Sokomoko. Popular Culture in East Africa (Amsterdam, 1992), 58–62.Google Scholar Published examples of business documents in Arabic from East Africa are in Thomas, H.B., “Arabic Correspondence Captured in South West Bunyoro in 1895: With a Note on Arab Traders in Bunyoro,” Uganda Journal 13 (1949), 31–38Google Scholar, and Jiddawi, Abdurrahim Mohamed, “Extracts From an Arab Account Book, 1840-1854,” Tanganyika Notes and Records 31 (1951), 25–31.Google Scholar

9. Speke, John Hanning, Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile (New York, 1864) 553–55Google Scholar; Baumann, Oscar, Durch Massailand zur Nilquelle (Berlin, 1894), 370–77.Google Scholar Another porter list, with names only, was published in Stanley, Henry M., How I Found Livingstone (London, n.d.), liii.Google Scholar

10. Rotberg, Robert I., Joseph Thomson and the Exploration of Africa (London, 1971), 306–14.Google Scholar

11. One copy is in the Cameron Papers, Box 1, R.G.S. Archive, London, (henceforth “Cameron/1874”). The other is an enclosure in the Kirk Papers, September 21, 1876, corr. block 1871-80, R.G.S. Archive, (henceforth “Kirk/1874”).

12. Kirk had the task of paying off porters for several British expeditions in East Africa. A partial search of the consular records in the Zanzibar National Archives turned up several sets of accounts with information about porters.

13. This represents only a fraction of all the expedition's porters. At its strongest there were 192 porters plus 34 askari (soldiers), their commander, a storekeeper, six servants, three boys, several (uncounted) women, and slaves (also uncounted) belonging to the men. In addition more porters were hired en route. See Simpson, , Dark Companions, 105–06.Google Scholar The large gap between numbers of this order and the 54 names in the wage book is explained by differences in the terms of hire and perhaps desertions, deaths, and the return of some of the caravan members to the east coast.

14. Cameron/1874, 27.

15. Kirk/1874, 26.

16. LBR.MSS, Notebook, VLC 4/2, Cameron Papers.

17. Smith, , MacKenzie, and Co. Ltd., The History of Smith, MacKenzie & Co. Ltd. (London, 1938[?]), 27.Google Scholar The company, which subsequently became part of the Inchcape group, included in its various operations in East Africa the outfitting of caravans for the Church Missionary Society and the Imperial British East Africa Company, among others. The recruitment of porters was integral to its business.

18. For further details see A.C. Ledger, Smith, MacKenzie and Co. to C.H. Thompson, Government Archives and Museum, Zanzibar, 27 April 1961, enclosed in the notebook.

19. I recognize that the evidence from the Zanzibar notebook relates more to the era of colonial conquest than that of precolonial commerce. Nevertheless, the material is almost identical in its form to that from earlier decades.

20. “Men engaged for Masai Caravan,” Notebook Stanley's Expedition, Zanzibar Museum.

21. Speke, , Journal, 553.Google Scholar

22. Paraphrased in Simpson, , Dark Companions, 57.Google Scholar

23. Published in Rotberg, , Joseph Thomson, 307.Google Scholar

24. A descriptive example with Stanley's usual embellishments is in Stanley, Henry M., Through the Dark Continent (2 vols.: Toronto, 1988), 2: 51–52.Google Scholar

25. E.g., “Regulations to be observed by caravan leaders and others in the engagement and treatment of Porters,” Zanzibar Gazette, 17 October 1894, 9–10.Google Scholar To be fair, the regulations included protective clauses and minimum standards relating to such matters as loads, rations, and punishments.

26. For example Cooper, , On the African Waterfront, 1-2, 36.Google Scholar A fine study from India making the same point is Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Rethinking Working Class History: Bengal, 1890-1940 (Princeton, 1989).Google Scholar

27. I have not mentioned, for instance, pay dockets or pay notes made up as proof of payment of outstanding wages.