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Trade Unionism in Colonial Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

Charles A. Orr
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Extract

Along with modern technology and modern forms of commerce, Europe has exported wage labour, trade unions, and collective bargaining to Africa. Before the coming of Europeans, various forms of indentured, communal, and customary labour existed, but there was no class of wage and salaried workers in the modern sense. During the nineteenth century, a wage labour class emerged, to one degree or another, in every part of Africa. As in other industrialising areas, this soon led to an organised labour movement.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Modern African Studies , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , May 1966 , pp. 65 - 81
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1966

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References

Page 65 note 1 Sachs, E. S., The Choice Before South Africa (London, 1952), pp. 138–41.Google Scholar

Page 65 note 2 Alam, Abdel Raouf Abou, The Labor Movement in Egypt (Washington, 1955), p. 6.Google Scholar

Page 65 note 3 E.g. the Nigerian Civil Service Union, whose first meeting—attended by 33 members—took place on 19 August 1912. Photocopies of the minutes for the years 1912 to 1922 can be obtained from the Library, U.S. Department of Labor, Washington, D.C. These minutes mention similar institutions in Sierra Leone and in the old Lagos Colony and Southern Nigeria Protectorate (which existed 1905–12).

Page 65 note 4 E.g. there is a record of a strike of canoemen in Cape Coast in 1896 and of a ‘trade union’ of carriers in 1898 who were able to ‘dictate to a helpless Government’ the terms on which they would convey loads inland from the coast. See Kimble, David, A Political History of Ghana, vol. I (Oxford, 1963), p. 44.Google Scholar Further research is needed into such African ‘proto-unions’.

Page 65 note 5 Roux, Edward, Time Longer than Rope (London, 1949), pp. 138, 153–4, 161–2, and 175.Google Scholar As early as 1902 the annual conference of the South African Typographical Union heard a motion by H. W. Sampson, who later became Minister of Labour, proposing that a subsidiary union of Natives be formed, because the printing companies were hiring mission-trained African compositors and machinists at lower wages. See Hepple, Alexander, The African Worker in South Africa (London, 1956), p. 7.Google Scholar

Page 68 note 1 Hached, Farhat, ‘Tunisie et syndicalisme’, in Confrontation internationale (Paris), 3, 1949, pp. 19–20.Google Scholar

Page 70 note 1 Fawzi, Saad El Din, The Labour Movement in the Sudan, 1946–1955 (London, 1957), p. 38.Google Scholar

Page 71 note 1 Léon Jouhaux, at a meeting of the I.C.F.T.U. Emergency Committee, mentioned the existence of a trades council in Algiers in 1895, and stated that trade union rights had never been refused to natives in Algeria; but he did not mention when the first unions were founded, nor whether they included Algerian workers. I.C.F.T.U. document, 3/EC/23; Brussels, 1951.

Page 73 note 1 Roux, op. cit. pp. 153–4, 161–3, 170–76, and 184.

Page 74 note 1 For example, four workers were shot dead in the South African European miners' strike of 1884, 21 in their strike of 1913, and nine in the strike of Indian coal miners in 1913; 20 Africans were killed in the Kenya strike of 1922, 10 in 1935 and 17 in 1940 in Northern Rhodesia, seven in the Belgian Congo in 1945, and 10 in South Africa in 1946.

Page 75 note 1 Thompson, Virginia and Adloff, Richard, French West Africa, (London 1958), p. 502.Google Scholar

Page 75 note 2 Montagne, Robert, ‘Naissance du proletariat Marocain’, in Cahiers de l'Afrique et l'Asie (Paris), III, 1948–1950, p. 220.Google Scholar

Page 75 note 3 Coleman, James S., Nigeria: background to nationalism (Berkeley, 1958), pp. 255–6.Google Scholar

Page 76 note 1 Fawzi, op. cit. pp. 25–57.

Page 79 note 1 Other than transport or government workers appear to have been the first to have trade unions in: South Africa (European carpenters—1881), Mozambique (commercial employees—1898), Egypt (cigarette workers—1899), Morocco (construction workers—1936), Kenya (artisans—1937), British Cameroons (plantation workers—1944), Seychelles (building trades—1949), and Basutoland (typographical workers—1952). In some of these territories, transport workers were quick to follow. Thus a racially mixed tram workers' union was organised in Cairo in 1908, as the third trade union to appear in Egypt. Building trades and printing trades were also organised early in several territories.

Page 79 note 2 Although our data do not indicate the occupational composition, we know that European workers were the pioneers in Algeria (1895), Tunisia (1910), and probably in South West Africa during the 1920's. We do not know the occupations of the first workers to organise unions in the French Cameroons and French Equatorial Africa (in the late 1930's), Bechuanaland (in 1948), Eritrea (in 1952 or earlier), French Somaliland, Mauritania, or Réunion.

Page 81 note 1 Berg, Elliot, ‘French West Africa’, in Galenson, W. (ed.), Labor and Economic Development (New York, 1959), pp. 204–5.Google Scholar