1. Peasants or Proletarians? 1890s-1940s
HI177 | A History of Africa since 1800
Term 2 | Week 2 | Dr Sacha Hepburn

2. Today’s lecture Making colonialism pay
The settler model
The extractive economy
Migrant labour
African workers, farmers and entrepreneurs
Gendering the colonial economy
Women and work
Female (labour) migrants

3. Making colonialism pay (i): the settler model
Settler colonialism was highly uneven
Europeans were vulnerable to tropical diseases
Physical presence was restricted: southern Africa, highlands of Kenya
Whites benefitted from policies of racial exclusion
Land
Africans forced to work for whites
Taxation
Forced labour policies
‘A welfare state for whites’ - Phimister

4. Large European settler home in colonial Kenya
European domesticity in the colonies – Karen Blixen at home in Kenya, c. 1920s
White farmers in Southern Rhodesia, c. 1920s

5. Making colonialism pay (ii): the extractive economy
Extraction and transport of raw materials from colonies to the industrial economies of western Europe
Plantations as a form of extraction
Mineral wealth
Particularly prominent in Southern Africa: gold, diamonds, copper, lead. Later uranium, cobalt.
Industrialisation and urbanisation – migrant labour linking rural and urban areas

6. Diamond mining, Kimberly, South Africa, c. 1890s
Black and white mineworkers, Langlaagte Deep Gold Mine, South Africa, c. 1890s

7. Making colonialism pay (iii): migrant labour
Migrant labour key to industrial and mining economies of Southern Africa
White mineworkers from Britain, Australia, the United States and elsewhere (took highly-paid, skilled jobs)
African workers from across region and as far north as Tanzania (forced into low-paid, ’unskilled’ jobs)
Migrant labour system
Chiefs helped with labour recruitment
6-12 month contracts
Cheap for the mining companies

8. Workers’ quarters in South African mining compounds, c. 1940s

9. Indigenous entrepreneurs and the ‘cash crop revolution’
African peasant producers in the broad belt of tropical western, central and east Africa
E.g. Gold Coast and Ivory Coast
African farmers established cocoa farms from the 1880s
By 1914, Gold Coast was world’s largest single supplier of cocoa
Massive wealth could be generated: Felix Houphouet-Boigny, wealthy cocoa planter and first President of independent Ivory Coast

10. Labourers on a cocoa farm, Gold Coast, 1925
Peanut farming in Senegal, c. 1930s

11. Gendering the colonial economy
Early histories: focus on wage labour and male workers.
Cash-based nature of urban economies.
Women’s access to resources and housing often mediated through men.
Women contributed to urban economies through various economic activities.
Women’s reproductive labour in towns crucial to daily and generational reproduction of labour power.

12. Women and colonial cities
Female migration to urban areas challenged patriarchal nature of African social hierarchies.
Gendered and generational nature of struggles over female migration.

13. Conclusions Making colonialism pay
The settler model
The extractive economy
Migrant labour
African workers, farmers and entrepreneurs
Gendering the colonial economy

14. Email me: s.hepburn@warwick.ac.uk Come to my office hours:
Questions?
me:
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Monday 3-4pm and Friday 11am-12pm
H3.31, third floor Humanities