Strike action and self-help associations: Protest and culture of African workers after World War I, Zimbabwe
Date
1987-08-26
Authors
Yoshikuni, Tsuneo
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Abstract
The years immediately following the armistice of the First World War
witnessed the rapid growth of labour movements throughout the world.
In sub-Saharan Africa, despite the region's relative weakness of
capitalist penetration, the period was punctuated by stirrings of
industrial discontent among African workers, apart from a contemporary
spate of strikes by European workers in settler-dominated
southern Africa. The places affected ranged from Freetown to Cape
Town, from Lagos to Lourenco Marques, from Nairobi to Johannesburg
and many other industrial centres. Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe,
was no exception. In the period from 1918 to 1921 African workers
are known to have mounted several work stoppages in major towns,
railways, mines, etc. throughout the colony. None of these disputes
was more than a 'skirmish', lasting only a short while, but together
they constituted a militant strike movement or movements. The first
part of this essay is an attempt to describe this upsurge of labour
protest. The protest on such a scale was perhaps the earliest of
its kind in the colony's history and much of it has so far remained
in obscurity; as such, it deserves to be accounted in detail. The image of the African worker that can be obtained from the
first part is, insofar as its concern is restricted to the protest
scenes, inescapably a very much simplified and abridged one: he is
to be depicted as a man rationally and milltantly responding to
economic realities of an industrial society. In order to probe more
deeply into the character of the African worker, the labour protest
of 1918-21 needs to be placed on a wider historical canvass. For
this purpose, the second part of this essay addresses itself to a
case study of the Tonga or Zambesi municipal workers in Salisbury
(Harare) who staged a strike in August 1919. Its emphasis is upon
penetrating the interior of the world which African migrants created
in the face of everyday problems—a world, made of intimate human
ties, where people found natural and effective forms of self-protection
and self-assertion in the industrial situation.
Description
African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 26 October 1987
Keywords
Working class. Zimbabwe. History. 20th century, Strikes and lockouts. Zimbabwe. History. 20th century, Fraternal organizations. Zimbabwe. History. 20th century