140227 KU Visions of Equality: Work and Organized Labour in Africa (2019S)

Under the recent conditions of neoliberal globalization and growing inequalities, social conflict has been surging in many African countries. In 2012, a wildcat strike at the Lonmin platinum mine at Marikana (South Africa) was brutally put down by police forces causing the massacre of 34 mine workers. In 2017, Ethiopia experienced its largest wave of strikes since the 1974 revolution. In 2018, three national trade union federations in Nigeria successfully called for a nationwide strike to put pressure on the government to double the countries’ minimum wage for workers. To understand these recent conflicts and demands we will examine processes of labour formation and labour organization in Africa from global history and contemporary perspectives.

The course offers, firstly, an opportunity to examine various forms of work on the African continent, including categories such as white-collar and blue-collar labour, waged and forced labour, domestic work or migrant labour, mining, and or other types of manual labour. We will discuss how different kinds of labour have been gendered and have reflected racialized hierarchies of colonial rule.

In relation to this we will, secondly, investigate the history of organized labour movements and their global connections to the Pan-Africanist diaspora, trade unionist federations and international organisations. Since African workers were the backbone of the labour-intensive colonial economy, organized labour movements could position themselves as significant players in the process of decolonization. Increasingly from the interwar period onward, African workers organized themselves in associations, unions and societies while still under the colonial yoke and sought cooperation with international trade union bodies such as the US-dominated ICFTU and the Soviet-dominated WFTU. With the attainment of independence in most African countries in the 1960s – and some trade union leaders turning into presidents – the new class of postcolonial politicians circumscribed trade unions’ room for maneuver. Since the 1990s, trade unions have been trying to renegotiate their role in neoliberal settings – but in many ways, a narrow trade unionism has posed limits to mobilization as only a minority of the population in most parts of the continent is employed in the formal sector. Recently, some trade unions have responded to this predicament by becoming more inclusive and reviving forms of broader political protests.

Students will have the chance to choose a case study within these broader fields and, in collaboration with other colleagues, contribute to a special exhibition based on their work done during the semester. The exhibition will be shown at the Department of African Studies during the whole 2019/2020 academic year. In preparing their exhibition pieces, students may use not only “classic” forms of paper and printed text but also audio-visual installations, photographs, or other forms they find suitable to present their topic. Students are also invited to use their creativity and organizational skills in the planning of the “Schnittpunkte” event in the first week of October 2019 which will kick off the exhibition.