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Wage labour and capital in Africa: a historical perspective

The studies published in this special issue were presented and discussed at the international workshop Wage Labour, Capital and Precarity in African and Global History, which took place at the International Institute of Social History of Amsterdam and at Leiden University’s Institute for History and African Studies Centre, on 13–14 March 2015. The overarching theme of the workshop was the ‘great convergence’ in labour conditions between Africa and Europe. Inspired by the work of Bernard Conte, La Tiers-Mondialisation de la planète (Conte, 2009), which explores the decline of workers’ conditions in Europe – which are increasingly becoming more similar to those of their counterparts in the Third World – this group of Africanist scholars gathered in the Netherlands to analyse the convergence towards a generalised or globalised precarity of wage workers from a Third World, African perspective. Historically, Africa’s human geography and social history present markedly different challenges to the process of labour exploitation and economic capitalist transformations, in particular due to the fact that the introduction of (free) wage labour and capitalist mode of production is a much more recent phenomenon. However, with the precarisation of labour in the so-called Global North (Europe), some points of comparison between the African and Western modes of capitalist labour exploitation are emerging. The workshop brought together specialised scholarship on the history of labour in the emergence of capitalism in Africa and the study of ‘African’ forms of capitalism. Contributors discussed their research results on different African countries, sectors and workers’ organisations, in order to engage critically with the following research questions: how is the transition to capitalist forms of production expressed in specific histories of labour relations in Africa? How have different contexts and backgrounds resulted in contrasting relations of production? Can case studies on African labour history shed light on the interconnection between slave-based economies, transitional forms of labour mobilisation, colonial forced labour, semi-proletarianisation and contemporary forms of informal employment and the ‘precariat’? Are we observing a process of labour-driven conversion between Africa and the global North? Could capitalism exist outside the Marxian ‘wage labour and capital’ dialectic? Or are African economies and societies doomed to be non-capitalist? The hypotheses underpinning these studies are the following: (1) in Africa, unfree labour is normally equated to slavery. Some scholars prefer to use the adjective ‘unfree’ rather than ‘slave’ because of the Eurocentric connotation of the latter. (2) Free labour is considered by