Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences - Institute of Asian and African Studies

Projektleiter: Prof. Andreas Eckert

Projektmitarbeiter:in : Hedvig Lagercrantz
                                      Felix Yao Amenorhu

Förderinstitution: Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft

Förderzeitraum: 10/2022 - 09/2025

This project starts from the confluence of two observations, historiographical and historical. One is that interest in the history of labour in Africa recently experienced a rebirth. Labour never ceased to be an important part of economic and social life on the continent, but new research on the topic had wavered – with a few exceptions – since the 1980s. The return of labour as a major focus of research in African studies is characterized by a trend to analyse work “beyond wage labour” and to focus increasingly on “informal” and “precarious” labour. This historiographical shift responds to the post-colonial “discovery” of informal labour, and to accumulating evidence from the late colonial and early post-colonial periods that the traditional assumption that the direction of change in labour relations in Africa was towards full “proletarianization” (the loss or foregoing of rights of access to land by the vast majority of the population) and the prevalence of regular wage contracts was too simple, even wrong.
The second observation is that rapid urbanization and the “land rush” that accompanied the unprecendently widespread economic boom across Africa from c.1995 until very recently, has re-opened the question of whether the old assumption is right after all: perhaps the working population of Africa really is destined to consist mostly of wage workers (Oya 2013a).
This combination of observations underlines the need for a historical approach to the study of labour trends over the sixty or so years since most African countries became independent. Structural Adjustment in the 1980s, the transition from state-led to market-based development policies, was a watershed in the rules and incentive structures surrounding labour relations. We need to understand both the changes and the continuities across this divide. Yet, so far, there is a dearth of literature on the postcolonial era as a whole. For the colonial and early post-colonial period, we have seen important innovations in the subject matter and conceptualization of labour history. At the same time new approaches to the economic dimension of labour have concentrated on the colonial era. They have emphasised quantitative measures and the search for new sources, notably a more meaningful and commensurable method of calculating real wages in poor economies (Frankema/Van Waijenburg 2012). But there is a lack of substantial and comprehensive studies which systematically combine economic (history) and social (history) perspectives on the labour history of the post-colonial period in Africa.