Coerced African Labour for Food Production in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) during the Second World War, 1942–1945

Abstract

Like their colonial counterparts in other parts of Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, some Africans in Northern Rhodesia experienced labour conscription during the Second World War. Civilian labour conscription in colonial Africa was revived during the war due to challenges faced by the Allied powers in recruiting labour for military, agricultural and industrial use. Although forced labour has a long and infamous history in Northern Rhodesia, it had waned by the 1930s. With the outbreak of the war, however, the Emergency Powers (Defence) Act was applied to empower the colonial government to expand the supply of food and raw materials to Britain and its Allies. The demand for Northern Rhodesian copper led both to a steep increase in the Copperbelt's labour force and to unusual pressures on the territory's capacity to produce adequate maize, the primary staple for African mine workers. This article argues that in order to solve the pending food crisis, the colonial Government used its Emergency powers to revert to an older system of forced African labour for settler farms. Previous studies were less concerned with the theory behind violence in the colonial situation or the historicisation of conscripted labour in today's Zambia. It is these barely glimpsed aspects that the present essay deals with by using hitherto unexplored materials from the National Archives of Zambia.