Gendering Production in Wartime South Africa

Abstract

To SAY THAT THE SECOND WORLD WAR WAS IMPORTANT is to make last uncontroversial statement in African Studies. These words opened a volume on Africa and Second World War several years ago. The editors went on to suggest that such accord arose because Everyone knows that it was either end of beginning or beginning of end of European colonialism in Africa. Indeed, by end of World War II, European colonial powers were exhausted by second maelstrom to hit their continent in twentieth century and soon determined that direct rule over African territories could not be sustained. Within fifteen years, most of African continent was on road to independent political rule. Historians and other scholars, however, have not looked very closely at wartime experiences that brought about such momentous change. According to editors of Africa and Second World War, most historians refer to conflict as an almost incantatory invocation, a sort of empty historical marker, assuming immense significance of event but not examining it as a period in history or paying any attention to its complexities.1 While historians agree that there must be a relationship between war and subsequent African independence, our understanding of such a connection remains paradoxically both emphatic and amorphous. More recently, Frederick Cooper has addressed this lacuna in analysis, drawing our attention to fundamental importance of war in shaking old structures of power and habits of discourse and causing British and French colonial authorities to change their entire approach to the labor in their African colonies. During and after war, officials pondered the reshaping of a political framework in which a social question is debated. The political framework was colonialism. The social question was labor control over African colonial subjects. As Cooper demonstrates, political framework was shaken by African laborers who challenged outright and brutal repression exercised by their colonial employers. Massive labor strikes during and immediately after war threatened to bring production to a standstill throughout both British and French colonies. As war drew to a close, colonial policies gradually changed in hopes of turning unruly workers into a stabilized work force. Colonial administrators throughout Africa began to accept their subjects as urban dwellers and industrial workers, incorporating them into local political structures instead of treating them as minors without rights, and they allowed union representation and