Introduction: Histories of Mobility, Histories of Labor, Histories of Africa

Abstract

Migrant labor is one of the most extensively studied subjects of Africa's colonial history, helping to inaugurate the professional study of Africa in multiple academic disciplines. Anthropologists in the 1940s, working to outline the impact of colonial rule, used migrant labor to demonstrate the changes occurring within African societies previously considered immunized by tradition against major social change. Economists in the 1950s and 1960s, seeking to gauge the prospects of economic transformation in Africa, examined migrant labor between the traditional and modern sectors of the economy in order to divine what future changes in the balance between these two putatively separate economic spheres might follow from increased investment under colonial and then post-colonial development schemes. Scholars of African politics and society in the era of independence used migrant labor to examine the relationship between states and citizens in newly independent countries, as well as to forecast how this relationship would continue to evolve following the end of colonial rule.Migrant labor was also an important subject for the first professional historians of Africa. Just as the anthropologists who inaugurated the professional study of Africa used migrant labor as an indisputable marker of cultural dynamism, so too could historians use migrant labor as an indisputable marker of diachronic change. The historical study of migrant labor took some time to develop, as the first wave of historians of Africa were predominantly interested in researching precolonial Africa, so as to establish an authentically African past for the emerging postcolonial future. During the 1970s and 1980s, however, increased historical interest in studying colonial rule brought a rapid proliferation of migrant labor histories, diffused through a confluence of closely related historiographical strands.1 One was the focus on African workers as key actors in challenging and ultimately overcoming colonial rule, and a potential force for ushering postcolonial Africa further along the path toward modernity.2 Another was the animated debates, inspired by underdevelopment theory, over Africa's historical relationship with global capitalism.3 Still another was the equally animated debates over the role of material relations in shaping African societies, as well as the proper analytical framework (or mode of production) through which these relations ought to be categorized and understood.4 Hovering over these historiographical nodes was the reigning paradigm of social history, in which economic relationships were understood to be the primary driver of historical change, and to offer the most perceptive lens into the broader arc of history's march toward the present.Migrant labor was well-positioned to feature prominently in all of these historiographies. For labor historians, migrant workers presented a discrete group of individuals whose actions-protests, evasion, strikes, and so on-could be clearly catalogued as an example of the interlocking dynamics of structure and agency as workers confronted the onset of colonial rule.5 For economic historians, migrant laborers instantiated the changes wrought by colonial rule in a particularly vivid way, as the dramatic rise of migrant wage labor-especially in eastern and southern Africa-made clear the scale of the transformations inaugurated by colonial capitalism.6 For historians participating in debates over African modes of production, migrant laborers' movement between work and home made it possible to extend critical analyses of capitalist transformation and its attendant models into regions that had not been previously subjected to rigorous materialist analysis, having instead been considered largely unaffected by such transformations, owing to the fact that capitalist enterprises in many parts of colonial Africa were limited in number and geographically concentrated into a few limited areas.7In the late 1980s and 1990s, however, the previously vibrant historiography of migrant labor entered into significant decline. …