Migration for ‘white man's work’: an empirical rebuttal to Marxist theory

Abstract

Enlisted between 1920 and 1960 for mines in Ghana and and for the construction of the Markala dam in Mali, migrant Dogon workers offer a definition of colonial work that runs counter to that of Marxist intellectuals who have denounced it in all its forms. Within the colonial towns, the migrant workers established a hierarchy of tasks according to the amount of labour and the technical and social organisation required to accomplish them. This article analyses why the Dogon migrant workers glorified colonial work in these different dimensions (time, organisation, discipline). This new hierarchisation of activities places ‘white man's work’ at the top, and other activities at the bottom, of the scale. The following questions lie at the heart of this article: (1) In what manner does the discourse of Africanist researchers reflect the practices, the experiences, and the minds of those people who migrated and worked in colonial centres? (2) Does the ‘ancestral’ system of work have any influence on the differentiation and evaluation of the ‘white man's work’? (3) Does the local classification of village activities have any effect upon the classification of the colonial world?