Transport Workers, Strikes and the "Imperial Response": Africa and the Post World War War II Conjuncture

Abstract

Wartime causes [of the 1942 agitation] include the hardship caused by…sudden strain to which the workers have been subjected in an effort to increase efficiency and output simultaneously; inescapable privations necessary to satisfy the needs and demands of the Metropolis of the Empire. Memorandum of the Land and Survey African Technical Workers Union of Nigeria (Great Britain, 1946: 117) Maybe it would be better to have employees controlled by Mr. Patrick than by Mr. Stalin and to be quite candid I think that is at the bottom of it all. I think that we have got to face the fact that if we don't get labour organised and controlled we shall be up against much bigger problems when they organise themselves. An elected member of the Kenya Legislature in 1947 (Quoted in Singh, 1969: 194) A wave of general strikes and urban protest, reaching from Durban to Tunis, and from Dakar to Dar es Salaam, took place in Africa in the years immediately following the Second World War. While each general strike possessed its own specific features, taken together the strikes shared several common characteristics. They were all primarily economically motivated, and African workers initiated and led them. The most salient feature of this unrest was the participation of all segments of the urban population, because its structural causes were economic conditions which deleteriously affected whitecollar civil servants and unskilled laborers alike. Furthermore, railway and dock workers in particular often assumed prominent roles. The strikes demonstrated the existence of contradictions in colonial social formations which required resolution, and authorities throughout British Africa reacted in a similar manner.