African Labor History

Peter Gutkind was a distinguished social anthropologist (and a noted pioneer in the field of urban anthropology) who was associated with the Department of Anthropology at the University of Warwick from 1986 until his death in 2001. He was Professor of Anthropology at McGill University for the majority of his career and President of the African Studies Association in the USA.Robin Cohen is Emeritus Professor of Development Studies at the University of Oxford. For the first decade of his academic career, he worked on comparative labour issues. His books included Labour and Politics in Nigeria (1974) and the co-edited collections The development of an African working class (1975), International Labour and the Third World (1987), African Labor History (1978) and the current title, Peasants and Proletarians. He subsequently wrote on the themes of migration, globalization and diasporas. His best-known work is Global diasporas: An introduction (3rd edition, 2022).Jean Copans is a French anthropologist and Africanist. He has taught and researched at l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en sciences sociales, The Johns Hopkins University, l’université Laval (Quebec), l’Université de Picardie Jules Verne and Paris Descartes. He has done most of his fieldwork in Senegal and has visited a dozen African countries including South Africa. His centers of interest have dealt with the Mouride Islamic brotherhood in Senegal, the Sengalese and more globaly african working classes as the making of national African entrepreneurs. This context has led him to study the role and the nature of national development policies and organisations in Africa. He has authored/edited over 20 books.

• Introduction Robin Cohen, Jean Copans and Peter C. W. Gutkind. 1. An Emerging Nigerian Working Class: The Lagos Experience, 1897-1939 Arnold Hughes and Robin Cohen 2. Working on the Railway: Forced Labor in Northern Nigeria, 1907-1912 Michael Mason 3. The 192 Strike on the Rand: White Labor and the Political Economy of South Africa Robert Davies 4. Tragedy at Thiaroye: The Senegalese Soldiers’ Uprising of 1944 Myron J. Echenberg 5. The French West African Railway Workers’ Strike, 1947-1948 J. Suret-Canale 6. Trade Unionism in Kenya, 1947-1952: The Militant Phase Sharon Stichter 7. Unionization and Employer Strategy: The Tanganyikan Sisal Industry, 1958-1964 Dianne Bolton 8. Strikes, Urban Mass Action and Political Change: Tananarive, 1972 Gerard Althabe 9. The State, Mineworkers and Multinationals: The Selebe Phikwe Strike, Botswana 1975 David Cooper.

Original Reviews of African Labor History:‘A useful overview mapping progress made in both the Anglophone and Francophone traditions in labour studies’ – Mike Mason Labour/Le Travailleur, Spring 1981‘[In this book] labor is now primarily an object of study not of anthropology but of history (and to a lesser extent sociology) in Africa. The colonial period has been reinterpreted as the era of capitalist penetration and, in varying degrees, the introduction into Africa of capitalist production. African Labor History posed a more radical challenge and insisted on the classic revolutionary thrust of the proletariat as its historic task in Africa’ – Bill Freund African Studies Review, 27 (2) 1984