Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa.

West, Michael O.

By Frederick Cooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. xvii plus 677pp.).

This is an important book by a leading Africanist labor historian. It is also quite different from the author's previous works. Hitherto Frederick Cooper - whose writings on African working people include monographs on slaves, squatters and wage workers in Kenya and elsewhere in East Africa - has focused primarily on the immediate context and consequences of the labor process: the character and organization of work; struggles between (and among) workers and bosses at the point of production; and worker consciousness, culture and community.

The book under review, by contrast, is much less concerned with the agency of the African working class, at least in the first instance. Here, Cooper turns his attention to the labor policies of the two leading imperial powers in Africa, namely France and Britain, in the late colonial period, from the mid-1930s to the late 1950s. Using examples mainly from Senegal, the Ivory Coast, Kenya, the Northern Rhodesia (Zambian) Copperbelt and the Gold Coast (Ghana), he forcefully and consistently places the labor question at the center of the decolonization project. An earlier generation of scholarship had privileged the activities of nationalist movements, led everywhere by the emergent African petty bourgeoisie, in the struggle for African independence in the postwar period. Cooper's rejoinder consists of a synthesis of imperial discourse and policy prescriptions on the one hand - including the findings and musings of European researchers and intellectuals, official and unofficial, in the metropoles and the colonies - and African labor and political history on the other. The result is a fuller, rounder and, in many ways, novel account of the decolonization process.

Along the way, Cooper posits a radical disjuncture in colonial labor policy. From the advent of colonialism down to the 1930s, his story goes, the labor question was "unposed" in Africa. That is to say, both the French and the British, assuming a long term imperial presence in Africa and seeking to preserve supposedly organic "native" societies, supported a system of labor migrancy under which male workers, in a highly gendered social order, rotated between the capitalist worksite and a peasant existence in the village. In these circumstances, there was no question of encouraging the creation of a working class completely dependent on wage labor; indeed, forced labor was widespread and routine. To the imperial mind, the African laborer remained a "tribal" figure, a so-called target worker pining for village life and militantly uncommitted to the capitalist mode of existence in its industrial form.

This conception, however, was shattered in the mid 1930s in a sweeping reassessment of the colonial project and, with it, the "posing" of the labor question. Under the new dispensation, Cooper argues, the image of the temporary migrant laborer was transposed; in its place came a new figure: the proletarianized, urbanized African "industrial man," wife and children in tow, with all the consequences implied by this emerging configuration, including a demand for "family wages."

The attempt to make (or remake) an African working class in an imperial image may have been conceived above (in the metropoles and colonial state houses), but this was no immaculate conception. In Cooper's representation, the about-face in colonial labor policy fundamentally was a response to erruptions from below, notably strikes, boycotts and riots by colonized workers in the 1930s, first on the Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt and later in the British Caribbean and French West Africa. With generalized disorder looming, the old colonialist fear of "detribalization" gave way to a preoccupation with "modernization." Henceforth there was a new emphasis on colonial "development" and "welfare," a project underwritten by an unprecedented (if limited) injection of metropolitan funds into the periphery.

Central to colonial development was the "stabilization" of labor, that is, an abandonment of migrancy in favor of full proletarianization and the social reproduction of the work force in the cities, mining areas and other centers of capitalist production. Better living conditions (welfare), the reasoning went, would better equip workers for the "battle of production" (development). Concomitantly, newly-created government labor bureaus, in alliance with the metropolitan labor movements, were pressed into service to guide the emergent "industrial men" and their trade unions along what the colonial rulers considered moderate and responsible lines. These processes, which began in the late 1930s, deepened in the postwar years.

The colonialists, however, eventually recoiled from the consequences of their handiwork. By the 1950s, and against the backdrop of postwar reconstruction in the metropoles and an emphasis on cost-benefit accounting in the periphery, the price of colonial development and labor stabilization soared out of reach. The "burden of declining empire," as Cooper characterizes the late colonial period, had become too great for France and Britain. The burden was especially heavy for the French. Unlike the British, who made a clear juridical distinction between the metropole and the periphery, the French maintained the legal fiction that their colonies were an integral part of the French Union, one and indivisible. Taking the colonial masters at their word, workers in France's African empire - or rather the overseas French Union - demanded equality across the board, including equal benefits and remuneration with their metropolitan fellow industrial men! Turning the colonial assimilationist rhetoric against its initiators, one labor organ in French West Africa proclaimed: "There is no difference between a FRENCHMAN born near the banks of the Seine or the Loire and a FRENCHMAN born near the banks of the Senegal or the Niger." (p. 287)

Such demands warranted disunion, in other language, decolonization. The turn toward decolonization provided an opening for the men of the African petty bourgeoisie and their anti-colonial nationalism. The colonialists would divest themselves of responsibility for the revolution of rising expectations, a revolution spawned in no small part by their own doings, by gradually and formally ceding political power to the nationalists. They calculated that the nationalists, some of whom doubled as labor leaders, could more legitimately and effectively subordinate proletarian interests and aspirations to the project of African "nation-building." The Faustian bargain sealed, the colonial mantle was duly transferred, with the result that trade unions, along with other organized manifestations of civil society, were shorn of their autonomy and incorporated into the single state-party apparatuses called independent African governments. With the burdensome and dirty work of empire having been handed to someone else, the vaunted colonial "mission civilisatrice" assumed a new incarnation: neo-colonialism, which is to say imperialism on the cheap.

Cooper's is a highly ambitious and sweeping study, based on extensive archival research into the French and British sources as well as a firm command of the secondary literature. It will remain a standard reference for years to come, and future students of African labor history, nationalism and decolonization will have to grapple with the many challenges it poses.

Currently, I have two concerns about the book. The first is Cooper's treatment of decolonization and African nationalism. While generally nuanced and sketched in shades of gray rather than black and white, the burden of Cooper's argument is that juridical independence was given by the Europeans, not taken by the Africans. This is an argument, however, that clearly has greater validity in the French than in the British cases - a point that deserves greater emphasis than it receives in the book.

A second and more important concern centers on the length of the book and its general unwieldiness. Indeed, the book opens with a revealing authorial declaration: "My friends and my publisher tell me this is a long book. I think it's too short." (p. xi) This reviewer joins the author's friends and publisher in charging him with prolixity. The problem is rather serious. It is also self-injurious in that the book might not attract as wide an audience as it deserves.

This is not a tome for the faint-hearted; indeed, its appeal is likely to be restricted largely to a hardy band of specialists and their long-suffering graduate students. Yet, with greater discipline and frugality, the vast body of source material - including official correspondence, commission reports, labor-bureau findings and parliamentary debates - that makes up the bulk of the text might have been profitably condensed. Actually, such an example of discursive economy can be found in Cooper's own assessment of Kenya in the Mau Mau era (pp. 348-360) - a fine synthesis of the scholarly literature on this particular subject. Perhaps an abridged version would produce a leaner and more finely tuned product better suited for a general readership, including university undergraduates.

Michael O. West University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill