Over the next two weeks, we will be posting three pieces to mark the publication of Working People Speak – Oral Histories of Neoliberal Africa. Here, the book’s editors introduce the volume, which draws on worker testimonies from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Uganda, and South Sudan. They argue the value of oral histories in helping document and understand significant change in the everyday working lives of people on the continent, and review the wide range of material covered by the book. Commentaries by Alexander Freund and Kalundi Serumaga will follow next week.
By Jörg Wiegratz, Joseph Mujere, and Joost Fontein
The last few decades have witnessed unprecedented changes in the working lives of people across the African continent. Yet, there has been a surprising dearth of oral histories of work since the emergence of neoliberalism in the 1980s. Compared to scholarship published more than half a century ago, there has been a decline in the use of oral histories to explore experiences of living and working under capitalism.
The recently published edited collection Working People Speak – Oral Histories of Neoliberal Africa thus presents a re-engagement with oral histories as a way of documenting, understanding, and discussing experiences of work and economic life in Africa under neoliberal capitalism. It shows that oral historical accounts of working lives can offer unique and productive insights into these changes by allowing analyses of neoliberalism that focus on personal experiences over the longue durée. By grounding analysis in biographical details, histories, and dynamics, the chapters in this book seek better understandings of the wider life contexts, challenges, and circumstances in which people’s ‘agency’ emerges, unfolds, gains traction, and gets (re)shaped; and a better grasp of the multiple, entangled layers and temporalities of life and work in capitalist Africa.
This volume explores oral histories of economic life from different parts of the African continent during the neoliberal period. It gathers seven studies in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Uganda, and South Sudan, from the late 1980s to the present, to offer an analysis of neoliberal transformations and realities at the incisive level of peoples’ biographies. The issues that are explored include rural livelihoods, mobility, urbanisation, and change, conflict and precarity as well as postcolonial labour relations. The centrality of oral history in the work collated here means that all of the articles speak to questions of entangled, incongruent pasts, presents, and futures in particular contexts.
While the first analysis in our collection speaks specifically to questions of how remembered and re-imagined pasts inform understandings of present working lives and economic futures in specific contexts, other studies assembled in the book speak to how larger political and economic forces and structures are manifested, experienced, and made sense of in the context of: migration and urbanisation in South Africa; in the wake of conflicts in the border lands of Darfur and South Sudan, and in northern Uganda; and in the context of continuing struggles to organise labour relations, unions, and workers’ rights in post-apartheid South Africa and postcolonial Zimbabwe.[i]
Why? The rationale for an oral history of neoliberal Africa
Oral histories of contemporary economic life and change in Africa – including those of work or earning a living – have, it seems, fallen out of fashion. Notably, oral methodologies, ethnographic fieldwork, and the collection of life histories have become standard tools in the research repertories of scholars ranging from political scientists to cultural studies specialists, and far beyond the anthropologists and historians for whom they have long been a mainstay of research.
Yet, there are precious few significant oral histories of the contemporary capitalist period. Oral history material is analysed, for example, in Swanson, Field, and Meyer’s edited collection Imagining the City: Memories and Cultures in Cape Town and in Lee’s book Africa’s World Trade: Informal Economies and Globalization from Below. Yet, we have not come across a recent, large body of work that resembles in terms of focus, scope, depth, volume or format the seminal work of Terkel. Terkel published many oral histories of life under capitalism in the US. His 1972 book Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do has more than 120 entries, each ranging in length from three to six pages.
One of the exceptions to the dearth of oral histories of working lives during neoliberalism is Alvarez’s The Work of Living: Working People Talk About Their Lives and the Year the World Broke. The book is based on interviews with ten different workers in the US, focusing on their working lives and personal working experiences during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Alvarez asks how people’s experiences of the pandemic will be remembered, what will be remembered, and whose voices will be recorded. The issues Alvarez raises are highly relevant to the history of neoliberalism as well:
In the future, we’ll need to remember how we felt about this as it was actually happening to us. Because those who aim to capitalize on it will tell us to remember it differently, or they’ll have us recall only very select parts of the experience. The question for us then … is: What will we remember, and how will we remember it? … [W]hose voices will go on the record? Who will tell the story of what happened here? How will they tell that story? What will they focus on? And what will we care to listen to? More importantly: How will we each see ourselves as participants in and shapers of this history? … I think we should all be deeply suspicious of any retelling of human history that leaves little room for, or deliberately excludes, the messy complex lives of the working people who lived and made it.
Given the above, the current lacuna is problematic for several reasons. Firstly, it is a problem of record and analysis. The last few decades have seen significant changes across the continent in the everyday working lives of people. This applies across generations. Generating substantial oral historical accounts would offer invaluable insights into these dynamics and experiences of change. They would show how protagonists manoeuvre around as well as understand, reflect on, and assess these changes and the resulting social order, and their place in it. This would record capitalist transformations – the reordering of the economy, society and culture – unravelling at the level of a person’s biography, as opposed to, for example, economic or social sectors.
Secondly, oral histories can re-open and refocus attention upon questions of voice, self-making, and representation, and more broadly of inclusion, humanism, and equality, which profoundly animated Africanist scholarship a generation ago. These questions are no less urgent but arguably receive less attention today.
Thirdly, such oral histories and their analysis could enrich debates about neoliberalism across Africa, extending, deepening, and nuancing them. Put differently: how can we expect to more effectively hear, listen, and understand the impacts of neoliberal transformations (and crises) without oral histories? Strong oral histories of neoliberalism’s broader societal and political as well as economic affects, abjections, and often undelivered promises, have much to offer.
Oral histories of economic and working life can generate more nuanced understandings of people’s experiences of the myriad challenges provoked by neoliberalism in Africa. The potency of such oral histories of the living lies in how, through the medium of oral interviews, both the interviewer and the research participant co-create knowledge. This results in the production of rich and nuanced knowledge about those mundane aspects of life that often get missed in or silenced by other sources. However, oral histories also present challenges to do with the politics of representation. It is therefore important to reflect on and address concerns about whose voices, whose lives, whose experiences, and whose histories are represented in oral histories.
Fourth, oral histories of economic life under neoliberalism can make key contributions to the global scholarship of neoliberalism, including analyses of the forging of market civilisation, neoliberal subjectivities, earning a living under neoliberal labour regimes, and work in/for the hallmark of neoliberal institutions: the corporation. Workers are prime witnesses of neoliberalism-in-practice. Fifth, such oral history accounts of neoliberalism can also enrich the oral history literature in general: notably, neoliberalism/capitalism does not feature as a topic in the list of 33 chapter titles in The Oxford Handbook of Oral History.
Entangled, incongruent pasts, presents, and futures in particular contexts
Yet, just as these biographies and oral histories of working lives do not emerge in the absence of longer histories, rather finding traction and resonance in the enduring presence of complicating pasts, so too do they not emerge in a historiographical vacuum. As Ferguson noted in the late 1990s, modernity’s ‘malcontents’ make sense of their abjection through their own histories, or more correctly, their own historiographies, in which futures and pasts collapse into or overtake each other; like those workers on Zambia’s Copperbelt for whom ‘modern futures’ became the ‘object of nostalgic reverie, and “backwardness” the anticipated (or dreaded) future’.
Others working elsewhere in Africa have discussed how older aspirations to middle-class respectability entangle in complex ways with the requirements of contemporary cosmopolitanism, just as desires towards ‘conspicuous consumption’ frequently intertwine with, or grate against, older but enduring motifs of rural belonging as often actualised, for example, through elaborate new funerary practices.
As historians of Africa came to realise almost as soon as they embraced oral history, and as already discussed above, historiography and history can never, in the end, be disassembled. One always implies the other, and in the process conventional, ordered temporalities are easily unsettled, reversed, or collapsed. It is for this reason that understanding contemporary working lives in the neoliberal period cannot, only, be a discussion framed by questions of political economy and ‘materialist’ analysis. The temporal schemas upon which such analysis is too often construed cannot bear the weight of time in its multiple forms and complexities; as it appears, in other words, in biographies, life stories, and oral histories.
Collecting oral histories of working lives in the neoliberal period therefore necessarily attends to questions about how the past informs, structures, resonates, and affords the present and falls into the future in significantly open-ended and indeterminate ways; and through this, the demands of materialist analysis of political economy necessarily merges with the insights of post-structural and meaning-oriented analysis.
This indeterminacy reflects exactly the uncertainties and precarities of working lives on the margins, or rather in the wake or demise of modernity’s promise – a promise that has scarcely survived and yet still often informs everyday understandings of working lives in the neoliberal period. It also points exactly to the need to explore actors’ interpretations and diverse meaning-making regarding what analysts conventionally label and understand as ‘neoliberalism’.
That said, we are concerned with the need to examine the salience of larger national, regional, and global political and economic forces and structures across many different contexts, and the extremes of precarity and abjection that these engender, but also with the opportunities and space, however limited and fragile, for agency, autonomy, creativity, wealth, voice, and social mobility, that they sometimes offer. At the same time, we are compelled to recognise and properly account for the particularities and diversities of how these larger forces and structures are manifest, experienced, and understood in specific historical, social, economic, and political contexts.
These include contexts of migration, urbanisation, conflict and post-conflict situations amid the ongoing expansion and intensification of global corporate capital and related large-scale economic and social transformations and change, incorporating recursive cycles of economic boom and bust.
The chapter contributions
The first chapter, by Kaur, focuses on rural experiences of neoliberal South Africa through the empirical lens of farmworkers’ experiences of ‘development’ in the Western Cape. Far from offering a profound challenge to the structural inequalities of the past, she concludes that ‘the neoliberal economy of development produces its own inequalities, perpetuating feelings of worthlessness among the working poor’.
The next chapter, by Barbosa, focuses on the biographies of two men who moved to Johannesburg at very different historical moments, separated by almost four decades (1976 vs. 2015). Barbosa argues that dispossession remains the most prominent form of ‘unfreedom’ generated by racial capitalism, which, despite neoliberalism’s promises (and like the failures of ‘development’ that Kaur identifies) is ‘reproduced every day in and through cities’ and ‘lived as alienation’.
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Next, Erwin and Marks explore the strategies and coping mechanisms deployed by migrant women – from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Somalia, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and rural South Africa – to build economic lives in the South African city of Durban. The oral history data presented here reveals ‘an economy that is fundamentally political, and that attempts to individualise responsibility generating further vulnerability and dislocation, and often amplified household burdens’.
Moving away from the experiences of migrants who have to come to South Africa to make new lives, the next two chapters take us to experiences of displacement, dispossession, and resettlement in the aftermaths of conflict in East Africa, particularly Darfur, South Sudan and Uganda.
Kindersley and Majok examine how cycles of wars that spawned displacements and resettlements in South Sudan and Darfur borderlands ‘created class stratification and individual accumulation and how new propertied and cash-rich classes have invested in exploiting marketisation and a cheap workforce via manipulating laws and controls on land labour’.
Similarly, Ssali tackles the theme of formerly displaced people’s experiences of post-war reconstruction and the implementation of neoliberal policies in northern Uganda. Ssali argues that life history narratives of heads of households demonstrate the nature and transformations of livelihood patterns before, during and after the war. Her chapter shows how neoliberalism and the legacies of conflicts permeated all aspects of post-conflict northern Uganda; land, work, and healthcare, for example.
The last two chapters return to the questions of labour relations which preoccupied Kaur’s focus on Western Cape farm workers’ experiences of inequality in the first article. Brandt examines women’s experiences and navigations of a neoliberalised labour market in South Africa, arguing that the entire institutional set-up of the current system of labour relations creates conditions of unbelonging that workers face and negotiate.
In the final chapter, Gwande uses biography to explore the history and contributions of an often less accounted-for veteran unionist, Alfred Makwarimba, and his labour centre, the Zimbabwe Federation of Trade Unions (ZFTU), to re-examine trade union politics in the context of neoliberal reform in Zimbabwe. Gwande uses oral testimony to demonstrate how Makwarimba navigated the tumultuous neoliberal period.
He concludes that ‘Makwarimba seized the neo-liberal moment, particularly the deregulation and democratisation of labour relations, to propel his trade union career during the 1990s’. This dimension is missing in accounts of labour’s experience during neoliberalism as scholarship preoccupied itself with the role of the dominant Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) in national politics.
Conclusion
This volume reopens debate about the efficacy of oral histories, life histories, biography, and personal reminiscences in the reconstruction of people’s everyday experiences of neoliberalism in African contexts. Although neoliberalism has received considerable scholarly attention, particularly the contentious SAPs, there has been a dearth of works that draw on oral histories or seek to understand contemporary capitalism from the vantage point of ordinary people, i.e. working people/classes of labour.
Oral histories as both a source and method allow researchers to co-create people’s lived experiences of neoliberalism in different geographical and temporal contexts as well as revisiting debates about representation and voice. They allow us to shift the gaze from ‘neoliberalism from above’ and respond to Gago’s call to explore ‘neoliberalism from below’ (i.e. people’s resisting and succumbing to it).
As Erwin and Marks note: oral histories bring to the forefront experiences of actors that get neglected and/or obscured by dominant discourses and narratives. They illustrate how ‘there is no single and predetermined experience of livelihood making in the city’. One can arguably extend this (and as papers in this volume show): there is no ‘single story’, no single experience of neoliberalism (e.g. the neoliberal city).
Further, the articles in this volume indicate that actors navigate, are exposed to, interact with and negotiate multiple sites and aspects of neoliberalism over long periods of time. Oral histories provide detailed insight into respective matters of structure and context, as well as agency, subjectivity, and perception. They offer insights into the multi-faceted nature of options, choices, experiences, emotions, and practices of life unfolding over time, of complex social and personal worlds in motion and interaction.
In other words, oral histories help to recognise and understand better that capitalism is lived, experienced and assessed ‘biographically’ by protagonists (and their families), from childhood to youth and through adulthood. The biographical data presented in Brandt’s analysis (and in several of the other chapters in the volume), for example, shows how people’s family lives, relationships, and care responsibilities shape their economic lives and vice versa; how workers’ subjectivities change over time in particular biographical contexts; and how conditions and changes in economic spheres affect household affairs and social reproduction, allowing deeper insight into relations between work, union/organising, and family life.
By grounding analysis in biographical details, histories, and dynamics, we thus gain better understandings of the wider life contexts, challenges, and circumstances in which people’s agency takes place, unfolds, and gets (re)shaped; and, more broadly, a better grasp of the multiple, entangled layers and temporalties of life in contemporary capitalist societies. This in turn, we hope, contributes to interdisciplinary dialogue about the efficacy of oral histories (in their various forms) for making sense of how people grapple with the effects of neoliberal transformations in different geographical and historical contexts across Africa, and beyond.
[i] The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Third World Thematics titled ‘Oral histories of economic life in Africa during neoliberalism’ (the introduction of the special issue is here). They are accompanied by a new Foreword by Freund and Afterword by Serumaga, to be published on roape.net.
Jörg Wiegratz is Lecturer in Political Economy of Global Development at the University of Leeds and Senior Research Associate at the University of Johannesburg. He specialises in neoliberalism, fraud and anti-fraud measures, commercialisation and economic pressure and related aspects of moral and political economy, with a focus on Uganda and Kenya. He is a member of the editorial working group of ROAPE. His books include Neoliberal Moral Economy: Capitalism, Socio-Cultural Change and Fraud in Uganda and Neoliberalism and the Moral Economy of Fraud.
Joseph Mujere is Lecturer in Modern History at the University of York, UK, and Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies, University of Johannesburg. He is also currently Volkswagen Stiftung Senior Postdoctoral Fellow (2020-2023) doing research on artisanal chromite mining in Zimbabwe. He published his first book in 2019 titled: Land, Migration and Belonging: A History of Basotho in Southern Rhodesia, c1890-1969s and has also produced a documentary film titled Waiting in a Platinum City.
Joost Fontein is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Johannesburg. From 2014-2018 he was director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa in Nairobi, and before that he taught anthropology at Edinburgh. He is co-editor of the (IAI) journal AFRICA, former editor of the Journal of Southern African Studies, and former editor and co-founder of Critical African Studies. He recently published his third monograph on Zimbabwe titled The Politics of the Dead in Zimbabwe 2000-2020: Bones, Rumours & Spirits, and co-curated a multi-authored collaboration between scholars and artists entitled Nairobi Becoming which was published in February 2024.
For further oral history material and analysis/work, see also: the History Workshop at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, the Centre for Popular Memory at the University of Cape Town, the Anti-Privatisation Forum collection at the South African History Archive, the African Oral History Project and Overview of African Oral Histories Online Collections at the Washington University in St. Louis.
Featured Photograph: Book cover of Working People Speak: Oral Histories of Neoliberal Africa, photograph by Nicholas Bamulanzeki. Nicolas is a photojournalist with The Observer Newspaper, Kampala, Uganda. He does documentary and events photography. As a photojournalist, writer, and blogger, he has covered major events in Uganda and Africa generally, especially in the areas of health, sports, conflict, and development.
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