This blog post is the second of three pieces marking the publication of Working People Speak – Oral Histories of Neoliberal Africa. It features Alexander Freund’s compelling foreword, which introduces the wide range of oral histories explored in the book, including interviews with female farm workers in South Africa, tea makers in South Sudan, and a prominent trade union leader in Zimbabwe. The foreword highlights the diverse ways oral history sheds light on the economic hardships, inequalities, and the profound socio-political and cultural changes neoliberalism has imposed on millions of ordinary working people.
By Alexander Freund
What does it mean for people to live and work under the conditions of neoliberal economies in modern-day South Africa, South Sudan, Uganda, and Zimbabwe? The Case for Oral Histories of Neoliberal Africa tackles this question head-on through oral histories of those most affected by economic exploitation, inequality, and violence. The authors’ in-depth research on personal narratives of people’s working and living conditions under neoliberalism in Africa since the 1980s documents the harsh economic reality of rural and urban labourers. It also highlights the role of oral history as a research method in modern African historiography. Historical and economic research often hides people’s voices as it prefers quantitative methods and structural explanations. The authors show, however, the diverse ways in which oral history helps us understand how the deep economic, socio-political, and cultural changes across the continent over the past half century have affected tens of millions of men and women, families and children, and workers and small business owners.
The individual articles focus on several countries and diverse sectors, and they illustrate the diversity and complexity of working lives in neoliberal economies. They explore themes from a bottom-up view, such as the impact of “structural adjustment programs” on female workers and activists, the privatisation of public services in the aftermath of war, the deterioration of work and labour relations through brokerage firms, the hollowing out of social safety nets for those most in need of them, and the consequences of war and other forms of state violence. With its focus on individual and collective experiences, this collection enriches our understanding of recent economic and social history in Africa and our appreciation of oral history’s role in making public such experiences.
This collection also clearly shows that oral history is not a one-size-fits-all approach or a monolithic method. While oral history uses the case study as an in-depth look at historical change and experience, it is broad enough to encompass individual biography, group biography, and larger oral history collections. The authors use ethnographic vignettes, individual biographies, and studies of collectives of dozens and even hundreds of interviews. Whatever their approach, the authors clarify that individual voices are not ornamental to statistics; rather, they are at the core of any possibility of understanding how neoliberalism works and affects social structures. It is when people tell their stories that we can get an inkling of what it means when parents have to leave behind their young children to find work; when they lose their farmland and are forced into backbreaking labour at an age when people expect to retire; and when they depend on the arbitrary decisions of employers that may fire them at a moment’s notice, cheat them of wages, or deprive them of the most basic safety measures.
In her interviews with female farm workers in South Africa, Tarminder Kaur learned about class relations that were reminiscent of the paternalism of Manchester capitalism. Anna, one of her interviewees, recounted how her widowed employer—whose income alone was twenty times higher than Anna’s—complained about her own “financial difficulty.” While this employer seemed to have taken the familiarity between them as a sign of friendship, Anna never forgot the dramatic inequality in their relationship: “What does she want me to do?! – feel sorry for her? I do their taxes. I know what she earns….” (94).
Under the conditions of neoliberal economies, this book shows people’s lives and work are characterised by a fundamental precarity of existence that reaches far beyond the labour situation. They experience inadequate, unsafe, and unreliable housing, often dependent on the goodwill of their employers or, for migrant workers without papers, life under steady threat of discovery and deportation. Luisa Calvete Portela Barbosa interviewed migrant workers in South Africa to uncover the long history of racial capitalism and explore their experiences of dispossession as unfreedom. Khumo, born in the 1950s, explained how white employers used Apartheid in the 1980s to cheat him out of his already meagre earnings and would break Apartheid law to ensure he could still work for them when their profits were at stake. Kagiso, born in the 1990s, had to break off his education and begin paid labour to support his family. Early on, as he noticed how poorly white colleagues and bosses treated black people, he realised, “oh, this is the Apartheid that they are talking about.” (94)
In their interviews with thirty female labour migrants in South Africa, Kira Erwin and Monique Marks learned of other hardships brought on by migration. “I had not imaged that I would leave my child behind to go and work as a maid,” Faith explained. Like other female labour migrants, Faith refused to be a victim. She argued that her sacrifice was nevertheless “a good option.” (94) Other women, fleeing the violence of war, did not have a choice. These women, just like other migrant workers, were not only shocked by the continuing precarity of their existence but also saw and seized opportunities for advancement and activism. Even under the double burden of work and child care, they engaged in networking and acts of resistance, and they took pride in their achievements.
Nicki Kindersley and Joseph Diing Majok Majok interviewed some 200 “tea ladies, market and long-distance traders, day labourers and farm workers, charcoal sellers, seasonal agricultural workers and bricklayers, soldiers, ex-militiamen, police and security agents, students, and elderly men and women on farms and in homes” in the Northern Bahr el Ghazal region of South Sudan. While providing a contextual analysis of the economies of this region, the authors also help us understand everyday survival through illuminating quotations. Regina, a single mother of three young children, was a tea maker:
[I] go to the shop to borrow a half-kilo of sugar, a bit of charcoal with 70SSP and a jerry can of water with 20SSP, and then sit down to make tea…. I am renting the tea equipment…. Now in the evening I pay back the owner of this shelter I am operating in, and the owner of the tea equipment. (94)
It is through such interview excerpts, as we also learned early on from the American pioneer of oral history, Studs Terkel, through his oral histories of work, that we can understand life at a level that statistics and theoretical analyses cannot provide and sometimes even obscure. It might be a cliché that it is under such conditions of deprivation that solidarity flourishes, but it is a truth in many places and important to remember when accounting for the costs of neoliberal capitalism.
Sarah N. Ssali interviewed 47 women and men in northern Uganda, where war had ravaged the countryside and population and neoliberal reforms were introduced after the end of the conflict in 2006. This led to further dispossession and poverty, where now families who used to own land all worked in stone quarries. Health care, even though nominally free, was accessible only through nepotism or bribery. Poverty was particularly high among older adults and sick people, who could no longer perform hard labour. Femke Brandt uses interviews to document how female workers in precarious jobs, under constant threat of violence at work, at home, and in public, and often with full responsibility for child care, launched a campaign for better working conditions. Victor Gwande uses the biography of a Zimbabwean labour leader to clarify the complex relationship between trade unionism and neoliberalism in Zimbabwe since the 1990s.
The chapters in this book document in vivid and poignant detail how neoliberal reforms since the 1980s have failed many Africans, especially those already at the margins of society and victimised by war and other forms of state violence. They demonstrate people’s sometimes superhuman ability to survive under inhuman forms of oppression and exploitation, to band together in solidarity and resistance, and to thrive in protest and activism. One very important contribution of this book therefore is to show how workers have maintained their dignity, even as the superrich try to take away their dignity for the sake of endless profits and insatiable greed.
The Case for Oral Histories of Neoliberal Africa constitutes a major corrective to the scholarship’s neglect of personal narratives. The authors rightly indicate that such an omission only impoverishes our understanding of neoliberalism’s impact because it overlooks people’s resilience, adaption, and even resistance in the face of local and global economic pressures. People’s stories of working and living through neoliberal exploitation challenge the dominant narratives that have often portrayed Africans and their governments as passive recipients of neoliberal policies. Instead, they reveal the agency of individuals and communities, their critical engagement with these policies, and their creative strategies for survival and adaptation. This shift in perspective has profound implications for how we understand economic development, social change, and people’s agency under conditions of massive adversity.
Reading the stories of mothers and fathers, the young and the old, and workers, activists, and union leaders reminds us of the importance of listening to those who have lived through—sometimes barely surviving—historical transformations that we cannot understand in any meaningful way through statistics, analyses, and theories. In the shadows of these stories, we get a sense of the price countless people have paid, including the many who perished under neoliberalism’s often inhumane conditions and did not get to tell their stories. Oral history directs our gaze to the past, but the emotion, power, and urgency of people’s voices also turns our view to the present and the future. And we can only hope that this future lies in the hands of Miriam Letseka, Auntie Marie, Yual, Kagiso, Yomella, Tadiwa, Faith, and the many others who even in the harshest of working and living conditions generously shared their stories with researchers and now with us as readers of this book.
The narratives in this book are fresh with pain and hope, like the voices Studs Terkel captured in Work. Like American workers in the 1970s, workers in African nations in the 2010s and 2020s understood and expressed sophisticated political analyses of their plight and offered suggestions for meaningful reforms. In another work, Hard Times, Terkel captured Americans’ memories of the Great Depression, but after forty years, memories sometimes had become nostalgia. It is only by documenting such voices now that historians in forty years will be able to analyse what happened to Africans’ memories of neoliberalism. Let us hope then that this volume initiates a resurgence in collecting oral histories of working lives in modern Africa and elsewhere.
Alexander Freund is a professor of history and holds the chair in German-Canadian studies at the University of Winnipeg, where he codirects the Oral History Centre. He coedited Oral History and Photography (New York: Palgrave, 2011) and The Canadian Oral History Reader (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015)
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: Africa Woman Farming a big piece of land by herself ( Wiki Commons)
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