ROAPE’s Bettina Engels introduces Volume 51 Issue 182 of the journal, about labour organisation, working class struggles and popular protests. The issue features contributions from Eddie Cottle on the role of women in the Durban mass strikes of the 1970s, James Musonda on the financialised precarity of Zambian mineworkers, Prince Asafu-Adjaye and Matteo Rizzo on informal workers in Ghana, and Franceso Pontarelli on Gramsci’s concept of passive revolution in South Africa. It also features briefings from Nathaniel Umukoro and Eunice Umukoro-Esekhile on conflict and innovation in the Niger Delta and Jeremiah O. Arowosegbe on attacks on intellectual labour in Nigeria, alongside a debate piece on global historical materialism and decoloniality from Joma Geneciran. The issue is rounded off with two book reviews, with Zachary Patterson on Voices for African Liberation and Tarminder Kaur on Wentworth: The Beautiful Game and the Making of Place. Each article is accessible through the links provided above and below, and the entire issue can be accessed, downloaded and read for free here.
By Bettina Engels
This issue is about labour organisation, working class struggles and popular protests.1 It is about the ambivalent role that trade unions play in the organisation of workers and labour struggles as well as in popular struggles and mass protests on the continent. These can only be understood in the context of the continued austerity policies, privatisation and economic liberalisation enforced by the international financial institutions (IFIs). Recent protests in Kenya and Nigeria have clearly exemplified this.
On 25 June 2024, protesting youth in Kenya stormed the national Parliament and set part of it on fire. This was the peak of a week of massive protest all over the country against President William Ruto’s government’s fiscal strategy that was announced in May and introduced significant new taxes, including on essential goods. The youth, widely referred to as Gen Z, know where this comes from: ‘Ruto is IMF village elder in Kenya’, says a sign held up by a protester (Patterson 2024). Indeed, the tax was suggested by the IMF, and the government had stated that it needed the tax revenue to service the external debt (ibid.; Wambua-Soi 2024). On 26 June, Ruto strategically withdrew the Finance Bill in an effort to calm the protests. The protestors, unwilling to be tamed in this way, met the military on the streets the following day. More than 40 youth were killed during the protests, and thousands were injured, arrested or have disappeared, possibly abducted by the police (Githethwa 2024; Muia 2024). In the city of Ongata Rongai a 12-year-old was killed by a stray police bullet (Wambua-Soi 2024). Ruto, to save his neck, dismissed most of his cabinet on 11 July, and on 12 July, police chief Japhet Koome resigned. But this has not changed the principal course of the government.
The following month in Nigeria, mass protests, both organised and spontaneous, took place across the country between 1 and 10 August 2024 in anger at President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s austerity policy. The state authorities reacted harshly: around 40 protestors were killed and more than 1,500 arrested (HRW 2024; for the campaign to release the detained protestors, see Ousmane 2024). On 1 October, protests – tagged #FearlessOctober – resumed, and were promptly suppressed (Amnesty International 2024). Tinubu had taken office in 2023 and immediately begun to implement measures demanded for some time by the IFIs. Among the first measures, taken at the end of May 2023, was the withdrawal of the fuel subsidy, which was a major cause of the rise in inflation of over 34% within a year. The electricity price was increased almost threefold (Odah 2024) and the national currency, the naira, was devalued by 50%. This was a familiar set of outcomes following IFI intervention. The same happened 30 years earlier with the CFA franc, the currency of neighbouring countries, which was similarly devalued by 50% in 1994. Unsurprisingly, as in countless other cases, hunger, poverty and unemployment have increased as a consequence of the austerity policies, the rising cost of living and declining real income, although in Nigeria’s case GDP (in current US dollars) has increased threefold in real terms since 2000.2 As in many other cases, people have expressed their anger through what have been labelled food and fuel price riots – riots against ‘the politics of global adjustment’, as Walton and Seddon (1994) express it in the subtitle of their book. The current protests in Nigeria are taking place under the labels #EndHunger and #EndBadGovernance whereby the protesters do not have same notion of ‘bad governance’ as the global liberal development discourse.
In July 2024, the trade unions reached an agreement with the Nigerian government to increase the minimum wage by more than 130% (to 70,000 naira per month, which corresponds to slightly less than €40 in mid October 2024). This may sound like a lot, but it falls far short of the 1,500% increase (to 494,000 naira per month) that the unions had called for. Against the backdrop of the significant rise in the cost of living, the real value of the minimum wage halved in the five years before this increase (Odah 2024). Apart from the fact that wages are paid irregularly, only those who receive a wage from a more or less formally contracted job benefit from the minimum wage. And not even formal employment in an supposedly well-paid sector such as industrial mining necessarily secures the livelihood of workers and their families, as James Musonda demonstrates in his article in this issue (Musonda 2024). As Prince Asafu-Adjaye and Matteo Rizzo show, also in this issue, informal-sector waged catering workers in Accra, Ghana, are often paid less than the national minimum wage (Asafu-Adjaye and Rizzo 2024).
The Ghana case study, like the recent uprising in Nigeria, points to the ambivalent role of trade unions in popular struggles against hunger, poverty and corruption: Nigerian trade unions have a militant tradition and are certainly more combative than almost all of their counterparts in the global North. They consider themselves more as mass organisations, and historically they have been important forces in broad popular struggles for liberation and against (neo)colonialism, dictatorship and apartheid (Freund 1988; Kraus 2007; Beckmann and Sachikonye 2010). They have played a leading role in the recent protests and faced substantial repression.3 However, they are still membership-based workers’ organisations, and ‘workers’ continues to mean, first and foremost, people in more or less formally contracted employment status.
Worker is neither a synonym for employee nor for man
The articles in this issue all deal in various ways with the labour movement, labour organising and working-class struggles. It is important that labour is not limited to formal wage employment but also includes informal and self-employed labour as well as reproductive labour, and to understand these as members of the exploited classes (Pattenden 2021, 94). Concepts such as the ‘popular classes’ (Seddon 2002; Seddon and Zeilig 2005), ‘working people’ (Shivji 2017, referring to Walter Rodney) or peasant workers (Pye and Chatuthai 2023) are based on the same idea. However, the relationship between wage labour and reproductive labour often remains vague or subordinated, and the concepts hardly engage in depth with the fundamental entanglement of class and gender relations.4
In this issue, Eddie Cottle draws our attention to the fact that ‘worker’ is frequently used as a supposedly ‘gender-neutral term’ (Cottle 2024, 544), while actually suggesting that the ‘normal’ worker was identified as male, noting Ensor’s 2023 finding that in a book ‘where 95 workers were interviewed the gender of the interviewees was not mentioned; the male pronoun, “he”, was used, but never “she”’ (ibid., 544). Cottle emphasises that agency and leadership of women is widely ignored both in the practice of labour struggles itself and in reports and research. This not only obscures the agency of women but also gender relations within labour, the labour movement and labour struggles. Feminists have been pointing out for decades that most analyses of class relations and class struggles fail to integrate gender into their theoretical reflections (Robertson and Berger 1986). A feminist perspective in class analysis of course does not mean to ‘add women and stir’; nor does it refer to a liberal-constructivist gender perspective that neglects or blurs the material conditions of social relations. Underlining that gender relations are social relations does not mean getting stuck in the observation that gender is socially constructed. It means to recognise that gender (and of course, gender does not simply mean ‘men’ and ‘women’) is a social relation that is produced by inequality and power: heteronormativity and the supposedly ‘natural’ binary gender order are very useful for capitalism, colonialism and imperialism (Federici 2004; Lugones 2007; Beier 2023). As Lyn Ossome put it, ‘capitalism draws on reproductive labour for its functioning but does not support the reproduction of that labour’ (Ossome 2024, 517). At the same time, reproductive labour under capitalism is, at least partly, also transformed into waged labour. Janet Bujra has traced that domestic service as wage labour ‘is a product of the colonial period with its racialised social order’ (Bujra 2000, 4).
To reveal how the entanglement of gender and class relations works precisely in various contexts, and how people reaffirm or contest it, both in everyday confrontations at the family and community levels, including within labour organisations, community organisations and social movements, and at the level of socio-political struggles, remains a task for empirical studies.
In capitalism, waged labour represents one of several forms of labour; and the idea of waged labour actually works on the basis of the exploitation of other forms of labour, namely in the reproductive sphere. Focusing on waged labour, it might be argued, somehow reflects an andro- and Eurocentric perspective that universalises the concept of waged labour in the factories at the time of the emergence of capitalism in Europe (Komlosy 2016, 56–57). This form of capitalism, hand in hand with colonialism and imperialism, is the dominant global form but by no means the only one, either in the North or the South.
Indeed, most people in the global South (and increasingly, in many settings in the North likewise) are not engaged in formal and relatively secured waged labour. They are handicraft producers, artisanal miners, petty traders, hauliers, agricultural labourers, care workers and others, and they do unpaid reproductive work. Around 85% of African workers are engaged in the so-called informal economy and, even in South Africa, the most ‘advanced’ industrialised economy on the continent, more than 40% of all employment is precarious and irregular in some way (Bernards 2019, 294). That large numbers of people are engaged in formal, relatively secured employment is rather an historical exception than the norm in global capitalism (Breman and van der Linden 2014; Serumaga 2024). Informal, precarious, unfree and unpaid labour is, and has always been, key to capitalism. Thus, ‘our picture of capitalism – whether as a system of “accumulation on a world scale” or more narrowly as a set of spatially and temporally bound relations of production – [is never] complete without taking such forms of work into account’ (Bernards 2019, 296).
If precarious and informal work are expanding, this does not mean ‘the end of trade unionism as we know it’ (Rizzo and Atzeni 2020, 1114). Prominent authors on precarity (Standing 2011; see also Gallin 2001), predominantly focusing on the North, assume that trade unions are unable to defend the rights of precarious workers and struggle to improve their conditions of work and life. Informal workers are indeed sparsely represented in trade unions but are present in a range of other organisations, both progressive and neoliberal (Britwum and Akorsu 2017): workers’ associations, women’s associations, cooperatives, civil society organisations, advocacy organisations, and others – ranging from scattered local groups to well-organised transnational networks. This does not have to be an either/or (trade unions or other organisations): for example, in the 1990s the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions sought to organise informal workers by allowing their organisations to become associate members of the federation and providing them with some funds. However, these attempts were neither sustainable nor particularly successful (Yeros 2013, 230). In other cases, for example in the urban transport sector in Dar es Salaam, the organisation of informal minibus workers and the transport trade union entered into an alliance, with advantages for both sides (Rizzo 2013). Finally, there are also examples of informal workers organising in trade unions: in palm oil production in Ghana, casual workers have organised themselves alongside their regularly employed colleagues in two competing trade unions (Britwum and Akorsu 2017).
Contributions to this issue point to this well-known debate about the form of organisation and representation of workers’ interests, on the continent and worldwide: namely, whether and how far trade unions are the appropriate, best and only organisations to represent workers. This debate is, of course, as old as the labour movement and trade unions themselves. Trade unions as organisations emerged at a specific moment in the history of capitalism, namely the industrial revolution and the related proletarianisation, especially in Europe. This form of organisation has spread, changed and been adapted. Trade unions are not a fixed model arising from the historically specific industrial relations of the global North (Engels and Roy 2023). Many different organisations and collective actors consider themselves ‘unions’, for example student unions, unions of artisanal miners or other ‘informal’ and precarious workers, of the unemployed or small peasants throughout the world. Industrial unions by no means have a monopoly on the term and no exclusivity over the form of organisation, just as they have no exclusive claim on striking as a means of collective action (Atzeni 2021). The current strikes in Nigeria are an impressive example of this. Elsewhere on the continent, a well-known example and a paradigmatic case of the ambivalent role of trade unions as a form of organising and mobilising workers on the one hand, and as an institutionalised actor in corporatist state–society relations that tend to tame and contain workers movements on the other, is the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA – see Francesco Pontarelli’s (2024) contribution to this issue) and the strikes in the South African platinum mines in 2012–13 (Chinguno 2013, 2015; Dunbar Moodie 2015).
As class formations, trade unions organise workers to end workers’ atomisation in order to maintain and increase wages, reduce working hours, and so forth (Annunziato 1988, 112; McIlroy 2014, 497). This does not necessarily mean that they develop class consciousness in relation to a working class as such that goes beyond the respective workforce, union members or formal workers in a particular area. This is what the notion of ‘labour aristocracy’ refers to (Saul 1975; Waterman 1975). Moreover, trade unions are a product and part of capitalism and function as a regulating force to it. This raises the question of the extent to which the elites and leadership of trade unions, the bureaucracy, are actually responsible for the fact that trade unions contain rather than escalate class conflicts; and of what difference formal democratic procedures make within trade unions. To what extent does the fact that trade unions are both actors and products of the capitalist system place limits on radical democracy because it is incompatible with the system (McIlroy 2014; Atzeni 2016)? Furthermore, leaders and members of trade unions are not homogeneous groups: depending on the context, reformist ideas are just as entrenched among the rank and file of trade unions as among their leaders, and in some case ‘officials may be more militant than members; in other cases the opposite applies’ (McIlroy 2014, 517). At the end of the day, this remains an empirical question, which is also addressed in the articles in this issue, with reference to the perspectives of workers and trade unionists themselves.
Articles in this issue
In the first article, Eddie Cottle aims to uncover the agency and leadership of black women in the Durban mass strikes that took place between January and March 1973. More than 61,000 workers engaged in 160 strikes. The author points out that in reports and research on the strikes, notably in The Durban Strikes 1973: Human Beings with Souls, an ‘authoritative book’ (544) published by the Institute for Industrial Education in 1977, women’s active roles have widely been ignored. Based on a detailed analysis of reports and press articles, Cottle argues that female-dominated industries, namely the textile and clothing industries, prepared the strikes, as they were at the forefront of the strike movements of the 1960s that preceded the Durban strikes. Cottle demonstrates that mass strikes, even if they seem to emerge more or less spontaneously, are embedded in a history of labour and class struggles.
James Musonda investigates how the consequences of IFI politics – forced privatisation and related retrenchments – relate to the indebtedness of Zimbabwean mineworkers. Even workers in industrial mines, who might be expected to receive a relatively good and reliable wage, continuously go into debt to compensate for low wages. The retrenchments of the mining companies include, for example, the withdrawal of support in the areas of housing, water, electricity and free education – which in fact means a considerable reduction in wages, as the workers now have to pay for basic social services on the market. A growing range of financial products, which are also aimed at the poor, is part of this ‘financialised precarity’. Experiences of vulnerability and uncertainty shape the life of the mineworkers and their families. Musonda, himself a unionist, impressively tells the story from the perspective of a worker: ‘It is easier to write about the underground; it is another thing to work there’ (557).
While organising labour in the formal manufacturing sector is relatively straightforward, organising workers in the informal sector is not at all easy. Against this backdrop, Prince Asafu-Adjaye and Matteo Rizzo engage with the difficult relationship of trade unions and informal workers. They analyse chop bars, informal street food caterers, in Accra, Ghana, and notably the Ghana Trades Union Congress’s efforts to organise these. The Trades Union Congress receives donor funding from the EU, USAID and others for this purpose. However, this has certain negative effects. As the authors demonstrate, the donors, unsurprisingly, follow the neoliberal idea of informal sector workers as potential entrepreneurs and the funding programmes deliberately ignore the structural political-economic causes of informality. Furthermore, they limit the target group to very specific workers and ignore that social stratification and class relations do exist in an informal sector such as the chop bars. There is waged labour in the chop bars – eight out of ten chop bars in the authors’ study employ labour. Yet this is not formal contracted labour, and relations between chop bar owners and workers are shaped by unequal power relations – ‘toxic’, as one of the interviewees describes it. Many chop bar workers end up with less than the national minimum wage. The donor programmes do not target these workers, as the donors consider the informal sector as self-employed. Efforts by the Trades Union Congress to organise the workers were not covered by the donor funding, whereas entrepreneurial ‘capacity building’ of the chop bar owners is supported. The Trades Union Congress also supports bar owners in accessing credit and formal social security. Overall, donor support related to the informal sector is exclusive and clearly based in a market fundamentalist ideology. It is up to the trade unions to decide whether this is the direction they want to pursue.
In the fourth contribution to this issue, Francesco Pontarelli, analysing popular struggles in South Africa, engages with Gramsci’s concept of the passive revolution, and particularly how the concept is referred to in South African academic literature. The ‘passive revolution’ describes a ‘revolution’ – in the sense of a transformative and progressive process – that is carried out not by the masses but by the ruling classes as a strategy of crisis management. The ruling classes take up some of the demands of the subalterns and integrate them, while at the same time suppressing those parts of the subalterns who do not want to adapt and be incorporated. Pontarelli joins the series of articles in ROAPE – in the journal as well as on Roape.net5 – that make use of Gramsci’s vocabulary to understand (class) struggles on the continent (for example, Reboredo 2021; Suliman 2022; Gervasio and Teti 2023). The fascination of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks lies in Gramsci’s political biography, in its ‘unfinished nature’ and in ‘Gramsci’s own extensive use of the term’ passive revolution (595). Pontarelli’s concern is to see the passive revolution as a political strategy that opens up room for manoeuvre for the subaltern classes, not just as a theoretical-analytical concept. In analysing recent popular struggles in South Africa, the author uses two quite different cases, NUMSA and #FeesMustFall. He shows first that organised labour – in this case NUMSA – can represent a potential counterforce to the passive revolution. Second, #FeesMustFall can be seen as an example of a successful cross-class alliance of students and workers. Pontarelli’s point here is that the analysis of passive revolution should not be limited to the perspective of the elites, capital and the state, but must explore the scope for resistance by the subaltern classes and at the same time recognise the risks for cooptation.
The first briefing, by Nathaniel Umukoro and Eunice Umukoro-Esekhile, explores a neglected area of debate linked to natural resource conflicts in Nigeria’s Niger Delta. They examine whether conflict in the region over oil extraction has led to the development of innovative strategies for petroleum refining by the local population. The briefing by Jeremiah Arowosegbe documents attacks on academic freedom in Nigeria. He first sets an Africa-wide context of the ways in which higher education has been politicised before looking at a detailed case study of attacks on academic freedom and intellectual labour in Nigeria. He also assesses ways in which academic trade unions and associations have challenged Nigerian state repression. Joma Geneciran’s debate provides a historical materialist critique of decolonial theory. They do this by engaging in the work of Walter Mignolo, offering a trenchant critique of decolonial literature that fails to engage with the specificity of social formations and historical contexts. Geneciran argues for the centrality of historical materialism, national liberation and the social formation as a unit of analysis.
Notes
1. This editorial for ROAPE Issue 182, which concludes our first year of fully open access publication, is, as always, a collective effort. Many thanks to the editorial collective for comments, corrections and discussion. Any remaining inadequacies and superficialities are my own.
2. See World Bank Data at https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?locations=NG, accessed October 13, 2024.
3. For example, on 9 September 2024, the president of the Nigerian Labour Congress, Joe Ajaero, was arrested at Abuja airport to prevent him attending a Trades Union Congress meeting in the UK.
4. For an excellent empirical illustration of the entanglement of the productive and reproductive sphere, see Asanda Benya’s (2015) analysis of the ‘invisible hands’ of women in Marikana.
5. See https://roape.net/tag/antonio-gramsci, accessed October 4, 2024.
The entire issue can be accessed, downloaded and read for free here.
Bettina Engels teaches at the Department of Political and Social Sciences, Freie Universität Berlin, in Berlin. Bettina is an editor of ROAPE.
For 50 years, ROAPE has brought our readers path-breaking analysis on radical African political economy in our quarterly review, and for more than ten years on our website. Subscriptions and donations are essential to keeping our review and website alive. Please consider subscribing or donating today.
