Wage labor history in Central and Southern Africa

Labor in southern Africa changed rapidly over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the region became firmly locked into the global capitalist economy. The development of wage labor in southern Africa adapted to the rapid changes brought about by the minerals revolution and the spread of commercial agriculture. This was also a period of rapid urbanisation, creating both opportunities and challenges for workers. Labor migration and the mobility of both people and ideas, tied the region together often creating a shared experience of working life in both the formal and informal economies. Southern Africa’s political, social, and economic development was fundamentally altered by processes of colonisation and the new forms of economic activity that arose from that intrusion. The large-scale exploitation of mineral resources in the late-nineteenth century and the entrenchment of European colonialism reshaped African societies and changed the nature of how, and why, people worked. Broadly speaking, the push of taxes combined with the pull of wages in new mines, farms, and factories slowly coaxed Africans into the capitalist economy. Growing urban centres, and the new occupations they generated, provided alternatives to mine and farm work, as well as providing opportunities for livelihoods based in the ‘informal’ economy, catering for the needs and desires of the growing number of urban residents.