Forced Labor and Colonial Development in Africa

As European powers began to assert hegemony in much of Africa during the early twentieth century, forced labor became a common and cheap method of organizing the labor of colonial subjects. The impoverished colonial states needed cheap African labor for infrastructure development while, in settler colonies, European immigrants and business interests also required affordable labor to squeeze out profit margins. 1 The myth of the lazy African male, unresponsive to economic incentives and lethargic due to the labor of his womenfolk, fueled the ideological justification for forced labor as an aspect of progressive rule. 2 Essentially, if Africans would not work for Europeans, which was in their best interests anyway, they must be forced to work. Out of this moral and economic “dilemma” of development grew the multiheaded Hydra of forced labor in Africa: forced labor for private interests, government forced labor, and coercion in the interests of community. In this chapter we first, broadly, examine the general archetypes of forced labor in colonial Africa and their connection to economic development.

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Notes

  1. For example, it is estimated that Kng Leopold of Belgium extracted approximately 1.1 billion dollars’ worth of profit from the Belgian Congo, or as it was known, the Congo Free State. Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (New York: Mariner Books, 1999), 277. Google Scholar
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Okia, O. (2012). Forced Labor and Colonial Development in Africa. In: Communal Labor in Colonial Kenya. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230392960_2

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