Final Report Summary - FORCEDLABOURAFRICA (Forced labour: an Afro-European heritage in sub-Saharan Africa (1930-1975)?) Practices of forced labour under colonial rule in sub-Saharan Africa hold a very unusual position in African history: on the one hand, this theme appears to be widely known; on the other hand, very little research had been carried out before 2009 to get to an analytic interpretation of its various forms and effects. ForcedLabourAfrica has approached the organization and experience of such compulsory labour through a number of case studies and the analysis of entangled processes. Effects of colonial forced labour have been studied for Senegal, Ghana (Gold Coast) and Equatorial Guinea, through three PhD projects. Angola, in its border-crossing connections to Zambia (Northern Rhodesia), Namibia (South West Africa), the Belgian and French Congo, and São Tomé e Príncipe, has been another particularly enlightening case for the research project, as this former Portuguese colony constitutes a territory of great scandals, but also shows the potential of populations to organize their escape from forced labour. Amongst the most important research outputs are eight articles in international, peer-reviewed journals, with four more in press. A milestone event of ForcedLabourAfrica was a conference organized with the University of Ghana at Accra and Ho, in January 2014.The project shows the possibilities of extracting the voices of the African victims of colonial forced labour – practices of corvée labour on the roads, persecution of so-called “vagrants”, forced agriculture of cotton and rubber collection, and the use of coercion to bring locals to sign contracts for the capitalist sector – through the meticulous analysis of archival files that have so far been unexplored. Also, it illustrates the importance of comparative approaches and of the discussion of compulsory labour as part of a global history; in particular, the comparison with types of unfree labour in the Americas has been identified as an interesting approach. The results have also been linked to questions that are discussed amongst African historians, such as issues of “modern slavery” and “communal labour”.ForcedLabourAfrica has analysed the degree of destabilization that colonial forced labour introduced into rural communities. For different regions, the project demonstrates how much room for maneuver so-called “native guards” had in the recruitment of African labourers for public works. It also discusses the manifold abuses and dramatic conditions that were characteristic for the labour sites, and the ways in which women were (illegally) forced to transport food to these sites and in danger of becoming victims of sexual assaults.Individuals in Angola, Congo-Brazzaville, Zambia and elsewhere managed to react to the violence connected to forced labour. ForcedLabourAfrica sheds light on the – often quite elaborated – practices of flight and resistance. The extreme cases of resistance come close to the experiences of maroon societies in the Americas (communities of refugee slaves in the former plantation zones). The project offers an impression of their strategies of organization.But the research project also gives a profound analysis of the logics on which colonial administration was based with regard to forced labour. It identifies many of the practices that were used as “obsessive”, that means, colonial officials and their auxiliaries internalized the routines of extracting unfree labour from colonial subjects as a kind of principal goal of their activity. In the Portuguese case, e.g. in Angola, these attitudes or mindsets can be shown as particularly strong, but the role of these forms of behaviour can be demonstrated for most of the cases that were analysed.It has to be asked in how far colonial forced labour was a precursor of compulsory labour practices that continued after the independences. Obviously, forced labour was not simply copied from the colonial into the postcolonial world. All in all, it became more infrequent and less systematic. Nevertheless, important continuities could be shown.
