Abstract
“A young girl of 10 or 12 was given twenty-four blows of the palmatoria while Sr Amaro stood behind her with a hippopotamus hide whip to force her to hold out her hand.” A halt was called to this scene “when they saw me.” However, he adds for the benefit of his employers, “corporal punishment for the black man is necessary because it is the only thing he fears.”Please note that in [the] future the designation “men” must be substituted for “boys” in all communications referring to the Colliery labour either collectively or individually. No person employed by this department must be addressed as “boy.”Colliery Manager (Enugu) to Staff, 23 December 1941For African workers, World War II brought contradictory experiences of “progressive” reform within authoritarian labor systems and the preservation of archaic oppressive systems of labor mobilization and control. The opening quotes illustrate the contrasting strategies that colonial powers used in their search for the best labor regimes to control African labor. There was a clear difference between brutal, coercive systems of labor discipline used, in this instance, by Portuguese planters on Principe and British rejection of incendiary forms of racial address in the British colonies. It was better to make concessions to the gendered sensitivities of African working-class men than to put down a strike whose demand was “respect.” But even British reformers were not adverse to using brutal forms of forced labor and ignoring the rural starvation that it caused, as was the case in the tin-producing areas of northern Nigeria after the loss of the Far East colonies to the Japanese. British reform, although often abandoned, came from an embarrassing rash of violent strikes (that spilled over into anticolonial protests) in the British Caribbean and on the Northern Rhodesian copper belt in the late 1930s when workers attacked white bosses. These experiences nudged them along the road to recognizing that Britain did, in fact, have a colonial working-class that might quite possibly be controlled by “enlightened” “modern” systems of worker control and industrial relations used on the English working-class.