The Making Of An African Working Class
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The Making of an African Working Class
It is now 50 years since E.P. Thompson published his classic, The Making of the English Working Class. The Making of an African Working Class follows Thompson in exploring the formation of working class identity among low-paid African workers. In arguing for a radical public anthropology of worker identity, the book seeks to analyse the cultural, legal, ideological and experiential dimensions of labour activism often neglected in other labour studies. Pnina Werbner shows that by fusing cosmopolitan and local popular cultural forms of protest, unionists have created a distinctive, vernacular way of being a worker in Botswana: one that does not deny workers' roots at home or in the countryside, while being cognisant of a wider world of cosmopolitan labour rights. The assertion of working class dignity, honour and respect, Pnina argues, is a powerful motivating force for manual workers. Against legal-sceptical approaches, The Making of an African Working Class argues that in challenging the government - their employer - in court, manual workers' protests and mobilisation are deeply embedded in ethics, social justice and the law.
A Working Class in the Making
For colonial administrators and the Belgian banks, the Belgian Congo was an immensely rich source of raw materials; diamonds, gold, manganese, oils, nuts, tobacco, peanuts, etc. One of the major forms of exploitation of the Congo was the effort to set up mining companies and to force Africans to work in the mines to extract these resources. Focusing on the most powerful of these mining companies--the Union Minière du Haut-Katange, John Higginson provides a detailed history of the relationship between the company and the African workers from 1907 through 1951
Histories of a Radical Book
For better or worse, E.P. Thompson’s monumental book The Making of the English Working Class has played an essential role in shaping the intellectual lives of generations of readers since its original publication in 1963. This collected volume explores the complex impact of Thompson’s book, both as an intellectual project and material object, relating it to the social and cultural history of the book form itself—an enduring artifact of English history.