ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the ILO’s role in struggles to manage rural-urban migrant labour in postwar Africa. It highlights the interplay of workers’ mobilization and colonial efforts to draw a line between a small segment of recognizably ‘working-class’ Africans and a larger ‘tribal’ or ‘traditional’ surplus population. It focuses in particular on debates between colonial authorities who sought to ensure that African workers did not permanently settle in cities, particularly through the implementation of a system of pass laws and migrant labour on the South African model, and those who sought to ‘stabilize’ a small urban working class through the adoption of ostensibly ‘non-political’ trade unionism and the extension of social policy. In no small part, this debate was decided by workers’ own actions - most notably a region-wide string of general strikes through the late 1940s and 1950s and the increasingly close (if often conflictual) relations between workers’ movements and broader resistance to colonial rule. However, constructions of race and gender had a significant influence on the trajectory of the debate at the ILO and IALC.
