ABSTRACT

H. M. Stanley grandiloquently described the founding of the Congo Free State in the 1880s as a human experiment. Stanley's words only suggest the labor policy of colonialism, but he had things clearly in mind. Every "cordial-faced aborigine," he wrote, was a future recruit to the ranks of soldier-laborer. Stanley's words are easy to understand, and they are confirmed by what happened in central Africa when the Belgian and French projects were undertaken in the nineteenth century. The history of labor in Africa has been up until primarily about the modern period, that is, after colonization was already firmly established, and much of it with the period of industrialization. Richard Gray and David Birmingham avow, in words that could have been used in the nineteenth century, that "Africa's most important wealth, both to itself and to others, was man-power". The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.