ABSTRACT
The role and power of the multi-national corporations is recognized and much debated with reference to North America, Europe and other parts of the world. But a similar process involving foreign companies generally is also evident in Africa, in which labour is seen as the most abundant resource and therefore relatively cheap. Each East and Central African country has a growing abundance of young, increasingly more educated people who aspire to the limited white-collar and skilled jobs for which, they have been taught to believe, their education has qualified them. Ethnicity in Africa may well be a form of false consciousness or mystification which deflects migrants' attention from the fundamental cleavage arising from their displacement from a peasant to an industrial mode of production. In a plural society, of which colonial southern Africa is a type, favourable agro-ecological regions tend to be controlled by the dominant group which demands and is able to hold labour from within the region.
