ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the typicality of precariousness in colonial and postcolonial Africa was not confined to labour exploitation and control, but also characterized African workers' responses to waged employment. The precariousness of work in Africa thus undermines working for wages as a putatively progressive norm as well as a social condition through which capital reproduces itself. The precariousness of African work is 'post' colonial to the extent that it has challenged imaginaries of rule – emerged in the colonial context and transmitted to independent nation states – geared at positing wage labour as a condition to make Africans governable and productive. The changing precarity of work thus becomes symptomatic of a more general precariousness of capitalism in the neoliberal age. Neoliberal postmodernity validated in the end the persistence of hierarchies premised on despotism, nepotism, and servitude, which ironically superseded the modern wage form and its institutionalization in colonial and post-independence states.
