The Worlds of Labor in Ghana’s Gold Mining Industry, c. 1895–1957

Abstract

Abstract The global turn has contributed to a revitalization of labor history. Historians have become increasingly attentive to the varied forms of labor commodification that existed under capitalism. Many historians have welcomed this approach which challenges the universalism of “free” wage labor. Critics, however, have warned that global labor history risks re-inscribing the power of capital at the expense of local specificities, particularly in terms of the plurality of labor’s worlds and its (dis)connections with capital. This is not a new debate within African studies. Since the 1980s, historians of Africa have questioned the privileging of wage labor at the expense of other forms of labor and the focus on (post)colonial workplace relations to the exclusion of other relational power structures which shaped the behavior of African men and women. This article takes up these debates by focusing on different forms of labor connected to the gold mining industry in colonial Ghana. The article argues that African men and women involved in the mining sector, including mineworkers, petty traders, and sex workers, responded to their experience of commodification in ways that were about more than just their status as abstract sellers of labor power. What emerges from this analysis is a more nuanced understanding of the strategies and aspirations of African labor which was connected to the mining sector. That is to say, where colonial officials saw working patterns that were purportedly symptomatic of the “lazy” and “ill-disciplined” character of African labor, this article demonstrates otherwise. The behavior of African labor associated with the mining sector was indicative of choices that were made in accordance with individual and collective needs connected to issues of class, gender, and generation, which, in turn, were “entangled” with capitalist market imperatives but not necessarily determined by them.