African Labour and Liberation

African Labour and Liberation brings together the experiences of workers, trade unions and labour movements across the continent to ask what they can tell us about work, power and liberation today. We assembled this collection because of the surprisingly few recent accounts of the emergence of a class politics on the continent. Labour is central to understanding the present political economy of Africa. More than 90 percent of Africa’s 500 million workers work in informal and precarious jobs in a labour force that will grow rapidly in the next three decades.

The social and political mobilization of workers in multifarious contexts across the continent is imperative to improving their socio-economic conditions. It is necessary to situate Africa’s workers at the centre. This collection starts from the premise that labour struggles are essential to improving the conditions of work and stamping out poverty and inequality that the confronts most African workers today and form the basis for building new forms of collective power.

This heterodox collec­tion finds six primary patterns prevalent in the struggle for the working class liberation in the post-independence era.

1. Most governments in Africa are comprador-bureaucratic regimes beholden to foreign capital and imperialists’ interests to protect and maintain unequal exchange of trade and the attenuation of demands by the masses for national control over natural resources and production. Comprador-bureaucratic regimes remain loyal to their post-colonial powers and pay fleeting attention to national sustainability, the rights of women, natu­ral ecology, and the ever-growing needs of the masses for health care, education, housing, infrastructure, water, and electricity.

Government legislation to defend popular interests that have been enacted by national assemblies are rarely fully implemented and are likely to be opposed by international banks and lenders, predominantly from the West through structural adjustment programs that undermine evanescent attempts to ameliorate the most significant challenges.

2. Diverse workers’ movements form to resist t the comprador-bureaucratic political economies which formed in the colonial era which most often extract surplus value from workers and natural resources from the continent through what Arghiri Emmanuel identified as unequal exchange of trade, and despoiling, and plundering African nations. Control is maintained by local elites attached to state power who are beneficiaries of rentier capitalism. These national elites have welcomed Western powers to establish military bases osten­sibly to establish peace and order.

In most instances, the emergence of violence and disorder were generated by Western military intervention. However, as Samir Amin shows, workers and peasants drive the enduring imperative for the formation of national projects for popular sovereignty, which are often imperfect and challenged by imperialists seeking to maintain the unequal exchange of trade.

3. African states are ruled by comprador state-centric bureaucratic elites who maintain rentier capitalism as the primary source of revenue rather than investing in productive technology. The historical pattern is opposition to the redistribution of wealth and income to the masses.

This process, in which bureaucratic elements seek to transform themselves – sometimes successful sometimes not, but nearly always drawing links to imperial­ism and thereby fusing the bureaucratic and comprador elements – can be seen nearly everywhere. Unquestionably, compliant and often corrupt political elites provide the patina of legitimacy for all practical purposes, for the expansion of inequality.

4. In Africa, racial justice must include an anti-imperialist per­spective which acknowledges the legacy of European colonialism and the protracted nature of imperialism which sustains racial subordina­tion. Markedly, South Africa, a semi-peripheral mineral-rich state, did not redistribute wealth and property with the end of political apartheid and the development of a superficially democratic state. Black South Africans, composing over 80 percent of the country’s 65 million popu­lation, remain marginalized through the 1994 accords, which did not include a redistribution of wealth and resources – causing higher levels of poverty and inequality and impeding the working class from improv­ing its living standards.

5. Women constitute a large proportion of the African labour force, while also being disproportionately concentrated in precarious and insecure forms of work. Their labour is central to the reproduction of the economy, both through their participation in vital productive sectors and through forms of unpaid and underpaid labour that sustain households and communities.

Two women selling okpa at the Eke Awka Market in Awka, Anambra State, Nigeria (Wikimedia Commons, 2026)
This is particularly significant on a continent where, despite rapid urbanisation, more than half of the population continues to live in rural areas. Women are central to subsistence production and food sovereignty, while their role as primary caregivers places them at the centre of social reproduction. Any account of labour and liberation must therefore attend not only to women’s position within waged employment, but also to the often invisible labour through which they reproduce life, sustain communities and secure livelihoods.

6. The rural and urban economy, which is dominated by precarious employment, is also produced and amplified by climate uncertainty primarily instigated by Western consumption. A formula for social justice must include eco-socialist perspectives, ecological concerns and the extent to which these have been and are addressed by African labour movements. We attach importance to trade unions as sites of radical democracy and decolonial politics.

However, there is also significant invention and development that has taken place within African trade unions in different times and places that must be accentuated. We believe that trade unions and working-class organisa­tions must be tested, from case to case, rather than asserted, because of the proliferation of African trade unions which have developed forms of organisations and struggle that are necessary, novel, innovative and effective.

Taken together, enduring patterns of labour resistance demonstrate the enduring centrality of workers and popular movements to struggles for political and economic transformation and anti-imperialism. The histories gathered in African Labour and Liberation show that labour is not only understood simply through the workplace or trade union but must be situated within the anti-imperialist contestation over natural resources and the unceasing struggle to achieve, genuine popular sovereignty.

Concomitantly, these histories reveal that existing workers’ organisations on the continent are not uniform or even the vehicle for advancing the interests of the masses who are living under informal and precarious conditions. Across contexts, workers and their class allies have developed distinct modes of organising, resisting and building collective power.

African Labour and Liberation foregrounds histories of differentiated movements that resist enduring forms of domination and lay the groundwork for new terrains of conflict in opposition to internal oppression and imperialist domination. Far from being peripheral to the history of labour, they are central to understanding how working people have confronted exploitation and sought to reshape the societies in which they live.