In the final instalment of our three pieces to mark the publication of Working People Speak – Oral Histories of Neoliberal Africa, Kalundi Serumaga critically interrogates the concepts of ‘workers’ and ‘working class’ and their relevance outside of Western industrial society. He then reflects on how the oral history method might be one way to better understand the exploited and oppressed in their own contexts and in their own words.
By Kalundi Serumaga
History is something someone once said, while talking about something they saw happen. Then somebody else wrote that down. And it ceased to be oral. And the written was deemed to be better than the oral source. This collection of essays is a quest to make the case for the alternative method and to also use it. In summary, it seeks to intensify the basis of social science empirics by utilising the often‑overlooked method of oral history. This could present some interesting situations.
Any reading of a good, as in well‑written, academic paper today, will include taking in of a very large number of references to supplement each point. It is as though writing tends more now toward affirming what has been said earlier by another academic, and therefore in need also of being duly acknowledged. I have sometimes asked the question to academics that who awarded the first ever PhD graduate with their PhD if no one else already had one? It is another way of asking when does knowledge become knowledge and not the opinion attributable to an individual? Furthermore, how may new thoughts and ideas enter into the discourse, if the requirement for proper academic writing is that even fresh arguments must be located within the existing literature?
Often, to do this, one is required to devote a good amount of space to referencing and acknowledging and then possibly even more to explaining any disagreements one may have with some of them. New entrants are therefore always at risk of either deferring constantly to all who came before at the expense of their own arguments or to produce an unwieldly and still overcrowded, tome. Perhaps oral history will enable something of a “reset”, by providing fresh and source material upon which a new generation of disputations can then be built over time. But this raises questions of method, intent and execution.
This is a collection of essays arguing for the use of oral history and, in some cases, using some of its methods. They look at the fate of trades unionism in a changing Zimbabwean economy; the conditions of farm workers in South Africa; the conditions of female casual urban labourers in South Africa; the dynamics of post‑war recovery in northern Uganda in the context of neo‑liberalism; and the impact on ordinary South Sudanese of an increasingly neoliberal economic regime.
With method: in the end, even if one is going to use any method of investigation, it is the one researching who will decide on the subject matter and the area of focus within it. Overall, the essays examine a social category they in general define, or allude to, as “workers” or “the working class”. The question may be asked as to why they choose to do this?
We may reflect a little on the origins of the concept of the “working class” as a political utility and also therefore a point of interest to social science. It emerged during and after the great upheavals within especially Western industrial society when capitalism struggled to contain the continual unrest from its exploited labour force. This course is best known as chronicled by the activism and resultant writings of leading theorists of this conflict on the side of labour. Their position was to see the labour force as a legitimate, viable and potent agent for politico‑economic change, and theorised extensively around this, to support revolutionary political action. The best known of course are Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin. These epistemologies that flowed from these contentions have had a far‑reaching impact on Western social science.
This reality is one of the reasons why the revolutionary movements in other non‑, or far less, industrialised parts of the world spent a long time looking for a class that did not really or substantially exist; so as to ground their own movements in then greatly favoured theories of the day, and hopefully access the potentially significant international support from those states that had already had such successful “revolutions”.
This was quite common to more than a few African dictatorships of the Cold War era. Many problems emerged from this, not least that the pre‑eminence of European thought in the revolutionary thinking of the beginning of the 20th century and the latter half of the century before it, led to a certain Western Left cultural chauvinism, in which many Western activists and thinkers saw themselves as the permanent custodians, curators and teachers of it to everyone else.
This was ironically the result also of the Western cultural legacy coming out of their earlier missionary traditions that built into a 500‑year assumption of Caucasian global leadership. The reality is that the greater experience of the peoples of the world was not of being turned into an industrial proletariat: this was a global minority experience. This is not to say the Western industrial proletariat were not being exploited and left dispossessed and even oppressed. But this reality of demographic divergence is what led, for example, to the critical schisms of theory and practice between the communists of China who had initially received support during their armed struggle from the already successful communists of Russia/the Soviet Union. This support waxed and waned over the later insistence of the Chinese on developing different politics to accommodate interests of other socio‑economic classes in China based on the reality that such classes consisted a substantial part of Chinese society, and were also objectively oppressed by Western and Japanese imperialism. There simply were not enough industrial factory workers and the like in the so‑called Third World upon which to build the classic (or Western?) Marxist vision of workers’ revolution.
With these essays and many before them we now even have the situation where the concept of Working Class may now be found in a perhaps repurposed, or perhaps disembodied form, in areas of writing outside the Marxist tradition. But this may raise the question of what intention lies within the study of the “working class” in the absence of the historical role attributed to it by the ones who invented and weaponised the socioeconomic concept of them?
In terms of execution: all the studies focus on the Global South and are then skewed to southern Africa; partly because of settler industrialism there and again within that, therefore, a quest to find a class in which to locate one’s analysis. These studies, however, are not concerned with revolution and its theories. Nevertheless, we have to engage with the question of what to do when an element of a theory is extracted from its original conceptual habitat and thrust into another area of study. This is one big question. It could be partly answered by the expansion of the oral history method. We can get to hear how the exploited and oppressed of these areas see themselves in their own words. We can also learn the fate of the traditions of the working‑class struggle as perhaps originating in Western Europe and exported, not necessarily in an ill‑intentioned way, to Africa after its own envelopment by the Western capitalist economies.
The essays have made the case for oral history. As the work continues to develop, perhaps more areas could be examined to see if they can enrich it. First, oral history may be seen as now part of the wider family of orality, as it were. These are the arguments put forward by people like Pio Zirimu, who believed that unwritten folklore and even music could be considered as part of what is called “literature”. Diop argued somewhat conversely that the African traditions of verbal record‑keepers among many African communities were in fact a consequence of the falling away of earlier writing skills. Diop said it was disadvantageous because a lot of knowledge got lost or distorted this way, but that the information originally memorialised is in fact actual history. This work being undertaken could also begin broadening its scope to folk includes more music, folklore, popular theatre and the like.
Not everything needs to be designed beforehand and directed by the researcher. We can listen passively, too. Second, if the purpose of such studies is to understand the economic life of a society, perhaps other social groups may also be taken into account. This could include the various categories of subsistence farmers, the small‑scale business owners, and those branches of the “working‑class” communities not in full or regular employment. The essays provide much interesting data and anecdote. A lot has happened in Africa in the last fifty years. There is a lot yet to be captured, one way or another.
Kalundi Serumaga is an activist and political commentator based in Kampala. He has had a long career working as a filmmaker, director, journalist, dramatist, and historian, and has faced broadcasting bans. Serumaga is a follower of the late African activist and philosopher Dani Nabudere. His writing can be found on Patreon as Kalundi Serumaga. He is also on X @NativeLandgrab.
For further oral history material and analysis/work, see also: the History Workshop at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, the Centre for Popular Memory at the University of Cape Town, the Anti-Privatisation Forum collection at the South African History Archive, the African Oral History Project and Overview of African Oral Histories Online Collections at the Washington University in St. Louis.
Featured Photograph: A stoneworker in the Central African Republic (Wiki Commons)
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