Colonial labour displacement devalued African women’s social position.

Evidence

The cohesiveness of the African family was put to test when the colonial recruitment agencies, the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (WENELA) and the Rhodesia Native Labour Association (RNLA) both legally and illegally moved male labourers to mining sites. Other men and maybe a few women were moved to the cities to serve the domestic needs of the colonial masters, while most women, children and elders were likewise forcibly moved to less arable and tsetse-infested reserves to give way for white settler farmers to occupy good soils. In such arrangements the African woman’s position slowly lost value, while men, through the monetary value of their industrial wages, became better citizens. — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 934

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to settler-colonial land theft and labour expropriation dynamics paralleling records of the Witwatersrand mine labour system. — connects to: Degraded forests imposed added unpaid labor on already-dispossessed women — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 395