West African wage labor was embedded in family and seasonal ties

Evidence

At around the same time an internal memorandum on the subject of labor in all of West Africa noted that there were no African agricultural laborers who lived exclusively by working for others. The Africans who hired themselves out did so for only part of a year, and only to a member of their extended family. This situation made it difficult for the few European farmers in West Africa, who needed steady workers to succeed. … The author nevertheless ended on an optimistic note, and his final words provide one last reminder of how much faith Dakar put, before the war, in the transforming power of technology; with the opening of new communications, with the increasing contact with Europeans, with the constant population growth, the existing labor problems “were bound to disappear. ” Dakar’s program of mise en valeur in West Africa between 1902 and I9I4 paid the price of a civilizing ideology forged in a different social, economic, and cultural context than the one in which it operated during the early I 90o’s. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 231

Categorization

• XREF: Relates to accounts of precolonial African economic life where labor was kin-based and seasonal rather than a free wage market, complicating imposed capitalist models.