Working People Speak

Oral Histories of Neoliberal Africa

Jörg Wiegratz, Joseph Mujere, Joost Fontein, Jörg Wiegratz, Joseph Mujere, Joost Fontein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781032743172
• eBook ISBN: 9781040146170
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

This book presents a re-engagement with oral histories as a way of documenting, understanding, and discussing experiences of work and economic life in Africa under neoliberal capitalism. It draws on seven case studies in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Uganda, and South Sudan, from the late 1980s to the present, to offer a critical analysis of neoliberal transformations and realities at the incisive level of peoples' biographies.

The last few decades have witnessed unprecedented changes in the working lives of people across the African continent. Oral historical accounts of working lives can offer unique and productive insights into these changes by allowing analyses of neoliberalism that focuses on personal experiences over the longue durée. Yet, there has been a surprising dearth of oral histories of work since the emergence of neoliberalism in the 1980s. Compared to scholarship published more than half a century ago, there has been a decline in the use of oral histories to explore experiences of living and working under capitalism. By grounding analysis in biographical details, histories, and dynamics, the chapters in this book seek better understandings of the wider life contexts, challenges, and circumstances in which people's 'agency' emerges, unfolds, gains traction, and gets (re)shaped; and a better grasp of the multiple, entangled layers and temporalities of life and work in capitalist Africa. This book will be indispensable to students and researchers interested in political economy, development studies, anthropology, sociology, history and African Studies.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Third World Thematics and are accompanied by a new Foreword and Afterword.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement Page
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword – Voices of survival and resistance: African lives under neoliberalism
• Introduction – The case for oral histories of neoliberal Africa
• 1 As jy arm is, is jy fokol! – Poverty, personalism, and development: farmworkers’ experiences of neoliberal South Africa
• 2 Of space and alienation: South African stories of unfree life under racial capitalism
• 3 The economic lives of migrant women in a South African city: informal work, gender, and transformative possibilities
• 4 Class, cash and control in the South Sudan and Darfur borderlands
• 5 Neoliberal transformations after war: gendered narratives of post-conflict survival and crisis in Gulu district, northern Uganda
• 6 Asserting autonomy and belonging in precarious times: working lives of women labour broker workers in Johannesburg, South Africa
• 7 From state corporatism to workerism: Alfred Makwarimba and trade unionism in Zimbabwe under neoliberalism
• Afterword – Talking and writing about the history of the exploited and oppressed
• Index