11:30 - 13:00
Oral session
Room: Arts – Lecture Room 2
Stream: Concepts, Classes and Workers. Revisiting the Making of a Working Class, African Case Studies
Chair/s:
Stefano Bellucci
Paternalism and the Making of Class in Central Africa: Unilever in the Belgian Congo, 1911-1960
Reuben Alexander Loffman
School of History, Queen Mary, University of London, London

The Anglo-Dutch company Unilever is one of the most profitable companies in the world today, with a turnover last year of over $52.7 billion in 2016. A number of authors, notably Walter Rodney and David Fieldhouse, have examined the history of Lever’s operations in Central Africa. For Rodney, Unilever embodied a historic pattern of European exploitation of Africa. Fieldhouse did not emphasise exploitation as explicitly as Rodney but he still explained Lever’s success in terms of the importance of local colonial regimes in Africa and beyond that offered protection for Lever’s assets. However, both Fieldhouse and Rodney examined Unilever in the Belgian Congo chiefly during the early colonial period and did not include the era after the Second World War in their research. In the post-war period, Unilever raised a class of blue collar workers and did invest in their pensions to some extent. However, many of these salaried workers were not in fact from the Belgian Congo but were instead from West Africa. Likewise, no African had an executive role in Lever in the Congo, or Huileries du Congo Belge (HCB), and precious few had any managerial roles despite the upward mobility that some did receive. The story of Unilever in the Belgian Congo at least, therefore, must take paternalism into account when explaining why those who lived and worked on Lever plantations often struggled with poverty and endemic hardship during decolonisation and afterwards.


Reference:
Tu-A11 Concepts, Classes and Workers 2-P-003
Presenter/s:
Reuben Alexander Loffman
Presentation type:
Panel
Room:
Arts – Lecture Room 2
Chair/s:
Stefano Bellucci
Date:
Tuesday, 11 September
Time:
12:00 - 12:15
Session times:
11:30 - 13:00