In 1943, a French Colonial administrator situated in Mauritania’s northern Adrar region announced that:
“A new social hierarchy, founded uniquely on wealth, is being established. Politically, it is difficult to predict the consequences of this evolution which consecrates the importance of work and which destroys the ancient seigneurs….Practically, this evolution has developed on the one hand poverty . . ., on the other, has created a new class: ‘the working class”.
The “ancient seigneurs” were Mauritania’s white Moors of largely Arab descent; this “new class” referred to their former slaves, haratine, who were mostly black. The reference to the establishment of a “new social hierarchy” was an allusion to the Abolition of Slavery, the purported goal of French colonialism in this region. The French colonial administrator most certainly over- estimated the destructive impact of this purported new social hierarchy on the Moors and exaggerated the degree to which this new class was a fait accompli in 1943. But was he right that, as E P Thompson famously put it (1963), there was a working class ‘in the making’? And if so, what do we know about its history? How has it been shaped by its ‘slave’ origins? What significance does this specificity – that those workers were probably of slave and freed-slave origin in the 1940s, and of slave descent in more contemporary times – have for how the study of African slavery intersects with the history of African labour? And ultimately, how African intersects with Global labour history?
This paper is actually a piece of a larger project looking at the history of freed-slaves and their descendants as workers for Mauritania’s famous ‘Mountain of Iron’ – the iron-ore industry in the northern region from which the Administrator wrote so many decades ago, that was founded by international colonial capital in the 1950s. Nationalized by the new independent Islamic Republic of Mauritania in 1974, the mine continued to recruit haratine as its major indigenous work force. As of 2011, it was estimated that about 90% of its employees were still haratine. Today, the company’s minerals constitute about a third of Mauritania’s export economy. Its workers and their unions are politically active, and for the last decade at least, often articulate their grievances alongside those of the country’s famous anti-slavery organizations. To return to E P Thompson, he also observed that: “class is defined by men as they live their own lives”. This is how I hope to begin to get at the question of Mauritania’s first wage-earning ‘working class’ – by learning more about the lives of the haratine who work in the Mountain of Iron and seek today to negotiate a new ‘post-slavery’ identity even as they remain tied, through their labour, to the vicissitudes of a global labour economy.
*E. P. Thompson The Making of the English Working Class, 1963; 1968: 10,11.]