Sandro Mezzadra argues that liberal conceptions of citizenship are rooted in the development of free labour, and thus in the end of feudalism and the demise of slavery and serfdom. Historically, labour has served both to include people into citizenship — or, exclude them from it — and to provide socioeconomic advancement. Discursively, we frequently substitute taxpayer for citizen and expect rights-bearing subjects to be ‘productive ‘ members of society. A tendency to focus on commodified labour, moreover, affords this notion of the productive citizen a decidedly masculine bias.
This labour-citizenship nexus can also be recognized in colonial Africa. Colonial discourse linked wage labour to civilization and opposed it to ‘primitive’ subsistence economies. People in urban/industrial employment enjoyed rights that other ‘subjects’ did not, including exemptions from forced labour and customary authorities, even if these rights fell far short of those of full citizens. Moreover, wage labourers played a big role in independence movements, as the late colonial state was trying to mold modern industrial men. Marxist historiography, meanwhile, has frequently prioritized ‘the worker’ as agent of change.
Several nationalist parties initially drew their support from urban constituencies: workers, professionals, trade unions. Decolonization thus brought great expectations, as people demanded access to jobs — now that they are citizens — and looked at the state to deliver these. Employment would turn the African masses into modern citizens. These rights-bearing citizens of bureaucratic nation-states, rather than subjects of traditional authorities, would provide a power base for nationalist parties. Indeed, wage labour was often believed to be the great emancipator that can wean people away from the pre-modern ethnic particularism of chieftaincy and indirect rule. Jobs, however, failed to materialize and the labour-citizen nexus broke apart in much of Africa. Other, and often un-salutary, forms of political inclusion thus take center stage, as patronage and patrimonialism, politicized ethnicity, warlordism, and big-men-ism frequently govern relations between elites and masses. In South Africa, moreover, a comparatively generous welfare and grants system has, for now, managed to shore up the emancipatory credentials of liberation while playing a role in the xenophobic violence that has periodically plagued the country for over a decade.
In this paper, I will look at how the failure of the early nationalist project to provide access to citizenship and foster socioeconomic advancement through labour has shaped African political realities. I argue, with particular reference to Ghana and South Africa, that these histories force us to reconsider our understanding of both citizenship and labour. Such considerations are not only relevant to the study of Africa. Indeed, throughout the Global South and even the Global North, employment is increasingly unable to fulfil the role of marker of full citizenship and key to development and poverty reduction. Following the Comaroffs’ argument in Theory from the South, I believe that Africa’s experiences of political inclusion, and its failures, also inform the study of politics and work in the Global North.