1 Introduction¹

The article addresses the question of international labour regulations for African workers in colonial contexts after the First World War. After the so-called scramble for Africa in the 1880s, the aim of the European colonial powers was to integrate African colonies into the capitalist world economy, thereby relying strongly on the cheap labour of African people and very often on forced labour. After the First World War, in 1919, the International Labour Organization (ILO) was founded to improve the working situations of workers all over the world and to regulate working conditions. It was also seen as an answer by the Western powers to the threat of a communist revolution after the 1917 Bolshevik Russian revolution. During its first years, the ILO was mainly concerned with workers in the industrialised Western world. Furthermore, its work and methods were shaped by imperial interests that hindered the immediate emancipation of colonial workers within the organisation. For example, the ILO subsumed special regulations for workers in colonial contexts under the term ‘native labour’. The term allowed the ILO to disregard the ratified labour standards it had for workers in Western industrialised nations for workers in colonial contexts. Through Article 19 of the ILO’s Convention, it was further allowed to adapt the regular labour conventions due to the ‘special conditions’ in the colonies, which included, for example, the ‘climatic conditions’ and ‘the imperfect development of industrial organisation’. As a consequence, these ‘special conditions’ remained only vaguely defined, thereby opening up space for a deliberate misuse of the category (ILO 1920).

These divergent regulations were also justified by racist attributions and reflected the colonial powers’ needs to cheaply exploit Africa’s natural resources through the employment of a local workforce. Central to the discourse was the portrayal of the African male worker as inherently unwilling to work, lazy and undisciplined. This stereotype, widespread across colonial narratives, served as a justification for the imposition of strict educational and disciplinary measures, which, although not labelled as such, frequently included forms of forced labour (Keese 2014). In the colonisers’ logic, indigenous workers needed to be taught how to labour productively for two main reasons: firstly, to repay the financial investments made by the metropolitan governments into the valorisation of the respective territories in Africa; and secondly, to supposedly lead Africans towards a more ‘civilised’ stage of humanity. Labour exploitation thus was frequently masked as part of a broader humanitarian ‘civilising mission’.²

The article seeks to connect insights gained from research on the racist discourses surrounding the colonial employment of the African workforce with the ILO’s specialised treatment of African labourers, focusing on the work of the so-called Committee of Experts for Native Labour. The expert group, convened by the ILO in 1927, met five times between 1927 and 1934, before quietly dissolving around 1940. One of the committee’s most significant outcomes was the ILO’s adoption of the Forced Labour Convention in 1930. Therefore, this article will first examine the formative stereotypes and assumptions held by colonial powers that shaped the general treatment of African workers well into the 20th century. Subsequently, it will turn to selected discussions among the experts during the preparation and drafting of the Forced Labour Convention of 1930, illustrating the ways in which these underlying discourses influenced the ILO’s colonial policies.

2 The Stereotype of the ‘Lazy African’

Overall, the colonisers regarded most indigenous peoples primarily as a source of labour essential to extracting profit from their colonial possessions. Without the exploitation of local workforces, the economic viability of these colonies would have been difficult to sustain. This perception was even more pronounced in the so-called tropical regions in Sub-Saharan Africa, where, according to the racist ideologies of the 19th century, Europeans were considered inherently unsuited for manual labour. A report by the Native Commissioner in the British colony of Natal stated this as early as 1854:

It would be very difficult to contemplate any kind of product of labour, except skilled labour, which does not involve that of the Kafir (i.e., the African) in this district. On a farm he does almost everything. He herds the cattle, milks the cows, churns the butter, loads it on the wagon, the oxen of which he inspans and leads. He cuts wood, and thatch, he digs sluits [ditches], and makes bricks, and reaps the harvest; and in the house invariably cooks. There is little that I ever see a farmer do, but ride about the country.³

This idea of a European, or, more precisely, a white unsuitability to work in the colonies, was part of a larger scientific debate called the ‘acclimatisation question’. This debate built on the subjective experiences of white Europeans living in Asia and Africa and tried to explain their physical and psychological experiences with scientific reasons derived from the laws of nature. The underlying assumption was that each ‘race’ possessed a fixed degree of adaptability to climatic conditions that would or would not allow them to live and work at a geographical location other than their home country.⁴ Thus, by assuming a general non-fitness of white European workers in tropical climates, the colonising powers needed to employ African workers. Furthermore, it would only be possible to yield profits in the colonial agrarian economy through the employment of cheap labour. This is why the treatment of and control over indigenous labourers became one of the most important elements of colonial policy (Fall and Roberts 2019). This was also to have a lasting impact on the discourse on African labour, intensifying with the so-called scramble for Africa from the 1880s.

In encounters with various African societies who mostly practised subsistence farming or extensive pastoralism, sometimes nomadic or semi-nomadic, the racialised perception of Africans as lazy, often referred to as ‘lazy natives’, developed among white European travellers and later missionaries as early as the 18th century (Rönnbäck 2014a; see also Rönnbäck 2014b). According to this logic, ‘the African’ did not do any regular work like the ‘civilised European’, as he hardly had to work to feed himself in the abundance of the African continent—so the Europeans assumed. This stereotype, far removed from any African reality, became even more pronounced after colonial occupation. If Africans resisted the colonial powers’ compulsion to work, they were automatically characterised as ‘apathetic’, ‘unwilling’ and ‘lazy’, as Ann Whitehead convincingly showed using the example of the Lamba in the Copper Belt in colonial Zambia. In fact, the Lamba group was able to earn the taxes imposed by the colonial powers through their own sales and did not want to go into dependent labour on farms and in mines. However, the colonial rulers categorised this as a refusal to work and a character flaw (Whitehead 2000, 51). In the French, English and German literature of so-called colonial experts during high imperialism, there are countless references to and repetitions of the image of the ‘lazy African’. Through its link to the concept of the ‘civilising mission’, the stereotype became tremendously powerful and also drew heavily on Western understandings of gender and especially masculinity (Fall 2002; Okia 2012; Conrad 2004).⁵ All in all, the compulsion to work was dressed up as a supposed achievement of civilisation.

3 African Labour as an Important Resource and Forced Labour Systems in Colonial Africa

Europeans relied heavily on the cheap labour of Africans across a range of sectors, from the plantations of East and West Africa to the farming industry in South Africa, as well as in major infrastructure projects such as road and railway construction. Mining, particularly in the Union of South Africa, required a particularly large number of African workers—by 1909, around 150,000 labourers were employed on the Witwatersrand near Johannesburg alone.⁶ For the colonial rulers, the exploitation of African labour was a means of integrating their African colonies into the global economy and ensuring their profitability.

The Europeans therefore developed various strategies to force what they considered to be ‘lazy’ Africans into dependent labour. The most popular means was the hut or poll tax, which the colonial rulers introduced in almost all colonies, and which usually had to be paid in cash. In this way, Africans were forced into extremely poorly paid wage labour on plantations, farms and in mines, often causing them to migrate to areas where the demand for labour was highest. Through these measures, the colonial rulers violently tore apart African societies across the continent and destroyed social ties (Hyam 1999, 59). In South Africa, which was colonised much earlier than most other African territories, this coercion was introduced as early as the middle of the 19th century, for example in Natal in 1849. The hut and poll tax were considered to be extremely successful both for colonial tax revenues and for providing a labour pool to which the colonial rulers had immediate access. Even if its true effectivity has been questioned by some researchers such as Leigh A. Gardner (2012, 58), it was in any case an effective and powerful instrument to bring workers into dependent employment. In British South Africa as well as in German Southwest Africa, where extremely racist control was exercised over the African population, taxes were combined with passport laws that also restricted the freedom of movement of Africans. This significantly increased control and, as a result, the compulsion to work (Feinstein 2005; Zimmerer 2001, 71, 251–281). Two more direct forms of forced labour were the system of work tributes and the use of prison labour. The former was particularly widespread in French colonies as corvée labour. African societies and groups had to pay tribute to the colonial rulers in the form of labour days without pay. In the African colonies, it was mainly the infrastructure (roads, railways) that was developed (Fall and Roberts 2019, 85). All these forms of forced labour by no means disappeared after the First World War but continued to exist in most colonies in various forms until well into the 1930s or even after the Second World War.

4 The ILO and the Problem of Forced Labour

In the mid-1920s, the ILO began to address the problem of forced labour. While the organisation’s principal objective was to develop and establish common and universal labour standards through the co-operation of government representatives, employers’ associations and trade unions, ILO standards were only universal in the sense that they applied to all states that ratified the conventions. Even if a state committed itself to a convention adopted at the International Labour Conference, the so-called colonial clause, laid down in Article 35 of the ILO Constitution of 1919, could apply. This allowed states to exclude parts or all of their dependent territories, such as colonies, League of Nations mandates and so forth, from ratifying the standards (Maul 2007, 481). Article 19 also made it possible to stipulate special conditions for so-called special local conditions in the conventions themselves (Maul 2019, 74).

Under these conditions, which from the outset did not promise equal treatment for workers in the colonies, the ILO’s Governing Body decided to set up a Committee of Experts for Native Labour in June 1926 (N.N. 1926).⁷ One of the first tasks of the Committee of Experts was to prepare the Forced Labour Convention, which was adopted four years later and was intended to regulate and abolish various forms of forced labour in the long term. However, before this convention took on the form it is known as today, the working group first had to clarify fundamental questions, to which the so-called experts, mostly former colonial officials, came up with some very different answers. What was ‘forced labour’? What practices of forced labour existed in the various dependent territories and how had they been regulated to date? Who should be able to be used as forced labour? What restrictions should there be on the duration, scope and frequency of labour assignments? How should forced labour be remunerated? And, on a more abstract level, how could the existence—and likely persistence, despite widespread calls for its abolition—of forced labour be ethically justified? From the outset, there was a consensus that an immediate abolition of forced labour, be it on the basis of labour shortages, the supposed civilising mission of the colonial powers or the entirely realistic assessment of the ILO’s lack of enforcement power, was unthinkable.

The following section examines three selected examples to illustrate the ILO’s approach to the issue of forced labour. The analysis draws on the internal minutes of the first meeting of the Commission of Experts for Native Labour, held in Geneva from 7 to 12 July 1927.⁸ In addition to the eleven experts (two others were unable to attend), the meeting was attended by four ILO representatives, one representative of the League of Nations and, at times, four representatives from the British philanthropic Anti-Slavery Society and the League of Nations Union.⁹ As will be shown, the discussions surrounding the three selected issues were constantly shaped by racist lines of argumentation and must be understood within the broader context of the discourses about ‘African laziness’ and ‘education for labour’ outlined at the beginning of the article.

Basically, the ILO identified five types of forced labour that were still widespread at the time of the discussion, that is, at the end of the 1920s: (1) labour as tribute, which resulted from direct pressure on African chiefs to provide labour; (2) prestation, a form of direct taxation of labour, often for a certain number of days per year; (3) the so-called second part of the annual military draft, in which some of the recruits were selected for public works; (4) penal labour, a form of forced labour often used for public works; and finally (5) the forced cultivation of certain crops or cash crops (ILO 1930).

A first example concerns the discussion about the distance between the area of labour deployment and the forced labourer’s home village. The principle proposed by the ILO for this was ‘(1) No forced worker should be taken to a greater distance than X days travel from his home, and, (2) He should be permitted to return there at stated intervals’. As previously outlined, colonial governments, facing chronic labour shortages, forcibly recruited workers for public projects, such as for expanding colonial infrastructure (Fall and Roberts 2019, 84). This led to significant migration flows of male forced labourers. At the same time, the persistent notion that ‘the African’ and his family were not dependent on his wages, as they supposedly retained access to village resources, continued to shape policy. Although this assumption was increasingly contradicted by the reality on the ground, colonial authorities upheld it as a convenient justification for ignoring the growing problem of unemployment among African workers (Eckert 2019, 33).

Two camps emerged in the expert discussion about the distance these labourers could be expected to travel. On the one side was the French representative Martial Merlin (1860–1935), a French colonial administrator, who had been the Governor General of the French Congo and also a former governor of French Indochina. From 1918 to 1923, he was the Governor General of French West Africa and afterwards became the French representative on the League of Nations’ Permanent Mandates Commission (see N.N. n.d.c). Albrecht Gohr, a Belgian judge and politician, supported similar opinions (1871–1936). In 1897, he was Director of Justice and four years later was appointed judge at the Court of Appeal. In 1905, he joined the administration of the Belgian Congo as an officer of justice and in 1914 became Director General of Native Law and Politics. From 1926 onwards, he was Director General in Belgium’s Ministry of the Colonies as well as a professor of colonial law at the University of Brussels. He served as a member of the League of Nations’ Temporary Slavery Commission and was a member of the Belgian Institut Colonial International.¹⁰ Both were high-ranking, elderly colonial administrators and argued that a legal restriction on distance could be prevented as long as sufficient food was provided for the workers. Moreover, in their line of argument, such a proposal was even against the interests of the workers themselves, as otherwise the entire local labour supply could be used up and there would be a lack of workers for the activities of the village community.

Harold Atheling Grimshaw (1880–1929), a senior ILO staff member and a key figure on the committee, strongly opposed these arguments. Educated at London University and later associated as a lecturer with the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), Grimshaw had joined the ILO in 1920 and eventually became the head of its Native Labour Section.¹¹ Referring back to position papers by the British Anti-Slavery Society and the British League of Nations Union, both of which were also represented at parts of the expert meeting, Grimshaw argued that the principle at stake was not primarily about the distance as such, but rather about the workers’ right to regular periods of home leave. His stance found at least some support among other representatives. However, the exchange of opinions during the meeting reveals the ignorance of many of the experts regarding the workers’ actual living and working conditions. In reality, workers were often forced to live far away from their families, with few means and opportunities to return home, leading to the break-up of families and serious consequences for subsistence farming in their home villages. Such practical considerations, however, were largely absent from the discussions of the colonial experts. Instead, the expert committee served as an interface between the views of conservative colonial administrators on the one hand, and those of philanthropic and civil society groups on the other, between which the ILO, as an international organisation, sought to mediate. The so-called expert knowledge produced in this process, which later found expression in the Forced Labour Convention, ultimately bears the marks of this fundamental tension.

The question of distance was seamlessly linked to the second question of whether the days required for the forced journey to the place of labour deployment should also be remunerated. In addition to practical questions, such as whether or not it was sensible (and possible) to set a generalised number of days to be paid for all dependent areas, racist stereotypes also played a role. For example, the minutes of the meeting state about the former Portuguese governor Freire d’Andrade:

He however hoped that it would be drafted so as to show that the natives should be paid only for the days reasonably taken in travelling. A provision of this kind would prevent the natives taking more time than was necessary for the journey.¹²

Alfredo Augusto Freire de Andrade (1859–1929) was also a former colonial administrator, an engineer, a military officer (with the rank of general of engineering) and a politician. In 1890, de Andrade was named General Commissioner of Mines in Mozambique. After that he served as General Governor of Mozambique from 1906 to 1910. Between 1911 and 1913, he was Director General of the Colonies. In 1914, de Andrade was briefly Portuguese Minister of Foreign Affairs. After 1919, Freire de Andrade became the Portuguese delegate to the League of Nations and was a member of the League of Nations’ Permanent Mandates Commission and the Temporary Slavery Commission. His statement demonstrates the assumption that workers were fundamentally not to be trusted and that they would use any loophole in the law to stretch out the work to be done or to obtain additional, unjustified payment. Martial Merlin also expressed his outrage at the proposal that the necessary travelling days should be counted as working days. Instead, he suggested that the colonial administrations should award the labourers allowances based on the amount of their wages. Pedro Saura del Pan pointed out that regular workers would only be paid from the first day of work. Harold Grimshaw firmly countered these consistently critical voices of the imperial and colonial experts by pointing out the special nature of forced labour:

The Committee should not forget that forced labour was a special type of labour, accompanied generally by evil effects socially, morally and psychologically. One should therefore err on the side of generosity in regard to questions of payment. He [Harold Grimshaw] also pointed out that the forced worker who was compelled to undertake a journey of a certain number of days to reach his place of employment lost the wage which he might have earned in his own locality during this time.¹³

The last aspect to be addressed was the payment of overtime. The ILO’s proposal—‘(4) Hours worked in excess of the normal working day or the normal working week should be remunerated at rates higher than the normal rates’—was again met with much criticism. The experts pursued two lines of argument. On the one hand, the so-called black working habits were cited. Better pay for overtime worked would inevitably lead to an abuse of the system and thus a sharp increase in the number of overtime hours due to the poor work ethic inherent in Black workers. One expert even described the colonies as ‘spaces who had no taste for work’.¹⁴ A further argument put forward by one expert was that, for reasons of justice, any potential better treatment of forced labourers compared with free labourers should be avoided at all costs. Otherwise, there would be protests and work stoppages by the free labourers.

Generally, the expert committee argued mostly in favour of the interests of the colonial administration and its rather unregulated access to forced labour. The committee and its discussions were dominated by retired or elderly high-ranking colonial administrators who were obviously shaped by years of exploitative and racist colonial practices. The discussion also shows how the interests of the free Black workers were played off against those of the forced labourers and how the experts’ actual task of curbing forced labour regimes as far as possible was reduced to absurdity.

5 Conclusion

It becomes evident that common stereotypes and racist attributions had a lasting influence on the relationship between colonial powers and colonised workers throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Drawing on the trope of so-called African laziness, colonial officials portrayed the forced labour systems they implemented, such as labour tributes and prestation, as a supposed contribution to the ‘civilising mission’. After the First World War, the newly founded ILO sought to regulate these violent labour regimes in the Global South by establishing the Committee of Experts for Native Labour in 1926. This committee laid the groundwork for the Forced Labour Convention, adopted in 1930. However, as the selected discussions demonstrate, the experts consulted, almost all former colonial officials, frequently sought to preserve existing coercive work regimes. Their recommendations were often shaped by racist attributions. Ideas of the supposed ‘education for work’ found their way into the committee’s internal deliberations, ultimately influencing the ILO’s broader discourse and approach to colonial labour.