The Trade Union Movement and the Asians in Kenya:Politics and International Relations in Contemporary Africa
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The main purpose of this paper is twofold: first to trace the development of the African trade union movement in colonial Kenya, and second in the light of the important contribution of Asian immigrants (who originated in both India and Pakistan) to the development of African trade unionism, to point out the political role that the Asian immigrants played, albeit indirectly, in the African liberation movement. Although the economic function of Asians is well-known, my intention in this paper is to examine the political role of the Asians, focusing on the trade union movement. The trade union movement became political especially during the period between the Second World War and the first half of the 1950s, when multi-racial or Afro-Asian cooperation could be seen not only in the movement but also in the broader anti-colonial struggle.Right after the Second World War African labourers began to be organized into trade unions, and the African trade union movement became active on a large scale. Until that time, the movement was mainly confined to Asian labourers. The main cause for the delay in African trade unionism can be explained as follows; although labour stabilization is a prerequisite for organizing unions, in the pre-war period so called 'target worker' or migrant labour prevailed. Most of those involved were semi-peasant and semi-labourer at the same time; it was difficult to organize them. But even before the Second World War, a few Asian trade union leaders tried to organize the African labourers, and to create multi-racial trade unions based on class-consciousness. This occurred in the Labour Trade Union of Kenya (established in 1934), which was under the leadership of Mkhan Singh in the latter half of the 1930s. It has been argued that the biggest impact of the LTUK upon African labourers was its popularization of the right to strike. The LTUK organized a two-month strike in the Nairobi building industry to enforce a 25% wage increase demand in 1937. The lesson of the successful 1937 strike, it is said, induced various organized strikes by African labourers in Nairobi and along the coast between 1937 and 1939. The Asian trade unions leaders were said to have contributed greatly to the development of African trade unions.Historically in Kenya, as elsewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa, it was the colonial power that forcefully created the embryonic African wage labour. In Kenya colonial land policies, that put most of the productive land in the hands of European settlers, resulted in pushing out many African peasants who were forced to look for wage employment. Before the Second World War, African wage labour was demanded mainly in the white settler estate sector or plantation sector, and migrant type labour was predominant. But the forces of industrial development after the War made possible the move toward labour stabilization. The growth of industry was beginning to create a demand for skilled workers rather than for large numbers of unskilled ones. Labour stabilization was much more in the interest of large, highly capitlized foreign firms than it was for the settler enterprises. It is generally accepted that only in the 1960s did a breakthrough take place in the migrant cycle of low-wages, low-skill, and lack of stabilization. But the tendency toward labour stabilization had already begun during and after the Second World War.After the Second World War the African trade union movement developed on a large scale. There was a growing contradiction between postwar economic prosperity and the African low wage structure fixed by a racially discriminatory wage system. African workers became conscious of their deprived position. The wage system was still based on the living cost of a single adult male, despite the fact that labour stabilization was advancing. This was a driving force to develop a trade union movement. African dissatisfaction with the low wage system culminated in the biggest general
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