The history of labour and labour movements is perhaps one of the oldest and most important themes in African history, connected to the central role of trade unions in the struggles leading to African independences. However, in this rich historiography, female labour is certainly a blind spot. This is connected not only to the gender of the workers employed by the colonial state or who belonged to the most important trade unions, who were overwhelmingly men, but also to the invisibility of female labour in official archives, with the partial exception of elite female professionals (i.e. teachers, nurses, doctors).
Conversely, if in African historiography there is a rich scholarship on different aspects of women’s histories, women’s identities as workers have rarely been at the centre stage of research, probably because female labour has often been belittled as ‘informal’, mostly unskilled, and hardly historical and historicized.
In this stream, we are very keen to illuminate the history of female labour, and to put clearly the light on these central actors of the workforce as well as of African history. In particular, we seek to start our journey from the experiences and knowledges of female workers, including labour practices and wisdoms, professionalism, work ethics, working communities, technologies and materialities of labour, the impact of labour on gender and family relations, and so on. We shall also question the category of working women, defining them heuristically as those who received an income or a reward for their labour, which is of course a definition open to challenges.
Ethics and decolonial methodologies are at the heart of an enterprise of this type. Thus, a creative use of existing archives and oral histories, as well as informal archives, is essential in order to weave them together, as the sources are often extraordinarily fragmentary. For instance, a decolonised approach to photographic archives can play a significant role in documenting these histories. Underlying this research is the belief that we must be careful not to write about or over working women, but with them, thinking carefully about how to structure our work so that they and their families can feel they own this past.
If you are interested in contributing to this project, please send a 300-word abstract and a few bibliographic references to womatwork.erc@gmail.com.
