“Police Fire on Rioters, Africans Attack Patrol”

• In Event: State Formation Through the Lens of Colonialism and Missionary Movements

Abstract

Workers staged a wave of strikes around the African continent following World War II, and labor organizers were in many cases connected to nationalist movements that toppled formal colonial rule. Docks, railways, and mines became key sites for resisting suppression, but also for suppressing resistance. This paper advances African politics and the emerging field of global labor studies by offering a new comparative analysis to answer the question, how did workers’ resistance to exploitation shape the state’s methods to maintain economic power, particularly through policing? This paper uses previously classified British archival records to compare two strikes staged by dockworker unions in 1950: one in Dar es Salaam (the colonial capital of former Tanganyika) and one in London (the imperial capital of the former British Empire). In both contexts, workers were perceived as insurgents and often came head-to-head with the police, inspiring new tactics to ramp up surveillance, intelligence gathering, riot control, and strike breaking. However, important contextual differences between the two strikes distinguish strikers’ strategies and the state’s response. Examining the complex dynamics of labor organizing, exploitation, and policing provides a window into understanding the joint projects of imperialism and capitalism, and a long and continuing history of resistance to them.

Author

• Kaden Paulson-Smith, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay