Petroleum and Proletarianization

The social and economic history of Africa is necessarily constructed from many fragmented and contradictory sources. Often lost in sources dependent on archives, written records, and elite memoires are experiences and perspectives of inarticulate who, unwittingly, bear burden of large-scale structural change. Here it will be argued that historical representation requires writer to integrate interpretative meanings from lived experience of individuals at micro-level with more abstract theoretical concepts that explain deeper structural processes at macro-level. To move back and forth from these two levels, therefore, captures an individual's construction of meanings arising from experience of structural change. Linking these two levels, moreover, allows historian to ask: how does an individual worker experience and interpret theoryladen structural processes like the transition from peasant to proletarian, the articulation of modes of production, collective acts of class struggle, the acquisition of worker consciousness, or participation in populist political movements. Only a narrative can convey individual worker's interpretation of what is, by now, an accepted theorized structure of historical change: proletarianization. Despite distinct accumulation models prevalent in South Africa and Nigeria, affirmation of this approach for understanding proletarianization in Africa is surprisingly similar. Indeed, South African social history school, arguably most influential on continent, pursues same method. Take, for instance, William Beinart's methodological statement prefacing his analysis of experience of M, a Pondo worker from Transkei: it could easily preface following life history of Ahmadu, a Muslim Hausa worker living in Kano, Nigeria

Economics · Petroleum · Political science · Proletarianization · African history and culture studies · African studies and sociopolitical issues · Geology · Law · Natural Resources and Economic Development

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