Todd Cleveland. Diamonds in the Rough

The labor history of mining in Africa is well developed, with studies focusing on recruitment and migration; forced and free labor; working conditions and the treatment of workers; living conditions; gender; workers’ culture and leisure time; and skilled labor, foremen, and the development of African management; as well as resistance and trade-union organizing. Todd Cleveland organizes Diamonds in the Rough, his study of labor at Diamang’s diamond mines in the Portuguese colony of Angola from 1917 to 1975, around two concepts that sit uncomfortably in the existing historiography on African labor: “corporate paternalism” to which workers responded with “African professionalism.” Studies about other sites have been very skeptical about the intentions and effects of companies’ claims to paternalism, and the workers’ responses studied have frequently included strategies to sidestep or resist the expectations of the employer rather than attempts to engage with the employer professionally (Jules Marchal, Lord Leverhulme’s Ghosts: Colonial Exploitation in the Congo [2008]; Charles Ambler, “Writing African Leisure History,” in Paul Tiyambe Zeleza and Cassandra Rachel Veney, eds., Leisure in Urban Africa [2003], 3–18; Carolyn A. Brown, “We Were All Slaves”: African Miners, Culture, and Resistance at the Enugu Government Colliery [2003], 251–254). Indeed, Cleveland suggests that the situation in the Angolan diamond mines was “unique” (3), an “extraordinary relationship that Diamang and its African workforce co-cultivated” (8). I will return to these claims and concepts to evaluate their usefulness following my introduction of Cleveland’s specific case study.

Colonialism · Economic history · Paternalism · Political science · African history and culture studies · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law

• Skilled labour in colonial economies. Recruitment, education and employment in construction companies in German colonial West Africa, c. 1902–1912

  Nina Kleinöder•Labor History•2022

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