prevailing productive systems and put them in wage employment,
it made sure that these did not develop a strong stake in this new
sphere of life. By paying wages that are below subsistence level,
by denying the African worker any social security, by withholding
sickness and retirement benefits from Africans in wage em-
ployment, and by making the standard of living in the wage sector
completely unbearable for the African worker save for short
necessary durations, colonialism created the phernomenon of
migrant labour-a phenomenon which made it possible for
European capital to reap extremely high rates of profits all over
East, Central and Southern Africa.

If, therefore, it is true that in the bourgeois mode of production
the level of wages is settled, as Marx postulated, through ‘con-
tinuous struggle between capital and labour, (with) the capitalist
constantly tending to reduce wages to their physical minimum,
while the working man constantly presses in the opposite direc-
tion’, in the colonies the trends are for keeping wages below the
physical minimum so as to also exploit even the non-wage sectors
of the economy, which then are forced to subsidise the subsistence
of the labour force that is temporarily in wage-employment. The
totality of political and military and domination which always un-
derlies the colonial system precludes most chances of substantial
economic improvements for Africans through trade union action
as happens in the metropolitan societies.

In Tanganyika, the structure for the recruitment and circulation
of labour was constructed very early in the period of British rule:
by the beginning of the fifties close to half a million Tanganyikans
were recruited annually for serving chiefly in the sisal estates in
the country and in the mines of Central and Southern Africa. In
the plantations, living conditions for Africans were especially ab-
horrent as the annual medical report of the colonial government
testified:

On arrival at the plantations, the labourers were turned on to build any
sort of shelter, and within a day or two were put to work. The diet
issued was deficient in quality and variety, and there was no adequate
arrangement for hospital accommodation, medical attention, water sup-
plies, kitchens, latrines, etc. As a consequence, dysentery, bowel troubles
and deaths ensued, and the proportion rendered unfit was large.?

The colonial government confirmed quite early the fact that
wages for Africans in employment were below subsistence level,

134