as for instance when an official enquiry carried out in 1942
revealed that even among government employees in Dar es Salam,
87 per cent of them were ‘in receipt of a wage on which they can-
not possibly subsist without getting into debt and remaining in
debt.?

An official survey made early in 1939 reckoned that the total adult
male labour force in the town was around 6,000. Of these some 25 per
cent were thought to be unemployed at any time. Of those employed, 60
per cent probably earned less than 15/— a month, the average for a
registered casual docker. The social conditions of the town were equally
dreadful. Only half the children of school age went to school, while
some 1,000 children under the age of fourteen were thought to be em-
ployed, usually at a wage of 2 to 4 shillings per month plus food. Some
20 to 25.000 Africans were crowded into approximately 3,200 houses,
many of them merely temporary shelters.*

The colonial system of production therefore creates a double-life
for those in wage-employment as they are structurally forced to
rely both on petty commodity production of the rural areas, and
on the sale of labour-power in select areas. In the rural areas,
taxation and land pressure constantly push many rural dwellers
into migration, while in the urban areas the insecurity and general
deprivation push the labourers back into the villages. If, therefore,
alienation is an essential feature of the capitalist production
process, in the colonial situation this alienation acquires major
proportions.

This alienation is further intensified by the cultural and
ideological domination and suppression which always underlie
colonialism. In the colonies, capital is not only private but also
foreign; there is thus a clear-cut economic, political and cultural
distinction between capital and labour. Hence, there is very little
room for the development of some ideological and cultural unity
between the capitalists and the workers as happens to some extent
in the metropolitan societies; on the contrary in the colonies the
two sides in time acquire ever different features. The fact that
colonialism is always accompanied by a racist ideology and racist
social, economic and political institutions, drives further the sharp
wedge between capital and labour; wages, promotions, education,
etc, are given not through pure capitalist economic rationale: con-
siderations for upholding the racist structures are most pre-
eminent.

135