of dock-workers won legal recognition for the first time in the
history of the country. This first trade union organisation however
did not live for long, the colonial government disbanded it
following a riotous strike in 1950.

The period following the second world war was characterised,
among other things, by the rapid growth of nationalist forces
throughout Africa. Various movements dedicated to the over-
throw of the colonial yoke were launched in colony after colony.
At the same time it became urgent for British colonial policy to
foster the development of trade unions in the colonies. The ob-
jective purpose of this change was to try and pull the carpet under
the feet of the rising nationalist movements by concentrating the
attention of the African workers on the economic struggle rather
than the political one. It is, therefore, not surprising that the first
and most important point which the colonial government tried to
drive home to the African people, was that trade unionism must
not be concerned with political goals.

Following a government-sponsored visit to East Africa by an
official of the British Trade Union Congress, a manual for colonial
trade union advisors was written which started with the
statement: ‘A trade union is not an organisation with political
aims. It is an association which has as its main object the
regulations between workers and their employers’.® But as the
colonial Labour Department in Kenya observed in commenting on
the TUC official’s visit: ‘The African found it difficult to grasp
that a trade union was not a political weapon'.® The difficulty to
grasp did not arise from any incapacity on the part of Africans to
conceptualise; it arose from the socio-economic conditions the
African people found themselves in: conditions in which em-
ployers and government are not separable both in appearance and
in essence, and in which therefore political and economic demands
are inseparable both conceptually and practically.

Nevertheless, this initiative of the colonial government marked
the beginning of a new phase in working class activity in
Tanganyika. The fifties were characterised by organised working
class activity and the rapid growth of a structure of trade unions
throughout the country. Unions began to be officially registered in
1951; by the end of the decade just over half the labour force in
wage-employment had been organised in trade unions, which in
turn were co-ordinated through and affilliated to the Tanganyika

138