Istwa Nou

Competition for work and for access to the colonial economy hardened ethnic identity, because solidarity in a scramble means sorting people into groups and caricaturing the ones you are outside. The mines had begun with migrant labour: men on short contracts who came from the countryside, took the wages and went home, described as urban tribesmen raiding the industrial economy. From the 1920s the contracts lengthened and companies settled workers with their families near the shafts, which produced a permanent urban working class. Johannesburg was the largest case, built on gold. Lagos, Leopoldville, Nairobi and Salisbury grew through the same years on people walking in from the countryside. Reid calls this migration the most important single theme in Africa's modern social history. New arrivals kept village ties and rebuilt rural custom in town, and competition kept ethnic loyalty useful. The towns also mixed everyone together, and intermarriage and shared work produced urban cultures of their own. Women found in them some distance from the authority of the homestead.

Growing for export did not make African villages rich. Households had to divide their land between food and cash crops while imported European manufactures undercut whatever they might have made themselves. Farmers set neither the price of what they sold nor the price of what they bought, and by the end of the 1920s a handful of European firms, the enormous United Africa Company chief among them, controlled the West African import and export trade. Between the wars the terms moved steadily against the grower. In the 1930s farmers had to plant more of the export crop and less food simply to meet the tax, which exhausted soil and produced famine, as in Niger in 1931. Growers organised. In 1929 Igbo women in Nigeria attacked the offices of the trading companies over falling export prices, and dozens died in what is remembered as the Women's War. Gold Coast cocoa farmers held their crop back until the price should rise, and the firms bought elsewhere and waited for the tax collector to do their work.

African mine workers began striking in numbers once they stopped being migrants and started being residents. The 1927 walkout at the Shamva mine in Southern Rhodesia was run by Nyasa men who had lived on the property for years and had worked out how it functioned. On the Northern Rhodesian copper belt the pits sat close together, so news and plans moved between them, and the big stoppages came in 1935 and 1940. The second of those landed while the Royal Air Force was fighting over southern England. The miners knew nothing about that battle and everything about the fact that Britain could not do without copper, and the terms they extracted proved the point. No trade unions existed to call any of it. The organising ran instead through the Watchtower church and through Mbeni dance societies, formed for amusement, which split members into rival teams with uniforms and mock official titles borrowed from the men in the offices. Women danced and organised alongside men. Mbeni members served as go-betweens during the copper belt strikes.

Wages fell across Africa through the 1930s, in the mines, on white-owned plantations and in the towns that Africans were moving to in growing numbers. South Africa recorded serious African unemployment for the first time since the industrial boom of the late nineteenth century. Prices fell too, which softened the blow on paper and made little difference in a household. Inflation in several territories hit town workers hardest, and real wages did not rise again until the second half of the 1940s, so the decade of hardship ran on for fifteen years. Poor whites suffered alongside them. Commercial farming had pushed tens of thousands of white families off the land and into the cities, where they competed with Africans for the same work, which is why the colour bar laws exist. Those who stayed on their farms scraped by growing maize for the towns. This population, urban and rural, became the constituency that Afrikaner nationalist politicians set out to win, and the winning of it reshaped South Africa.