3 bourses en histoire coloniale africaine

3 PhD stipends in African/Colonial History - international ERC Starting
Grant Research Group "ForcedLabourAfrica" - from 1/9/2011 (Selection Phase)

1) at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
Location: Germany
Grant Date: 2011-05-20


3 PhD stipends in African/Colonial History - international ERC Starting
Grant Research Group "ForcedLabourAfrica" - from 1/9/2011 (Selection Phase
1) at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany

The international research project ‘ForcedLabourAfrica', ERC Starting
Grant n° 240898, funded by the European Community, invites applications
for three PhD stipends to be settled at the Humboldt-Universität zu
Berlin, Germany. The successful candidates will participate in a group
analyzing practices of forced labour under colonial rule and their
after-effects in sub-Saharan Africa. It is expected from the group members
on PhD level to take up a doctoral project from one of the three regional
contexts outlined below. They will finalise a doctorate and contribute at
least one chapter to a group publication, under the supervision of
Principal Investigator Alexander Keese.

At the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, the project group will contribute
to and enjoy the academic life at the International Research Center "Work
and Human Life-Cycle in a Global Perspective", a unique place of academic
exchange on the history of labour. Directed by Andreas Eckert, the
research center offers conditions to interact with an international group
of specialists. The group members will profit from an inspiring
environment of methodological debate and comparative discussion on
experiences of labour through different periods and in different parts of
the world.

Please note that this selection process will consist of two phases. This
is due to current grant amendment procedures with the European Commission.
While funding for the PhD stipends is guaranteed, the start date and the
settlement of the posts at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin can
presumably only be confirmed shortly before selection phase 2. No final
selection will be made before the end of this latter phase, which is
likely to fall into the second half of June 2011. The use of two selection
phases is advisable to speed up the entire process in the interest of
candidates.

The project addresses structures of forced labour under colonial rule in
sub-Saharan Africa, with a focus on West, West Central and South Central
Africa. The project language is English. Applicants should at least decide
for one of the following regional contexts, in which their PhD project
would fall in case of their selection:

Cocoa and the whip: São Tomé e Príncipe between scandal, reform, and
internal tensions, 1930 to ca. 1978

The small archipelago of São Tomé e Príncipe was considered, by the 1920s,
one of the biggest scandals of all the colonial labour systems. In a phase
in which it was still unusual to attack the colonial practices of European
administrations, the case of São Tomé was already discussed by both the
League of Nations and the International Labour Organisation. In many of
the prosperous cocoa plantations (the roças) in the mountainous interior
of the two islands, workers were treated like slaves, they earned little
or no money and, frequently coming from Angola during the interwar period,
were kept on the archipelago against their will for prolonged periods.
After 1945, those conditions gradually improved, at least on paper.
However, it is obvious that still at the end of the 1940s, the hygienic
and nutritional situation on many of the roças was disastrous. In 1953,
the island of São Tomé was the place of a suspected revolt, and of
colonial over-reaction against so-called ‘conspirers', culminating in the
Batepá massacre of the same year. The role of the labourers on the roças
during those events is still far from being sufficiently analysed; even a
short glance at this problem shows that the behaviour of those labourers
was very complex. Even more, we know next to nothing about the evolution
on the roças between 1961 and 1975. From the period after national
independence towards 1980, the nationalisation of the roças provoked new
effects on the conditions of the labour force.

Candidates for this project will need to have at least capacities in
fluent reading of Portuguese, and have to acquire proficiency in written
and oral Portuguese in the first year of their project period.

A model colony? Ghana/Gold Coast from 1930 to 1975

The case of Ghana is particularly instructive because this colony has had
long tradition of being exposed, by the British administration, as a haven
of good labour conditions. Part of this can be explained by early
competition of the Gold Coast administration with the neighbouring German
colonial regime in Togo: British officials attempted to motivate locals
from the other side of the border to migrate into the British-controlled
zone. Those efforts to cope with the increasing demands for labour were
multiplied after the First World War, when Germany lost the territory of
Togo. At this moment, the western part of the Togo colony, now being
administered within the Gold Coast Colony, became an enlargement of the
latter's cocoa zone. Being confronted from 1914 with a French neighbour in
eastern Togo and Upper Volta, British officials resumed their former
strategy. They engaged in luring possible workers from Togo into the Volta
Region under British rule, and tried to divert the transport of labour
recruits from Upper Volta scheduled for the coffee areas of Côte d'Ivoire,
into the Gold Coast. For all those reasons, the Gold Coast administration
favoured a relaxed approach towards forced labour. This was still
confirmed by the decisive role important local chiefs played in the
colonial regime, and who jealously guarded their own prerogatives in
commanding the local workforce.
However, the latter point in itself is extremely interesting to analyse,
and becomes still more important whenever one considers that the British
colonial administration frequently needed, nonetheless, an ad-hoc labour
force for road and railroad construction and maintenance, in particular.
This problem became less dominant in the post-World War II period, when
ample funding for infrastructure was accessible over a couple of years.
However, the transition from ‘communal labour' on the roads administered
by the chiefs, to a free labour market, is obscure, and this project will
focus on the different phases of this process.

Feigned abolition, repressive reality? The turbulent end of forced labour
in Senegal, 1930-1975

In Senegal, like in most of the French colonies in sub-Saharan Africa, the
history of forced labour between the 1930s and decolonisation was a story
of ups and downs. In 1930, the recourse to an involuntary labour force,
organised collectively through local chiefs, was still the rule. The
demand for a workforce seems to have been so desperate in some cases that
officials exerted pressure on the legal system in order to ‘produce' more
penal labourers. In the period of the Second World War, notoriously after
the Government-General of French West Africa had finally changed to the
Gaullist side, a repressive use of forced labour, particularly in the form
of extended labour tax contributions, became the rule.
After the end of the war, French officials found themselves in the
embarrassing situation to overthrow the whole system, a system that had
indeed reached its most brutal forms only months before.
Moreover, the existence of an ‘educated elite' in the coastal urban
centres of Senegal, which was now enabled to participate in territorial
elections, made this subject a vulnerable point to be exploited in
electoral campaigns. This contrast made it extremely difficult for
administrators to react properly, as the expectations of their allies
among local chiefs, local populations, and the leaders and marabouts of
the important religious orders (especially of the Muridiyya) were often
diametrically opposed.
Some clandestine forms of involuntary labour very probably survived
official abolition in 1945. The evolution of these practices towards
independence is unknown. Reactions and mentalities of the local
populations will be at the heart of this analysis.

The successful candidate will have a fluent level in French; knowledge in
Wolof is a plus.


Candidates will have a master/MA or equivalent degree in history or an
adjacent field. They are, during this first selection phase, invited to
send a letter of motivation (pointing out individual capacities and
interest with regard to the project contexts), a curriculum vitae, and a
letter of support by an academic teacher (e.g. the professor responsible
for their master thesis), plus (optionally) a second letter of
recommendation by an academic peer or other researcher.

In this first selection phase, applications are to be sent before 20 May
2011, to the current research address of the Principal Investigator:

Dr. Alexander Keese
Centro de Estudos Africanos da Universidade do Porto (CEAUP)
FLUP
Via Panorâmica, s/n
4150-564 Porto
Portugal

The second phase of the selection process is planned to lie between the 15
and 25 June 2011 (dates to be confirmed). Candidates who have sent their
application material during the first phase will then be asked to confirm
their application.

Informal inquiries concerning this application can be made to the
Principal Investigator of "ForcedLabourAfrica", to email address:
a.keese@gmx.eu.
Dr. Alexander Keese
Centro de Estudos Africanos da Universidade do Porto (CEAUP)
FLUP
Via Panorâmica, s/n
4150-564 Porto
Portugal

Email: a.keese@gmx.eu