The conflation of labour activism and political activism in Namibian history and historiographyor views of a seamless transition between the twohas meant that meaningful empirical historical studies of labour relations and labour policy in Namibia have been downplayed, leaving scholars to rely on older, potentially outdated studies. The articles in this part-special issue de-centre Namibian nationalism from the economic and labour history of Namibia, instead re-centring the labour process, labour policy and the lived history of labourers themselves. Studying labour history necessitates working at multiple scales. Global labour history (GLH) frameworks, in conjunction with transnational and microhistory methodologies, enable deep consideration of structural transformations in globally interconnected economies as well as local contingent factors. GLH has helped to guide labour historians to balance both global and local scales. The articles in this special issue draw from new archival and oral history sources in order to reinvestigate central themes in Namibian labour history and to open new vistas for future research.
This article focuses on convict labour in the Namibian-Cape border region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It situates this form of unfree labour within broader trans-colonial discussions on the "labour question" and compulsion after the abolition of slavery. The article demonstrates that convict labour was a flexible and steadily available labour force, which officials used on both sides of the Orange River to manage, in part, the fluctuating labour demands of public and private employers.While local Cape officials utilised it to meet re-occurring labour deficits at short notice, their German counterparts followed the long-term objective of "educating" Africans to work by means of compulsion. At the same time, colonisers on this shared frontier of the Cape Colony and German Southwest Africa lamented the weak deterrent effects of convict labour, as this potentially undermined their claimed authority and control over convicts as well as African labour more broadly, partly unsettled by convicts' own actions. Ultimately, this article argues that officials conceived of violence as a key measure to counter these subversive tendencies, but that it had equivocal consequences which further complicated the "labour question" on the ground. By analysing the debates on and (violent) practices of enforcing convict labour, the article also opens a window into the contentious formation of settler colonialism on the ground.
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