Narrating Working Lives: Oral Histories of Work in Neoliberal Africa

This book presents a re-engagement with oral histories as a way of documenting, understanding, and discussing experiences of work and economic life in Africa under neoliberal capitalism. It draws on seven case studies in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Uganda, and South Sudan, from the late 1980s to the present, to offer a critical analysis of neoliberal transformations and realities at the incisive level of peoples’ biographies.

The last few decades have witnessed unprecedented changes in the working lives of people across the African continent. Oral historical accounts of working lives can offer unique and productive insights into these changes by allowing analyses of neoliberalism that focuses on personal experiences over the longue durée. Yet, there has been a surprising dearth of oral histories of work since the emergence of neoliberalism in the 1980s. Compared to scholarship published more than half a century ago, there has been a decline in the use of oral histories to explore experiences of living and working under capitalism. By grounding analysis in biographical details, histories, and dynamics, the chapters in this book seek better understandings of the wider life contexts, challenges, and circumstances in which people’s ’agency’ emerges, unfolds, gains traction, and gets (re)shaped; and a better grasp of the multiple, entangled layers and temporalities of life and work in capitalist Africa. This book will be indispensable to students and researchers interested in political economy, development studies, anthropology, sociology, history and African Studies.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Third World Thematics and are accompanied by a new Foreword and Afterword.

Jörg Wiegratz is Lecturer in Political Economy of Global Development in the School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds, Senior Research Associate in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Humanity, University of Johannesburg, and Research Fellow at the Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs, United States International University-Africa, Nairobi. He specialises in neoliberalism, fraud and anti-fraud measures, commercialisation and economic pressure with a focus on Uganda and Kenya. He is a member of the editorial working group of the Review of African Political Economy.

Joseph Mujere is Lecturer in Modern History at the University of York, UK, and Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies, University of Johannesburg. He is also currently Volkswagen Stiftung Knowledge for Tomorrow - Cooperative Research Projects in Sub-Saharan Africa Senior Postdoctoral Fellow (2020-2023) doing research on artisanal chromite mining in Zimbabwe. He published his first book in 2019 titled: Land, Migration and Belonging: A history of Basotho in Southern Rhodesia, c1890-1969s and has also produced a documentary film titled Waiting in a Platinum City.

Joost Fontein is currently Professor of Anthropology at the University of Johannesburg. He is editor of the (IAI) journal AFRICA, and co-founder of Critical African Studies. He recently published his third monograph on Zimbabwe titled The Politics of the Dead in Zimbabwe 2000-2020. Bones, Rumours & Spirits, and co-curated a multi-authored collaboration between scholars and artists entitled Nairobi Becoming.