The Slow Abolition within the Colonial Mind: The Discussion about “Vagrancy,” “African Laziness,” and Forced Labor in West Central and South Central Africa, 1945–65

Forced labor was a phenomenon that destabilized many rural communities in sub-Saharan Africa. Labor taxes, drafting of so-called “vagrants” for corrective forced labor, pressure exerted on locals to accept underpaid plantation contracts in order to avoid being qualified as “vagrants,” and obligatory production quota decreed for peasants—all these elements led to (mainly male) Africans under colonial rule being constantly on the move. Some were (often illegally) sent to far-away infrastructure projects; other needed to leave their homesteads to seek refuge from forced labor practices. While the International Labour Organization had already attempted to put pressure on democratic governments in the interwar period, only the moral environment of the immediate post-Second World War phase led to an abolition of colonial forced labor. Colonial officials, whose forms of local government had strongly relied on the practice, were suddenly compelled to do without it. However, much of their critique was only voiced behind closed doors, and the decolonization process obscured as a whole the complicated ways in which these European administrators attempted to cope with or to evade the new rules. Based on examples from the different colonial territories in a larger region tentatively called “West Central and South Central Africa” my paper will, from a comparative perspective, show the colonial mind after the abolition. It sheds light on attempts at a redefinition of “forced labor,” resilience in the practical implementation of the abolition decrees, and on the deep obsession with unfree labor driving many Europeans in colonial Africa. It also presents forced labor as an issue that was deeply enrooted in the everyday routines the rulers of empire had, even after its official abolition around (mostly) 1945.