Abstract
During the two decades preceding the outbreak of the First World War, Northern Rhodesia acted as a labour reservoir for a wide variety of internal and external industrial and agricultural interests. There were two major externally-based recruiting agencies. The larger was the Rhodesia Native Labour Bureau (RNLB), which since 1903 had served Southern Rhodesian mines and farms and which also recruited, as a sideline, for those of Northern Rhodesia. The smaller, Robert Williams and Company, recruited for Union Minière du Haut Katanga located in the nearby Belgian Congo.
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Notes
Any discussion of Northern Rhodesian labour movements during the prewar period inevitably suffers from the absence of reliable official figures, particularly in relation to unregistered ‘voluntary’ mine labour leaving the territory and farm labour in general. Consequently, estimates have to be made with an unavoidable degree of inaccuracy. This is particularly true of Northern Rhodesia’s own internal labour consumption, which is almost entirely derived from often inaccurate boma estimates. For similar problems encountered with regard to pre-war Central African labour statistics, see Kuczynski, A Demographic Survey of the British Colonial Empire, Vol. 2, pp. 442–3 and F. E. Sanderson, ‘The Development of Labour Migration from Nyasaland, 1891–1914’, Journal of African History, Vol. 2(2) (1961): 259–271.
The ban, prompted by the demands of Nyasaland planters for labour protection, incensed Company labour officials. After one heated meeting in August 1911, H. M. Hole attacked the Governor as a ‘pompous little bounder, full of self-confidence and without much intelligence’. H. M. Hole to F. J. Newton, 10 August 1911, GP, BSA/7/221. See also H. M. Hole to Sec. BSAC, 7 October 1911, GP, BSA/7/223. For Governor Sharpe’s attempts to halt illegal labour migration from Nyasaland, see B. S. Krishnamurthy, ‘Economic Policy, Land and Labour in Nyasaland, 1890–1914’, in B. Pac (ed.) The Early History of Malawi (London: Longman, 1972), pp. 397–8. Although his pass system failed to significantly stop unauthorised migration it was sufficient to persuade the BSAC to concentrate more heavily on Northern Rhodesia.
See Palmer, Land and Racial Domination in Rhodesia, pp. 80–130 for one major study of this process; see also Arrighi, ‘Labour Supplies’, pp. 212–14 and I. Phimister, ‘Peasant Production and Underdevelopment in Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1914’, in R. Palmer and N. Parsons (eds), The Roots of Rural Poverty in Central and Southern Africa (London: Heinemann, 1977), pp. 227–8.
Strachan, The First World War, Volume 1: To Arms’, p. 571. Some recent revisionist German historians have recently portrayed Vorbeck’s aggressive actions as less than heroic and constituting ‘nothing but a military coup’. Stig Förster, ‘Imperial Germany: Civil-Military relations’, in J. Winter (ed.) The Cambridge History of The First World War, Vol. 2, pp. 91–125 (116), and Tanja Bührer, Die Kaiserliche Schutztruppe für Deutsche-Ostafrika (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), pp. 401–77. On the precariousness of Northern Rhodesia’s position at the outbreak of war and the consequent immediate need for Belgian assistance, see Paice, Tip and Run: The Untold Tragedy of the Great War in Africa, pp. 32–3 and Anderson, The Forgotten Front: The East African Campaign 1914–18, p. 46.
See Annual Report Barotseland 1915–16, NAZ, ZA 7/1/3/2, confirming a potential of 2,000 more carriers in addition to the 2,000 already sent to the Luapula war. Wallace’s post-war account suggests this potential was probably exceeded. See L. A. Wallace, ‘Northern Rhodesia and the Last Phase of the War in Africa’, in C. P. Lucas (ed.) The Empire at War, Vol. 4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926), p. 295.
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© 2015 Edmund James Yorke
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Yorke, E.J. (2015). War Labour Recruitment and Mobilisation: The Roots of Crisis. In: Britain, Northern Rhodesia and the First World War. Studies in Military and Strategic History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137435798_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137435798_2
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