Child Labour and Capitalist Social Engineering in Africa: Divorcing Society from the Means of Production

Abstract

This article engages with some salient issues relating to child labour in colonial and post-colonial Africa. The central argument hinges on the inconclusive assault of capital on pre-capitalist socio-economic formation in Africa and the urgent intellectual task of liberating the study of child labour from humanitarian, United Nations and non-governmental organisation bureaucrats by privileging the voices of children themselves. The first section deals with historiographical issues, while the second focuses on agriculture, aspects of urban poverty and the emergence of a Lumpenproletariat to examine the transformation from above which took place after the colonial state was created at the turn of the century. The third section addresses two insidious categories of child labour in the post-colony: child trafficking and child soldiers. The final section grapples with the moral economy of child labour by interrogating the complex array of instruments that have emerged on the global scene to address what is today seen as the child labour ‘problem’.