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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:The Moral Economy of Working Class Struggle: Strikers, the Community and the State in the 1947 Mombassa General Strike
Author:Zeleza, TiyambeISNI
Year:1995
Periodical:Africa Development: A Quarterly Journal of CODESRIA (ISSN 0850-3907)
Volume:20
Issue:3
Pages:51-87
Language:English
Geographic terms:Kenya
Great Britain
Subjects:colonialism
strikes
Labor and Employment
Economics and Trade
Politics and Government
History and Exploration
External link:https://www.jstor.org/stable/24486881
Abstract:The Mombassa (Kenya) general strike of January 1947 was not organized by a trade union. The strike cannot, therefore, be fully understood without analysing the social networks in the community where the workers lived. Using the Mombassa strike as a case study, this paper shows that strikes are not merely episodic struggles between labour and capital at the work place. In reality, they involve much wider struggles in society. After a brief historical and theoretical discussion of African labour struggles and the concepts of 'moral economy' and community, the paper examines the tradition of strikes and the patterns of community organization in Mombassa. Then it traces the development of the 1947 general strike during its early days, the use of public meetings as forums for articulating the objectives of the strike, and the initial responses by the employers and the State. Next it delineates the role of the community in the strike and the strategies used by the State to crush it. Finally, it assesses the effects of the strike's resolution on subsequent relations between the colonial State, capital and labour, and on social relations in the working class community itself. It appears that both the strikers and the employers mobilized external resources: for the former it was the moral weight of the community, and for the latter the coercive might of the State. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. in French.
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