The Violence of Work: Revisiting South Africa’s ‘Labour Question’ Through Precarity and Anti-Blackness

A normative association of waged work with ideas of dignity and personal responsibility was central to the elaboration of the ‘labour question’ by the institutions of white rule in early 20th-century South Africa. Colonial work ethic sustained representations of the ‘native’ as a productive agent for whom promises of progress and modernisation (deriving from economic interdependence) contrasted with the deepening of political subjugation and racialised despotism. The respectability that was putatively linked to working for wages served to define the ‘native’ in opposition to what the white state perceived as a more threatening blackness, averse to wage labour and incompatible with the country’s colonial situation. Nascent African nationalism articulated its claims (albeit with significant ambiguities), against the background of such ideational oppositions. Ideals of productive Africans as virtuous subjects of the white-ruled polity simultaneously disguised and underpinned modalities of structural violence. These consisted in the institutional and coercive definition of wage labour as a quintessentially precarious experience for black workers. Conceptions of native work ethic became the stake in political conflicts. They cast blackness as an antagonistic other, often associated with images of indolence and work avoidance, the silencing of which has been a recurring theme in 20th-century South African politics.