The Background to Third World Unionism

Although trades union organisations have existed in the nations of Africa, Asia and Latin America almost as long as they have existed in the nations of Europe and North America, they did not play a major role in their national economic or political life until well after the First World War. The first recorded industrial action in Africa took place as early as 1793, when Nova Scotian settlers in Freetown struck against the Sierra Leone Company for higher wages. A similar strike took place in Freetown in 1874. These early unions were formed by European workers who brought with them their traditions and institutions of workers’ self-help organisations. In 1881 the Amalgamated Society of Woodworkers created a recognised union in South Africa; the French national trades union centre the Confédération Général du Travail (CGT) set up a trades council in Algeria in 1885; the British Rhodesians created a labour council in 1896; Portuguese unionists formed a union in Mozambique in 1898. These unions were restricted, for the most part, to European workers. The earliest unions of non-European labour in Africa can be found in the history of British West Africa where a strike by canoemen in the Cape Colony in 1896 and a trades union of carriers and porters in 1898 succeeded in winning certain rights from the colonial administrators. The first substantive non-white union, however, was created in Lagos in 1905 when indigenous civil servants banded together to form a recognised union. Despite these early developments, union growth and function in Africa, except for white European unions, tended to be slow, evanescent and largely unrecognised.