In Africa, colonisers faced what they openly called ‘the Labour Question’: how to get Africans to work in mines and on plantations for low wages. Africans generally preferred their subsistence lifestyles, and showed little inclination to do back-breaking work in European industries. The promise of wages was in most cases not enough to induce them into what they considered to be needless labour. Europeans fumed at this resistance, and responded by either forcing people off their land (the Native Lands Act in South Africa shoved the black population onto a mere 13% of the country’s territory),
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