Gender and Plantation Labour in Africa: The Story of Tea Pluckers' Struggles in Cameroon

Piet Konings

Jan 2012 · African Books Collective

About this ebook

This book explores the relationship between plantation labour and gender in Africa. Such a study is the more opportune because most of the existing works on plantation labour in Africa seem to have either under-studied or even ignored the changing conceptions of gender on the continent in recent times. One of the book's major concerns is to demonstrate that the introduction of plantation labour during colonial rule in Africa has had significant consequences for gender roles and relations within and beyond the capitalist labour process. The book focuses on two tea estates in Anglophone Cameroon. A study of these estates is particularly interesting in that one of them employs mainly female pluckers while the other employs mainly male pluckers. This allows for an examination of any variations in male and female workers' modes of resistance to the control and exploitation they meet in the labour process. Such a comparative analysis is helpful in assessing the widespread managerial assumption on tea estates that female pluckers tend to be more productive and docile than male pluckers.