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The rise, in the Western academia of the second half of the twentieth century, of “social movements” as a distinct object of disciplinary expertise has largely ignored or sidestepped the politics of contention and conflict in colonial and postcolonial Africa. Even attempts at providing comprehensive scholarly overviews of African social movements have been few and far between, reflecting the uneasy discrepancy between social movement studies as a field aiming at conceptual and methodological coherence and the exceeding complexity of African contentious politics. Black thought is challenging the study of African social movements to reject the mechanical internalization of concepts and theories that are not accountable to, again in Fanon’s terms, “the lived experience of Blackness.” Placing Africa in relation to global Blackness and Black theory highlights the limitations of such approaches when confronted to power that ordinarily takes the form of lethal and gratuitous violence rather than the hegemonic solicitation of consent or even the capitalistically enforced necessity of producing surplus.

The transition to democracy in South Africa has seen trends towards what can be defined as a growing institutionalisation of labour, meaning that trade unions have been increasingly participating in social and political institutionalised bargaining, both in policy making and industrial restructuring. Dinga Sikwebu grew up in Cape Town and left school in 1978 having received an early political education from the radicalisation that swept South African schools after the 1976 Soweto uprising. John Appolis is Wits regional secretary of the Chemical, Energy, Paper, Printing, Wood and Allied Workers Union. John had been an anti-apartheid activist in his youth and studied at the University of the Western Cape. John is also the chairperson of the Gauteng Anti-Privatisation Forum, which unites and co-ordinates the struggles of community organisations located in the townships of Soweto, East Rand, Vaal and Alexandra. Sectoral Employment Training Authorities are bodies established in 2001 to develop systems of skill acquisition and recognition of skills by industry.

This chapter argues that the typicality of precariousness in colonial and postcolonial Africa was not confined to labour exploitation and control, but also characterized African workers' responses to waged employment. The precariousness of work in Africa thus undermines working for wages as a putatively progressive norm as well as a social condition through which capital reproduces itself. The precariousness of African work is 'post' colonial to the extent that it has challenged imaginaries of rule – emerged in the colonial context and transmitted to independent nation states – geared at positing wage labour as a condition to make Africans governable and productive. The changing precarity of work thus becomes symptomatic of a more general precariousness of capitalism in the neoliberal age. Neoliberal postmodernity validated in the end the persistence of hierarchies premised on despotism, nepotism, and servitude, which ironically superseded the modern wage form and its institutionalization in colonial and post-independence states.