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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Reflections on masculinities in the wage labour economy of late colonial Katanga (DR Congo)
| Panel |
62. Copper and Migrants: Towards a social history of industrialisation and social change in central Africa 1890-1990
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| Paper ID | 469 |
| Author(s) |
Cuvelier, Jeroen
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | Faced with the need to secure the social and biological reproduction of their labour force, large companies in the British, French and Belgian colonies developed a so-called stabilization policy in the first half of the twentieth century. This policy consisted of a set of measures aimed, on the one hand, at improving the working conditions, and, on the other hand, at regulating the social lives of the workers and their families. Most importantly, it gave rise to the genesis of the male breadwinner ideal. Men in contemporary Katangese society often refer to the latter ideal to justify their involvement in the artisanal mining of copper and cobalt, currently one of the most important survival strategies in the south-eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Nevertheless, evidence gathered in the course of recent fieldwork in Katanga shows that, even at the time of the stabilization policy, several types of masculinities coexisted simultaneously. In this paper, I will use testimonies of former employees of the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga to analyze the impact of colonial projects of social engineering on the definition and expression of gender identities. |
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