Previous page | New search |
The free AfricaBib App for Android is available here
Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | Petroleum and Proletarianization: The Life History of a Muslim Nigerian Worker |
Author: | Lubeck, Paul M. |
Year: | 1989 |
Periodical: | African Economic History |
Volume: | 18 |
Pages: | 99-112 |
Language: | English |
Geographic terms: | Nigeria Northern Nigeria |
Subjects: | working class industrial workers biographies (form) Labor and Employment Economics and Trade Religion and Witchcraft Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups) |
External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/3601754 |
Abstract: | This text describes the life experiences and subjective interpretations of Ahmadu - a peasant-origin, Muslim, Hausa-speaking industrial worker living in Kano, Nigeria. He is accompanied while he inadvertently joins others in what theorists call the transition to semi-industrial capitalism. As his life is chronicled over a decade and a half, the social forces of industrial capitalist accumulation initially suck him into the expansion generated by the civil war; then they thrust him into the dizzy heights of the petroleum boom; and finally, they hurl him precipitously into the chasm that ushered in the depression of structural adjustment. What is the experience of first-generation proletarianization, if it is not coming to terms with the urban labour market, coping with the insecurity of industrial employment, and learning to wield the weapons of industrial conflict? The text is reconstructed by the author from in-depth interviews with Ahmadu beginning in December 1970 and ending in July 1985. Each phase of his biography is placed in historical context. Bibliogr., note. |