Workers of Africa: The Unfinished Struggle for Liberation

IOL News

25-05-2025

Kenyan Nairobi, 2024-06-24. Protesters confronting a police officer during a protest against Kenya's new Finance Bill in Nairobi on June 24, 2024. Africa's workers face a coordinated attack by capital, both local and global, backed by the IMF, the World Bank, and complicit elites who have abandoned the very people they once claimed to serve, says the writer.
Image: AFP
Mbuso Ngubane
AFRICA Day is not a day for celebration in the narrow sense. It is a day of remembrance, reflection, and recommitment.
We do not mark the birth of the Organisation of African Unity on the 25th of May 1963 with song and dance alone. We mark it with struggle. The very idea of Africa's unity, and its promise of liberation, has always rested on the backs, and in the hands, of its workers.
Not just those who labour in mines and factories, but also those who clean homes, till the soil, sew clothes, raise children, and build roads. It is working-class men and women, those who carry the continent's burdens daily, who have borne the cost of empire, and it is they who have carried the fight for freedom across generations.
Africa's liberation has never been the product of state declarations or elite negotiation. It has always been forged in protest, in strike, in sweat, and often in blood. When Ghana rose under Nkrumah, it was the strikes of railway and cocoa workers that shook the colonial economy. In South Africa, it was not the ballot box alone that broke apartheid.
It was the power of the organised working class, from the 1973 Durban strikes to the formation of militant unions like the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa. The same can be said of Guinea-Bissau under Amílcar Cabral, where the peasantry and rural workers were central to building a people's war. Cabral was clear: 'Tell no lies, claim no easy victories.' And we must now also be clear. Africa is not yet free.
The great betrayal of African independence was that while flags changed and national anthems were composed, the economic system remained intact. The colonial economy, rooted in extraction and exploitation, continued to thrive. This time under African managers, but still under the same logic of capital.
Workers remained landless, poor, and expendable. Their voices were marginalised in the very nations they had helped to liberate. As Thomas Sankara warned, political independence without economic justice is merely the illusion of freedom. Sankara, a revolutionary of rare honesty and vision, called for a break with neo-colonialism, for land redistribution, for women's emancipation, for a new economic order rooted in self-reliance. He was murdered by the very forces that feared what might happen if workers truly led.
And today, we must ask: what has changed? In South Africa, nearly 50% of young people are unemployed. Women continue to carry the burden of unpaid reproductive labour, while also surviving on precarious wages in the care and retail sectors.
Miners die underground, farm workers live in shacks, domestic workers are denied basic protections, and informal traders are harassed and criminalised. The economy remains colonial in structure. It exports raw materials, imports manufactured goods and services for the profits of capitalists while communities go hungry. This is not transformation. It is continued dispossession.
The same conditions exist across much of the continent. In Nigeria, oil workers face mass retrenchments while the profits are repatriated to multinational giants. In the DRC, children dig for cobalt with their bare hands, fuelling a so-called green economy that has no place for them.
In Kenya and Uganda, trade union leaders are imprisoned or assassinated. In Morocco and Tunisia, workers organising for dignity are crushed under anti-terror laws. From the Sahel to the Cape, Africa's workers face a coordinated attack by capital, both local and global, backed by the IMF, the World Bank, and complicit elites who have abandoned the very people they once claimed to serve.
But this is not just a story of defeat. New fires are burning on the continent. In Mali and Burkina Faso, led by figures like Assimi Goïta and Ibrahim Traoré, there is a rebellion against the dominance of France and the plunder of our resources. These processes are complex, often contradictory, and we must watch them with both hope and clarity. But what cannot be denied is that something long suppressed, is now stirring.
A Pan-African consciousness is resurfacing. Not from orchestrated summits or high-level dialogues, but from the lived experiences of those whose hands sustain our economies. It is returning through the organised defiance of farmworkers resisting landlessness, through the daily calculations of informal traders navigating criminalisation and debt, and through the collective frustration of unemployed youth with no future promised to them. It is shaped not in abstractions, but in concrete material struggle. What we are seeing is not a spectacle. It is a substance, and it cannot be ignored.
On this Africa Day, we must reject the empty symbolism of liberation without transformation. We must say clearly that the project of African unity is meaningless if it does not speak to the daily struggles of working people. Africa will not be saved by billion-dollar infrastructure deals, or by a new scramble for lithium and rare earths. It will be saved by the transformation of our societies along the lines of justice, equity, and people's power. That re-organisation begins with workers. Those who produce value, who build nations, who raise the next generation.
The trade union movement on the continent must rise to this occasion. We must rebuild our solidarity across borders. We must reject the legal straightjackets imposed on our organising. We must stop relying on state patronage and return to the grassroots, to the workplaces, to the streets.
Unions cannot be junior partners in capitalist development. We must be the voice of an alternative future. We must also be honest about our failures: where we have been co-opted, where we have ignored women's struggles, where we have failed to adapt to the realities of the informal and unemployed. A movement that cannot renew itself cannot lead.