African Presence 1492-1992: Schomburg Exhibit

Work

The demand for labor- people who could work in the diverse economic enterprises that made the European colonization of the Americas profitable - led to the establishment of the trade in enslaved Africans. Africans were captured, sold and shipped to the Americas because they were perceived by European colonies to be the best workers available in the world.

In addition to the manual labor required to work in the mines and on the sugar, tobacco, cotton, coffee, cocoa and indigo plantations, enslaved African men, women, and children brought with them a familiarity with the topography of the tropics, as well as skills, techniques and efficient ways of organizing labor. Africans and their descendants, therefore, where also counted among the architects, entrepreneurs, builders, artisans and craftspeople responsible for the construction of the infrastructure necessary to the social and economic life of the Americas. Women not only shared agricultural and mine labor with men, but also were responsible for bearing and raising their own children, maintaining their family households, and assuring the comfort and well-being of slave owners and their families.

With abolition, newly freed Africans joined other blacks (and, depending on the country in question, indigenous people, East Indians, Chinese, and poor whites) in a labor caste system that restricted the kinds of economic activities in which they were allowed to participate. In the United States, sharecropping replaced the plantation system. In the Caribbean, the rural peasantry increasingly turned to subsistence farming or the lure of urban promises.

Today, throughout the hemisphere people of African ancestry often carry on the same kind of work they have always done in conditions which, for many, have not materially improved. In Colombia, women still engage in placer mining, searching for a few nuggets of gold with which to support their families. In Peru, men and women of African descent continue to do predominantly low-paying service sector jobs. Black workers in Brazil are depended on overwhelmingly for domestic work, mining, agriculture and manufacturing jobs. In the United States, African Americans are viewed as an expendable labor force even as they assume increasingly responsible positions in the economic and political structures. Everywhere, job discrimination continues to be a constant.

While exploitation and suffering have certainly been part of the work lives of most of the hemisphere's African descendants, their approach to labor has also been constructive and creative. Work was enlivened by song and talk, made easier, more productive or efficient by the invention of tools or processes. In the context of the work place, whether on the plantation or in the factory, people of African descent gathered together to plan escapes and revolts, and to organize unions or guilds. Finally they used whatever jobs they had to earn the means by which to provide for a better future, if not immediately, then at least for their children.