It gives me particular pleasure to be here. I think that I am the first Canadian citizen to be honored by the presidency of what has increasingly become an international organization. And yet, I am very much one of you. I was born and raised in the United States. I served in its army and represented it abroad as a Fulbright professor before becoming a Canadian. Passionate as my commitment to my adopted country is, my roots remain here, no place more than in this community of scholars.

Like many of my generation, my career has been marked by a tension between thought and action. As a historian, I wanted to understand the world in which I lived. As an activist, I wanted to change that world, to make it a more just, more tolerant and more egalitarian place. If you had asked me 25 years ago why I chose Africa, I would have stressed my scholarly objectives. I would have mentioned the problems that interested me and the questions I wanted to answer. In retrospect, the appeal of Africa for myself and many of my generation of Africanists was very much the excitement of watching the destruction of an oppressive colonial order and being involved in the creation of a new one. Furthermore, the quest for justice and self-determination abroad was linked, sometimes unconsciously, to the quest for equality and social justice at home. For myself, as for many of my peers, the conflict between thought and action often cut deep, and we sometimes paid a price.

This paper addresses the subject of working class redefinition within the context of production and profit in the iron-ore mines. Sierra Leonean miners, especially laborers, struggled to redefine themselves as a group with similar interests against efforts by state and capital to maximize profit and increase productivity. The maximization of profit and the minimization of labor costs were crucial to, and dependent on, the survival and profitability of the iron-ore mines with its labor intensive system of production.

The central proposition on which the argument hinges relates to the struggle for social reproduction in the economic sphere. By social reproduction is meant “the activities and attitudes, behaviours and emotions, responsibilities and relationships directly involved in the maintenance of life on a daily basis and intergenerationally. Among other things, it includes how food, clothing and shelter are made available for immediate consumption” (Brenner and Laslett 1976, 117). Between 1935 and 1938, laborers struck twice, demanding better working conditions, increased wages, and an end to draconian discipline. The laborers also organized (without a formal union) and resisted attempts to control time, workplace situation, and leisure. Their protests ranged from refusal to reside in mining compounds to absenteeism from work. The laborers' struggle for social reproduction in the economic sphere constitutes the most significant variable in the development of the miners' consciousness and their transformation into a working class.

Modern African literature has gained recognition worldwide with such classics as Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Ngugi wa Thiongo's Weep Not Child, and Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman. This recognition was reinforced by Soyinka's winning of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. Modern African literature is written in indigenous African languages and in European languages used in Africa. Written African literature is very new compared to the indigenous oral tradition of literature which has been there and is still very much alive. While there are literary works in Yoruba, Hausa, Zulu and Sotho, among others, this literature in African indigenous languages is hardly known outside its specific linguistic frontiers. Writers such as Mazisi Kunene, Ngugi wa Thiongo and the late Okot p'Bitek first wrote some of their works in African languages before translating them into English. Most African writers, however, write in English, French, and Portuguese. There is the Eurocentric temptation to see modern African literature written in these European languages as an extension of European literature. However, after modern imperialism, language alone cannot be the sole definer of a people's literature.

An increasing number of studies highlight the important role played by Christian missionaries in the processes of change that occurred in African countries before independence. Fifteen years ago a bibliography listed no fewer than 2,859 publications on Christianity in Tropical Africa and their number has grown even more considerably in recent years (Ofori 1977). Both historians and social scientists have taken a keen interest in this issue (see Etherington 1983). But it has not always been so.