Acquiring Human Capital skills through Labour Migrancy: The case of Colonial Njombe District; 1900-1960s

Abstract

The migration of labourers to centres of mining, plantations and industrial production has been one of the most important demographic features of the African continent since its incorporation into the capitalist money economy. It is, however, surprisingly that the influence of this phenomenon on rural transformations remains largely unexplored as most of studies have mostly addressed the negative consequences of labour migration pointing at the destructive nature of labour migration to the local communities. While not denying the detrimental impacts of labour migration, the paper integrates written and oral information to establish that such exclusive attribution of rural underdevelopment to labour migration was indeed a traditional way of viewing labour migration. Such views were mainly a result of over emphasis on just macro-economic cost-benefit analysis that economists have always considered and emphasized upon. This article, therefore, is an effort to go beyond such economic arena by considering the acquisition of human capital particularly linking labour migration with western education and the spread of the Swahili language. Drawing from transformational approaches, this article argues that knowledge and skills that Njombe migrant labourers got from different work places, imbued them with elements which knowingly or unknowingly became part of the instruments for the wider rural transformation.