Cinema And Wage Labour In Colonial Kenya Samson Kaunga Ndanyi

Download or read book Cinema and Wage Labour in Colonial Kenya - Samson Kaunga Ndanyi*. written by and published by . This book was released on with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Harry Thuku (1970: 32), the doyen of Kenyan nationalism and founder of the first political party in that country, raised the issue of taxation and involuntary labour with the colonial administration and demanded that the government explain why 'young girls and women' worked with no pay under the supervision of tribal policemen when Winston Churchill had outlawed such practices. [...] The final scenes show the mother knitting with her daughter, the father reading his newspaper and smoking a pipe, the mother helping the sleepy daughter to bed, and father and son working together on a model aeroplane. [...] Eager to lessen, if not close, the existing gap in trust between the public and the police force, a gap that was increasingly widening in Africa following the clamour for independence that sparked wars of land and freedom - such as the Mau Mau war in Kenya and the Algerian civil war - the narrator quickly reminds viewers that 'the policeman is a friend of the people and he knows that they will alw. [...] The ignorance continued even in the face of Africans' agitation for 'equal pay for work of equal value'.13 Constituting the bulk of the labour force in the country, African workers in public and private spheres were routinely underpaid. [...] In passing, however, I should point out that the war occupied the minds of British officials in the colony and in London, including European settlers who feared for their lives and safety and asked the government to spare no resources in dealing with 'these thugs'.