The pioneers of new ways of thinking about African labor were bureaucrats – the Inspecteurs du Travail, the labour officers and commissioners, members of investigatory commissions, and a number of governors and ministry officials. As they made their case for stabilization within their governments, they also talked to each other, notably at the ILO and since 1948 at the Inter-African Labour Conferences (IALCs). The international discussions helped to anchor an agenda, giving a global imprimatur to what labor specialists were trying to do inside colonial governments and defining what was a discussable social issue. The ILO had agreed in 1944 and in more specific form in 1947 that the basic standards of labor policy which that organization applied to independent countries should apply to “non-metropolitan” areas as well. From there, a common agenda for the ILO and the IALC shaped discussions well into the 1950s: limiting migration, promoting stability in employment, paying family wages, developing systems of social insurance, establishing institutions to carry out inspections and insure regulations were followed, providing mechanisms for collective bargaining, and increasing the productivity of African labor. That the United Nations should publish in the 1950s a Report on the World Social Situation suggests how much the social had become a domain for international surveillance and judgment.

It was only in the first half of the 1950s that there developed a significant body of scholarship on labor and urbanization in Africa. The sequence is important: the new scholarship appeared after the new policies had been decided upon. New labor policy was a direct response, drawing on metropolitan experience, by civil servants to a challenge raised by colonial workers.