Introduction: Bodies as Nodes in an Empire of Labor
Colonial rule did more than extract resources from African lands; it repurposed the daily lives and bodies of African women to stabilize and expand imperial dominance. The metaphor of women as “permanent infrastructure” captures how their labor, reproduction, and social roles became enduring foundations for colonial economies, legal systems, and social order. This article examines how colonialism interconnected gendered labor, property regimes, and statebuilding, transforming intimate spaces into sites of state function.
Labor as Currency: Agricultural, Domestic, and Extractive Demands
Across colonial Africa, women’s work sustained both settler economies and rentier states. In plantation zones and mine-adjacent villages, women were often primary cultivators, processors, and traders who kept households functioning amid wage labor scarcity. Domestic labor, caregiving, and food provisioning extended the reach of colonial markets into homes. These tasks were not peripheral; they were essential to the reproduction of a labor force, the maintenance of colonial households, and the circulation of goods, capital, and taxation. By converting everyday labor into measurable productivity, colonial authorities embedded women’s contributions into the economic arithmetic of empire.
Reproduction, Property, and Legal Regimes
Colonial regimes frequently redefined family structures to serve administrative and economic ends. Marriage, inheritance, and kinship were reframed under legal codes that privileged colonial interests—often privileging male property rights while regulating women’s autonomy. In many contexts, women’s reproductive labor—bearing and raising children—became critical for maintaining the labor pool that imperial economies depended on. Schools, clinics, and churches, deployed by colonial administrations, also shaped gender norms, cultivating a generation of women who would reproduce or resist the colonial order. The outcome: women became living infrastructure for sustaining population growth, social order, and political control.
Health, Surveillance, and State Capacity
Public health campaigns, vaccination drives, and medical clinics were not neutral endeavors. They served to monitor, regulate, and often discipline women within the sphere of family and community life. Reproductive health, birth spacing, and maternal care were intertwined with tax collection, census-taking, and labor mobilization. As state capacity expanded, so did the surveillance of women’s bodies, which were seen as barometers of population strength and economic vitality. In this sense, the state treated women as crucial assets for long-term imperial stability, linking maternal health to security and governance.
Education, Modernization, and the Internal Coloniality of Gender
Mission schools and colonial academies introduced new ideals of femininity aligned with productive labor, disciplined labor ethics, and disciplined citizenship. Girls’ education often carried dual purposes: to create a trained workforce and to inculcate loyalties or norms congruent with colonial rule. The internal coloniality of gender refers to how colonialism not only extracted resources but also remade the social and moral order within African societies. Women were central to this project: as teachers, nurses, traders, and farm managers, they internalized and reproduced the colonial framework within households and communities.
Resistance, Resilience, and Reframing Infrastructure
Colonial histories are not tales of passive submission. Women mobilized networks, knowledge, and recourses to resist exploitation and to navigate the constraints of colonial rule. From informal economies that circumvented state controls to organizing within and across kin networks, women remade the terms of labor and social life. The concept of permanent infrastructure thus also carries a counter-narrative: the resilience of African women who, despite being positioned as essential state assets, leveraged their roles to challenge colonial power and reassert autonomy in their communities.
Legacy and Decolonial Futures
Even after formal colonial administrations receded, the lasting imprint of these gendered infrastructures persisted in land tenure debates, wage gaps, and health systems. Contemporary African feminisms engage with this history, seeking to disentangle exploitation from agency and to imagine futures where gendered labor is valued, voluntary, and equitable. Understanding the colonial past helps explain present inequalities and illuminates pathways toward more just social and economic systems.
