Living and Struggling in a Plantation: Wage Labor, Control and Conflicts in a Post Structural Adjustment Plan Agro-Industrial Plantation (Sosucam) in Cameroon

International audienceFor the agro-industrial plantations in Cameroon, the instability of their labor force has always been a strategical stake. This is due to the relative particularity of wage labor in this country, which makes the recruitment on a plantation only a stage in the economic strategies developed by the workers, who most generally keep an organic link with the rural areas. To cope with the situation, the plantations historically developed internal housing for the workers, avoided to hire local laborers, and allowed them to establish their families on theses camps.In the SOSUCAM plantations (which produce sugar in the Center region of Cameroon) as elsewhere, these camps thus played a key role in the relationships between the staff and the workers. My communication will try to show how housing is a matter of conflictuality in this plantation, in an attempt to understand the organic links which unify the everyday resistances of the workers and explicit collective labor struggles. I will also try to show how this conflictuality was affected by the evolution of the paternalistic pattern adopted by the plantation after its privatization. This communication will be based on a fieldwork realized in June 2013 in the Nkoteng SOSUCAM plantation