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This article examines the logic of deployment (recruitment, management, distribution) of “indigenous” labour within a palm oil production concession in the French Congo between 1911 and 1940. It focuses on how these workers were categorised in the context of parallel and competing labour mobilisation policies implemented by both private companies and the colonial administration. How colonial administrators, employers, and masters attempted to define what an “African worker” was made it possible to account not only for issues of governmentality but also to question the logic of social and ethnic-racial hierarchisation that participated in the institution of labour relations in the colonial context. As a result, the commodification of labour, notably through the introduction of the labour contract, is not the main lever in the capitalist transformation of labour relations. Other provisions of colonial power (in particular identification practices supposed to ensure the control of mobility and labour stabilisation policies) also contribute to this transformation and come into tension with the forms of defection and accommodation developed by local workers.