African peasantries: A theoretical framework

Abstract

Abstract The paper seeks to contribute to a framework for the investigation of the specific historical conditions and contemporary manifestations of the agrarian question in sub‐Saharan Africa. The latter is distinguished, inter alia, by the timing and modes of incorporation of African social formations in the international economy, and by the forms of intervention of the colonial and post‐colonial states in the absence of features classically associated with the agrarian question elsewhere, such as large landed property, the political power of landlords, and the formation of an agrarian bourgeoisie. The forms and degrees of subsumption of peasant simple commodity production in the circuit of capital, a process in which the state plays a central role, are seen as moving towards a situation in which peasant producers are constituted as ‘wage‐labour equivalents’. Notes Research Fellow, University of Kent at Canterbury. Originally published as an Occasional Paper of the Economic Research Bureau, University of Dar es Salaam, with the title ‘Concepts for the Analysis of Contemporary Peasantries’. The paper is the result of participation in collective work and wide‐ranging debate at the University of Dar es Salaam in recent years; detailed comment on an ealier version by Deborah Fahy Bryceson has helped with the clarification and elaboration of the position presented here.