‘By‐day’ boys and dariga Men: casual labour versus Agrarian capital in Northern Ghana

Abstract

The development of agrarian capitalism in Africa has accelerated in recent years and is taking several forms. In some areas, peasant labour is managed by state and international agencies and exploited on irrigation and settlement schemes; multinational agribusiness is frequently involved. Elsewhere private entrepreneurship by Africans, often subsidised by the state, is prominent, and the hire of wage labour by such entrepreneurs is widespread and expanding. It is with the latter form of capitalist agriculture that this paper is concerned. In many parts of Africa the development of capitalist agriculture has led to immiseration among rural people and increased their exploitation. But this has not always been the case and it is not inevitable. In northern Ghana the rural population has not succumbed to the all‐powerful, rampant capitalism of the orthodox Marxist model. The real activity of rural labour has constrained the emergence of capitalist rice farming from the late 1960s. Through their struggles, labourers have done relatively well. This paper will examine how capitalist farmers attempted to mobilise labour, to induce workers’ commitment to capitalist production and how exploitation is carried on. All three processes involve struggles between capital and labour which have shaped agricultural development in the north.