Gift Exchange and Income Redistribution between Yombe Rural Wage-earners and their Kinsfolk in Western Zaïre

Abstract

IntroductionA Previous article (Lux, 1971) dealing with the network of visits between rural wage-earners and their kinsfolk in Western Congo, presented a first set of findings collected during field-work conducted in July 1966 among a stratified random sample of 268 workers in the territory of Lukula in central Mayombe. One-third of them are employed in the plantations, and two-thirds in the industrial, mainly wood-processing, sector of seven generally big enterprises. Some of these workers live in Lukula, a small town of 10,000 people, others in rural company camps. They are thus to a large extent rural industrial wage-earners. Many of them are fully committed to the modern wage economy, so that I have been forced in the previous article to question Southall's assertion that rural wage-earners are ‘still firmly embedded in the fuller kinship system of rural tribal communities’ (1961: 34). The degree of their commitment has been measured by their various occupational profiles, to which I shall turn later. Suffice it here to say that half of them are already second- or even third-generation workers.