Stories of Rural Accumulation in Africa: Trajectories and Transitions among Rural Capitalists in Senegal

Abstract

This paper analyzes primary qualitative evidence from life histories of rural capitalists in contemporary Senegal. Various common themes in the declining literature on rural capitalism in Africa are discussed with reference to the specific individual trajectories of rural farm capitalists in Senegal. The themes include the emergence of rural capitalism in the context of protracted, uneven and gradual rural social differentiation and the various processes that have accompanied it; the condition of ‘entrepreneurship’ in such changing historical contexts; the symbiotic relationship between different spaces (loci) of accumulation, especially trade, transport and farming and the historical context in which they take place; the crucial but sometimes contradictory role of the state in spurring or constraining rural capitalist accumulation; and the variety of ‘idioms of accumulation’, which reflect transitions and synthesis between non‐capitalist and capitalist forms of labour surplus appropriation at the level of individual capitalists, despite some uniformity in the general logic of capital and the spread of capitalist relations of production and exchange. The paper also discusses the methodological power and limitations of oral narratives as a method to gather evidence on long‐term processes of agrarian change and accumulation in rural Africa. Finally, the life histories shed some light on the origins of rural capitalists and show that there is a combination of instances of ‘capitalism from above’ and ‘from below’ but that no dominant pattern can be clearly discerned at least in the space of one or two generations.