African Peasants Research Articles

Conservation, peasants and class: critical reflections on the political economy of climate change strategies in West Senegal

ABSTRACT Environmental conservation has become a key climate mitigation strategy in the last two decades. Through the multiplication of ‘conservation’ projects, Africa is one of the main centres of this kind of intervention. While scholars have shown conservation to be a vehicle for the advancement of capitalist interests, scarce attention has been paid to agrarian labour and class dynamics in the African countryside sustaining this development. Drawing on the authors’ research in West Senegal, this article develops a conceptual framework for integrating class and peasant labour in the study of capitalist conservation. It shows how conservation-related climate mitigation strategies in Africa nurture and are nurtured by neoliberal and imperialist processes of agrarian change, reinforcing the economic and political vulnerability of African peasants. Alternative, anti-imperial climate change mitigation strategies need to be centred around peasant environmentalisms and their liberation from labour oppression.

From commons to resilience grabbing: Insights from historically-oriented social anthropological research on African peasants

AbstractThis paper aims to show the relevance that institutions governing common-pool resources (CPRs) play in peasant resilience. It outlines nine variables for resilience taken from socio-economic and ecological anthropological theories focusing on subsistence and minimax strategies and used for the comparative historical analysis of African case studies. These include drylands (Morocco, Ghana), semi-arid areas (Sierra Leone, Malawi, Tanzania) and wetlands (Cameroon, Kenya, Zambia). The variables could be found under pre-colonial common property but were no longer operating during colonial and postcolonial institutional change from common to state property and privatisation via land grabbing, leading to commons and resilience grabbing.

Ambiguous Repositories: Archives, Traders and the Recruitment of Mineworkers in the Eastern Cape: 1900–1946

ABSTRACT South Africa’s system of migrant labour is widely accepted as being an exploitative system that was based on the degree to which the Chamber of Mines could derive a profit from cheap labour. The exploitation and suffering that mine labour and recruitment produced, however, tells us only part of a story. Why were people so willing to become migrant labourers – particularly on gold mines – in the first place? This is all the more important because it has been shown that African peasants responded very positively to market forces in the last third of the nineteenth century, and thus would have all the reason more to remain in their rural homes. As in the Caribbean, the Chamber of Mines in South Africa realised that active recruitment was required to launch large-scale migration from one region of Africa into another. But what did this active coercion involve? This paper primarily uses archival and pictorial records to explore how workers could sell their labour so cheaply at the expense of their families and rural homes. Extensive use has been made of the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (WNLA) and Native Recruiting Corporation (NRC) archives at the University of Johannesburg, as well as personal accounts of ex-traders in the Transkei. These have been used to inform an exploration of how the larger phenomenon of migration was propped up by false advertising, debt and extortion of mineworkers in the Eastern Cape.

From law to history: The politics of war and empire

Abstract:The Internationalistsargues that the outlawry of war in 1928 created the modern international order. This review essay critiques this single-cause account of world history. It shows howThe Internationalistsrelies on statistics that obfuscate the character of war and on a juridical model of international politics that makes liberal empire invisible. I argue that war making by Asian and African peasants played more of a role in bringing about decolonisation than peacemaking by Western lawyers.

Political Participation by African Peasants as Development Actors of Integrated Water Resource Management

Political Participation by African Peasants as Development Actors of Integrated Water Resource Management

Reproducing Portuguese Villages in Africa: Agricultural Science, Ideology and Empire

This article examines the political and ideological uses of agronomic research, focusing on state-directed rural white settlements in Angola. Implemented ‘against the tide’, in the mid-1950s, with Angola’s African anti-colonial movement already under way, these schemes contained numerous contradictions. Under a modernising agenda, the Estado Novo dictatorship created the colonatos of Cela and Cunene, with the expressed purpose of reproducing Portuguese rural villages in Africa, settling poor Portuguese peasants and perpetuating colonial rule. Drawing on a range of primary sources from Portuguese colonial and scientific archives and the literature on Angola, I analyse the relationship between policymakers and the agricultural engineers mobilised to study the soils and its agricultural suitability in the regions chosen for the colonatos. I show that several experts criticised state-sponsored development of white rural settlements and exposed the policy’s drawbacks. I also place this particular example within the context of the existing literature on the history of science and development in post-war Africa. I will argue that the Portuguese version of the ‘developmentalist’ colonial state was burdened with an anti-progressive ideology that criticised industrialisation, urbanisation and proletarianisation, ignored technical and scientific conclusions, and despised settlers’ aspirations of upward mobility, seeing such aspirations as potentially politically disruptive. According to this model, the ideal type of white settler – modest, rooted in the land, earning only enough to get by – would be emulated by the African peasant, ensuring both social peace and colonial order. The failure of this experiment illustrates the (dis)connection between science and ideology in the last years of the Portuguese Empire, and the social and economic cost of their disengagement.

Selling Servitude, Captivating Consumers

After the abolition of Russian serfdom and American slavery in 1861 and 1865, respectively, businesses played an important role in molding popular attitudes about post-emancipation integration processes in Russia and the United States through visual representations of serfs, peasants, slaves, and freedpeople in advertisements. Both American and Russian companies developed parallel marketing strategies by constructing advertisements that depicted African Americans and peasants in positions of servitude, which appealed to consumers who were nostalgic for an idealized rural, pre-industrial and pre-emancipation era during an age of rapid industrialization, urbanization, and geographic expansion. But Russian and American companies also pursued divergent marketing tactics that beg further consideration. While US businesses predominantly disparaged African Americans in racialized caricatures, Russian businesses sometimes depicted peasants in positions of equality relative to other citizens. What accounts for this disparity? This article examines newspaper ads, posters, broadsides, and ephemera from collections at Russian and American archives, and argues that apart from perceived racial differences in the case of US ads, dissimilarities between Russian and American population compositions, urban migration patterns, and distinct notions of national identity also explain this important distinction.

Atlantic rice and rice farmers: rising from debate, engaging new sources, methods, and modes of inquiry, and asking new questions

For the past 40 years, scholars of the US South and West Africa have been engaged in a robust debate about the agency of enslaved laborers in the origins and evolution of the commercial rice industry in the colonial South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry. Though the debate has been contentious at times, scholars studying Atlantic rice farmers have come to agree on a few points: enslaved Africans’ provision grounds were probably important in Carolina colonists’ experimentation with rice as a staple crop; enslaved Africans continued to practice “heel–toe” sowing techniques until the nineteenth century; African water control and processing techniques served as prototypes for mechanized irrigation and processing machinery. This article suggests the time has come to explore additional questions, particularly in what different ways did subsistence and commercial production shape the lives of African peasants and enslaved Africans? An analysis of the evolution of mangrove rice production in West Africa's Upper Guinea Coast and the South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry reveals overlap between these two artificial categories. However, the different impacts of intensive mangrove and tidal rice production on the health of African peasants in early modern Upper Guinea Coast and enslaved Africans in the antebellum South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry are stark indeed.

African Peasants on the Move. Turmoil between Global Dynamics, Migration and Food Insecurity

This issue presents some of the publications resulting from the research project “African societies facing global dynamics: Turbulences between external intervention, migration, and food insecurity” [Dynamics]. The underlying idea was to investigate contemporary global dynamics faced by African societies, how they interact with internal processes of change and these societies’ responses to these pressures. The contributions address the key issues raised in the Dynamics research project in di...

‘African Peasants and Revolution’ revisited

This short essay begins by revisiting John Saul's landmark article in the first issue of the Review of African Political Economy in 1974, which was, inevitably, very much of its historical moment. The author suggests that Saul used an ideal-typical conception of ‘peasants’ combined with a particular view of ‘incomplete’ capitalism established by colonial rule in Africa and continuing since political independence. He then proposes, in highly selective and abbreviated fashion, an alternative approach to understanding the social conditions of existence of African ‘peasants’ and the politics of Africa's agrarian questions. He illustrates his argument with special reference to the current moment of globalisation and neoliberalism. ‘Globalisation’ serves as shorthand for the restructuring of capital on a world scale since the 1970s (and not least ‘financialisation’), while he uses ‘neoliberalism’ to refer to the political and ideological project of promoting the interests of capital in such restructuring at the expense of the interests of labour. He concludes with some broad historical theses about ‘African Peasants and Revolution’.

African Colonial Economies: State Control, Peasant Maneuvers, and Unintended Outcomes

AbstractA supreme goal of colonizers' economic policies was to transform African subsistent and semi‐subsistent farmers into export oriented peasants‐‐peasantization in the jargon of African economic history. This was a difficult, complex, and long‐drawn process, requiring multiple mechanisms, some coercive, others persuasive.This essay begins with a survey of the messy unfolding of this process in diverse regions of Africa, highlighting its problems and unforeseen consequences. It then posits an analytical overview of the mining economies of Southern Africa, and their counterparts in pockets of West Africa. Keeping the focus on the interactions between the agency and interests of African peasants and the enforced reach of colonial policies, the essay suggests a way of evaluating colonial agricultural systems by analytically privileging the struggles and strategic maneuvers of Africans drawn into the colonial export economy. In these discussions, multiple conceptual and theoretical perspectives that scholars have deployed to understand these processes are analyzed and critiqued.

Nonwaged peasants in the modern world-system: African households as dialectical units of capitalist exploitation and indigenous resistance, 1890-1930

Colonialism did not transform African peasants into waged labor. A majority of peasants worked as forced laborers, often unpaid, and they returned to their agricultural household labor as soon as they completed work assignments mandated by the colonizers. Colonial Africans resided in mixed livelihood households in which nonwaged labor forms (both free and unfree) predominated, and very few became dependent on wages. For a majority of colonial Africans, informal sector activities, tenancy, sharecropping, and subsistence production on communal plots were not temporary nonwaged forms on an inevitable path toward proletarianization. Wage earning was not the primary mechanism through which these households were integrated into the modern world-system. Instead, these households primarily provided nonwaged labors to capitalist commodity chains that, in turn, extracted surpluses from them and externalized costs of production to them.

Wielding the ax: state forestry and social conflict in Tanzania, 1820-2000

Finalist for the African Studies Association's 2010 Melville J. Herskovits Award. Forests have been at the fault lines of contact between African peasant communities in the Tanzanian coastal hinterland and outsiders for almost two centuries. In recent decades, a global call for biodiversity preservation has been the main challenge to Tanzanians and their forests. Thaddeus Sunseri uses the lens of forest history to explore some of the most profound transformations in Tanzania from the nineteenth century to the present. He explores anticolonial rebellions, the world wars, the depression, the Cold War, oil shocks, and nationalism through their intersections with and impacts on Tanzania's coastal forests and woodlands. In Wielding the Ax, forest history becomes a microcosm of the origins, nature, and demise of colonial rule in East Africa and of the first fitful decades of independence. Wielding the Ax is a story of changing constellations of power over forests, beginning with African chiefs and forest spirits, both known as ax-wielders, and ending with international conservation experts who wield scientific knowledge as a means to controlling forest access. The modern international concern over tropical deforestation cannot be understood without an awareness of the long-term history of these forest struggles.

Liberalisation and poverty in Africa since 1990–Why is the operation of the ‘invisible hand’ uneven?

AbstractThe dramatic reduction in poverty in Uganda and Ghana in the 1990s was derived largely from the liberalisation of the export price received by a labour‐intensive peasant export sector. Other African economies ought to be able to derive inspiration from this manifestation of the invisible hand, but can they? Several other African peasant export economies experienced price liberalisation during the structural adjustment period, but without experiencing anything like the same positive poverty reduction dynamic. Two reasons are fairly clear—liberalising countries varied in the extent to which they passed on higher export prices, and they also varied in the extent to which they impacted on dimensions of governance, especially the politics of market access, in the rest of the economy. The latter continues to be an important research frontier for future investigators. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Peasant Response to Agricultural Innovations: Land Consolidation, Agrarian Diversification and Technical Change. The Case of Bungoma District in Western Kenya, 1954-1960.

Author(s): Makana, Nicholas E | Abstract: The diagnosis of rural poverty in Africa has historically adhered to the cultural barrier hypothesis, which identified social and cultural factors as overriding impediments to the adoption of innovations and the attainment of development objectives. The prevalent orthodoxy has been that the behavior of African peasants is always conditioned by a subsistence ethic that renders such societies impervious to change and innovation. This article utilizes the case example of Bungoma district in Western Kenya to debunk the notion of inherent African peasant conservatism. Employing mainly primary research material, the article argues instead that African rural households do possess the requisite capacity to positively respond to economic incentives with a view to modernizing their agrarian economies.

パラダイムとしての「アフリカ小農世界」

パラダイムとしての「アフリカ小農世界」

Seeds for African Peasants: Peasants' Needs and Agricultural Research-The Case of Zimbabwe

Seeds for African Peasants: Peasants' Needs and Agricultural Research-The Case of Zimbabwe

Another side to rural Zimbabwe: social constructs and the administration of farm workers in Urungwe district, 1940s

To understand why commercial farm workers in Zimbabwe are on the margins of state development plans, this article presents an argument that suggests it is crucial to understand the historical roots of both rural administrative relations, and political identities, in the power relations that crystallized around the emerging field of ‘development’ in Southern Rhodesia in the 1940s. During this period, different procedures of controlling conduct became defined along three distinct spatial and sociological identities: administrative development of ‘rural African peasants'; administrative politics of ‘European farmers’; and domestic government of ‘African farm workers’ on European farms. This paper situates the privileging of ‘domestic’ (paternalistic), as opposed to ‘public’, procedures of dispute settlement and resource allocation on European farms in the wider policy changes of the 1940s and illustrates some of the common practices of this ‘domestic government’ through examples from white farms in Urungwe District, the site of the largest government resettlement scheme for returning European soldiers from World War Two.

Afrique tropicale : de l'échec de la « révolution verte » à la « révolution doublement verte » (Tropical Africa : from the "green revolution" failure to the "doubly green revolution")

Abstract. - Why did Tropical Africa reject the "Green Revolution" initiated at the end of the sixties, based on the introduction of high yield varieties of grain crops, when at least an important part of Asia adopted it ? This is not because this continent rejects modernization, but because this one did not fit with the strategies and the means of African producers. "Green Revolution" was a typical intensification program, when, at that very time, African farmers were in a process of extensification : manpower was proportionally scarce, due to population growth, and the main problem was to control as much land as possible to challenge the multiplication of rural households. There has been only one full experiment of the Green Revolution approach in Africa, the Zambian case. In this country, Kenneth Kaunda's government launched Operation Food Production, which aimed at a quick increase of maize production on the whole country through the use of improved varieties, fertilizers and pesticids, all modern inputs being subsidized ; maize production was bought by parastatals at subdisized prices and maize flour was sold much below costs. This worked well technically but it was a complete economic failure : when copper prices fell, the Zambian government was unable to go on. Anyway, the Zambian case shows that African peasants answer positively to economic incentives. The huge population growth in tropical Africa now compels to intensification at least in parts of the continent, but the Green Revolution approach is unrealistic, taking into account the technical, social and economic situation : irrigation infrastructures are generally lacking, trading systems are unefficient, inputs are too expensive. Moreover the revolving towards a liberal economic approach, as prescribed by IMF and World Bank is a major constraint A new strategy has to be found, which could be what is sometimes called "Doubly Green Revolution", founded on a sophisticated approach of ecosystems in a perspective of sustainable development. In a way, traditional agricultural strategies in Africa fit with this type of approach, but it implies a great effort in research and, moreover, greater autonomy given to rural communities, which is a political challenge.

Book Reviews

David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the WorldNagesh Kumar, Multinational Enterprises and Industrial Organisation: The Case of IndiaAmiya Kumar Bagchi (ed.), New Technology and the Workers' Response: Microelectronics, Labour and SocietyRichard Heeks, Prabhakara Bhatt, Mozammel Huq, Chris Lewis and Ahmed Shibli (eds), Technology and Developing Countries. Practical Applications, Theoretical IssuesA. Pio (ed.), From Adjustment to Long‐Run Growth. The Role of Human Capital and the Informal SectorSonia Corrêa with Rebecca Reichmann, Population and Reproductive Rights: Feminist Perspectives from the SouthGita Sen, Adrienne Germain and Lincoln Chen (eds), Population Policies Reconsidered. Health, Empowerment and RightsMarian A. L. Miller, The Third World in Global Environmental PoliticsThaddeus C. Trzyna (ed.), A Sustainable World. Defining and Measuring Sustainable DevelopmentMadhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha, Ecology and Equity: The Use and Abuse of Nature in Contemporary IndiaMelissa Leach, Rainforest Relations. Gender and Resource Use among the Mende of Gola, Sierra LeoneAkhileshwar Pathak, Contested Domains—The State, Peasants and Forests in Contemporary IndiaJohn Martinusson, Democracy, Competition and Choice: Emerging Local Self‐Government in NepalMyo Thant, Min Tang and Hiroshi Kakazu (eds), Growth Triangles in Asia: A New Approach to Regional Economic CooperationW. G. Huff, The Economic Growth of Singapore: Trade and Development in the Twentieth CenturyK. S. Jomo, U‐Turn? Malaysian Economic Development Policies after 1990E. T. Gomez, Political Business: Corporate Involvement of Malaysian Political PartiesAdam Fforde and Stefan de Vylder (eds), From Plan to Market: The Economic Transition in VietnamKathleen Barry (ed.), Vietnam's Women in TransitionMichael R. DiGregorio, Urban Harvest: Recycling as a Peasant Industry in Northern VietnamElisabeth Croll, From Heaven to Earth: Images and Experiences of Development in ChinaPer Pinstrup‐Andersen (ed.), The Political Economy of Food and Nutrition PoliciesJames Morton, The Poverty of Nations: The Aid Dilemma at the Heart of AfricaJohn Sorenson (ed.), Disaster and Development in the Horn of AfricaAndargachew Tiruneh, The Ethiopian Revolution 1974–1987. A Transformation from an Aristocratic to a Totalitarian AutocracyGerard Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis; History of a Genocide 1959–1994Tor Skalnes, The Politics of Economic Reform in Zimbabwe. Continuity and Change in DevelopmentEsbern Friis‐Hansen, Seeds for African Peasants: Peasants' Needs and Agricultural Research: The Case of ZimbabweMax Spoor, The State and Domestic Agricultural Markets in Nicaragua. From Interventionism to Neo‐LiberalismLúcio Kowarick (ed.), Social Struggles and the City: The Case of Sāo PauloSEADE Foundation, Survey of Living Conditions in the Metropolitan Area of Sāo Paulo