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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 May 2014
All of my work in the last fifteen years has been influenced by my association with Bill Brown. But it is perhaps especially appropriate that this piece be included in this tribute to him, for it is the first paper which I wrote after joining him, and it focused on what was always of prime concern to him: the clarification of concepts. I still recall some of our discussion when I showed him the first draft: he was with it, at least insofar as the limits of space permitted development of the topic. Perhaps I remember this because this paper was in a way an earnest of what my stewardship in his institution should be.
The paper was read at the American Anthropological Association annual meetings in Detroit, December 1954, in the Symposium on Economic Factors in Stability and Change. I made no effort then to submit it for publication in any of the appropriate journals because I had taken time out from writing my dissertation to do the paper and returned my attention to that urgent task (it was also my first year of teaching a survey course on African ethnography), and the paper was soon out of mind. Now, after a lapse of time, the question arises, should it be brought up to date? Two quite different things can be implied by this question. First, should more recent data be adduced? To do so would be to write a new paper which would have none of this one's association with W. O. Brown. Furthermore, this paper now has a certain historical value as a contemporary description of some aspects of late colonial conditions. Second, should the interpretation and conclusion be modified in the light of more recent writings? I feel that both can stand. Therefore, no change has been made in the text.
1 In brief, the planter position is that the management of a plantation is better acquainted with the market requirements and has greater knowledge of production. Thus greater control can be exercised over selection of soil and seed, conditions of planting, harvesting, processing, and shipping; and measures of prevention and treatment of plant disease can be handled more scientifically. This results in a higher quality and a higher price so that both consumer and producer are benefited. Finally the example of the plantation is a model for the peasant to improve his methods. Critics of the plantation charge that the capital usually comes from outside the territory and profits are exported, leaving the areas with little development except the transportation network necessary for the crops. Recruiting of labor for plantations tends to uproot people, weakening the cohesion of the tribe, whose welfare functions decline; this state of affairs produces a rural proletariat which may become a future political problem.
Defenders of the peasant system say that profits from crops will be distributed among numerous small farmers in amounts substantial enough to create a market for a variety of goods, and that this arrangement will raise the standard of living of the colonial people; the commerce will thus benefit the metropole to a greater extent than would the profits of the planters. Production can be increased by peasants without much risk capital; in the case of crops with which there are a large number of variables, the farmer has a better chance to survive the fluctuations of the market. Finally, it is asserted that a peasant society is a stable one. Critics of the peasant system say that it is wasteful of land and labor and that its unscientific methods result in low quality, but they do not deny that a peasant society is a stable one.
For further discussion see Angelino, A. D. A. deKat, Colonial Policy, particularly vol. II, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931, chs. 6, 7CrossRefGoogle Scholar; SirPirn, Alan, Colonial Agricultural Production, New York: Oxford University Press, 1946 Google Scholar; Hancock, W. K., Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs, vol. II, part II, London: Oxford University Press, 1942, ch. 2Google Scholar; Wickizer, V. D., Coffee, Tea and Cocoa, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1951, chs. 12, 13, 14, 15, 16Google Scholar; Buell, R. L., The Native Problem in Africa, New York: Macmillan, 1928, vol. I, chs. 47, 50, 53Google Scholar; vol. II, chs. 72, 87, 102; Delavignette, R., Les Paysans Noirs; Freedom and Authority in French West Africa, Paris: Stock (Delamain et Boutelleau), 1946, ch. 8Google Scholar; Labouret, H., Paysans d'Afrique Occidentale, Paris: Gallimard, 1941.Google Scholar
2 Colonial Review, vol. 3, no. 8 (12, 1944), Colonial Department, Institute of Education, University of London Google Scholar; quoted by Pim, p. 119.
3 Lowie, R., History of Ethnological Theory, New York, 1937, p. 280 Google Scholar. “Concepts must be clear and rigid, rising above the fluidity and vagueness of raw phenomena. … The clarification of concepts, then, directly gauges scientific progress.”
4 This is not to deny that other structures cannot be superimposed on the peasant family; the distinction is that these higher structures act upon the peasant rather than giving him a larger sphere for action. Cf. “The family is practically the only organized social group to which the peasant primarily belongs as an active member.” Thomas, W.I. and Znaniecki, F., The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, New York: Knopf, 1927, p. 140 Google Scholar.
“The family in a peasant community is a sufficient unit to provide the necessary and minimum social cooperation in everyday economic pursuits.” Also: “Extensive organization in such enterprises gives no appreciable profit, but rather complicates human relations. This accounts for the fact that among peasant society the basic group is usually small.” Fei, Hsiao-Tung, “Peasantry and Gentry: An Interpretation of Chinese Social Structure and Its Changes,” in Bendix, R. and Lipset, S. M. (eds.), Class, Status and Power, Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1953, p. 632 Google Scholar.
5 Linton, Ralph, The Study of Man, New York: Appleton-Century, 1936, ch. 14Google Scholar.
6 “… the really important characteristics peculiar to the peasant are his sentiments and attitudes, the intense attachment to his native soil, and family tradition, which even in the economic sphere take precedence over the desire for individual advancement and gain.” von Dietze, C., “Peasantry,” in Seligman, Edwin R. A. (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. XI–XII, New York: Macmillan, 1933, pp. 48–52 Google Scholar.
Fei also mentions nonaggressiveness (p. 632); Thomas and Znaniecki mention fatalism (p. 173); and von Dietze adds fecundity. Cf. Labouret's characterization of the West African's attitudes: distrust of strangers and women, facility for cunning, ambition to live in clever idleness, self-sacrifice for a master, search for a benefactor, contempt for avarice, cowardice, envy, and boasting, and even intemperance (p. 261).
7 Cf. Report of the Commission on the Marketing of West African Cocoa (Nowell Report), Cmd. 5845 (1938).
8 “It is difficult even to define the term, while construction of a comprehensive theory of peasanthood is well nigh impossible” (von Dietze). The connotations of the word peasant vary enormously (cf. Sorokin, P. A., Zimmerman, C. C., and Galpin, C.J., Systematic Source Book in Rural Sociology, vol. I, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1930)Google Scholar. Farmer, peasant, yeoman, serf are somewhat overlapping, and often the term used by one writer as a pejorative is used by another as a euphemism. One would have to know the society of the time and the general attitude of a writer to understand the way he uses the words. Compare Jefferson's picture of the independent small farmer to Tolstoy's idealized peasant or to Marx's “idiocy of the rural countryside.” For variation in tribal organization, see Linton, note 5 above.
9 Beckett, H., Akokoaso, London: Humphries & Co. Ltd., 1944 Google Scholar.
10 Cf. the Nowell Report (note 7).
11 Williams, Robin M. Jr., American Society, New York: Knopf, 1951, p. 538 Google Scholar. Williams quotes Mannheim, Karl, Ideology and Utopia, New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1946, p. 75 Google Scholar, “By social stability we do not mean uneventfulness or the personal security of individuals, but rather the relative fixity of the existing social structure, which guarantees the stability of the dominant values and ideas.”
Cf. Parsons, Talcott, The Social System, Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1951, ch. 11Google Scholar; Malinowski, B., Dynamics of Culture Change, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1945 Google Scholar.
12 Rattray, Robert S., Ashanti Law and Constitution, London: Oxford University Press, 1929 Google Scholar; Field, Margaret J., Akim-Kotoko: An Oman of the Gold Coast, London: Crown Agents for the Gold Coast Government, 1948 Google Scholar; Kingsley, Mary, West African Studies, New York: Macmillan, 1899 Google Scholar.
13 Administrative policy in British West Africa, French West Africa, and the Belgian Congo now all favor the small producer. The British started early with this policy and have been rather consistent in it; the planters' hope to change it ended in 1925 with Lord Leverhulme's failure to get concessions of freehold land, guaranteed labor, and power to fix prices for palm nuts in Nigeria. The British administrations have been conditioned by the philosophy of “indirect rule,” organizations like the Aborigines Rights Protection Society, which fought alienation of land, and the fact that cocoa growing was initiated by Africans.
The French and Belgians, by somewhat different processes, came to a similar point of view, but not until planters had become established as a sector in the economy and able to exert some influence. In the Ivory Coast wages were fixed at a low level to help the planters (Elliot Berg, unfinished ms.), and in the Kivu region wages were reduced below the level of the rest of the Belgian Congo as a result of the “planters” lobby ( Zaïre, vol. 8, ch. 6, p. 621 et seq.Google Scholar). Wages were depressed not only on plantations but for employees generally, since otherwise labor recruitment would be hindered. This supports the proponents of the peasant system, since lowered wages means less money in circulation, which is further reduced by the export of planters' profits.
However, today the agricultural exports from West Africa are predominantly nonplantation. In British West Africa there are only the former German plantations in the Cameroons; in the A.O.F. only 10 percent of the coffee and cocoa are plantation grown, but all the bananas exported are from plantations; the Belgian Congo has a somewhat higher percentage of plantation products.
French writers show a certain Gallic eulogization of the peasant which has had a more literary expression in the novels of Jean Giono; the Belgians have been more pragmatic and think in terms of increasing food supply and exports; but implicit in both positions is the belief that a peasant society is a stable one. The British have been concerned in preserving the tribal organization, rather than to create a paysannat indigene, and have used the word “peasant” less frequently than the others; but the substance of the proposition has been held just as widely among them.
In any event, the existing conditions in Africa are not simply the outcome of these arguments influencing policy; that has happened to some extent, but these arguments are also partly rationalizations of exiting conditions. After several decades of competition of the two systems of production, there were different results in different areas and with different crops. The latex of rubber trees is adversely affected by bacteria and great care is necessary in its collection. Plantation production has eliminated the small producer except in Liberia, where African-owned farms are run on more or less a plantation basis. Peanuts and cotton have been more successful as “peasant” endeavors, and plantations of these crops have disappeared from the West African scene. Bananas, coffee, and cocoa are still grown by both methods, but from one point of view at least, cocoa is the outstanding success of the small farmer, for the bulk of the world's cocoa is grown by West Africans.
14 Census of Population, 1948, Accra, Gold Coast Google Scholar.