Are there peasants in Africa?

This question is not academic, though academics have contributed extensively to the discussion. Once seen as a transitional stage, peasants and peasant societies have emerged as a focus for research that, to an increasing extent, cuts across disciplines, continents, and historical periods. This developing academic interest is conveying new insights into the relationships between rural dwellers and their political and social systems.

Africa is a continent without peasants, so the conventional wisdom has stated. The syllogistic reasoning runs as follows: cultivable land is relatively abundant, at least in most parts of tropical Africa, resulting in a relative absence of population pressures. Patterns of communal land tenure remain the norm in rural areas. Hence, given the absence of both pressure on the land and individual land title, Africa lacks peasants—since there are neither landlords to collect nor rents to be collected. “Tribal” feelings of solidarity, it is further asserted, preclude the emergence of the peasantry as a class cutting across diverse groups. Finally, the absence in many parts of tropical Africa of cities and structured states meant that cultivators rather than peasants were common. Let us look briefly at these arguments.

Focusing attention on subsistence cultivators is one of the logical starting points for examining rural Africa from a geographical perspective. Such farmers, functioning within a physical setting that provides both opportunities and constraints, must depend for survival on a familiarity with environmental qualities and contend with extreme conditions. Within this situation an agricultural system must be designed to provide for current food consumption plus a surplus that will vary with local circumstances.

Both agricultural practices and environmental characteristics impinge, in turn, on systems of settlement and mobility. Neither the individual nor the farm family is static, but circulates within a defined area and may eventually relocate when circumstances require. When land is actually allocated, not only subsistence needs are taken into account, but also social regulations such as those concerning the distribution of homesteads relative to the distribution of fields.

Thus, this overview of the rural African will be concerned with a sequence of four interrelated factors: (1) the dominant mode of food production, (2) the environmental setting, (3) a scheme for organizing terrestrial space at a local scale, and (4) a systematic approach to migration. Within the context of these spatial and environmental factors, the process of change can be superimposed; operating gradually at first and then accelerating, especially during the last hundred years. As population density has increased, as land has become more scarce, and as the commercialization of agriculture has spread, the basic relationship of environment, production, settlement structure, and mobility have been modified. Simultaneously, the cultivator has been evolving into a peasant.

The African landscape is littered with the remnants of failed agricultural schemes. Yet, international agencies and national governments, both purportedly interested in development, continue to experiment with schemes that are little better planned than some of their more spectacularly misbegotten predecessors. This government persistence in the face of repeated failures is not interpreted as a defect of planning but as proof of government commitment to modernity in the face of cruel odds. Failures are explained by the intransigence or primitiveness of peasants.

Such explanations begin to break down upon closer examination of actual experiences. Agricultural schemes are commonly over-capitalized, under-planned, and poorly managed (Palmer, 1974). It is worth considering the hypothesis that governments persist in these costly and unremunerative experiments neither because of a commitment either to modernity or productivity or because of simple ineptitude but because of their quest for control. Control over the peasantry is crucial since peasants are the majority of the population in all tropical African countries and earn the bulk of the governments' foreign exchange in all but Nigeria, Zambia, Angola, Botswana and Liberia. Because of this political and economic dependence on peasants, governments want a productive peasantry, but one that remains under secure control. Governments do not want peasants using their productivity to wrest either political or economic concessions.

The transformation of peasant agriculture is a central concern of many African leaders. Since the population of most African countries is predominantly peasant, rural change is considered a requisite of national development. Several leaders have turned to the socialistic experiences of the Soviet Union and China for models of rural transformation. Some have seen in the idea of establishing rural socialist communities, a notion similar to that of the nineteenth century Russian Narodniki, an appropriate strategy for such transformation. They believe that such communities will involve the peasantry in new political and economic relationships of a sort which will improve the way of life of both rural and urban inhabitants. Among African adaptations are such entities as the Algerian socialist villages and the Tanzanian Ujamaa villages.

Tanzania's efforts to establish Ujamaa villages, in turn, have attracted attention throughout Africa and the Third World. The country formally committed itself to building a socialist state in the Arusha Declaration of early 1967. Major private industries were immediately taken over by the government. Leaders, however, realized that the key to their efforts would be the establishment of socialism in rural areas. In September of 1967 President Nyerere issued a policy paper titled “Socialism and Rural Development,” which proposed the creation of Ujamaa villages where people “lived and worked together for the good of all” (Nyerere, 1967b: 337-66). Since the majority of the peasants lived scattered on individual plots of land outside villages, people had to be moved together.

A virtual crisis in Algerian agriculture has been experienced since the early 1950s. This crisis, which has its roots in the dislocations created by the seizure of the best lands by the French and the implantation of the colon regime of agriculture since the conquest of 1832, has been primarily a crisis of underproduction. The war of national liberation, which was fought primarily in the rural areas of the nation, the forced “regroupment” by the French army of approximately two million people during the war, and the massive destruction of livestock and of farm and forest lands resulting from the eight year war exacerbated the problem of underproduction. The relative contribution of agriculture to the GNP in 1954 was 34 percent, for example; whereas in 1968 it dropped to 15 percent, declining to less than 10 percent in the early 1970s (Viratelle, 1974: 196). The failure after 1962 of the post-revolutionary governments to stimulate agricultural production adequately or to create new or additional rural jobs helps to explain the constant decline in the peasant contribution to the Algerian GNP and to the development of the country after independence.

A massive rural-urban exodus also continues unabated. Approximately one hundred thousand farmers leave the lands, the villages, and small towns of the Algerian countryside each year swelling the already overcrowded cities of the north. This exodus, though not a recent development, has not been arrested in a sector where unemployment in the early 1970s reached one out of two persons (Ammour et al., 1974: 78).

In March 1975, the Ethiopian ruling military council, or Derg, proclaimed a sweeping land reform, which aimed at bringing about a complete transformation in the country's complex land tenure system and in its social and political structures. More than a land reform, the measure should be called a land revolution, for there was nothing reformist in the Derg's approach. It simply opened the floodgates of rural discontent, allowing the peasants to take over the land and encouraging them to organize into “peasant associations.” The government did not seriously attempt to control the process, partly for ideological reasons, and partly because it simply could not do it. Rather, the peasant associations were allowed to decide whether to redistribute land among their members, or to enter into collective forms of land cultivation.

The ambitious scope of the reform, and the suddenness with which it was announced and implemented, led most observers, including many radical Ethiopians and most diplomats from socialist countries, to forecast economic disaster and social breakdown. Such dark predictions did not come true. The economic consequences of the land reform were some increase in production, due mostly to good weather conditions (Dalton, 1975), and a tangible improvement in the peasants' living conditions. The urban population, though, suffered because of the sharp price increases that resulted from the disruption of the marketing system and an increase in on-farm consumption (Holmberg, 1976). Social turmoil undoubtedly was part of the land reform process, and thousands of people lost their lives in it.

This study argues that in technical terms the usual economic models of international trade and development are misspecified because they deal only with market relations and omit important social and political equations (i.e., the social relations of production) which are important variables in the development matrix. This omission has led to development strategies which favor the “modern sector” at the expense of the traditional sector; the agricultural communities are undermined and impoverished. The traditional sector is maintained as a reservoir for cheap labor and as security for the old and the indigent to cushion off crisis in the capitalist modern sector. The traditional sector is undergoing a prolonged crisis without a smooth transition to capitalism or socialism. A more humane and viable process of development of the African economies is suggested: it is argued that Third World policymakers shift from the “dualistic” paradigm of economic development—a post World War II neoclassical paradigm associated with the work of Lewis (1954), Fei and Ranis (1964) and Jorgenson (1970)—to a version of the populist strategies of the Narodniki (Russian) and Maoism in transforming the backward agrarian economies of the Third World (Walicki, 1969; Gurley, 1975).

Most Third World economies may be classified as subsistence economies with industrial enclave sectors. The majority of the world's population live in an agrarian environment. Yet neoclassical and Marxist economists, having preoccupied themselves with the study of the capitalist system, have ignored agrarian economics (Georgescu-Roegen, 1970). Noncapitalist economies have simply not captured the interest of most economists.