Class Politics
To use the concept of social class effectively in the African context requires some work not just defining, but in effect taking a position on, class and its validity. Just as culture dominates anthropological theory, sociological theory has no greater vessel than class with which to discuss human forms of integration. Yet, and of course precisely for this reason, using class today is deeply controversial. One representative view in a much used ‘key ideas’ series insisted that: ‘[t]he sociological significance of classes is that class relationships … are the key to the social structure in general, and economic and political life in particular. It is in this sense that industrial capitalist nations, such as Britain and America, are still class societies’ (Edgell 1993: 116).
By contrast, a contemporary pair of Australian sociologists considers that ‘the intellectual armoury of class theory is about as useful for the contemporary social scene as a cavalry brigade in a tank battle’ (Pakulski and Waters 1996: 152). Although we should also note their view that ‘during the nineteenth and early twentieth century the social question of class was at the centre of the political agenda, class imagery was strong and clear and class identification was firm’ (ibid.).
How can such opposing views both be seriously held? One obvious reason is that so many intellectuals are captivated by the breathtaking vision of Karl Marx that the proletarianized industrial workers would be the revolutionary force that would overcome alienation in the modern world. They would become more numerous and more homogeneous, and so the logic of their coming together culturally, socially, and politically to transcend the oppressive aspects of capital accumulation under capitalism would become ever stronger. Here, the Pakulski and Waters view has its merits; this is hardly how the world’s historical trajectory looks today.
Marxist views of class under capitalism fitted the politics of the century after the writing of the Communist Manifesto far better than it does our own. The industrial proletariat is stagnant or declining in size globally, the situation of workers is increasingly heterogeneous, inequality is not such an important feature of some capitalist societies – especially where left-of-centre parties have legislated for equality – and classic worker political instruments and forms of organization have declined to the point that they struggle to have a purchase on the contemporary world. Nor is there a bourgeoisie hovering around a class of buccaneering capitalist owner-operators of firms. However, a meticulous study like Wright’s Class Counts (1997) shows that it is still possible to comprehend industrial society in terms of class agendas as we consider mobility, skill levels, social identity, and even politics. Wright marries an abiding belief in the importance of class politically with an American tradition of empirical stratification studies. The value of this process in grasping social change over time, of not simply considering social categories independent of their place in the economy (or perhaps abandoning social categories entirely), seems patent even if class antagonisms are abandoned as the moving force in history.
In Africa, to make use of class with any conviction one has to abandon both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie as master-classes; both classes exist today in Africa, but neither is strong or numerically dominant, at least in the form Marx or Weber would have considered critical. Moreover, they have if anything regressed. It is interesting, however, that even Pakulski and Waters admit to the historic importance of class, and what else but history should be the proper study of the historian? It is argued here that looking at other class categories and considering them vis-à-vis the question of exploitation or surplus extraction can be a valuable, if not sufficient, way of exploring the African past and the African present.
Class in African History
To a specialist in African history, Pakulski and Waters’s disinterest in the past and in the delineation of class outside of capitalist societies seems peculiar. In fact, the latter issue has been very important for some Africanists. How do we characterize pre-colonial societies and with what implications for modern history? To what extent did modernization in enclave form coexist with older values and social forms in the colonial period and since? In one classic study, for instance, the question of class in colonial Kenya led Gavin Kitching (1980) to suggest that class formation existed within a society that could not really be assessed in terms of a single mode of production.
So class in this sense is closely aligned to a question raised in the 1970s and early 1980s around the concept of mode of production – a concept that is more implicit and descriptive in the writings of Karl Marx than explicit (Crummey and Stewart 1981; Freund 1985). Marx felt that the roots of social formation lay in the mode of production, the means by which a surplus is systematically, socially, and economically formed through the power of one class over another. Considering this issue forces historians to confront not only the issue of inequality in society but also the relationship of ruler to ruled, of how an economic surplus is systematically pumped out, no doubt in conjunction with a system of sacred beliefs. Those interested in this debate were generally concerned with the issue of state formation and the impact of long-distance commerce rather than with establishing a schema of progressive change over the course of history, as was Marx. My own view was and is that this concept was a very useful and stimulating touchstone, but that if applied too rigidly or simply as part of a formula it is unlikely to teach us much. The concept of class, closely allied to the attempt to identify how production and power intersected, is rather similar. It has raised very interesting questions and suggested further lines of research, but quickly turns sterile when used merely as a classificatory device.
There are parts of sub-Saharan Africa where class relationships belonged to everyday consciousness and where the link between power, wealth, and status can certainly be investigated quite directly. One of these areas is lowland northern Nigeria, in particular the core emirate territories that accepted the authority of the Sultan of Sokoto in the nineteenth century. Here there certainly was a peasantry that paid taxes and tributes and a horse-riding aristocracy that could wield power. Up to a point, wealthy people could own estates as well as landed property in towns. There was a radical edge to the religious wars that created the Sokoto polity and denounced this form of earthly inequality. The emirate system attempted a revolutionary political reform, as did equivalent jihads in other parts of Sudanic Africa, but the reformed polities, however austere and severed from any association with ancient sacred kingships, came to exhibit their own forms of exploitation felt by the masses. The republican (and in some respects egalitarian) Islamists of the Futa Djallon promoted the hunting and selling of pagan Africans in Guinea and Sierra Leone. Within the Sokoto caliphate there were rebellions of slaves and others in the name of Islam, the ‘sword of truth’. However, the success of the rebels only led to the foundation of political units that mimicked the very emirates that had failed to stamp out the pre-jihad injustice of the Hausa rulers called Habe. In its heyday, the emirates presided over enough peace so as to promote internal and external commerce and, with it, wealth. The greatest of the towns, Kano, was a massive trading emporium as well as a centre for handicraft production that attracted hundreds of traders from Egypt and North Africa alone during the trading season. This was a society where rich merchants ran businesses but their status vis-à-vis the religious state and the sword-bearing class was not entirely certain. It was only after the coming of the British that they were permitted to build their houses as tall as those considered the legitimate rulers of society.
A major feature of the society was the massive presence of slavery. Slaves were sometimes soldiers, worked in the fields on private estates, became skilled craftsmen and craftswomen, or became the wives of powerful individuals in a juridical regime where descent was recognized through the male line. A few were eunuchs; probably the majority in fact were women. It is most uncertain whether slaves were exploited ‘more’ than free peasants and poor clients. Often no doubt they worked side by side. If (or once) slaves were Muslim, they also enjoyed being part of a theological discourse of human equality. However, there was exploitation and there was certainly a surplus to be extracted (Lovejoy 1978; Usman 1974).
Class is therefore an important factor for understanding the social forces that motivated and justified these jihads, as well as for understanding revolts against the new regime and the reactions to the coming of colonial rule. Indeed, this latter tended to prop up that regime through the system of indirect rule, even if it was shorn of most elements of state power.
There are parallels across the whole immense belt of Africa north of the equatorial forests and the dry lands of upper East Africa. The surviving chronicles that tell us a little about life in the kingdom of Songhay, occupying much of what is today Mali, mention substantial agricultural estates worked by slaves at least as far back as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In his magnum opus, Donald Crummey tells us that:
the main, ongoing way in which, through the centuries, the Ethiopian state and rulers affected the lives of ordinary people and limited their productive autonomy was through its system of taxation and tribute, known by the term of gult, an institution of land tenure which brought together producers and privileged, farms and rulers, and provided the means whereby the former supported the latter. This would suggest it is of central importance for understanding the workings of historic Ethiopia.
(Crummey 2000: 5)
In Ethiopia, the church, too, was a factor in land ownership and surplus extraction from the bulk of the peasantry. Closer to the Sahara, nomadic clans also exhibited social stratification, despite what one might think was the unlikelihood of pastoralists creating unequal societies. Reluctant as they were to acknowledge adherence to a state, they nonetheless held agricultural populations in oases to the status of slaves or semi-slaves. Of course, it is worth noting that some scholars would be more comfortable understanding such a society as one of caste, which they would choose to delineate sharply from class.
Slavery, Trade, and Inequality
One should not discount the importance of commerce in bringing about change in Africa in the nineteenth century and, with reference to the slave trade, even earlier in coastal West Africa. It is difficult to forget the argument of Walter Rodney, considering the upper Guinea coast, who argued that slaving over time created inequality, stoking massive violence and what he called social oppression even where large state formations were not in question (Rodney 1966). Certainly social strata emerged, occasionally of mixed racial origins, which depended for their existence on maritime commerce, if not in slaves then in other commodities.
Slaving polities such as Dahomey or the Kongo kingdom raided their peripheries ceaselessly and demanded tribute in people, but they kept dense communities of individuals focused on the core controlled by the ruler. Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch has suggested that slaves, once no longer used for overseas trade, were put to work once the palm oil trade began to flourish on the coast of what is today the republic of Bénin (Coquery-Vidrovitch 1971). Similarly, Boubacar Barry indicates that the ceddo warrior caste of the Senegal River valley became more oppressive as these societies became more money- and trade-orientated, and also more violent – an oppression that rendered the arrival of the French not entirely unwelcome (Barry 1972). The rise of slave-based economies in other regions has also been attested (Cooper 1977; Sheriff 1987; Campbell 2005).
Returning briefly to West Africa, Emmanuel Terray proposed that Akan-speaking people formed strong states (the greatest of which was Asante) in what is today Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire due to the ability to control the production of gold, probably through the use of slave labour. Here was an area that for a long period sold gold rather than slaves, and actually imported slaves commercially. However, research has suggested that producers in gold mines were not slaves, that the state did secure revenue but largely through taxing trade, and that merchants, rather than producers, were able to do very well out of lucrative gold-producing areas. It is difficult here to say whether gold production intensified the existing earlier forms of inequality that were reproduced through the economy or helped to create them (Dumett 1998).
In contrast to arguments that link slavery to the intensification of class through an antagonistic process of social stratification, Harms (1981) and Horton (1969) have shown how massive slaving went together with the rapid absorption of slaves into trading societies formed along transport routes in the Congo River valley as well as in the Niger Delta. By contrast with, say, Asante, slave origins could be rapidly forgotten where individual initiative was highly valued. Southeastern Nigeria was a massive source of slaves for the Americas, but it was and remains a very densely populated region famous for its relatively egalitarian villages with authority vested in title societies, masquerade societies, and other social forms, some of them consisting only of women. The Igbo-speaking peoples honoured individual achievement and did not turn slaving into a particularly hierarchical set of social values.
Further to the west, Yoruba speakers, also massively involved in the slave trade, formed societies based on concentrated urban communities where massive households included master and slave, creditor and debtor, rich and poor, and were to some degree gathered together in common fortune. When the British made their first incursion into this world by occupying Lagos, the question of what happened to the slaves become especially salient. The answer, Kristin Mann found, was that for reasons of safety and identity they needed to stay associated if at all possible with powerful households even if their status was no longer so clear cut and they could be legally emancipated if they wished (Mann 2007). Throughout most of Africa, large and diverse social units emerged along similar lines and typically overrode or masked the existence of potentially antagonistic class relations. As Marcia Wright showed for East and East-central Africa in the late nineteenth century, women unable to attach themselves to such units were women ‘in peril’, and proved to be particularly interested in finding succour in mission settlements when they appeared (Wright 1975). So trade and violence did not necessarily lead to societies where class distinctions hardened into the main building blocks of social relations.
In other parts of this diverse continent, inequality was less significant, the economy far less commodified, and class relations seem largely irrelevant before the nineteenth century. Certainly this holds for most of the southern third of Africa. Much of this land was characterized by the practice of extensive forms of agriculture, largely carried out by women (often using wooden hoes), and with men concentrating on the keeping and herding of cattle wherever suitable. Here the common wisdom of Africanists, which I shall not challenge, is that it was labour – not land – that was scarce. This may have encouraged human movements to have a violent element, involving the seizure of captives and systematic apparent enslavement. Over time, however, there was also a strong inducement to incorporate the captives into mainstream society and to establish a new form of loyalty to the village, the chief, or the household head that represented potential prosperity and safety. The extended reproduction of these societies was more effective due to the absorption of new members on a relatively egalitarian basis – except for the general issue of exploitation of women – rather than the formation of a permanent exploitable underclass. So here it is the very absence of class that leads us into sociological insights.
As commercial life intensified in Africa, it is notable that by the seventeenth century in coastal Ghana and by the nineteenth in the central West African savannah travellers and merchants found that a pool of men (and perhaps women?) were prepared to work in return for a fixed sum of money or a wage. One might assume that the massive caravans bearing ivory tusks from what is today the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo all the way to ports on the Indian Ocean, a region where pack animals could not be kept in good health, were full of slaves. However, in fact they were dominated by relations of free labour and organized according to hierarchies with the particular interest of specific ethnic groups (Rockel 2006). Eventually railways and roads ended the careers of porters as they did those of transport riders in southern Africa, but colonialism brought with it demands for labour on the plantations, mines, and transport infrastructures inherent to the new economies, and so labour-induced migration continued.
Continuity and Change in the Colonial Era
How to define these issues in class terms presents a variety of problems. Slavery, for one thing, did not die out immediately but tended to dissipate gradually, as was also true of debtor–creditor relations mediated through clientelist labour relations. Nor can slaves be defined strictly as a class. Early colonialism made wide use of forced labour, even if some pay changed hands. The wild rubber trade of the central African equatorial forests was tied to the notorious forced labour regime where massive violence caused a scandal that forced the end of the private regime of the Congo Free State of Belgium’s King Leopold II. However, equivalent abuses continued in the French colonies on the other side of the Congo and the Ubangi for long after (Coquery-Vidrovitch 1972) – a region that also witnessed a huge death toll in the construction of the all-French Congo-Océan railway, completed in the 1930s. The indigénat which authorized forced labour in French colonial Africa survived until after the Second World War and abusive forced labour typified the Portuguese colonies even later. Increasingly characteristic of African labour systems was the presence of very large numbers of men who worked as migrants on mines and plantations (but also on African-owned farms, for example in the coffee fields of Uganda or the cocoa farms of south-central Ghana) but who also retained membership in home communities where they sought to maintain and build up households based on agriculture and craft activities. Being able to play two economic systems against one another could be advantageous. The reluctance of colonial rulers to introduce or spread private land tenure outside towns intensified this tendency.
As a result, the colonial workforce can be looked at in two ways. For some writers, particularly anthropologists, it has been important to de-emphasize the issue of class and examine the way that entry into new labour situations impacted on other aspects of the social firmament. The average unskilled mine worker in northern Nigeria, for instance, not only remained deeply involved in a different economy back home (and many came from distant areas) but participated in a recruitment process that took place along patrimonial lines that the white mine managers knew very little about (Freund 1981). The more such workers fended for themselves, the lower wages could be and the less involved in problems outside the mining situation they had to be.
To see wage workers as the equivalent of the proletariat in Europe, even when one could find pockets of complete landlessness, is therefore deceptive and leads social scientists to unrealistic expectations in terms of social identity and political practice. In 1946, after considerable inflationary pressures, a massive strike of South African gold miners took place. There clearly were a group of militant communist activists who supported and wished to be seen as the very heart of the strike. However, Dunbar Moodie has argued that it was the violation of a kind of ‘moral economy’ that more or less had determined what would be a reasonable wage for miners that angered them enough to take on the mighty mining companies (Moodie 1986). Yet of course strike they did. Cooper has shown how relatively well-intentioned French post-war administrators struggled to find a regime that would work in pay and welfare terms for railway workers and the like that also accorded with European ideas at the time, but their efforts did not mean the railway workers were unable to mount and sustain an epic strike that had powerful historic reverberations (Cooper 1996).
Moreover, the picture is more complex especially if we look at categories such as railway workers. Ralph Grillo wrote an excellent monograph on East African railway workers and found that they came largely from one ethnic group, moved from city to city across territorial lines, and had a strong sense of community, of being ‘railway men’. They also had specific skills, even if not always recognized as such (Grillo 1973). In the late colonial period, several eminent figures focused on the large population of copper miners in the territory of Northern Rhodesia, today Zambia. Their interest was spurred by several major strikes, notably in 1935 and 1940, which suggested the ability to act in common across ethnic borders and on a very large scale. It is interesting that several scholars of this ‘Rhodes-Livingstone’ school actually shifted disciplines, from anthropology to sociology. Whatever else the workers might be, according to Max Gluckman and others, on the mines they were miners and acted accordingly in response to a classic situation. The extent to which the miners melded into the urban population of the Copperbelt, however, was somewhat limited by their continued presence on rented mines premises, albeit eventually with families of their own. James Ferguson has recently characterized the outlook of miners as ‘modern’; they possessed a definite, Western-influenced sense of their place in a modern, independent country, and their union was a powerful social force in early independent Zambia (Ferguson 1990, 1999). In my view, therefore, understanding wage workers in colonial Africa can be understood as an important new class, but this point needs qualification and pursuit of particular configurations rather than limiting analysis to a classificatory exercise (Freund 1988).
As workers, in struggles with bosses and the state or effectively buttressing anti-colonial agitation, they played an important historic role. However, they did not necessarily abandon their affiliation to a world of autonomous cultivators and their situation as workers could shift dramatically in the ups and downs of a colonial economy. Some writers on colonial and post-colonial Africa have also given class overtones to the relationship of the rural population, once it paid taxes and was subject to regimes that seemed to adopt threatening policies. When elements of this population could accumulate, creating exploitation within the village community as well, the question of the peasantry as a distinct class is laid open (Freund 1988; Hydén 1980; Lamb 1974; Feierman 1990).
The social historians of colonial Africa have also been extremely interested in what was usually identified as a Westernized elite, which today we might be more apt to call an emergent middle class. African beneficiaries of the colonial system might potentially include cash crop farmers (or, more likely, the leaders of milling cooperatives, licensed buyers of crops, merchants, or town women investing in property) but these more elusive categories have been much less attended to than the mission boys who acquired leading-edge education. These were, of course, the potential future politicians who would shape nationalist movements and were thus of critical importance to colonial systems as devolution began to loom. In A Modern History of Tanganyika, Iliffe (1979), one of the most influential historians of modern African society, gives such figures attention. Terence Ranger, probably as influential or more so, has equally focused on them in much of his work (e.g. Ranger 1995).
However, were such men (and their families) a nascent bourgeoisie? Perhaps Paul Bomani, the power behind the Tanganyika cotton cooperatives, eager to displace millers of Indian descent, was a figure of this type. So were Bamako or Kano merchants (such as the Dantata family), who widened their range of business and knowledge with time. On the whole, though, the tendency before independence was rather to invest in education – which often became a platform for entering politics – rather than in industry organized on capitalist lines.
In some parts of Africa, however, settler power was considerable and they were able, through the diffusion of private property, to establish a conventional European-style capitalist society. As it developed, settler society contained industrialists, capitalists who focused on resources and agrarian cultivation, sometimes mimicking elements of pre-capitalist landlord culture, small independent businessmen, skilled workers, and, in a few cases (such as Algeria but especially South Africa) even semi-skilled and unskilled workers as well as farm employees without land. Local politics and the rise of interest groups and trade unions paralleled this process. In the southern half of Africa, there was (very contested) space for a large Indian merchant class that, especially after the Second World War, engaged in industry as well as other economic activities even while it lacked political rights.
South Africa was, of course, the site of the most sweeping transition to capitalism, the territory where fortunes (made in mining especially) remained in the country as settlers sought to create a local equivalent of Canada or Australia. However, even here a major theme, theorized as the key element to understanding capitalism in South Africa by its most interesting sociologist, Harold Wolpe, was the continual effort to prop up pre-capitalist social and property relations in a small but significant part of the country where much of the conquered African population resided. The survival of apparently tribal society in these Reserves was coupled with the long shadow of semi-feudal, non-cash economic relationships in many parts of white-owned rural South Africa. This system was fundamental to the period of state-building that followed the formation of the Union of South Africa as an effectively independent country in 1910. However, the intensified economic growth and industrialization from the late 1930s, which brought a very large number of African men and some women to the cities, increasingly threatened to bring it into crisis (Wolpe 1972). The black proletariat (for that it surely became), while unlike its Western counterpart in both cultural and political terms, became a force with which to reckon at every level. However, the racial divide between black and white (as well as black and Indian/coloured) remained an important feature of working-class life. Of course, this kind of boundary-setting in the working class is hardly unique to South Africa (Greenberg 1980). Well before the end of apartheid, however, observers considered the growth of class stratification and the formation of a middle class within the theoretically bounded black population to be of real significance (Kuper 1965; Brandel-Syrier 1971). At the same time, in the political language of black South Africans, whites and capitalists were synonymous and remained so after the end of the apartheid system.
Literature from the late colonial period, and even after, took seriously the idea that independence for Africa would mean a major expansion of the working class and the continued growth of trade union power. In part this was due to the salience of unions in being able to call out labour strikes on the part of strategic workers, especially workers in mining and infrastructural sectors (railways, ports, post offices, and so on), which was a key feature of the nationalist struggle in many territories. Many scholars also worked with the assumption that independence would lead to the growing capacity and influence of African capitalists who would play a major role in the economy, at least as partners to Western firms.
Independence and After
Neither of these expectations were realized. The new one-party and military regimes that emerged were suspicious and uneasy with any autonomous voices from civil society and worked hard to assimilate the unions into the state apparatus, even if the progressive-minded regimes tried, where and when possible, to improve the workers’ situation (Berg and Butler 1964). There were exceptions. In Zambia, trade unions remained a thorn in the flesh of Kenneth Kaunda and held on to some of the collective gains of the past while probably pushing the ruling party into a more left-wing stance. In time, a union candidate would defeat Kaunda when one-party rule was abandoned, in part under foreign pressure. From the 1970s, a new trade union movement came about in South Africa that achieved a growing ability to challenge business and then the state itself. It also attracted intellectuals who envisioned a working class-centred state and displayed impressive vigour and variety as well as discipline (Friedman 1987). Other than this, however, unions tended to lose much of their ability to cow governments but were able to survive and provide coherence to their members. Jon Kraus (2007) has made the case that in several important instances unions were crucial to the emergence of democratic practices. In Zimbabwe, the unions have been the core of the Movement for Democratic Change challenging the Mugabe government, to date without success. Sadly, given its history, union strength has also faltered in Zambia, where working class strength on the mines has been shattered (Ferguson 1990; Larmer 2007).
To some extent this held as well for the business world. A few Africans began to accede to unheard-of wealth but this now emanated directly from the governments, which used their hold on society to enrich a small class of people on clientelist lines. One could point, say, to merchants as important in the opposition to the left-wing regime of Modibo Keita in Mali, but overall it would be hard to say that the new states reflected the rise of a significant new class with its feet placed in civil society. Indeed in Julius Nyerere’s Tanzania, where relatively objective and honest practices characterized the growing bureaucracy, these educated civil servants, if not rich, manifested themselves as a new class. However, the typical African governments of the later twentieth century were predatory rather than developmentalist.
The explanation for the stagnation of class formation lay in Africa’s poor economic performance; critical structures in African economies were unable to adjust to the growing shifts in international trade, where primary products fell in value. Foreign aid in the form of Cold War gifts gave way to loans, which created dependency in new forms and led to attempts to force African states to behave in accordance with ‘good governance’ criteria as conceived by the World Bank (see Williams, this volume). The dominant pattern during this period was of Western disinvestment, apart from select – and lucrative – mineral projects. Perhaps Botswana and Mauritius constitute the only exceptions to this pattern of decline and international marginality, along with a few oil-rich states in the final quarter of the twentieth century.
At the same time, African cities were starting to grow apace and absorb an ever larger percentage of the population. The older ways of living on the land were no longer acceptable to many Africans and political crises with the threat of social breakdown intensified the movement off the land in many places. The peasantry, as Iliffe understood the term, began to lose coherence. The result was the rapid growth of what was clearly a proletariat in the original Roman sense of the word – the landless urban crowd – but only a few of these could find work in industry. Thus, the formal, state-recognized wage earning system became a marginal part of how individuals survived in large cities such as Lagos and Kinshasa.
From the 1970s, starting with Keith Hart’s (1973) work in Ghana and the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) report on Kenya, the so-called informal sector became a major standing feature in any discussion of African economies. This frankly incoherent sector included a great variety of activities: commercial, service-orientated, repair and maintenance work, and some productive labour, especially in countries with strong craft and apprentice traditions and a long history of urban life. How to comprehend this increasingly important population, and whether it contains elements that would permit substantial accumulation and upward mobility, is certainly a matter of debate. For some, Africa is simply developing classic third world cities of slums in which non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and charity just about keep the population surviving. In fact, the human development indices are higher for the slum cities than for rural populations. For others, these are slums of hope in which Africans are inventing new cultural forms and transforming older ways of living, with increasing scope for women to operate outside male- and elder-centred households and increased access for everyone to international trends (Rakodi 1997). In the first generation of independence, many African governments responded to the emergence of this ‘excess’ population by trying to pack lorry loads of the poor back to the countryside, just as they continue to try to expel foreigners during episodes of apparent social tension. These expulsions did not resolve the problem, however, and so the best way forward with regards to the urban masses remains a crucial question. It may be useful to consider them a working class but clearly not one for whom homogeneous conditions and the discipline of factory work will naturally lead to class-based effective organization. Although some intellectuals continue to see this pool of people as a constant potential threat to the state, in reality they are almost impossible to organize coherently. Either way, they are a critical social reality.
Conclusion
After a generation of crisis, decline, and violent upheavals in quite a few countries, the African situation has shifted again. Primary products are again bringing in good prices, even in agriculture where we may be seeing a turn to industrially orientated and more productive forms of cultivation, but also in forms that are further disrupting peasant life in at least some countries (Oya 2010). New entrants such as Chad, Sudan, Ghana, and Uganda are beginning to exploit substantial oil reserves. Copper, bauxite, and other minerals are once again valuable. The result is a certain stabilization and a return to some of the values of the early nationalist era, as loans from the International Monetary Fund and the threat of aid withdrawal become less crucial for many countries. Secondary industry is not growing rapidly but is reviving to a limited extent, and wage labour is certainly expanding in infrastructural and commercial sectors while hundreds of thousands of Africans find employment through emigration on uncertain time frames outside the continent.
African cities are showing signs of investment and restructuring by a more stable class of employees (whom we might call middle class), which is growing in size, competence, and buying power, furthermore fortified by foreign remittances. The breakdown of often-irrelevant colonial urban planning and control legislation has been to the advantage of a new class that has structured transport routes, shopping opportunities, and the presence of privatized services in health and education to its own advantage. Upon re-examination, studies that look at this as post-colonialism (i.e. culturally), or as a mark of changes in gender relations or the rise of so-called civil society, actually reveal the rising significance of the middle class (Tati 2001; Tripp 1997). This is something that has also been noted in Maputo by Jenkins (2009), while Hanlon and Mosse (2010) suggest that we can find in Mozambique today the germs of a class project that uses the state to promote development and its own interests simultaneously. Business journals highlight the emergence of a small number of African billionaires, including some white South African moguls but also black men with diverse interests in cell phones, oil, and even secondary industry. Here we might recall the judgement by Colin Leys on the dependency debate of the 1960s and 1970s that, for all the extent to which Kenyan development was tied to Western-dominated patterns of growth, there were real possibilities for a capitalist society to take root in Kenya. As Leys recognized, structural conditions did not render this impossible; rather, it was the failings of Kenyan institutions and the Kenyan state which slowed down the process (Leys 1996).
South Africa has often been condemned for its post-1994 development strategy, which saw the rapid emergence of a wealthy elite (Bond 2004). In a country where there is the possibility of real wealth accumulation for well-connected and ambitious entrepreneurs, a massive class formation process is underway. I would suggest that this is emblematic and typical – not exceptional – of today’s Africa. It is much easier for the accumulators, the educated professionals, to make their weight felt as a class than it is for the difficult-to-organize informal sector. In some ways, though, South Africa is also atypical, most notably in that it continues to have an often tense but very potent alliance between the ruling party and the trade union movement, which, at least in principle, allowed workers to influence government policy. However, this must be understood as the product of a specific set of historical process such as high levels of industrialization and protective labour structures that were not replicated in many other countries and are unlikely to be in the future (Buhlungu 2004). Of course the terms of this alliance benefit far more the small emergent class of wealthy Africans and the much larger black middle class.
Although class remains uneven and sometimes ephemeral in contemporary Africa, it remains of considerable importance as an analytical tool to explain collective feeling and collective action. If we wish to look below the surface, surely Seekings and Nattrass (2005) are right when they emphasize the growing analytical importance of class trumping race as a way of grasping social reality in South Africa, even if it is just what politicians are reluctant to promote and remains muted in their discourse. Class therefore retains importance for all those trying to develop a full understanding of Africa in the new century.
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