Can modernity accommodate african ‘peasants’?

Abstract

This paper interprets ‘modernity’ in Africa today as the consequences of historically specific patterns of capitalist development, or ‘actually existing capitalism’, with special reference to African ‘peasants’. Their social conditions of existence are fundamentally, if not exclusively, those of capitalist class relations and dynamics, internalised in the functioning of ‘household’ farming. Many, perhaps the majority, of Africans with a rural base are better considered as ‘classes of labour’ than as ‘peasants.