ABSTRACT:
The number of African small-holders who cannot dispose over the necessary resources to cover even their basic needs has been growing to alarming dimensions since the 1970s. Contrary to widespread views, the increasing poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa is due less to natural but to social constraints of development. The focus of this study is on socio-economic stratification and class-relations, because one major cause of the marginalization of the African peasantry is considered to be the differentiation-process within the peasantry itself. The underlying thesis of emerging rural-capitalist relations of production in Africa is backed by three lines of argumentation: First, by a critical review of literature on class-concepts concerning Africa and on methods to measure social stratification in the countryside. Second, by an analysis of the origins of rural class-formation in Nupeland or Bida Emirate, Northern Nigeria, in pre- and post-colonial times. And third, by a survey of the socio-economic stratification among peasants in four Nupe villages in 1975/76, backed by econometric analysis.
Already in the 18th century Nupe peasants were not mere subsistence producers, but had to deliver a considerable surplus-product for the support of their overlords, the kings court, the army, the urban handicraft, and last but not least, for local and distant markets. The economic and social foundation of the Nupe state at this time was not so much the control over trade (e.g. long-distance trade in slave or arms), as has been suggested by others, but the interference into the rural relations of production by brutal force. The use of pre-capitalist relations of production by rich peasants and landlords to their exclusive advantage formed an important if not necessary stimulus to the growth of rural capitalism. But at the same time it undermined the very social relations which gave birth to this new mode of production. This became particularly clear with respect to the transformation of traditional forms of (communal) labour organisation in the Nupe villages, 'efako', 'egbe', and 'dzoro'.
To the extend that labour, land and the spread of new farm techniques, like fertiliser, insecticides or the tractor hiring service, introduced by the colonial and post-colonial extension service, became submitted to the laws of commodity production, the direct intervention in the process of production in order to enforce the expropriation of the poor by rich peasants, landlords, or the state became obsolete. Rural capitalism had been firmly established in Nupeland in the 1980s. This is confirmed by a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the actual pattern and degree of socio-economic inequality among Nupe peasants.
Besides the overall resource-position of a stratified sample of 210 peasant families, the labour-, land-, and income distribution has been described in detail. A multiple linear regression model reveals significant structural divergences with respect to the effect of important factors, like the family-labour or capital input, between rich, middle, and poor peasants. Both the notion of a "representative farm", and life-cycle models of Chayanov and others are under this circumstances inadequate and misleading. Contrary to current hypotheses on demographic, geographic, climatic, or other "natural" determinants of farm size or income, the regression model demonstrates the dominating effect of social and economic variables even in an African "land and labour economy". This is valid not just for Nupe- but also for Hausa peasant families that the author analyses by means of a secondary analysis of the data provided by D. W. Norman’s Zaria survey of peasant households in the former North-Western State, Northern Nigeria.
