African Anarchism by Sam Mbah

Author:Sam Mbah
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: See Sharp Press
Published: 1997-08-10T16:00:00+00:00

4

The Development of Socialism in Africa

We touched briefly on the atypical development of classes in a few societies in pre-colonial Africa. However, after European contact, class formation accelerated. The European powers that invaded and colonized Africa in the late 19th century were fully industrialized capitalist countries that saw in Africa a captive market as well as a source for raw materials for their industries. This was the fundamental reason for colonialism.

The colonizers produced a capitalist economy with some similarities to the economies of their own countries.1 In Europe, the owners of capital had expropriated the land and other means of production from peasants and artisans, turning them into wage workers. From their labor, the capitalists extracted a surplus which they accumulated and invested in more land, factories, and labor in order to extract more surplus. In this way they expanded wealth and reproduced capitalist social relations at the same time.2

As we saw previously, the pre-colonial African mode of production was anything but a capitalist mode of production. To serve their own interests, the European colonizers superimposed capitalism on Africa. This entailed the transformation of African societies from relatively self-sufficient communal agricultural units into units dependent on the larger economies being created.3 A new division of labor was being forced on Africans leading to new material relationships in the larger society. In the colonies, the horticultural basis of the African mode of production was progressively undermined as villages were forced to grow cash crops for export or provide cheap labor for European plants and mines. This created new classes—new material relationships—within the colonies. In her study of colonial Guinea, for example, R.E. Galli identifies several colonial classes:

1. A new administrative class of Europeans

A European class of large landowners

A European class of large merchants (the trading firms)

A European managerial class

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