Archie Mafeje: Scholar, Activist and Thinker

The study of rural African society

19 Dani W Nabudere The study of rural African The study of rural African society society Mafeje viewed the issue of rural development as the key to understanding social relations in the countryside and, hence, of developing a basis for understanding the categories and concepts that could be used for analysing the situation. For this and other reasons, Mafeje undertook a number of field studies to try to understand these specific processes under way in the African situation and how they related to capitalist relations. Beginning with his article on tribalism in the ‘Journal of Modern African Studies’ in 1971, Mafeje questioned ‘dualism’ in analysing economic and political relations between the modern colonial capitalism and the traditional and rural agriculture. In this particular case, he took up the issue of the dichotomisation of African agriculture into ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ or ‘subsistence’ sectors. He took up other ‘dualisms,’ which he also attacked. In this sense, Mafeje’s article against the concept of ‘tribe’ can be said to have been one of the first attempts to understand economic relations between colonial capitalism and the dominated countries. In 1966, while acting as a research fellow at the African Studies Centre, Cambridge, he was sent with a fellow scholar to undertake field research in Uganda. He used the material from this fieldwork to write his PhD dissertation at Cambridge in 1968 entitled ‘Social and Economic Mobilisation in a Peasant Society’. He selected Uganda because he regarded it as having more sizeable agricultural enterprises. The purpose of his field research was to find out to what extent new forms of farming had emerged in the Buganda countryside since its colonisation. The research was inter-disciplinary, involving an economist and a sociologist. According to Mafeje, the purpose of the field research was ‘to investigate factors facilitating or inhibiting (the) emergence of large-scale farming in Uganda’.37 The economist was expected to investigate the accumulation of capital and its utilisation, choice of crops, suitability of climate, the use of labour, transport and communications, markets, outlets for investment and ‘loss of opportunities by farmers’.38 The sociologist, who ostensibly was Mafeje himself, was to investigate such issues as systems 20 Africa Institute of South Africa Archie Majefe: Scholar, Activist and Thinker of land tenure, the distribution of land, composition of the family and households, leadership patterns and ‘reference categories’ in the community, and social differentiation and stratification among the farmers. The field investigation found that, after colonisation, land in Buganda had been divided by the British government among chiefs and other ‘notables’ who had helped the British to establish their rule in Buganda. The chiefs were allocated mailo land as freehold while the farmers were dispossesed of their traditional holdings. The report noted that there had, nevertheless, been a fragmentation of these estates through sale and purchase over the past thirty years with the result that it had become easier to purchase and accumulate mailo interests beyond the original owners. Whereas before 1940, only 50 per cent of the recorded mailo possessions had been purchased, by the 1960s about 80 per cent of the interests had been acquired by others through purchase. This had led to increased fragmentation of land in Buganda, which had also influenced the distribution of sizes of farmlands between ‘the big farmers’ and the smaller ‘commercial farmers’, as well as among the peasant farmers who were the majority. The researchers also noted that with the growth of sales and purchases of land by the landowners, inheritance of land had declined. The report noted that in order to cultivate these sizeable farms, a process of importing labour from the south-west had emerged, with large numbers of migrant labourers being recruited from Burundi and Rwanda. It noted that family labour in Buganda was not significant in the production of crops for sale as the family members were engaged in family chores. As a result, different systems of wage labour in the form of katala (task jobs), lejjalejja (casual labour) and okuska (simple and short tasks) were used in the employment of labour. The report noted that mechanical cultivation was rare because it was considered not to be economical from the farmers’ point of view, ‘unless there was a shortage of labour relative to land and capital’.39 With other factors affecting labour in the countryside and the neighbouring countries, Mafeje and his colleague had concluded that even ‘big farmers’ who owned 20 acres or more, were not ‘big’ enough for mechanisation due to the...