Rethinking class and culture in Africa: between E. P. Thompson and Pierre Bourdieu

ABSTRACT

The article considers the historiography of labour and class studies in sub-Saharan Africa in relation to the contemporary ‘cultural turn’ in sociological studies of class. It identifies three phases: from the 1960s, a highly empiricist Marxist approach which drew on Fanon’s notion of an aristocracy of labour; from the 1980s, a shift to a stress on culture, agency and identity, following E. P. Thompson; the final move has focused on the African middle classes, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of consumption. Research on a public sector manual workers’ union in Botswana exemplifies, the author argues, the Thompsonian approach.

RÉSUMÉ

L’article examine l’historiographie des études du travail et des classes sociales en Afrique subsaharienne en relation avec le « tournant culturel » contemporain dans les études sociologiques sur les classes. Il identifie trois phases : à partir des années 60, une approche marxiste hautement empirique tirée de la notion d’une aristocratie ouvrière de Fanon ; à partir des années 80, un accent plutôt mis sur la culture, le pouvoir et l’identité, suivant E. P. Thompson ; enfin, le dernier mouvement s’est concentré sur les classes moyennes africaines, se basant sur la théorie de Pierre Bourdieu de la consommation. L’auteur soutient que la recherche sur un syndicat de travailleurs manuels du secteur public au Botswana illustre l’approche de Thompson.

KEYWORDS:

• African class
• Botswana
• trade unions
• African labour
• culture
• identity

MOTS-CLÉS:

• Classe africaine
• Botswana
• syndicats
• travail africain
• culture
• identité

Acknowledgements

This article was first presented at the workshop on ‘Social Im/mobilities in Africa’, at the Université libre de Bruxelles in February 2016. I am grateful to the participants in the workshop for their comments. An earlier version was also presented at the African Studies Association of the UK’s panel on class at the University of Sussex.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Pnina Werbner is Professor Emerita of Social Anthropology, Keele University, author of ‘The Manchester migration trilogy’ – The migration process (1990/2002), Imagined diasporas (2002) and Pilgrims of love (2003), and of The making of an African working class (Pluto Press, 2014), and editor of several theoretical collections on hybridity, cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, migration and citizenship.

Notes

1 On some aspects of the debate on the death of class see, for example, Pakulski and Waters (1996); on globalisation and postmodernism see especially pp. 679–682.

2 The range of literature is impressive. In addition to works mentioned in the text of this article there were also studies during the early period of mines in Nigeria (Freund 1981), Zambia (Epstein 1958), Botswana (D. Cooper 1978) and Ghana (Silver 1978); of trade unions, in Kenya (Sandbrook 1975), Nigeria (Cohen 1974), Ghana (Trachtman 1962), Gambia (Allen 1970), Africa comparatively (Friedland 1974), and more recently in Botswana (Mogalakwe 1997) and Zimbabwe (Raftopoulos and Phimister 1997); of port workers in Nigeria (Waterman 1978), rail workers in Tanzania (Grillo 1973, 1974) and Ghana (Jeffries 1978); manufacturing in Zambia (Kapferer 1972) and Nigeria (Hinchliffe 1974), to cite but some of this outpouring of work on labour.

3 It should be noted that the thesis echoed studies elsewhere of the rise of an influential ‘salariat’ in newly independent South Asian nation-states (Alavi 1987), and of a ‘state-made middle class’ in newly independent Israel (Rosenfeld and Carmi 1990).

4 Undoubtedly, the most comprehensive account of African workers’ struggles against the odds is that of Jack and Ray Simons (1969).

5 Following Bourdieu (1984).

6 In this they arguably differ from the current English working class.

7 Earlier works on members of the African affluent classes tended to speak of ‘elites’, given also their high status within the civil service or government in most African countries, but this has more recently been replaced by the broader term ‘middle class’ to include Africans in the burgeoning private sector as well.

8 Shula Marks argues that in terms of lifestyle, South African black nurses were a nascent ‘middle class’ (Marks 1994). In Britain and the US too, Skeggs (1997) speaks of British working-class aspiration to ‘respectability’, while Devine (1997) shows that American workers were recalled by the next generation as switching back and forth from being workers to middle class (‘comfortable’) outside the work context.

9 Thus, arguing against recent ‘cultural’ class surveys, Toscano and Woodstock argue that: ‘A classificatory exercise without a sense of social conflict, however muted, that is crucial to the notion of class … runs the risk of proliferating class categories which mimic those of marketing in representing a bundle of somewhat arbitrarily chosen attributes rather than being grounded in political contestation and social ontology’ (2015, 516, emphasis in original).