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ABSTRACT
The concept of social class and how it relates to the African context was theorised in France during the 1960s and 1970s in Africanist sociology and anthropology. The author summarises the major contributions of these works as well as providing his own analysis. He concludes that the variety of empirical data and the abrupt shifts in societal evolution of the continent over the past century have unfortunately dictated a speculative and quasi-experimental use of the concept of class in much of the literature. He also comments on the interventions on class that were published in ROAPE and its blog, Roape.net, in recent years.
RÉSUMÉ
Le concept de classe sociale et les possibilités de son application ont été introduits dans la sociologie et l'anthropologie françaises au cours des années 1960–70. L'auteur présente les contributions les plus importantes de ces travaux et offre ses propre réflexions sur cette question. Il conclut que la variété des données empiriques et les changements brutaux qu'ont manifestées les évolutions sociétales du continent africain au cours du XXe siècle ont malheureusement débouché sur une utilisation spéculative et quasi-expérimentale du concept de classe. Enfin il intervient dans les discussions qui se sont déroulées sur ce thème ces dernières années dans ROAPE et sur son blog ROAPE-net.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Elsa Paris, doctoral student from Paris Diderot, who invited me to participate in the sessions in Paris that led to this paper and agreed to read it out.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Note on contributor
Jean Copans has been Assistant and Associate Professor of Sociology-Anthropology at EHESS (1970–90), Professor at Université de Picardie Jules Verne in Amiens (1990–2000) and then at Université Paris Descartes (formerly Paris V, 2000–2008). He taught for one year at The Johns Hopkins University (1975–1976) and another year at Université Laval in Quebec (1977). He has directed the Centre for Research, Exchange and Scholarly Documentation (CREDU) in Nairobi, Kenya (1985–89) and travelled for academic exchanges or research in 15 other African countries including Nigeria, Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and South Africa. His fieldwork has been carried out in Senegal over 40 years (1967–2006). He has been on the editorial board of several journals (including Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines, Politique Africaine and Revue Tiers Monde); has been a contributing editor to ROAPE from January 1981 until March 2008, when he joined the Review's International Advisory Board; and has directed three series of books between 1974 and 2005 at François Maspero, Le Sycomore and Karthala publishing houses. He is the author or editor of 20 books and a great many papers.
Notes
1 In fact, I have been an on and off contributor myself: I published a book review in the third issue of ROAPE (summer 1975) and additionally over 1970–1980. I published two papers later, in 1985 and 1991. The title of the 1975 issue was ‘Classes in Africa’.
2 I use the term ‘Marxisant’ to indicate that, like ideological or political Marxism, academic Marxism is divided into several analytical traditions, none of which has the right or authority to proclaim itself the only permissible form. In any case, my own experience of the French version of Soviet and international Stalinism, militant and intellectual, in the 1960s prevented me from adopting this approach to thought and revolutionary action. I must add that I also encountered some of these bad habits among the different Trotskyist and Maoist traditions I frequented at the time. I understand that a rather different atmosphere obtained within British Marxism and ‘Communism’.
3 I refer in particular to the following half-dozen texts (Copans Citation1974, Citation1977b, Citation1979a, Citation1982, Citation1986, Citation1988a), some of which also appeared in English or in an English translation (Copans Citation1978b, Citation1979b, Citation1985, Citation1988b). This last text is a paper presented at a conference, held in Edinburgh in 1987, to which I had been invited by the late Chris Allen. For Marxism in eastern and southern African countries, see Copans Citation1991b.
4 Karl Von Holdt is a former trade union official and editor-in-chief of the renowned South African Labour Bulletin. He succeeded Eddie Webster in industrial sociology at the head of the Society, Work and Development Institute (SWOP) of the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. A French editor published this book last year, in 2019, but excluded Von Holdt as a co-author and removed all his sub-chapters, with no explanation. The activist and southern thrust of the triple conversation disappears completely and the book appears to be an ordinary theoretical reading of P. Bourdieu by a world-famous sociologist. This kind of depoliticisation is quite representative of some of the new tendencies of French sociology that are more dominated by ‘non-left’ researchers and publishers.
5 I should note that such behaviour was not uncommon at that time. C. Meillassoux used a twin pseudonym in a booklet self-published in 1966 under the auspices of another Trotskyist tendency (Munzer and Laplace Citation1966).
6 See the two 1965 issues of the journal Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie), which published the proceedings of the 1965 meeting of the International Association of Francophone Sociologists (Association Internationale des Sociologues de Langue Française, AISLF), held in Quebec, on social classes worldwide; especially Agblemagnon (Citation1965), Balandier (Citation1965) and Mercier (Citation1965).
7 INSEE is the official French statistical board which collects and uses, among others, social statistics concerning socio-professional category and income. During the 1960s a separate department, INSEE-Coopération, was set up for countries within the French sphere of influence, particularly the former African colonies.
8 Each category relates to one or more well-known monographs, mention of which is precluded here by lack of space. The best global–local study I know of is that of a French Marxist anthropologist and sociologist of Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD), Martin Verlet. His study (Citation2005) covers all the different forms of workforce from that of children, women and men in the domestic, informal and salaried sectors of a popular neighbourhood of Accra. This is a remarkable study. M. Verlet was one of the rare French social scientist specialists on Ghana.
9 I should mention the exemplary critical use of the Marxist concept of class by two young researchers who each completed a doctorate under my supervision. See David Mahut, who has published his thesis dealing with the members of the lower-middle classes of Bamako resident in Paris, which attempts to articulate a dual analysis of social class both in Mali and in France (Mahut Citation2017); and Abdoulaye Somparé, author of a thesis on Guinea’s working-class mining towns (Somparé Citation2006) that also forms the basis of an outstanding article (Somparé Citation2015).
10 See the ROAPE blog ‘Capitalism in Africa’ on Roape.net: in mid 2019, one could read 21 comments, and more since then. About half deal more or less with the topic of the nature of the working class vs the working classes. Let me mention those of N. Bernards, D. Bin, T. di Muzio, J. Smith, H. Chitonge, E. Macamo, K. Meagher and S. Ouma.