For three centuries Black Africa was an annex to America, with the function of providing the continent's slave labour. The hunt for slaves, which extended all over Black Africa, had the effect of transforming the previously existing formations even before actual colonial conquest. It contributed substantially to the establishment of military monarchies superimposed on solid village communities. In certain coastal regions in direct contact with the slavers' bases it resulted in the introduction of a new slave-owning mode of production. Subsequently, Black Africa, conquered at the end of the nineteenth century - but hardly opened up before the war of 1914-1918 and only to a limited extent between the wars, which was a period of relative stagnation of capitalism on the world scale - underwent a form of colonial subjection that was direct, crude, and simple, providing no opportunity for the appearance among the natives of any equivalent to the big agrarian capitalists and comprador merchants of the other two continents. Black Africa has, however, been closing this gap at a faster rate since the end of the Second World War.

The idea that Black Africa is the most backward and least-changing part of the underdeveloped world is certainly one of the most mistaken of prejudices - a survival of racism, perhaps. In fact, Black Africa is probably that part of the Third World which has undergone the most thoroughgoing transformations during the last half-century, and it is still changing with amazing speed. This process of change is certainly uneven between the different sectors of social life and different regions, and full of contradictions. This is because colonial subjection has been applied in Black Africa to societies that were among the most primitive, and apparently the least fit for adaptation to the new conditions of the dominant capitalist economy. Most of these societies had hardly grown beyond the level of primitive village communities, and state forms were still too recently arisen for the degradation of these village communities or their domination by the state machine to have reached an advanced stage. There was nothing comparable to the great states of the East or to the modern-type states of Latin America. Under these conditions, the ruling strata, the tribal chieftains, were less capable than elsewhere, economically, politically, and culturally, of transforming themselves into national bourgeoisies of the agrarian comprador type, well inserted in the totality of the new social and economic relations.

Elsewhere, in the Eastern and Latin American worlds, it was generally on the basis of large-scale landed property and the higher strata of state service, and sometimes also of the commercial community, that the new national bourgeoisie was formed. Large-scale land ownership, which was often identified with political responsibility, became reinforced and transformed into land ownership of the bourgeois type by adapting itself to agricultural production for export. This large-scale landed property was absent in Black Africa. Agricultural production for export was here often undertaken by big European plantations, as in the Belgian Congo and French Equatorial Africa. In other regions the économie de traite involved millions of small peasants organised in village communities. The survival of these community relations was bound to slow down the inevitable processes of differentiation that accompany the commercialising of agriculture. Nevertheless, under certain conditions, it was in this petty peasant economy that a rural bourgeoisie most easily took shape. On the other hand, in some cases the économie de traite stimulated the formation of social organisations which (for want of a better term and to be brief) I will call semi-feudal, notably in the Muslim savannah country, in Senegal, Nigeria, and the Sudan, where there came into being, not large estates of the bourgeois type, but heirarchical theocratic chiefdoms wielding political domination over village communities obliged to pay tribute.

In the great states of the East, with highly urbanised civilisations, there were often, before the colonial period, merchants similar to those of precapitalist Europe who were capable, by virtue of their technical knowledge, culture and wealth, of adapting and transforming themselves into modern bourgeoisies. Black Africa had nothing like this. In the absence of great urban civilisations, the traders appeared here as an extension of large-scale Arab trade. Dyula, Sarakulle, and Hausa traders of the West African savannah appeared as a result of contact across the Sahara with the Arab-Berber world, which was seeking to obtain the products of the forest zone. In Eastern Sudan and on the coast of the Indian Ocean, Arab traders carried out these functions. The slave trade with the European trading centres on the Gulf of Guinea or the Arab bases on the East Coast was usually carried on by new elements, alien to traditional society, the traitants, who were often half-breeds. In these circumstances, in the towns that were established from scratch after the colonial conquest, the new commercial tasks, even the most subordinate ones, were reserved either for the colonial companies or for foreign communities: Lebanese ("Syrians"), Greeks and Indians.

Finally the absence of solid political superstructures such as those of the East also had the effect of delaying the appearance of the bourgeoisie in Black Africa. It was often from the native members of the administrative organisation that the modern national bourgeoisies of the Eastern and Latin American countries were formed. In Black Africa, however, the cadres of the administration, like those of the modern business enterprises, were recruited, down to quite a low level in the hierarchy, from among the foreign colonists. This situation was still further heightened where, as in Kenya or Rhodesia, a system of settlement in the colony enabled "poor whites" to fill all these functions, to the detriment of the formation of local elites of the modern type.

The very pattern of direct colonisation, the pacte colonial that went with it, the lack of big towns, were also bound to delay the creation by colonial capital of light industries such as arose in the East or in Latin America. This delay itself held back the formation of technical cadres that would have served for the constitution of a national bourgeoisie. It is characteristic that the principal exceptions in this sphere are Kenya and Rhodesia (as well as South Africa, of course): colonies whose light industry was formed almost exclusively by and for the European minority. The Belgian Congo thus forms the only real exception, explained by the international statute governing the Congo basin, which deprived the Belgians of the privileges of the pacte colonial.

The handicap constituted by the primitive rural structures of Black Africa - the absence of large landed property - was to become an advantage in the present epoch. Whereas in the East and in Latin America the solidity of semi-feudal structures very often presents a major obstacle to capitalist development, in several regions of Black Africa a rural bourgeoisie of modern planters has come into being very quickly. This progress has, of course, not affected the whole of Black Africa, for - even apart from the Muslim savannah zones, which, under the influence of the commercialisation of agriculture, have evolved toward semi-feudal types of society - extensive regions are still stagnating quite outside the area of this transformation.

Comparative study of the zones in which a rural bourgeoisie has succeeded in developing leads to framing the hypothesis that four conditions need to be present in order that this occur.

The first seems to be the existence of a traditional society organised in a sufficiently heirarchical way, so that certain strata of the traditional chieftainry possess enough social power to appropriate substantial tracts of tribal land. It was in this manner that the traditional chiefs of Ghana, southern Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, and Uganda succeeded in creating a plantation economy rarely found among the non-hierarchical Bantu peoples. It should be noted, though, that excessively pronounced, more advanced hierarchies of the semi-feudal type, as in the Muslim savannah country, have not been favourable to the development of a rural bourgeoisie.

The second condition is that there be an average density of population of ten to thirty inhabitants per square kilometre. Densities lower than this make private appropriation of land ineffective and the potential supply of wage-labour inadequate. Excessive densities, as in Rwanda and on the Bamileke plateau in Cameroon, make it difficult for tribal chiefs to appropriate sufficient areas of land. The mechanism of proletarianisation is considerably facilitated, moreover, when a labour force of ethnically alien origin can be drawn on, as with the workers from Upper Volta who work in the Ivory Coast. At a second stage of the process the younger members and dependants of the families of the original planters may in their turn be proletarianised.

The third condition is the existence of rich crops, such as to enable a sufficient surplus to be obtained per hectare and per worker from the very first phase of the opening-up of the territory, when mechanisation is at a low level of development and the productivity of agriculture, still largely extensive, is not high. Cotton in Uganda, or groundnuts in the Serere country [in Senegal] and in general the production of foodstuffs, are forms of production too poor to make possible what coffee or cocoa beans have allowed to develop elsewhere.

The fourth and final condition is that the political authority be not unfavourable to this type of spontaneous development. The facilities offered for private appropriation of the soil, the freedom of labour, the availability of individual agricultural credit, have everywhere played a big role in the formation of this rural bourgeoisie. Characteristic in this connection was the abolition of forced labour in the French colonies in 1950. The bourgeois demand for freedom of labour enabled the planters of the Ivory Coast to turn to their own advantage a flow of immigrants incomparably greater in intensity than the supply of labour provided by the forced recruitment of workers - who moreover, had until then been made available only to the French planters. It also made possible the organising of a great political campaign in the countryside, with the peasantry who had been the victims of forced labour lined up behind the native planters. Contrariwise, the paternalism of the Belgian paysannats undoubtedly played a negative role, slowing down tendencies to bourgeois development in certain regions, such as the Lower Congo. Is it not significant that it has only been since the collapse of this policy, following independence, that a bourgeois development of this sort has succeeded in making progress? True, it must also be mentioned that, in the Lower Congo, another condition - the possibility of calling on an ethnically alien labour force - has been present only since 1960 (the refugees from Angola). The policies of Apartheid and of "defence of African traditions" practices in South Africa, Rhodesia, and Malawi are also, of course, obstacles to the advance of a rural bourgeoisie.

Is the same true of policies of co-operative rural development? Carried on everywhere in accordance with the same rather naïve paternalistic principles, based, no doubt, on the Utopian desire to see the whole countryside progress without inequality, at one and the same steady pace, these policies have neither prevented the plantation system from developing where it was possible nor caused any noticeable qualitative changes.

It remains true that huge areas are immune to movement, because the conditions that make change possible have not been present there: the Africa that "has not started," that "cannot start". This is the rural Africa which is "free from problems" in the sense that it can cope with population increase without modifying structures, by merely spreading wider the traditional subsistence economy. The insertion of this Africa into the colonial world has brought about a very limited development of export crops, often imposed by the administration as necessary for the payment of taxes. Sometimes, when the terms of trade between these exported products and the manufactured goods they make it possible to buy have grown worse, or simply when the administrative pressure that imposed them has weakened, we see these crops being given up in favour of subsistence agriculture. It would be superficial to describe this change as retrogressive, since rationality is here on the side of the peasants, not of the administration that strives to impose the cultivation of these noneconomic crops. The development of a parasitic urban economy, with the inflation it brings in its train, often lies behind this worsening in the terms of trade, the most spectacular example of which is the setback given to the cotton-producing economy of Congo-Kinshasa. Similar phenomena have occurred elsewhere (in Mali and Guinea, for example). There is much matter for reflection in a comparative study of these cases, especially regarding the role of different family structures and religious ideologies (animism, Islam, etc.), some of which seem to have adapted themselves more easily than others to the requirements of the new development.

In the regions affected by progress, the social upheavals have been radical and fast. Numerous strata of planters have broken with tradition; they engage in precise economic calculations and adopt European ways of life and consumption. Growth rates that are sometimes exceptionally high have been realised in agriculture: rates of 7 percent per year over ten or twenty years are not unknown. Undoubtedly, the transformations undergone by these rural areas of Africa during the last three decades contrast with the relative immobility of the rural areas of the Eastern world as a whole, and are closer to certain parts of Latin America.

Under these conditions, the "average rate of growth" of agriculture in Black Africa is a meaningless concept. Whereas in the East such average rates do in fact reflect the slow progress of an agriculture that is broadly homogeneous, in Black Africa they conceal the exceptional progress of regions that are moving into the capitalist mode of production. The conclusions drawn by the international organisations which, accepting these meaningless averages, put Black Africa at the bottom of the list, are superficial and deceptive.