Journal Article


Primitive accumulation in the East Africa Groundnut scheme

Abstract

This paper revisits the Groundnut Scheme, a postwar colonial development project in East Africa infamous for its catastrophic failure. It examines the plans made by British state managers and the Scheme’s planners at both the United Africa Company and the Overseas Food Corporation to transform African colonial subjects into stabilized wage-labourers. The paper seeks to understand this social transformation in the context of the contradictory nature of capitalist social relations. This is achieved by using Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation: the separation of the worker from their means of subsistence. The paper focuses on two aspects of this process. Firstly, the creation of remote villages for the Scheme’s workers, physically separating them from traditional support structures. Secondly, the creation of a new gendered division of labour that would have transformed the homelife of the Scheme’s workers.

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Authors

Sutton, Alex

Oxford Brookes departments

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

Dates

Year of publication: 2024
Date of RADAR deposit: 2023-07-12


Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License


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