Labor-power and precolonial Africa: Nyerere, Meillassoux, Marx

Abstract That people are wealth is a core concept in the history and anthropology of Africa. A claim about value in precolonial social orders, it has also been mobilised to explain economic development in colonial and postcolonial settings. Here I revisit two twentieth-century efforts to link wealth-in-people to economic modernisation. One was made by Nyerere, who argued that precolonial kin-based commitments to work cooperatively were a developmental resource that could substitute for capitalist investment. The second is from Meillassoux, who argued that the persistence of precolonial kin-based production facilitated capitalist development by affording a double-exploitation of labor. The arguments reached different conclusions but relied on a common premise: precolonial wealth-in people was premised on the capacity to labor, and that was its actual or possible contribution to modern development. This premise is anachronistic. The valuation of people as vessels of labor-power is particular to the capitalist social order. It is unlike the valuation of people as persons-in-relationship.